Professor by Day. Porn Star by Night. Can He Be Both?
‘People say they’re for free speech, but it’s only when it’s speech they agree with,’ says Joe Gow.
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Joe Gow could be stripped of his tenure after the university that employs him discovered he was selling adult films—made with his wife—online. (All photos by Jamie Kelter Davis for The Free Press)
Professor by Day. Porn Star by Night. Can He Be Both?
‘People say they’re for free speech, but it’s only when it’s speech they agree with,’ says Joe Gow.By Olivia Reingold
June 3, 2024
For nearly ten years—almost as long as they’ve been married—professor Joe Gow, 63, and his wife Carmen Wilson, 56, have been videotaping their sexual escapades, largely filmed while on vacation in spots like Los Angeles and Mexico. Wilson, a former university administrator, sometimes demonstrates how to cook vegan meals, like a “ sweet and smoky soy curl vegan pizza,” in the presence of adult film stars before they both take turns bedding each other.
But it wasn’t until this past fall, when Gow says he was planning to step down from his job as chancellor of the University of Wisconsin–La Crosse, that the couple decided to upload their videos online.
“Let’s try something a little unusual,” Gow remembers telling his wife. “Let’s put some videos online and see how they’re received.”
When Gow and his wife began posting videos to OnlyFans under the username “Sexy Happy Couple,” they quickly gained 10,000 followers. “Let’s try something a little unusual,” he remembers telling her.
Immediately, the couple’s OnlyFans account shot up from about five subscribers to now just over 10,000, a result Gow calls “stunning.” Today, they rake in “a couple thousand dollars” a month from their adult content, which Gow says features “pretty standard sexuality”—meaning no BDSM, no hitting, no violence. For $7.99, buyers can see the couple pretending to house-hunt with India Summer, Adult Video News’ two-time “MILF Performer of the Year,” who seduces both of them in the master bedroom. For slightly more—$9.99—one can purchase a compilation of the money shots.
Gow calls the shoots “thrilling,” revealing that he and his wife spent over $80,000 to produce their content, which appears on OnlyFans under the username “Sexy Happy Couple.” And he maintains that they’ve done nothing illegal—“no one is getting harmed.”
But a few days before Christmas, the sexy fun stopped when a university lawyer and an HR representative asked him to join a Zoom call.
Gow said he assumed he’d been asked to join the call to discuss another employee’s bad behavior. “And then they started asking, ‘Well, what about you—are these your videos?’ ”
He pauses. “And so that was a turning point.”
University of Wisconsin–La Crosse professor Joe Gow could lose his job over porn he made with his wife and sold on OnlyFans.
A week later, he tells me he received a “shocking” letter from Jay O. Rothman, the head of the university system, stating that he’d been fired from his 16-year term as chancellor for his “failure to demonstrate appropriate judgment, decision-making, and leadership.” Rothman added that Gow’s tenured post in the communications department would also now likely come under review. In March, Gow says his interim replacement, Chancellor Betsy Morgan, sent him a 300-page report accusing him of producing pornography using university technology, refusing to cooperate with the school’s investigation, and “unethical and potentially illegal behavior.”
“I’ve been on the other side of this as the chancellor, and what they typically do is if somebody’s done something really horrible—usually sexual harassment—that person then usually retires or leaves,” said Gow.
He said the university was hoping he’d do the same—he showed me another letter in which the interim chancellor wrote, “I am offering to settle this case without issuing charges if you would retire from the UW System effective May 4, 2024.” He says the university was hoping he’d be “so intimidated and ashamed” that he’d retire early, but he refused.
“There’s the First Amendment. This is 2024,” said Gow. “There seem to be a lot of people who say they’re for free speech, but it’s only when it’s speech they agree with.
“I don’t think I’ve done anything wrong,” he added. “And I don’t think they’re going to be able to prove that. I want people to know what’s going on here.”
On June 19, Gow will address a panel of his colleagues, who will then recommend to the interim chancellor whether he should lose his tenured gig. “These are people that have worked with me,” he says of the faculty panel handling his case. “They all know all about me.”
Gow, who is representing himself in his case against his employer, examines the 300-page investigative report prepared by the university’s attorneys. “I don’t have a lot of money to go out and hire the kind of lawyers that the system did,” he says.
He says the university has hired “a machine” of at least three lawyers to build a case against him. But Gow is representing himself. “I don’t have a lot of money to go out and hire the kind of lawyers that the system did,” he says.
Since being put on paid leave this past winter, he said he’s spent most of his time working on his opening statement and reviewing the university’s report.
It’s an ironic predicament for Gow: even though he works in academia, a field that has championed sex positivity for decades, he could find himself out of a job for being too sexually positive. He says there are academics at his own college who specialize entirely in sex positivity, and there’s even an option to major in Race, Gender & Sexuality Studies. And like many institutions—including Brown, Northwestern, and Harvard—the University of Wisconsin–La Crosse hosts an annual sex week, which includes an event called “condom bingo,” a trivia game that rewards students with “fun sex-based prizes.” The university’s outward commitments to sexual expression are one of the reasons he calls their treatment of him “a major hypocrisy.”
“The notion that we shouldn’t be talking about sexuality is, like, from the Middle Ages. This is 2024, right? Sexuality is arguably the most popular material on the internet.”
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression says UW–La Crosse may have been legally in the right for booting Gow from his chancellorship, considering his position’s public-facing nature, but that “the First Amendment may indeed protect Gow’s continued employment as a faculty member with UW.” The university declined to comment, adding only that “this is an ongoing personnel matter.”
Carmen Wilson, Gow’s wife of almost 10 years, thinks the university’s decision sets a bad precedent—especially at a school that prides itself on sex positivity and hosts an annual sex week.
At their leafy Wisconsin home with a redwood deck near the Mississippi River, Gow’s wife tells me that if the board strips her husband’s tenure next month, it’ll send a “scary” message to students.
“It definitely opens up a slippery slope of—what are people allowed to do in their personal lives?” Sitting cross-legged on a gray couch in their living room, she says that “conversations about healthy sexuality” should be welcomed at universities.
“The students are watching porn,” says Wilson. “So how do they negotiate that with partners? And what is porn, really? What is it? How do you use it in an unhealthy way?”
The two met about a decade ago at a conference for the state’s university system, when Gow was at La Crosse and Wilson was heading a satellite campus, the University of Wisconsin–Rock County. He invited her to dinner and found himself taken with her independence.
“She’s just such an honest and spirited person,” he says.
“This has not been easy,” says Gow, “but my wife and I, we haven’t done anything wrong.”
When they first started dating, they often played music together, preferably outside whenever possible—Gow plays the guitar, and Wilson, who he says is a “classically trained person who reads music,” strums the ukulele. In 2014, the year they married in a San Francisco ceremony, they rewrote the lyrics of “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay” to match their love story. “We got married on the Golden Gate,” Carmen sings in their rendition of the Otis Redding song. (The couple have no children together, but Wilson has an adult daughter from her previous marriage living in Texas.)
As he waits to hear his fate later this month, Gow said he is “eager to get things out in the open.”
He turned to his wife and placed his hand on her knee.
“This has not been easy, but my wife and I, we haven’t done anything wrong.”
They're getting it in.
