There's nothing wrong with the word career. Your career is basically the work you do over the course of your life.
As you work, you gain experience and skills that are more valuable. These skills are often specialized to some degree and support each other, tending to make you most valuable for certain kinds of work. As a result you will do a lot of that work. That's a career.
Whether you make a career out of starting tech companies or fixing pipe organs the word fits. In fact, you might start one career as a software developer and then decide to quit and run a nightclub instead. That'd be your career even if you technically had FU money and weren't doing it for anyone but yourself.
So, the question he is asking when he says "will a job in gay porn kill my career" is: will the skills and experience I have gained become worthless in other markets? Career is a flexible English word and takes on additional meaning easily. You can avoid it all you want, but that won't change the realities about how much his experience is worth to potential employers.
I believe that you are ultimately correct about the word 'career' in your well-written post, but the narrow way that it's constantly used in Corpspeak has generally ruined its meaning in that more broader sense.
When I encounter the word career it's almost always paired with 'climbing that career ladder', with the implied 'toe that line as a dedicated corporate soldier or your career is finished'.
It's a sad state of affairs that those with over-simplistic attitudes and an ultra-conservative agenda have seemingly hijacked such a fine word. What to do if your self-described 'career path' doesn't sit well with the pointy-hair's idea of a proper 'career'?
I'm feeling that the word is tainted among the more thoughtful and enlightened and it's better to just not use it at all, lest one risk coming across as a Philistinistic simpleton.
As you work, you gain experience and skills that are more valuable. These skills are often specialized to some degree and support each other, tending to make you most valuable for certain kinds of work. As a result you will do a lot of that work. That's a career.
Whether you make a career out of starting tech companies or fixing pipe organs the word fits. In fact, you might start one career as a software developer and then decide to quit and run a nightclub instead. That'd be your career even if you technically had FU money and weren't doing it for anyone but yourself.
So, the question he is asking when he says "will a job in gay porn kill my career" is: will the skills and experience I have gained become worthless in other markets? Career is a flexible English word and takes on additional meaning easily. You can avoid it all you want, but that won't change the realities about how much his experience is worth to potential employers.