Celebrating its first anniversary this month, Good Dyke Porn is a Vancouver site that aims to provide, well, good dyke porn.

Read on for a conversation with its creator, Bren Ryder, about just what that means.

Then, head to the site to check out the hot action—I think Aya Ruckus and Eddie Bull are my favourite.

So, was being a pornographer your first career choice?

I was pursuing a career in the fire department, working as a window cleaner for my day job while training to be a firefighter. I just made the choice to abandon my firefighting pursuits and go full on with this pornography thing.

Part of your decision came when you realized you could actually support yourself with this, right?

That’s been the goal all along. A big part of abandoning my firefighting pursuits was to give my all to this business so I can make it my top pursuit. I’ve been able to accomplish that and, just recently, I paid myself for the first time.

Did you make the original Good Dyke Porn film and then realize you wanted to launch a full site?

I made the film as a showpiece for the site. All along I’ve had in mind that this website needed to be made. Essentially, the site needed to be made because the content needed to be made. We needed some good dyke porn. The genre is very slowly growing and I really wanted to be a part of creating this work.

When did you realize the need for good dyke porn?

It was a few years ago. I would Google “dyke porn” because I was looking for an alternative to the girl-on-girl lesbian porn. I wanted to see real lesbians or at least some people who were visually representative of myself. I wanted to find my community. There was very little out there—I pretty much found one site. There are thousands of sites online for pornography and only one that had what I was looking for. I knew it was something that needed to change.

What makes dyke porn different from lesbian porn?

For me, it’s very much that girl-on-girl lesbian porn very much caters to a male audience. The women are all very pretty and not really doing what women do when they’re having sex with each other. It wasn’t anything that appealed to me because it didn’t look like sex to me. You can still have very feminine lesbian women having sex with each other, but when that’s dyke porn, it’s very different. The sex is different and the energy is different. The way they are expressing themselves, their comfort with their bodies and their comfort with their sex partner is different. It’s not so easy to articulate in words, but visually I can see the difference.

Your site and things like the Crash Pad series have a lot of real bodies in them, rather than the stereotypical mainstream porny body. Do you think that lesbians are more turned on by visual representations of real bodies?

I think that the lesbian community and maybe women in general want to see themselves on screen. Women are constantly bombarded with unreal images of female bodies. I think women want to see real bodies in the media in general. So when you’re accessing porn and watching sexual images, I think it’s just really refreshing and comforting to see women who resemble yourself or who just aren’t that unreal image of a woman’s body. The porny bodies, the big boobs and no hair whatsoever and really, really thin. I think that lesbians want to see a diverse image of female bodies so that they can see themselves in the images. How that compares to what straight women want to see, I’m not too sure. I’m sure straight women want to see diverse bodies but maybe they just want to see hot guys.

I’ve previously blogged about Erika Lust and when I was reading about her, I came across some negative comments about her films, basically that there’s no such thing as pro-female porn. Have you ever met someone who thinks that all pornography is bad for women?

I have come across it, just once. I had a conversation with a hardcore feminist—I mean, I fancy myself a feminist so it wasn’t just that she was a feminist that she didn’t agree with porn. She was expressing her views that porn was bad, essentially. To me, it’s kind of a narrow view because porn can mean so many things—it’s like saying movies are bad. Well, what movie? There are so many images you can create within a certain genre of film. I think that people like Erika Lust and myself and all the independent porn producers are trying to change the stigma that all porn is bad by creating images that are healthy and positive. That in turn will help people to realize that not all porn is bad. Open your mind and come to realize we can create some really beautiful images that are positive for women.

Are the actors in your films volunteers?

I pay them for their work. I’m taking ownership of their images and sharing it with the world and I think they need to be financially compensated as best I possibly can. Everyone who performs on camera gets paid for their work. But they’re all members of the local community and for the most part have come to me wanting to create this genre and create something that’s meaningful to them. An important part to me is giving complete control to the models —asking them what they want to do, how they want the scene to play out. Then I set up the camera around that and allow them to do their thing.

Do you think the fact that you’re Canadian means anything?

I think so. Being a Canadian affects art in all forms. I think because I’m not in California or some other big central porn hub, there’s a difference in perception. I don’t necessarily have the access to all the really big queer porn stars from big cities. My community is small and we are creating amateur work and it gives it more of a community feel.

What other directors and actors do you like?

The Crash Pad creators are definitely people that I follow. They’re very much on par with the type of genre that we’re trying to create and the images in there. Creating queer porn with trans people in it, people having real sex rather than just putting together some silly storyline that has two girls just messing around. I love Shine Light Houston’s work, I’ve very much been inspired by her and that whole group of people in San Francisco. I also really like Buck Angel, because his work seems very revolutionary and he’s been at it for a little while. It’s creating a porn that’s hot and very different, showing how transsexual bodies aren’t the same as everybody else’s, but yet have genuine sexuality and confidence in who they are. It’s hot.

So what are your goals for the site?

I want to continue to get the word out there to the world, to let people know that we’re here. I want to continue to create more and more content for the site from my community and hopefully to get images from other Canadian cities, potentially even beyond that. I very much want to create a large body of work. I want to have such a variety of types of sexual expressions and images that whatever people’s preferences, they can find something that they like in there. People have very different ideas about what’s hot and what they like. I want a lot of stuff.