"There is a way to make a living out of this," says Audrey, a marketing manager for a large adult affiliate network, "Toon and 3D animation porn is booming right now and finding good, reliable animators is difficult. In my opinion though, establishing your own clip4sale type of site is really not the way to go unless you already know a ton about traffic, micro billing and affiliate marketing. You'll end up putting forth a huge amount of effort with very little return. You can make money by creating semi-exclusive and exclusive content sets and selling them to adult publishers. You can work anonymously and hide behind your own company name. You can also state specifically that your company name not be attached to any of the front ends your content will appear on. We recently acquired some custom/exclusive 3D sets that kind of pushed boundaries and the artist stated specifically to not his name and company name attached to this stuff ever."

To get started, set up an account with Go Fuck Yourself (www.gfy.com), the adult industry's biggest and most active business board. "Introduce yourself, start posting some of your work and offer up your first semi-exclusive set for sale," says Audrey, "Semi-exclusive means that you can sell licenses of your set to let's say 10 or 15 different publishers. Continue to promote your work on the board and go to industry shows and promote your work. Eventually publishers will approach you to create exclusive custom projects for them. There are not too many full-time, good 3D artists out there so this could happen fast if you promote yourself properly."

Audrey also suggests setting yourself up with a site with prices and portfolio. As for collecting payment, an Epass account will do the trick. "Oh and sign up for an icq account," says Audrey. "It's old school, but pretty much all adult business is done via icq or Skype." If you want to learn about the who's who of the adult industry, www.xbiz.com is the website to do it. "It's a good place to build a mailing list, spec out what company is doing what, get yourself listed in the resource section and find out about industry events," says Audrey. Setting up a profile on www.xbiz.net, is also good way to make connections and drum up business.

Jason "Loki" Smith has been an artist on the vanguard of this industry for over a decade and offers his own encouraging news: "Half of the companies in adult either have or are developing a 3D paysite and the need for new artists will continue to grow. It has definitely been an interesting 10 years and the market has done nothing but grow, slow at first, then it literally stalled, but in the last two years it has taken a huge leap forward."

Since he's taken over managing a company's cartoon content, Loki's stepped down somewhat from creating and selling his own work but continues to help build the 3D market. " In the coming month I will be launching an adult webmaster forum [www.toonwebmasters.com] geared at cartoon webmasters," he says. "The site will focus on everything cartoon related: 3D, Anime, Hentai, hand drawn cartoons and will have sections for companies, affiliates, and artists."

You're running up against a problem that genderqueer, transgender and transsexual people face in many aspects of their lives, QCO. Whether accessing health care, government services, employment opportunities or online dating, it's the same story: there's no box for you. Even dating websites that fall outside the heteronormative model tend to ask only whether you're male or female. Would it kill them to go a little less binary without getting preciously specific? I know it's been a Fetlife festival here lately but as my friend Holly says, "It's the one of the only sites that allows you to choose your gender. On that note you can also choose forniphilia, fisting and furries as things you like to do, just like long walks on the beach."

You may, as some friends have remarked, endure some unwanted attention on Fetlife by people who do not read what is clearly written in your profile, but let's face it, this can be an issue on a lot of dating/social networking sites. Another pansexual friend who cruises online a lot endorses www.okcupid.com, though you'll notice their gender categories are limited to male or female. Consider sending feedback to sites about their options and see if they don't make some effort to include you and yours.