Behind the Raging Rumors of Downtown San Angelo's Porn Film Industry

Last week at city council, councilwoman Charlotte Farmer left her fellow councilmembers speechless with agenda item 19. The talk on the item was supposed to be about sexually oriented businesses, but ended up being an open discussion about someone allegedly filming a porn flick inside a downtown San Angelo business.

A pornographic movie! In historic downtown San Angelo!

During the discussion, Farmer alluded to filming of pornography before finally saying, “If I receive a constituent complaint, and I did, of adult filming activities going on at an office location downtown, [I want to know] they’re perfectly legal?”

Due diligence prompted LIVE! to investigate the alleged budding porn film industry in downtown San Angelo that Farmer was talking about. We were surprised to find a plethora of varying information from one person to the next until we were able to stitch together, as Paul Harvey would say, the rest of the story.

Farmer was vague and non-revealing in the council meeting about who the complaining constituent was.

Afterwards, Farmer said the woman (clue #1) who lodged the complaint was in the audience that day (clue #2), but because the council meeting was so long, she had to leave before the topic was discussed (clue #3). Farmer went on the say that she asked that item number 19 be moved up on the agenda that day in order to expedite and accommodate the female complainant who wanted to speak to council about the issue, but Farmer's wish was not granted. The council continued with agenda items in the order they were listed.

In the city of San Angelo, when a city council member requests an item be discussed it is added to the agenda without any sort of formal vetting process, said Mayor Dwain Morrison.  

“If a city council member is adamant about putting something on the agenda for discussion, we will put it on there,” he said. “If it’s something we feel shouldn’t be on there, we can discuss it with the councilmember, but if the councilmember is adamant that it be on there, they have the authority to put it on.”

Mayor Morrison said that he personally would not have added the porn discussion to the agenda, but since it was there, city Planning Manager Rebecca Guerra did an excellent job answering the questions about zoning that she was asked during the council’s discussion about it.

“I much rather do something in a private office when I know or hear there’s a problem (like this),” he said. “You can solve so many problems if you get the right people together in a private office and just talk about it, once you start bringing it public, then it just opens up all sorts of doors, and it’s not good.”

Marty Self, Rodney Fleming and Liz Grindstaff all agreed that before bringing an issue to council they do as much research as possible before actually discussing it in the council meetings.  Lucy Gonzales and Johnny Silvas were unavailable for comment at the time the information for this article was being compiled. The city manager, Daniel Valenzuela, was also unavailable for comment.

Farmer said she just needed some clarification.

“All the mayor said to me was that he just rather I handled it through channels and not made it public," Farmer said. "I just looked at him and I said 'Mr. Mayor it doesn’t bother me a bit we make this public' or I find out what’s legal and what’s not legal. As far as I’m concerned, I need to know should I be approached again with a complaint.”

Getting back to the rumor that Farmer heard about from a constituent, Farmer revealed the events that led up to the discussion at council last week.

“I was downtown and a business owner approached me and said that one of the citizens of San Angelo that owned another business was moving some items,” Farmer said.  “Her son was helping her move some items from one of their properties to another property. This is downtown and it was on a Sunday evening, late in the evening, 9 o’clock.  A small boy, who looked to be between the ages of 9 and 12--she wasn’t really sure--was wandering around on Concho St. by himself.

 “As her and her son were unloading stuff for their business, she approached the young man and asked him if he was lost and where his parents were,” she explained. “He said, no, he wasn’t lost, he was waiting on his mother and father. She asked the little boy who his parents were and where was he was supposed to be waiting.”

Farmer said that was when the women said the boy told her he was waiting for them in the area he was in, but that he was locked out because his parents were filming an adult video.

“It alarmed the woman that the little boy between 9 and 12 years old was locked outside late at night, at that time it was dark, so she called the police. The police came, the police handled it, there’s a police report about it,” Farmer said.

“The officer investigated and talked to the couple who were doing the filming, and according to the lady, she said the officer told them that the people had a permit and there was nothing that they could do; they were not breaking the law, they were consenting adults,” Farmer said.

“Of course, I raised my eyes at this, as the business owner was telling me this and she wrote down the name of the person that was doing the complaining and gave it to me and asked me to call,” Farmer continued.  “This is all hearsay and this is the reason I didn’t want to go into it in public because I was getting this information secondhand.  So the lady called me and said that she was at a council meeting and she had asked Councilmen Johnny Silvas to ‘please find out and talk about it.’ He saw her in the audience and didn’t bring it up and it wasn’t on the agenda. I said, I could bring up the fact of what is legal within the city limits of San Angelo, because quite honestly, I don’t know myself. I couldn’t get a clear answer so I told her that I would make some phone calls. I made some calls to various city people and really didn’t get a defined answer, so I said fine. I will put it on the agenda. I will get my definitive answer on the agenda.”

Farmer said that she explained to the woman she could not bring that part of the story up (porn flick filming) in public because it was all hearsay, even though bringing up the small fragment of the allegation like Farmer did poured more fuel on the fire. On Tuesday, the raging rumor mill was thriving through the open public discussion during city council.

“All I could do was to ask to be informed what our laws and restrictions were with references to our ordinances on sexually orientated businesses, and that’s exactly what I did,” she said. But in doing so, Farmer asked about filming pornographic movies downtown, which is a whole new ball game.

According to Police Chief Tim Vasquez, there was not a police report filed regarding the situation Farmer described, but was aware of the incident.

“The kid was almost 13 years old,” Vasquez said.  “We tracked down the photographer and spoke to him and another person helping him, and it wasn’t an adult filming or even an adult photo shoot. There was one female model that was dressed provocatively, not even in lingerie, just provocatively...he even showed us the pictures he had been taking. We saw the pictures; there wasn’t any nudity, there wasn’t anything like that in any of the pictures.”

“We went straight to the source,” Vasquez explained. “Both photographers are very professional. I have seen their work, they do outstanding work, and it wasn’t anything. We looked into the matter and the information that is being circulated is completely false.”

“I spoke to the city manager and gave him the information we had about it. I can tell you I cleared that rumor up before the meeting,” Vasquez said, referring to last week’s city council meeting.

Even if there really had been filming of a porn flick going on inside a business downtown, that doesn’t really even fall under the same category as sexually oriented business.

According to local government code, sexually-oriented business means a "sex parlor, nude studio, modeling studio, love parlor, adult bookstore, adult movie theatre, adult video arcade, adult movie arcade, adult video store, adult motel, or other commercial enterprise [where] the primary business of which if the offering of a service or the selling, renting or exhibiting of devices or any other intended to provide sexual stimulation or sexual gratification to the customer." 

Farmer says she has witnesses to the testimony that was given to her that day in downtown when she was slipped the name of the source of the complaint. “What I have been saying is the honest to goodness truth; I have no reason to say anything different.”

The phrase “I know it when I see it” was famously used by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart in 1964 when describing what fits the shorthand description of hard-core pornography.

In the city of San Angelo, there is no ordinance that forbids the filming of pornography on private property between consenting adults.