(continued)

POINT AND SHOOT Otherwise upstanding citizens are getting in on the act

Sex flicks offered a temporary salve, but he soon grew tired of the silicon Barbie dolls typically featured in commercial offerings. "I like my ladies thick," he explains with a laugh. After googling "homemade porn," he stumbled onto xtube.com, a fledgling user-generated erotica site featuring videos created by real people—exhibitionists, would-be starlets, free spirits, and maybe a few kooks—some of whom, it turned out, were also ladies of reasonable "thickness."

After a couple weeks of avid viewing, though, Lewellen's competitive nature got the better of him. "I realized that some of my own homemade movies were better than most of what I was seeing," he says. And so, on a humid July afternoon, 16 months after he left his fiancée, he fired up his late-model Dell desktop and posted a 5-minute, 29-second clip from a tape he and Zoe had filmed together. Recording the tryst had been her idea, and when he contacted her to ask if he could post a portion online, she was surprisingly enthusiastic.