Annabel Chong

Grace Quek, known professionally as Annabel Chong, is a Singaporean former pornographic actress who became famous after starring in an adult film that was promoted as the World's Biggest Gang Bang.

The film was commercially successful and started a trend of "record-breaking" gang bang pornography.

Four years later, Quek was the subject of the documentary Sex: The Annabel Chong Story, in which she was interviewed about her pornography career.

In 1994, she started in porn by answering an advertisement for a modelling agency in LA Weekly.

Quek was reportedly interested in blurring the boundary between pornography and performance art in her work.

The production that propelled her into the limelight was another Bone production, The World's Biggest Gang Bang.

Quek took part in this gang bang on January 19, 1995, when she was 22 years old.

She said part of her motivation to do the film was a desire to challenge gender roles.

She appeared in advertisements on adult television to solicit 300 participants for the event.

Initial reports differed as to whether she had sex with 251 men over the course of 10 hours, or with around 70 men multiple times to reach a total of 251: the largest number ever in a pornographic film.

Acting on the understanding that male participants who had verified a recent negative test for HIV would wear a colour-coded tag, Quek had sex with some men without a condom.

It later emerged that the testing had not been as strictly verified as the producers had led her to believe.

Even though the film became one of the highest-grossing pornographic films of all time, she was never paid the US$10,000 she was promised, and she apparently never received any money from the video.

After the event Quek made a host of media appearances, including The Jerry Springer Show and The Girlie Show.

Loretta Chen viewed Quek's work in pornography as an attempt to challenge the settled notions and assumptions of viewers about female sexuality and gender boundaries, but was not taken seriously enough.

For example, her conception of a gang bang was based on the example of Messalina, a wife of the emperor Claudius.

Historically Messalina suffered from a poor reputation, a fact that some attributed (at least partly) to gender bias.

According to Quek, she sought to question the double standard that denies women the ability to exhibit the same sexuality as men, by modelling what a female "stud" would be.

The film, Sex: The Annabel Chong Story, was released in 1999.

It includes footage from the gang bang shooting and her subsequent publicity appearances, explores her motives, revisits with her the site of her rape and depicts a painful conversation in Singapore between Quek and her mother, who had not known about her daughter's porn career before then.

It was directed by Lewis and featured contributions from Quek, Al Goldstein, Ron Jeremy and Seymore Butts.

In her March 2000 appearance on the radio program Loveline, Quek admitted that there were slightly fewer than 70 men in her gang bang and that there were water and lunch breaks during the ten-hour shoot.

For her performance, she earned a "dubious achievement award" in Esquire magazine.

The event also prompted author Chuck Palahniuk to write a novel, Snuff, about a fictional character who aimed to surpass Quek's record by having sex with 600 men.

She retired from the adult industry completely in 2003 to work in software engineering.

Quek was born and raised in Singapore in a middle-class Protestant Singaporean Chinese family.

She was the only child of two teachers.

She was a student at Raffles Girls' School, where she was enlisted in the country's Gifted Education Programme and Hwa Chong Junior College.

Former teachers and classmates describe Quek as quiet, conservative, intelligent, and studious.

After taking her A-levels, she took three gap-years, including a year spent in the United States, before going on to study law at King's College London on a scholarship.

While in the United Kingdom, Quek was riding on a train and met a man she became attracted to, and agreed to have sex with him in an alleyway.

He brought along other men, and she was gang raped and robbed in a rubbish closet under an inner-city housing block.

At the age of 21, she dropped out of law school and went on to study photography, art and gender studies at the University of Southern California (USC), where she excelled academically.

At the same time, she also began working in pornographic films.

She later went on to do graduate studies in gender studies at USC.

Since her parents did not approve of her dropping out of law school, she needed a source of income to pay her college fees.

In 2007 a play written by Ng Yi Sheng based on her story, 251, was staged in Singapore, directed by Loretta Chen.

Quek's media appearances caught the interest of Canadian film student Gough Lewis.

He met Quek and set out to produce a documentary about her.

While filming, Quek and Lewis became involved in a romantic relationship.