When You and a Porn Star have the Same Name

Everyone should google themselves at least once. Just for grins. Find out what’s out there about you on the interwebs.

I first googled myself some 20-plus years ago when I was a columnist for a weekly newsmagazine.

That’s when I discovered: Sharon Kayne, porn star.

I haven’t thought much about her over the years. But she was brought to mind recently. One of my cousins was searching for my book, This Restless Sea, on Amazon. And instead of searching by title, she searched by my name.

She encountered some books about interesting, assorted (not to mention, sordid) subjects. I imagine she wondered if I had a shadow life I’d never mentioned.

To be fair, Sharon Kayne, porn star, is not an author (her talents running more toward the physical than the cerebral, I suspect). However, there are a couple of books about her, ahem, career (including one that’s apparently about dildo usage).

To be clear, I am not now, nor have I ever been, affiliated with the pornography industry. Just saying. Heck, even my debut romance novel lacks sex! Still, it’s odd to know that when people search for me by name on Amazon they’ll come up with this other Sharon Kayne.

I could kvetch and groan about it, but the fact of the matter is, I have no one to blame but myself.

You see, I selected the name Kayne for myself. Although, in my defense, I did it long before Sharon Kayne, porn star, exposed herself on the silver screen.

I was born Sharon Kaney (pronounced KAY-nee). It’s a fine German name (coming from the original Köhne, so, see, I’m not even the first one who changed it!) and I’d always been happy with it.

Fast-forward to the mid-1980s, when I was ending my first, very short, very regrettable marriage. I’d had to petition the divorce court to restore my maiden name—even though I’d never given the court permission to take it away. It really annoyed me that I’d been expected to just give up my own last name but, if I wanted it back, I had to ask. I didn’t even feel like I’d forsaken my own name (I mean, it was the mid-80s, so naturally I’d hyphenated). It really felt more like I’d just sorta cheated on it with another name for a few years.

Flash forward to the early 1990s: I’d gotten my life together, managed to finish my college degree, and had moved to a new state. Higher education, of course, had turned me into a raging feminist. (What’s the point of a liberal arts education, after all, if it’s not going to awaken you to all of the inequities you’ve been taught to swallow by society?) Being young and idealistic (not to mention a bit jaded by divorce), I decided to take a stand against one of the greatest inequities to impact my life—patriarchy. And what is more patriarchal than the fact that names follow the male lineage? Even the term “maiden name” is kind of insulting, if you think about it. It’s like it’s your “little girl” name that you’re expected to cast aside when you grow up and become somebody’s wife. Ugh!

So, I decided to change my last name. I briefly considered taking my mother’s maiden name, and while it’s a fine olde English name (with ties to the Salem Witch Trials, even), that didn’t feel quite right. Then I recalled that when I worked for my college newspaper, our advisor had once misspelled my last name, moving the ‘y’ from the end to the middle, and I’d always been struck with how that looked kinda cool.

So, Sharon Kayne was born. Of course, that led to everyone pronouncing it KANE (like the movie). Naturally, I began diligently to correct them. But then I was hired to write a humor column for a local newspaper. When I met the editor/publisher, he was disappointed when I corrected him for mispronouncing my name.

“You pronounce it KAY-nee?” he said. “That’s too bad, because I was going to suggest calling your column Citizen Kayne,” he added, pronouncing it KANE.

I liked that idea, so I replied, “I could just stop correcting people.”

And so, I did. And I also started pronouncing it ‘Kane’ too. Of course, if I had wanted to change the way my name is pronounced, I would have just gotten rid of the ‘y’ instead of moving it around.

Not too long after that, I learned about Sharon Kayne, porn star. Still, I have no regrets. Although I think I’d be pretty happy if I had just stuck with Kaney.

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