Annabel Chong

Annabel Chong

Chong at the 2000 CES show
Born Grace Quek[1]
22 May 1972[2]
Singapore[2]
Other names Anabella,[2] Anabel Chong, Liquid Slater,[3] Annabella
Ethnicity Chinese Singaporean[3]
Height 5 ft 4 in (163 cm)[2]
No. of adult films 66 as a performer & 2 as a director (per IAFD)

Annabel Chong (born 22 May 1972)[2] is the former stage name of a Singaporean-born American pornographic film actress who became famous after starring an adult film that was promoted as The World's Biggest Gang Bang.[4] The film was commercially successful and started a trend of "record-breaking" gang bang pornography.[4] Four years later, Chong was the subject of the documentary Sex: The Annabel Chong Story,[5] in which she was interviewed about mainstream media. Academically gifted, she majored in Fine Arts and subsequently qualified in web applications development, before retiring from the adult industry completely in 2003.

Background

Chong was born Grace Quek[1] (Chinese: 郭盈恩; pinyin: Guō Yíng'ēn) and raised in Singapore in a middle-class Protestant Singaporean Chinese family.[4][6][7] She was the only child of parents who were both teachers.[8] She was a student at Raffles Girls' School, where she was enlisted in the country's Gifted Education Programme, and Hwa Chong Junior College.[4] Former teachers and classmates describe Chong as quiet, intelligent, and studious.[4]

After taking her A levels, she took nearly three years off, including a year spent in the United States.[4] She then went on to study law at King's College London under a scholarship.[4] While in the United Kingdom, Chong was riding on a train, where she met a man and agreed to have sex with him in an alleyway.[4] He brought along other men, and she was gang raped and robbed in a rubbish closet under an inner-city housing block.[4][9]

At the age of 21, Chong dropped out of law school and went on to graduate studies in photography, art, and gender studies at the University of Southern California (USC),[4] where she excelled academically. She also began working in pornographic films.[9][10] Chong went on to graduate work in gender studies at USC.[4]

Pornography career

Since her parents did not approve of her dropping out of law school, she needed a source of income to pay her college fees.[4] Chong started in porn by answering an advertisement for a modelling agency in LA Weekly. The modelling agency turned out to be an adult film company,[4] which led to photo shoots and then an interview with director John T. Bone. Bone, recognizing Chong's talent, embarked on producing a series of films starring her.[3] She was the new hardcore star in her early gang bangs such as Sgt. Pecker's Lonely Hearts Club Gangbang and I Can't Believe I Did the Whole Team.[2] Chong was reportedly interested in blurring the boundary between pornography and performance art in her work.[4]

World's Biggest Gang Bang

The production that propelled her into the limelight was another Bone production, The World's Biggest Gang Bang. Chong took part in this gang bang on January 19, 1995, when she was 22 years old.[4][10] She said part of her motivation to do the film was a desire to challenge gender roles.[4] Chong appeared in advertisements on adult television for 300 participants for the event. Reports initially differed as to whether she had sex with 251 men over the course of 10 hours,[10] or with around 70 men multiple times to reach a total of 251; the largest number ever in a pornographic film.[4] Acting on the understanding that male participants who had verified a recent negative test for HIV would wear a color coded tag, Chong had sex with some men without a condom. It later emerged that the testing had not been as strictly verified, as the producers had led Chong to believe.[4][10] Even though the movie became one of the highest grossing pornographic films of all time,[4] Chong was never paid the US$10,000 she was promised,[1] and she apparently never received any money at all from the video.[10]

Appearances in popular culture

After the event, Chong made a host of media appearances, including The Jerry Springer Show, and The Girlie Show[4] Chong presented her work in pornography as an attempt to challenge the settled notions and assumptions of viewers about female sexuality. For example, her conception of a gang bang was based on the example of Messalina, a wife of the emperor Claudius. Historically, Messalina had suffered a poor reputation, a fact that some attributed (at least partly) to gender bias. According to Chong, she sought to question the double standard that denies women the ability to exhibit the same sexuality as men, by modelling what a female "stud" would be.

In her March 2000 appearance on the radio program Loveline, Chong admitted that there were slightly fewer than 70 men in her gang bang and that there were water and lunch breaks during the 10-hour time span. For her performance, Chong earned a "dubious achievement award" in Esquire magazine.

The event also prompted author Chuck Palahniuk to write a novel, Snuff, about a fictional character who aimed to surpass Chong's record by having sex with 600 men. In 2007, a play written by Ng Yi-Sheng based on her story, 251, was staged in Singapore, directed by Loretta Chen.[4]

Sex: The Annabel Chong Story

The sensation caught the interest of university film student Gough Lewis. Lewis met Chong and embarked on producing a documentary about her, entitled Sex: The Annabel Chong Story, which was released in 1999.[4] The film includes footage from the gang bang shooting and her subsequent publicity appearances, explores Chong's motives, revisits with her the site of her rape, and depicts a painful conversation in Singapore between Chong and her mother, who had not known about her daughter's career before then.[10] It was directed by Lewis and featured contributions from Chong, Al Goldstein, Ron Jeremy and Seymore Butts.[10] In the film, Chong stated that she intended the World's Biggest Gang Bang to challenge "the notion of women as passive sex objects," and added, "We're not wilting violets, we're not victims, for Christ's sake. Female sexuality is as aggressive as male sexuality. I wanted to take on the role of the stud. The more [partners], the better."[10] She also self-harmed in the film, taking a knife to her arm.[10] The documentary propelled Chong further into the world media as it became a hit at the 1999 Sundance Film Festival,[4] where it was nominated for a Grand Jury Prize.[11] The film was later shown as part of university gender studies courses around the world.[4]

Late pornography career and retirement

Chong continued to work in the adult industry for a short while after the documentary came out, directing and starring in movies as well as setting up a website. In 2000, she directed and performed in the gang bang movie Pornomancer, her take on William Gibson's novel Neuromancer. After 2000, she largely stopped appearing in mainstream adult videos, concentrating instead on producing content for her website and appearing in a few BDSM videos. In 2003, Chong entirely retired from porn,[4] thanking her fans in a final message on her website which announced, "Annabel is dead and is now replaced full time by her Evil Doppelganger, who is incredibly bored with the entire concept of Annabel and would prefer to do something different for a change."[4] She stated that she intended to "begin her new life of peace and relative obscurity."[12] She stopped discussing her former career in the adult industry after her retirement. In limited correspondence for the biographical play 251, she told the producers, "Do whatever you want with Annabel Chong because this person doesn't exist anymore."[4][13] As of 2008, she was working as a web developer in California.[4]

In 2011, Complex magazine ranked her at #41 in their list of “The Top 50 Hottest Asian Porn Stars of All Time.”[14]

See also

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 Lawrence van Gelder (2000-02-11). "Movie Review – Sex: the Annabel Chong Story – FILM REVIEW; Champ (Briefly) of the Sexual Olympics". movies.nytimes.com. Retrieved 2010-01-26.
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 Annabel Chong at the Internet Adult Film Database
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 "Annabelle Chong at Adult Film Database". Adultfilmdatabase.com. Retrieved 2014-06-06.
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 4.7 4.8 4.9 4.10 4.11 4.12 4.13 4.14 4.15 4.16 4.17 4.18 4.19 4.20 4.21 4.22 4.23 4.24 4.25 4.26 4.27 Chew, David (2007-03-29). "The meaning of 251". Today Online. Archived from the original on 18 September 2008. Retrieved 2008-08-17.
  5. ↑ "Sex: The Annabel Chong Story". Watch Documentary Films. Retrieved December 13, 2013.
  6. ↑ Elgersma, Grant. (2007-01-26) catapult magazine Reviving Messalina. Catapultmagazine.com. Retrieved on 2011-12-28.
  7. ↑ Sex-The Annabel Chong Story. Screenmancer.tv. Retrieved on 2011-12-28.
  8. ↑ Sex sobers in controversial Sundance documentary. CNN. Retrieved on 2013-10-02.
  9. ↑ 9.0 9.1 Lewis, Gough (director). (1999). Sex: The Annabel Chong Story (documentary film).
  10. ↑ 10.0 10.1 10.2 10.3 10.4 10.5 10.6 10.7 10.8 "Sex: The Annabel Chong Story – Why a nice girl wants to be gang-banged". Seattle Weekly. 2000-07-26. Archived from the original on 7 December 2008. Retrieved 2008-12-08.
  11. ↑ "Sex: The Annabel Chong Story". Top Documentary Films. Retrieved 2014-06-06.
  12. ↑ "Whatever Happened to Annabel Chong?". 2003. Archived from the original on 2003-05-23. Archived at the Internet Archive, 2003-05-23.
  13. ↑ Shi'an, Tay (2008-08-19). "From sex marathons to real marathons". The New Paper. Retrieved 2012-04-24.
  14. ↑ Gabriel Alvarez (2011-09-19). "The Top 50 Hottest Asian Porn Stars of All Time". Complex. Retrieved 2013-08-02.

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