This winter, the board of regents at the University of Wisconsin–La Crosse, a campus of about 10,000 students overlooking the Mississippi River in western Wisconsin, fired the school’s longtime chancellor for an unusual reason: His porn videos were getting very popular. Joe Gow and his wife, academic administrator Carmen Wilson, shot the sex scenes together and with professional adult performers, and their videos, which they publish under the name Sexy Happy Couple, were racking up the views on Pornhub. I took a look, for research. The videos are charming, in their way; it’s unusual and interesting to see a couple in their 50s and 60s, clearly in love, going at it with the avidity of porn stars. At the university, though, only the regents’ ire was aroused, and Gow is now fighting to keep his job as a tenured professor. A hearing is scheduled for June.

I spoke over Zoom with Gow, while Wilson listened in off-camera. (“She just got off the elliptical, so she not real eager to be on camera,” Gow said, which was a funny thing to hear about someone I’d just watched have an orgasm.) We discussed how they ended up shooting professional-quality porn, why he thinks Republicans in the state Legislature are behind his ousting, and Wilson’s vegan egg-salad recipe. Our conversation has been edited and condensed.

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Dan Kois: When you and Carmen first got married, about 10 years ago, you started making videos with just the two of you?

Joe Gow: Yeah. Real homemade. We went to Best Buy and bought a Sony camcorder and just experimented with that.

What led to you making videos with porn performers?

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Before we were married, we were married to other people. At that point in your life—I was in my mid-50s, Carmen was in her late 40s—you sort of say, “Well, if I’m going to get into a new relationship, I think we need to get a lot of things out in the open.” I talked about how sexually unfulfilled I was in my previous marriage, and she said the same thing. Well, what would we like to experiment with? And one of the things was polyamory. Now that’s really quite a common topic, but back then …

It’s very buzzy now.

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Yeah. We simultaneously experimented with that and with the video-making. And we found that we really enjoyed the videos, but polyamory was very tricky. It just emotionally was not for us. We went to a swinger’s club, and that wasn’t really our scene. And then we went out to Nevada and went to a brothel. And obviously you can’t video that, but you can hire somebody.

And we were like, “Wow, OK. This should be a professional relationship.” So we did that a few more times.

We met a male stripper, because we’ve always tried to do gender balance. One time we’ll have a woman as a third partner, and the next time it’s a man. And this guy told us about a conference called Exotica. It’s like the Comic-Con of adult entertainment. And he said, “I know an agent, and he could set you up with adult performers, and you could video that.”

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So you’d hire a performer to work in your own amateur production with you?

Yeah. And we could interview them, too. In addition to a sex scene, we also shoot interview material. And we really try to humanize the performers in a way that you typically wouldn’t get from their work where it’s just all sex. We shot some videos in hotel rooms at these conferences with these performers. And then we found that, boy, it’s really hard to shoot the video and be in the video.

I should think so.

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So we asked that agent, “Gee, could you set us up with a professional studio?” And then we could be the stars of the videos, and they would be the experts on the technology.

So everything’s getting sort of more and more professional.

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There are all kinds of regulations that you’ve got to meet. We have to get tested and present those tests. And then you have to be verified that you’re of age, which is kind of silly. I’m 64.

It must be at least a little flattering. Like getting carded at the grocery store.

That’s right. And then—I’ll take credit for this idea—my wife is a great vegan cook. We’ve both been vegans for a long time. I was at a Planet Fitness on the elliptical, looking up at the monitors without the sound, and I saw a cooking show. I thought, “Could we do something as a couple interviewing people, and having the cooking in there and the sexuality?” So we came up with this concept for a show called Sexy Healthy Cooking, and we’ve shot maybe eight of those, where we interview a guest who is a performer from the adult industry and we talk about food, and also shoot a sex scene.

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I don’t know whether we’ll do any more of that. We never really planned for this to turn into a scandal. We’ve just made these shows for us. So they do have a sort of sincerity to them and authenticity, if you will, that people find distinctive.

How much does it cost to have a whole crew there for one of these cooking videos with a sex scene in it?

It takes two days. Because you would never want to try to shoot a sex scene and then a cooking scene, it just would be too much to do. That costs around $6,000 for everything, which would be the location, somebody to shoot it—two cameras, sometimes three. There are people that edit the stuff afterwards in post-production. There’s makeup, hair, those expenses.

That’s a lot of money.

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We have this joke: “We don’t play golf, we make porn.” So this is our hobby, and we take a nice trip and stay in a nice hotel and maybe make it a weeklong thing. So it’s probably about $10,000 for one of these experiences.

Do either of you ever feel like, “After spending all this money, I better not mess up this cooking scene, or this sex scene”? You’ve made a substantial investment in this thing.

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There’s no denying when it’s time to perform, there’s a lot riding on that. But I would say it’s no different for those professional guys. If they can’t perform, then you’re wasting everybody’s time. I could be a very effective spokesperson for Viagra or Cialis. I don’t know how you do it without that. On the cooking piece, Carmen really carries that. I play the silly sidekick. She does the demo and the planning.

She’s clearly the chef.

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That’s a lot of work to do that. So yeah, I would say it’s thrilling while you’re doing it, but it really isn’t something you can enjoy until afterwards, and then you see the finished product.

So at first, the goal of this really was creating that product for yourselves to enjoy. But at some point, you decided to put these out into the world. What made you decide to launch the Sexy Happy Couple channels?

I had been the chancellor of the university for over 16 years. I wanted to go back to teaching. And at the same time, Carmen was having some real bad experiences in her career as a higher-ed administrator. She was the dean of a two-year campus in the University of Wisconsin system, at Rock County. And that was then regionalized, and she was out of a job because they fired the deans. She got another job at a school that was underfunded, and she left that. She went to a private school and they closed it two years later.

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She was not feeling great about the state of her higher education career at that point.

Not at all. So we said, “I’m going to announce that I’m retiring as chancellor. Why don’t we just experiment with our videos and see what happens if we put them on OnlyFans and LoyalFans.” And no one cared. It was zero interest. Maybe one or two people. Gee, OK, I guess, who’s going to care about these middle-aged people? So then we took two videos and put them on Pornhub and Xhamster. And it was stunning. Very quickly, 1,000 views a day, 10,000 views a day, 100,000 views. In just a few weeks, the viewing was over 1,000,000. We did not anticipate that.

This was last fall?

Yeah. November and December.

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Why do you think these videos caught on? Why were people clicking on and watching and enjoying videos of regular middle-aged academic administrators having sex?

There’s a spectrum of videos out there. On the one end, it’s completely homemade, not really well edited, just a single camera, not well lit. And then on the other end, very highly polished, contrived, professional studio–produced stuff. We came right in the middle of that. Here’s a real married couple, with nice production values. And then because we made this for ourself, it’s: What do we want to have in there? We don’t do any extreme activity. There’s no BDSM or anything that is … it’s pretty straightforward in many ways.

It’s extremely vanilla.

By design. That’s who we are.

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People always complain that academia is stuck up in its ivory tower and it doesn’t connect to the citizens. And you guys really connected with the citizens, and then you lost your job. What was it about your videos that you think freaked out the board of regents?

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I thought maybe they’ll call me up and say, “Hey, retire early.” But instead it was this big blow-up. This is the report their lawyers did [holds up large binder-clipped report]. See, it says “CONFIDENTIAL MEMORANDUM.” It’s 300-plus pages. It’s fitting that we’re in Wisconsin, because this is right out of the McCarthy era. They include in this report statements from legislators, right-wingers, who said, “This guy ought to be fired. We ought to have an investigation. He is immoral, horrible.” I really do think significant political pressure was exerted on the system president. And so they needed to show, Yeah, we’re not going to tolerate this immorality.

Yeah, I was really struck by that language in the press release where they described you as “abhorrent” and “disgusting.” You believe the constituency for that message was Republicans in the Legislature?

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Yeah, I think that’s a big part of it. Based on the reactions that we’ve received, it’s pretty clear that yeah, the real conservative, religious people think this is abhorrent, but the rest of the world, I think people are like … What you do in your own time is your own business.

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You’re a communications studies professor. That’s the tenured position that you’re now battling to keep. Do you think that your experience making these videos and putting them out in the world is relevant to your field? Is this publishable?

Oh, this is an amazing learning experience for me. We do a lot of interviews with different people. I was on CNN this winter, and there’s a certain approach there. And then we were on a podcast with a guy who would range from First Amendment, free expression, cultural norms, real heady stuff—into, “What was it like to have sex with Nina Hartley?” The audience, the way you communicate with them, is really changing.

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If you return to the classroom next year, do you think it will be awkward? I feel like if I were standing in front of a bunch of undergraduates who had definitely seen me have sex, I would be very embarrassed. But are you immune to embarrassment?

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I’ve thought about that a lot. There is something incredibly honest about hearing from a person that you know you could go watch them having sex. They don’t have much to hide. If they let me back, my approach will be to start out and say, “OK, now I know you’ve heard about some things that my wife and I have been doing. And there’s been some controversy. Let’s talk. What questions do you have? What would you like to know?”

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And if I don’t get to come back, Carmen and I have talked a lot about this, we would love to travel to other campuses and speak and talk and meet people. I aspire to keep doing that. I’m 64, but I’m nowhere near ready to sit in a chair and watch TV. I really enjoy talking and writing and listening.

I have to imagine that yours is the only OnlyFans with a recipe for vegan egg salad on it. Do you hear from people who cook these recipes and enjoy them? Maybe this is a question for Carmen, not you.

Carmen (offscreen): Yeah, we have heard from a few people. Actually, my mom is 82 and she lives in a small town, 1,400 people, just north of La Crosse. She has her lady friends that she walks with and that she plays bridge with. And when this news came out, it was big news in Galesville. And she struggled with it initially, but she’s really come around. I think the most common words that come out of her mouth these days are, “I had no idea. I had no idea.”

But one of her lady friends watches the cooking segments on YouTube and told her, “Those recipes look delicious!” It’s really heartwarming that people make this stuff and like it. It makes me warm on the inside.