Luke Ford
Encyclopedia : L : LU : LUK : Luke Ford
Luke Ford is a Los Angeles-based writer, journalist, and blogger, popularly known as a pornography gossip columnist.
Personal
He was born May 28, 1966, in Kurri Kurri, New South Wales, Australia, and moved to California in 1977.His father, Desmond Ford, was a noted Seventh-day Adventist Christian preacher. His mother, Gwen Ford, died in November 1970, from bone cancer, so Ford hardly knew her. His father remarried, to Gillian, his stepmother, known as Gill. He has a sister, Ellen (born October 29, 1955), and a brother, Paul (born December 20, 1957).
His religious conversions, first to Atheism, then to Orthodox Judaism (in 1992, greatly influenced by Dennis Prager), had a large impact on his life. He observes the Jewish sabbath, attends synagogue regularly, and keeps kosher. His faith conflicts with his chosen profession, which many rabbis see as immoral, and he wrote about his religious ostracism in XXX-Communicated: A Rebel Without a Shul. For a time, he maintained [DennisPrager.Net], an unofficial web site alternating between criticising and praising Prager, talk-show host and moralist (it now redirects to Prager's official site).
He suffers from Chronic fatigue syndrome, which kept him bedridden for a time in his twenties.
Professional
Luke Ford studied Economics at UCLA but did not graduate. Instead, he worked as an investigative journalist for southern California newspapers and at a radio station. In 1995, he became intrigued with the lack of journalistic coverage of the pornography industry, and started to write a book, which would become A History of X.
In January 1996, after researching porn for a year, Ford wrote, produced, directed, and acted in What Women Want, a pornographic video, not related to the Mel Gibson movie. It was not a success [link].
In 1997, he started his pornography gossip web site, LukeFord.com. It was criticised for being badly organized, but contained a large amount of information; Ford would take a tape recorder with him nearly wherever he went, and transcribed many conversations. Prominent porn stars such as Asia Carrera and Brandy Alexandre criticised the errors and inaccuracy on the site. But its impact was undeniable, and he was referred to as the Matt Drudge of porn. [link]
He helped expose a 1998 HIV outbreak which infected an indeterminate number of actors (including Tricia Devereaux, Brooke Ashley and Kimberly Jade) who had been working with actor Marc Wallice. Ashley eventually sued Wallice, claiming that she had been infected on the set of The World’s Biggest Anal Gangbang.
He was sued for defamation multiple times by people from the porn industry, including by RJB Telecom, whom he (and the Federal Trade Commission) accused of dishonesty, Christi Lake, whom he mislabeled in a bestiality photo, and Laurie Holmes (widow of John Holmes), for accusations of prostitution on the set. Wired magazine called him The Most Hated Man in Web Porn [link]. He was even physically assaulted by Mike Albo, an editor for Hustler[link].
On August 8, 2001, driven by religious motivations, he temporarily quit his main profession of documenting pornography, and sold his main web site, [LukeFord.com], to Netvideogirls.com for $25,000, and created [lukeford.net], which avoided pornography, and focused more on Jewish issues. This lasted until August 25, 2002, when he started [lukeisback.com], with many of his old archives.
The Lukeford.com site is currently headed by Taylor Rain, "Owner and Editor In Chief", and publishes gossip that is friendlier to the porn industry.
Bibliography
- A History of X: 100 Years of Sex in Film. Prometheus Books, 1999. ISBN 1573926787
- The Producers: Profiles in Frustration. iUniverse, Inc., 2004. ISBN 0595664636
- XXX-Communicated: A Rebel Without a Shul. iUniverse, Inc., 2004. ISBN 0595664415
- Yesterday's News Tomorrow: Inside American Jewish Journalism. iUniverse, Inc., 2004. ISBN 0595667686
References
- [Luke Ford: Another Brash Web Columnist] Online Journalism Review article by Emmanuelle Richard, July 9, 1997
- [Porn Muckraker and Son of a Preacher Man] Luke Ford Holds Forth on Converting, Dennis Prager and the Trials of the Triple-X Industry, article in The Forward by Nancy Beiles, January 7, 2000
- [Porn Stripped of Gossip Maven] Wired article on Ford's temporary retirement by Noah Shachtman, August 13, 2001
- [LA People 2006:The Xxxorcist] LA Weekly Article on Luke Ford by Dan Kapelovitz, April 19, 2006
- Appearances in What Women Want and pornography documentaries
External links
Run by Ford
Luke Ford has an extensive online presence, actively maintaining quite a few Web sites.- [Official website], without pornographic content
- [Luke Is Back! Porn News] "professional site", as of 2002
- [Your Moral Leader] blog about Judaism and moral issues
- [Luke Ford's Relationship Blog] tongue-in-cheek blog about Ford's relationship problems, with regularly changing titles.
- [Nearer My God To Thee] Buzznet site with many photos
- [MySpace site] Used for personal and social activities
- [Protocols: A group of Jews endeavors towards total domination of the blogosphere.] Defunct Jewish-issues blog, run by Ford, Sam Singer, Pinchas Shapiro, Yehuda Kraut and Avraham Bronstein, active 2002-2004.
Associates
- [Luke Ford Fan Blog] Friendly Parody blog, run by Nicholas Vance (who occasionally guest-blogs for Ford [link]).
- [Luke Ford.com] is no longer associated with Ford, other than the name, and run by Taylor Rain
From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.