Joe Gow and his wife Carmen Wilson walked into a Best Buy in La Crosse, Wisconsin. They were going to buy their first camcorder.
A clerk stood behind the help desk wearing a blue Best Buy polo.
“We need a camcorder,” Gow said nonchalantly. The clerk turned to look at Wilson.
“Well, what are you going to shoot with this?” the clerk asked. “Sports?”
“Yeah, like that,” Wilson said.
Really, the couple was about to embark on a new passion project: producing porn together.
Now, Gow sits at his kitchen table. His hair is gray and perfectly coffied and his expression holds a soft grin. He’s tall and thin, his cheekbones prominent. He is wearing an orange terry cloth top and a silver chain.
Wilson is his opposite. She is short with dark, wavy hair. It looks to be wet, like she’s just showered. She is wearing a maroon UWL crewneck. They are like the light and the dark, the yin and the yang.
“The decision to post some of our videos was mutual,” Gow said. “If one of us was uncomfortable doing this, we certainly wouldn’t have posted them. We just didn’t envision that we would be outed so suddenly and thoroughly by the UW System Board of Regents. Once they learned of the videos, they could have asked me to resign in a quiet fashion — but the Regents chose to make a big statement about the situation. This led to unprecedented media coverage throughout the country and around the world.”
Before the camcorder
In 2006, UWL was looking for a new chancellor. Douglas N. Hastad had resigned after 17 years to become the president of Carroll College in Waukesha.
A 47-year-old Gow had recently moved from Winona, Wisconsin to Lincoln, Nebraska to be the provost of Nebraska Wesleyan University.
“I went down there and walked into a world of a lot of turmoil,” Gow said.
Faculty were at odds, the president had suddenly retired and the university desperately needed an interim president. Even though he was the new guy in town, Gow stepped up and took the interim position.
“Usually, you don’t want to pursue the full-time position because that’s politically very complicated,” Gow said. “But then everybody would say to me ‘don’t you want to be president?’ ‘Oh come on!’ ‘We love you!’”
So he threw his name in the hat, but there was a stipulation. He was also going to open himself up for other jobs.
He was publicly rejected for that presidential position. The board said they wanted someone who had served as a president in the past. The silver lining was that UWL then nominated him for chancellor around the same time – and he was happy to be considered.
In November of 2006, the UW System President Kevin P. Reilly said, “Dr. Joe Gow is an accomplished scholar and an experienced academic leader, and I am confident that he will be an effective and enthusiastic advocate for UW-La Crosse’s future.”
Wilson was the chair of the search committee working in administration at UWL at the time. They were both married to other people back then.
Gow began as Chancellor in February of 2007.
Brothels, strippers and sexpos
It wasn’t until Gow and Wilson had both gone through divorces and Wilson had become the dean at UW-Rock County that their romance began to flourish.
Gow was then in his late 50s and Wilson was in her late 40s. Gow wondered how he would meet a new prospect at this age.
They ran into each other at a system meeting, and he decided to ask her out for dinner. They got married on the Golden Gate Bridge in 2014.
Gow and Wilson discovered they had a mutual interest in adult film early into their relationship. Reflecting back, Gow said it was a nice discovery that enhanced their relationship.
After they bought their first camcorder, they started filming themselves. These were personal videos, never meant to be seen by anyone else.
“It’s really expressive,” Gow said. “It’s kind of like playing music.”
As they began to record their own porn, they were also trying polyamory – an experiment that ultimately failed after emotions became too complicated.
Though the polyamours relationship failed, they still wanted to figure out a way to bring in other people into their relationship.
Enter the Moonlite Bunny Ranch in Mound House, Nevada.
Nevada is currently the only state in the US that allows some legal prostitution, and on their quest to fully sexually liberate themselves, Gow and Wilson visited. The only word they had to describe the experience was “interesting.”
“We had an encounter with a male stripper,” Gow said. “When you pay people, it’s like enjoy it in the moment and life goes on. Nobody expects there’s any kind of relationship or anything like that.”
That male stripper ended up becoming a keystone in their porn producing journey. If it wasn’t for him, they would have never attended Exxxotica – the largest sex convention in the nation – where they met a professional production company based out of Los Angeles, California.
At that time, they were still recording off of their Best Buy camcorder, but it was time to upgrade. They contracted with the production company and got to work.
These professionally produced adult videos were still only for their personal collection at the time.
“The other thing we like to do is interview people,” Gow said. “We think that a lot of the performers, you don’t really know who they are as real people. So, we started doing interviews and sex scenes with professional people.”
The camcorder had officially evolved into multiple camera angles, a producer and an editor. That then led to their YouTube series “Sexy Healthy Cooking.”
The first YouTube video was published Dec. 8, 2023. None of those videos contained any explicit content as it would be against YouTube’s terms of service.
“It’s just talking to people about sex that are performers and then Carmen does this great vegan food,” Gow said.
“Neither of us were intending to put anything [porn] out into the world,” Wilson said. “That’s absolutely important to know. This was for us and our own relationship and that was it.”
Gow glanced at Wilson and smiled.
“It would be kind of like making a painting just for you, you know? Just for the enjoyment of doing it [and] we did it together,” Gow said.
He compared it to writing and recording a song, or writing a piece for a newspaper. When someone is proud of the thing they’ve created, they want other people to enjoy it too.
“We reached a point in our lives where we were like, well, what would it be like for other people to see the videos?” Gow said. “Would they like them or not?”
The beginning of the end
In 2021, Wilson and Gow lived separately. She had taken an administrative job out in Buffalo, New York and Gow was still serving as the chancellor at UWL. Gow decided he would move to Buffalo and they bought a house there.
But a storm was brewing. Wilson’s university was folding and the board was facing pressures to close down for good. She ended up leaving that school and accepting a consulting job at another. That job fell through too.
Wilson’s struggles in Buffalo happened in the spring of 2023. They were forced to sell their home in Buffalo and take a large financial hit. Over the summer, Gow and Wilson talked about what would come next. They were both ready to be done with administration.
“It’s been about 17 years as your chancellor, and I’ve enjoyed every minute of that, but I want to do other things,” Gow said during the fall 2023 opening remarks.
He was going to go back to teaching. Gow was set to finish his role as chancellor at the end of the spring 2024 semester.
“If we were still pursuing academic careers, we would have never put the videos out,” Wilson said. “But we were done with that.”
A national sensation
It started with OnlyFans and LoyalFans. It seemed like the safest option since all of the explicit content was behind a paywall.
For Gow and Wilson, porn was never about making money. Sure, they had spent plenty in their production pursuits, but making it back didn’t matter. They just wanted to get their videos in front of an audience.
There were too many creators on the subscription based sites and their content was buried amongst the sea of amateur artists.
One day in mid November of 2023, they were talking about their audience issues with their editor. The production company he works for is about 50 people and rather profitable in the porn space.
“We have a lot of luck on the free sites,” he told them. “Like PornHub and xHamster. Those are very popular.”
Gow and Wilson knew it was unlikely that they’d get anywhere as a middle aged couple on OnlyFans or LoyalFans. The free sites seemed like a logical next step.
These videos had everything the average porn viewer might want. Professional lighting, multiple camera angles and even a storyline throughout, Gow said.
“The fact [was] here [is] this older couple who are really married and they’re having sex in a loving way. It’s not abusive or manipulative, it’s very consensual…” Gow said. “That really caught a lot of attention and before we knew it,” Gow paused to look at Wilson. “It was like ‘how many people watched the video?’ ‘Oh, 1,000 today.”
And that number grew and grew until “TheSexyHappyCouple” received a badge on their profile to congratulate them for becoming the second largest creator in North America in December 2023.
Terminated
It was the Wednesday before Christmas.
Gow opened his email to an email he has received from one of the UW System attorneys and a human resource representative. It read:
“Can we talk with you about a personnel situation?”
Gow agreed, thinking this was about someone else on his staff. The adult videos had blown up so fast that Gow and Wilson hadn’t had time to process what might happen now that they were very obviously in the public eye.
“This is about you. This is about your videos, and we have the two books too,” he was told over a Zoom call later that day. Gow and Wilson had published two books under pseudonyms about how creating porn together strengthened their relationship alongside their videos.
Wilson said that at the time, they were more concerned about the money Gow might be making off of his new side gig. As an employee of the state, he was obligated to report the income he was making off of the videos and the books.
“He said ‘no, we’ve been contrary.’ We pay a lot of money to make the videos and the books,” Wilson said.
She clarified that their video and book income had never been more than $1,000/year.
Gow was officially terminated from his chancellor position and stripped of his tenure after a unanimous vote from the UW System on Sept. 27, 2024.
Local celebrities
It’s been almost a year since Gow was first fired from UWL. He sits at his dining room table and smiles over at his wife. They had been reflecting on how poorly Wilson had been treated after their videos came to light.
“[Everyone in the industry,] they’re people of their word, you know?” Gow said. “… And especially some of the women we’ve performed with. I mean, these are incredibly strong women that have their own voices, and they’re very clear about their expectations. Very well educated, many of them…”
Gow and Wilson believe that porn will eventually just be another “thing.” Gow said one day, it’s not going to be a big deal.
“It’s the older people that have struggled with this, because we come out of a time when it was really forbidden and [the younger generations] have ready access to it, but this is a big part of our intellectual experiment here is were pretty confident that history will look back on this and say, oh, that couple they were doing something that was brave and nobody had done before and now it is very accepted,” Gow said.
He looked across the table at Wilson again. A small frown forms across his face.
“But, there was a price to pay,” Gow said as he looked down at his hands. The price was his job and the likelihood of his wife ever getting a job again.
“We’re not happy about that, but I think we’re proud of the fact that we’ve done something that nobody else has done, and maybe this gets people talking about human sexual relationships, pornography, vegan food, you know?” Gow said, chuckling at his vegan food comment.
Their public perception has stayed positive around La Crosse. Friends on Facebook and former colleagues have come out to voice support for Gow.
“One of my former colleagues in the psych department who still works there sent me a Facebook message and she said ‘there are many, many people who think that Joe should not lose his tenure, but they are too afraid to speak up,” Wilson said. “And that right there is chilling.”
Wilson said that before any of the controversy started, the couple would be stopped for pictures every now and then. Students always seemed to have a positive reaction to Gow.
One night, not long after Gow had been fired, they were eating at a local sushi and Hibachi joint called Shogun.
Inside the dimly lit building, they had just paid and were on their way out. As they walked past the bar, a group of 10 young women quieted their chatter as they passed. Wilson didn’t think much of it until they reached their car in the parking lot.
One of the women had briefly popped her head out of the restaurant to snap a picture of them.
“Let’s go back in,” Wilson said to Gow. “We’ll get a proper picture.”
The group was shocked to see them walk back through the doors. Immediately, the one who had taken the photo offered to delete it.
“Give me your camera!” Wilson said. “I’ll take the pictures.”
The group relaxed when they realized Gow and Wilson weren’t mad, they were flattered.
“We want you in the picture, too,” another one of the women said to Wilson.
Wilson laughs as she recalls that day. “That was kind of fun,” she said. “Typically, that would not have happened.”
But now, it happens all the time. In the grocery store, they are stopped and told to “keep up the good fight.” At the nail salon, Wilson was in the middle of paying when one of the owners said “I saw you on the news this morning.” Wilson told her to expect another segment that night.
“I think you’re getting a total raw deal from those people,” the woman said.
The support has continued to flow since Gow decided to move forward with suing the UW System.
Free speech champions
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expressions (FIRE) reached out to Gow in early 2024 after learning from public reporting that his tenured position on the faculty might be at risk.
“We were disappointed to see a public university punish a tenured professor for expression clearly protected by the first amendment,” Zachary Greenberg, faculty legal defense and student association counsel at FIRE, said.
Gow’s case mattered enough to FIRE to take him on as a client. They connected him with Attorney Mike Leitner.
“I was brought into this case by [FIRE],” Leitner said. “I was disappointed that the UW System and UWL were taking such harsh and extreme measures to punish what I and many others believe is fully protected expression.”
Leitner has been involved in free speech cases since the start of his career in 1985.
“I have been fortunate enough to work on First Amendment matters more and more often in recent years,” he said.
Greenberg said that Gow’s case matters because everyone should have the right to express themselves however they want when they are away from work.
“We don’t want to live in a society where employees snoop around the private lives of their employees looking for reasons to fire them,” Greenberg said. “Free speech cannot thrive if public universities – dedicated to the free exchange of ideas – terminate tenured professors merely because donors and politicians dislike what they say…”
Greenberg and Leitner said that Gow’s fight will help protect students and faculty from persecution in the future.
“… We need strong First Amendment rights the most when the authorities seek to squelch controversial and unpopular expression,” Leitner said. “The First Amendment prohibits universities, like other public employers, from punishing the speech of faculty members because the university is worried that people will be offended.”
When Gow entered the world of academia, he liked the notion that when you received tenure, you had the freedom to explore things that are new and controversial, cutting edge. But he never expected that to turn into a full-fledged constitutional battle.
“I think if they had just said ‘Okay, we’re firing him as chancellor, he’s going to retire anyway. Just let him go teach classes,’ this would fade away,” Gow said. “I certainly wouldn’t be seeking out this kind of controversy.”
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