Gerrie Lim was through with music journalism. Having worked for years as a writer for LA Weekly and Billboard magazine, as well as music industry title Hits, he’d heard enough. “I found that after a while musicians are not that interesting,” he says after an omelette lunch in Wan Chai. “For every Pete Townshend and David Bowie, there are ten other dodos.”

And so he turned to the adult movie industry, which offered better money, juicier subject matter and easy access to the stars (for interviews, folks – heave your minds out of that gutter). In 1995, while living in Los Angeles, he got his introduction to the industry by acting as music editor for a CD Rom to accompany a show for pay TV porn channel Spice. Though his part of the job had nothing to do with sex, he got to meet a lot of porn stars. “I found that I liked them as people,” he recalls. “I thought they were cool.”

From there, Lim entered an alternative universe for journalism, picking up a column for kinky alternative US mag Penthouse Variations – writing under a pseudonym – and editing a website for Swedish porn star Linda Thoren. At some point, he interviewed Australian vixen Monica Mayhem, who soon became a friend. Lim suggested to the now 31-year-old scene veteran they do a book together about her life as a porn star.

The partnership came to a head in October with the Australian release of Absolute Mayhem, a plain-speaking memoir that offers a candid look at an unusual lifestyle and is now available internationally. The book opens: “Do you really want to know what it’s like to be a porn star? Brace yourself, because I’m not going to pull any punches.”

That approach is in line with Lim’s professed modus operandi of bringing the sex industry into the mainstream. “Why are people so afraid to talk about this sort of stuff?” he asks. “There’s no reason why the philosophical issues that are inherent [in the sex industry] shouldn’t be brought into the mainstream discourse.”

Lim, who’s actually a Singaporean but now makes his home in Hong Kong, was brought up Catholic in a very traditional Chinese family. “In some ways I got the worst of both worlds,” he says of his upbringing, which was “wrapped up in discipline and dogma”. His venture with Mayhem, on top of his other work – including two books on Singapore’s high-class sex trade – served as a moral release valve. “It was very freeing for me to do this.”

Exploring a taboo industry in a conservative city has raised more than a few eyebrows, but whenever he’s questioned about his prurient subject matter, Lim simply recycles a quote from the writer Henry Miller: “I do not write about fucking,” Miller said, “I write about self-liberation.”

Hamish McKenzie

Order Absolute Mayhem at www.seekbooks.com.au.