I know. Sounding like a broken record for the past year, Exxxotica New Jersey was the most attended Exxxotica I have been to in the last 12 years. Organisers said that attendance was even larger than a typical AVN Adult Entertainment Expo (AEE) but it wasn’t obvious due to the larger square footage., which kind of scares me on what a post-pandemic AEE would look like the same week as the Consumer Electronic Show.
Angela White for Brazzers
Like the past Exxxoticas this year, Angela White and Violet Myers had the longest lines stretching haphazardly several booth lengths. Even when Brazzers officials would try to stop the line near the end of the day, fans would continue to wait in line hoping that Angela would continue signing after closing, which she did.
Violet MyersBlake BlossomMila Monet
A new booth debuted, Ricky’s Room, by Ricky Johnson that featured Blake Blossom and Mila Monet. I congratulated Blake on her Best New Starlet title with AVN while I was surprised to learn that Mila had been in the industry since 2019. The pandemic has thrown my sense of timing off. I didn’t stray too far from the hotel in the after hours.
On to the last convention of the year with Exxxotica DC.
I attended my first XBIZ show since their last fan event with the Summer Expo at the Hard Rock in Las Vegas in 2010. I don’t think this would have been possible if the pandemic had not happened. Over the last twelve years and prior to that, I had never attended their events because of several reasons:
I was not interested in the web business side of the industry. There is some irony here since I write for IAFD.com, but we’re not doing this for the money. I also defer the business networking to Jeff.
I don’t vote for the XBIZ Awards. I’m sure they exist, but I don’t personally know any voters outside of the people that work for XBIZ .
Since XBIZ week usually occurs before AVN week in January, I did not have the time or budget to do both.
Since 1 and 3 did not apply this year, I looked forward to going to the only in-person capstone events for 2022 at the Hollywood Palladium in Los Angeles.
X3
Given that it was my first XBIZ event in nearly twelve years and the pandemic, there were some logistical issues to figure out at the beginning like finding where media registration was, proving my vaccination status along with the exhibitors and talent, and then being redirected to wait in line with the fans while the expo opened 30 minutes late, presumably to give the exhibitors and talent time to set up. The registration and vaccination check people couldn’t be any nicer.
Alex Blake
Chloe Temple
19Honeysuckle
After being let inside, the Palladium is similar in size to The Joint at the Hard Rock. There were not that many company booths, but there were many performers at individual tables to sell their wares on the first and second floor of the theater. One of the weird things I noticed was that there was actually a lack of porn on display at the expo. There was a prohibition against nudity in all forms, so even the items performers were signing like 8x10s and DVDs were subject to that prohibition. There were also these booths that had these cool influencer backgrounds to photograph against like I’ve seen at popular bars and clubs. In terms of new performers since the pandemic, I enjoyed meeting Haley Spades, Kay Lovely, and Jazlyn Ray for the first time.
Haley Spades
Kay Lovely
Jazlyn Ray
The floor was busy at certain points and the most popular booth by far was Brazzers as lines hovered for Angela White, Phoenix Marie, and Lily Lou. Angela had the longest lines at X3, but thankfully took the time to pose for photos when I skipped her line. Phoenix complained she would never see me when her lines are bonkers while Lily’s lines grew over the two days when the fans saw how great she was.
Angela White
Phoenix Marie
Lily Lou
I don’t normally like to skip the lines since fans can wait up to an hour to meet their favourite performer, but it was agonising to watch enthralled fans talk for 15-30 minutes each sometimes about menial subjects, and then I take about 30 seconds to snap some photos and give my pleasantries. From a practical standpoint by waiting in line, I missed out on shooting many performers that were walking around or had short signing shifts. I also saw many fans being overly aggressive with the performers to their dismay, grabbing and touching their breasts, butts, and legs without asking for consent. The sale of alcohol on site did not help with that either.
While talking to the attendees, we discussed the impact of the pandemic and compared the measures that California had taken compared to the other states I had been through because of Exxxotica. I was disturbed to learn that people were cheating the mandatory vaccination requirements by forging their vaccination status, sometimes with the help of a shady health care provider. This also included members of the industry that did not want to be continually tested if they were unvaccinated just like it was happening with players in the major sports leagues. It makes me question how much of the breakthrough Omicron cases were actually breakthrough cases. XBIZ was heavily criticised for hosting these events given the recent surge, but we are all adults and should know the risks that we are taking. However, you must be fucking bonkers if you are willing to go to one of these things unvaccinated and are willing to cheat the system to do so.
Overall, this was still a fun fan expo that I would recommend people to attend in a non-pandemic environment. Two days is ideal in a setting like Los Angeles. People were excited with the finishing musical performances of Too Short on the first day and Busta Rhymes the second day. Busta had the more polished production of the two.
I hate doing red carpets. To clarify, I like being at the Awards themselves, meeting and greeting people that I know, and watching theirs reactions when the winners are announced, but I can’t document the behind the scenes with my camera since I don’t have the all access badge to do that. However, I decided to do a red carpet after an absence of 5 years because I had never done the XBIZ Awards before, wanted to demonstrate my work to a new audience and generation of performers, and figured the attendance would be lower due to the pandemic.
Ivan & Misha Montana
Emma Sirus
Kyle Mason & Hime Marie
The XBIZ staff ran the carpet professionally even though it was outside with our backs to Sunset Blvd. I did not have to worry about fans or vagrants behind me stealing my equipment due security protecting our space.
Red carpets are high stress environment for not only the people that walk it, but for the photographers behind the rope. We are all basically fighting for the same shots even though there can be a wide discrepancy in skill between us. Some are more distractingly vocal in their directions, and I wish they would shut the fuck up since the talent knew how to pose for the most part. Further since the photographers were spaced adequately, I don’t know why they were even trying to draw someone’s attention from me. Since I was near the end of the photographer line, some of the talent skipped me to go to the interviews, which leads me to my next point.
Wonder Bread Bros sandwich
Since my outlets, IAFD and AdultDVDTalk, generously give me all the time in the world to work on the photos; my social media and phone got barraged by industry people who wonder where their photos are this week. Some are people that I never photographed or people that would otherwise never give me the time of the day outside these things. How did they even get my number? Can’t they continue to confuse me with Jeff Koga or Gordon?
After the red carpet was done, logistics was again an issue because I could not bring my equipment inside the venue, and there was no place to store it. So I trudge 30lbs back to my hotel by foot and missed a portion of the Awards when I returned. I then found out that I couldn’t step foot into the industry area and join my date because we hadn’t gotten the proper wristbands as an industry +1 right after the carpet. If only we hadn’t been separated by logistics, but she eventually got me in.
Cam Model of the Year Lana del Bae
G/G Performer of the Year Kenna James
Female Performer of the Year Emily Willis
The XBIZ Awards were a clean and straight forward production. The winners were deserving and happy. All aspects of the industry were represented in an integrated manner. When the Awards was over, the venue made it a point to kick everyone out in a timely fashion.
The vultures, err I mean the pornorazzis, were hovering outside for the drunk, high, and horny members to behave in an immoral fashion for their cameras. Imagine my annoyance in trying to get my date into a Lyft to go back to our hotel, only for the vultures to follow us back.
Exxxotica makes its first appearance near the nation’s capital. The convention isn’t actually in the District of Columbia, but calling it Exxxotica Dulles or Exxxotica NoVa does not have quite the same marketing ring. Given the new area, I wasn’t sure if this show would be the smallest one after the pandemic, but it turned out not to be. In fact, it was very busy. With less exhibitors and more attendees than the show in Miami, there was a steady crowd every day drawing from the DMV population.
Mary Moody
19Honeysuckle & Tom Christian
Evangeline Darling
Having met and photographed many of the same exhibitors the past three post-pandemic Exxxoticas, I interacted more with the popular webcam performers this time around; especially Chaturbate. Even though the booth is sequestered behind individual plexiglass displays due to health concerns, the Chaturbate models were accessible going outside the booth and checking out rest of the convention. They were also accessible hanging out around the host hotel and after-parties. I met up with Mary Moody for the first time in nearly 2 years, and she asked if I was vaccinated before hugging me which made me realise that I wasn’t wearing the COVID yellow wristbands that I had worn in the previous Exxxotica. I hung out with AVN Favourite Webcam Couple, 19Honeysuckle and Tom Christian, at and after the parties and made pretty photos of Evangeline Darling during off hours.
Lilly Bell
Alex Coal
Vicki Chase
Since this seemed to be the first Exxxotica in December, I saw plenty of people wearing holiday-themed apparel like Lilly Bell and Fiona Frost. The lines to see the performers at the Bad Dragon booth were evenly distributed. Vicki Chase hosted one of the official Exxxotica after-parties while Alex Coal vacillated between being a go-go dancer and bouncer, wielding a baseball bat.
This had been a successful Exxxotica season for 2021. I didn’t know what to expect after a year of cancellations due to the pandemic. Here’s to an even better one for 2022.
Photographer John A. Mozzer (who is also known around these parts as performer Alan Adrian) shared a bunch of photos he took around the 1988 Winter CES – when the adult exhibitors were tucked away on the second floor of the Sahara, and private parties were where you rubbed your elbows.
We can’t recommend enough getting lost and clicking around John’s meticulously captioned galleries over on SmugMug – it’s a cornucopia of the NYC downtown scene (and elsewhere) peppered with some familiar faces and a really great eye for the candid…
Click on the picture below to see the rest of the CES gallery:
Oh, it’s been quite a year. I’m not talking about the pandemic but the actual amount of reviewing that it takes to vote for the AVN Awards. As AVN founder, Paul Fishbein, once said, “It is a very long, horrible process”. You would think that with production stoppages this year there would be less things to vote on, but there seemed to be even more categories with 10-15 nominations in each. Apparently, everyone on the nomination committee worked for Oprah at one time, but you can’t please everyone. Sure, we have the option of not voting in every category – this year we voted in 69 of 89 categories – but you still have to watch all 10-15 nominees in order to fairly rank them in that category!
AVN doesn’t give us guidelines on how to vote so every voter has a different criteria on what they look for. As I mentioned last year, and for all of you analytic-minded masturbating prognosticators out there, I use a hybrid clinical approach in judging the technical aspects in the production and director categories and an overall feel for the scene and performer categories. People have asked whether voters have biases based on their experiences with the industry, and the answer is of course we do. Experience does impact how we view a product. No one has offered us blowjobs or even a handjob for a vote though, but that’s a lot of work to coordinate even for those that have publicists. Most of the performers just know me as a photographer while the producers/directors tend to be more savvy in their discussions around me.
But for the sake of transparency and further rumour mongering, here are some of our picks for the 2021 AVN Awards:
Movies
Best Cinematography: Mistress Maitland, Deeper/Pulse; Set Walker & Winston Henry
Best Episodic Movie or Anthology: If It Feels Good, Deeper/Pulse
Grand Reel: Under the Bed (Vols. 1 & 2) : Pure Taboo/Pulse
I wish Rocco would come to America more. He is a legend and his performing prime may be behind him, but you get see the excitement of the American performers that get to work with him which we don’t see as much in his European work. Jane Wilde is such a filthy performer and Jonni Darko, who I believe is the most technically adept director out there, make a great pairing for her showcase.
I realise that feature directors have a very difficult job juggling more factors on their sets than their gonzo, umm I’m sorry, non-narrative counterparts. However, I still place a lot of weight on the heat of their scenes/movies which is why I favour someone like Miles Long or Chris Streams who show a workmanlike approach to their craft; technically proficient in capturing the heat without being glossy or abstract. I also find that female directors/producers like Casey and Scarlett are stronger at answering the “Why are these people having sex?” premise beyond “THEY ARE HOT & HORNY!” and bridging the “Why are they taking so long to have sex?” filler that differentiates features from gonzo non-narratives.
Angela White would have made an excellent phone sex operator in the days before we had camming. Her dialogue and charisma would turn a eunuch on. I think it’s the Australian accent. Penny Pax has shown great range in the movies I’ve watched over the years. She can go from shy housewife to goofy nerd to seductive vixen. Even though Mainstream Venture is not a traditional acting category, Lily Labeau was the only nominee there for her acting. I found her acting chops and comic timing appropriate in the series where she switches between being the straight woman and comic foil.
After the year we had, I didn’t want to repeat any winners from 2020 so we voted for a new group of performers. Mary Moody is the first performer chosen that I knew mainly from camming. Every time I see her in public at the conventions, her delighted interactions with her cam colleagues also translated into her partnerships in scenes. She is very easy on the eyes and incredibly nice to boot. Anna de Ville and Erik Everhard, both veterans of American porn, continue to put out great scenes in Europe. I would be hanging out at my buddy’s house all the time as a kid if Sarah Vandella was his mom. Last, I am a big fan of Kenna James’s scenes. They do not involve much theatrics, but there is something about how her squinty eyes, the curl of her lips, and crooked smile contribute to her girl next door charm and accessibility. Her costars, men or women, all seem to be really into her. I may be clumsy compared to say Don Juan DeMarko in describing her appeal, but there was a reason why she was Penthouse Pet of the Year and why we feel she should be Female Performer of the Year.
