Porn Valley is Crying. Or Maybe It’s Just a Light  Drizzle.

Hunter Bryce.  If the name sounds familiar, perhaps you may have appreciated the erotic  intensity the performer brought to over seventy adult movies with titles like…hold on…um….well, do the titles really matter?  When it comes to getting cheap blog-laughs , spouting porn titles is akin to  shooting fish in a barrel. A very small barrel. With a sawed-off shotgun.

Yep. Whether you knew Bryce Hunter or not, the  name elicits an instant sense of familiarity. The dyslexic might easily confuse the name with  Price Hunter, the smartphone app for hardcore cheapos,  or maybe you just confused Hunter Bryce with this guy. Wouldn’t be the first time it’s happened.

Whatever you thought, it doesn’t really matter now, or at least not to Bryce Hunter.  She’s dead.

The 30 year-old performer was discovered  the evening of March 12th in her modest home, located (where else?) in Porn Valley, AKA the endless stretch of L.A. suburbia called the San Fernando Valley.  Though preliminary investigation has so far ruled out foul play, we couldn’t help but be a tad suspicious by this bit of reportage (note: emphasis is  our own) from Peter Warren of Adult Video News (AVN):

“News broke of Bryce’s passing by way of a tweet Wednesday morning from male performer Tucker Slain, which read that Bryce “was not doing well personally,” and that “her roommate told me she was found dead this morning.”

Thanks, Twitter!

Now, if this were broadcast news,  right about now we’d say “Let’s rewind that” and go back to the part where the name “Tucker Slain” is mentioned.  And we’d do that about twenty times in a row. Tucker Slain? Are you kidding us? It’s bad enough to have your demise announced with a measly Tweet, but from Tucker Slain? Call us paranoid, but if we had names like Dick Death or Mikey  Murderer or even Tucker Carlson, we’d probably put the death-tweeting on hold until after the funeral at the very least. Then again, with a name that obvious, being the first to tweet about her death would be a move that could only be called clever.  Clever like a Foxxx!

But no one’s accusing Mr. Slain of having slain anyone. Certainly not us and certainly no one  sane that we know of. Apparently Hunter Bryce was unhappy, which is an admittedly rare state-of-mind for porn stars, and had turned to the bottle (again, very odd), and was thirty years old, which is normally something to cheer about, but being a 30 year-old woman in porn is  like being a 90 year-old broad in the real world. Christ, these days if you’re over 23 in porn  you’re lucky to to get a role in a gonzo  MILF vid. Cold comfort now, but Ms. Bryce was not the only unhappy thirty year-old woman in the San Fernando Valley who was hitting the bottle too hard. And being a porn star in that neck of the woods is about as common as being  a lobbyist on K Street.

At least AVN showed Ms. Bryce a little dignity in death by not printing her real name, thus sparing her family and friends the unnecessary and ill-timed exposure that comes with the revelation that your daughter/sister/Christian camp counselor was a porn star.

No, the honor of exploiting the death of the late Ms. Bryce as an opportunity to print her real name goes to what many in the industry consider to be the “Shasta Cola” or “tissue-stuffed bra” of porn reporting, a publication whose real name we shall not mention here out of respect for dead.  Well played, gentlemen, well played!

To give you some idea of how brightly Bryce’s star shone in the porn constellation, her death was nowhere to be found on the front pages or top stories of the two adult trade websites  less than 48 hours after the body was discovered. In the amount of time it takes to write, cast, shoot, edit, and distribute a porno movie, the memory of Ms. Bryce was shuffled to the back of the pack to make way for bigger stories like the impending release of the much-anticipated “NOT MANIMAL: THE PARODY,” hot pix of the newest starlet in town Roxxxie Floxxx, and lastly, an announcement that the ” Mister Mambo Mystery Rabbit”  features vibrating beads, a taint tickler, PLUS  ”a rubber rabbit that can sense  a woman’s orgasm,”  and when he does he “pops out of the base of the vibe and dances a lively a  mambo to Perry Como singing  Papa Loves Mambo. Currently available in teal only.”

Time marches on. Hunter Bryce does not.  Ciao, bella!

In all seriousness, we offer our condolences to the friends and family of this lovely performer, whose real name you will have to go elsewhere to find. Depression is a serious illness–and that’s no joke.