Abella Danger – blog.iafd.com

AVN 2026

Another January Awards season has passed with the AVN Adult Entertainment Expo and AVN Awards returning to the Virgin Hotels Las Vegas. Similar to the Hard Rock in 2013, the Virgin staff and security made some adjustments to hosting after several common complaints in the first year, and the expo ran more smoothly this year.

Adult Entertainment Expo

The Expo was divided into three rooms. One room had large booths featuring studios like Brazzers and Sex Like Real and platforms like Loyalfans and MyFreeCams. One focused mostly on adult novelty companies. The third and largest room had a mix of studios, platforms, talent agencies, and other random vendors. Brazzers had the largest booth with lines that you had to cut through just to navigate in that area. Angela White and Abella Danger had the longest lines of fans waiting at the convention.

Sabrina Bishop interviewed performers on the floor for IAFD, but random fans kept trying to get her attention and talk to her even though they did not know who she was. Sabrina is a great interviewer showing natural rapport with whoever she was talking to although there were a couple fangirl moments that surprised me.

Sabrina Bishop, Girthmaster, Sara Loverays, Mikayela Miller — Sabrina with Girthmaster, Sara Loverays, and Mikayela Miller

Convention photos on Flickr

The Nightlife

The best part about AVN week is meeting friends that you only really see on an annual basis, often in an informal setting like at a party. One person, Mia Rose, I hadn’t seen in 17 years.

Dorcel threw a great party to promote their movie, Strip. I was happy to see Riley Reid there after an absence of three years. She again greeted me with, “It’s been so long!”, and I reacted again in confusion because years become a blur when you’re old like me.

Riley Reid and Anna Claire Clouds — Riley Reid & Anna Claire Clouds

Photographers were being kicked out of the AVN White Party, but I was too busy drinking and recording Anna Claire Clouds‘s new boobs with my brain for anyone to complain about my camera.

AVN Awards

I had attended 6 or 7 AVN Awards in person mostly working behind the scenes. My first was in 2006 when I accompanied Ariana Jollee along with several other members of AdultDVDTalk down the red carpet at the Sands. Twenty years later, I had the privilege of the lovely Emma Sirus taking me to the Awards. The red carpet went smoothly for me as a guest compared to when I photographed it in 2023. The Awards production crew was surprised and delighted to see us. Everything was a blur, and Emma fed me ice cream afterwards.

Several performers came up to me and asked me where my camera was. Some even asked me when they could see their red carpet photos while the red carpet was still going. Maybe adrenaline caused these conversations to be on autopilot.

Right before the Awards started, people like to take their photos on stage. As I led Emma to the stage for a photo with her co-nominee, other people stopped me to ask me to take their photo for them with their phones. After I finished taking this photo for Olivia Jay, I tried to compose a shot for Emma. Realising that Olivia Jay was in the frame taking selfies, I asked Olivia to move slightly to her left. Olivia petulantly screamed at me that she was there first. When she was finished with her selfies, she walked by and bumped Emma for good measure in front of everybody else.

Can’t have an AVN week without some drama.

The Awards themselves started earlier than usual and ended reasonably before midnight. Wiz Khalifa threw an inspired set, and the winners were all deserving. An ad by Joi promoting AI elicited boos from the crowd, and its placement at an awards celebrating performers was curious.

On a Closing Note

After finishing up my 22nd AVN week, I don’t know how long I can keep doing this. AVN is the most grueling event on the adult industry calendar and is geared for the young or the young at heart. I am neither. Most of the pornorazzi that I knew when I first started are dead, and the ones that are still around are jaded or bat shit crazy in their resilience. Even though I have made adjustments to my approach, I am plenty jaded and my resilience is waning.

I have met thousands of performers and made lifelong friends in and around the industry through these events. Many that I don’t view from a perspective of a fan so it always confuses me when people ask me for an introduction. I will miss them when I am done.

Like multiple winners at the AVN Awards, I would like to thank Mark & George for their hospitality the whole week, Dorcel for letting me crash an awesome party, and Sabrina for patiently keeping my short fuse in check with the idiotic attendees around. Shout out to my boys, Bono, Jeff, Danny, Shawn, Sammy, and Swine and my muse, Lily Labeau.

Thank you, Emma, for being one of the kindest people I know and being a great Awards date.

… and Summer, Sona, and Annaleigh, thank you for being magical.

AVN Expo 2024

It took a while, but I was distracted by personal life stuff. This year’s AVN Expo was smaller and cheaper than last year’s wallet shock of a show. Resorts World is still a very expensive venue when it comes to food and drinks, but moving the show off the same week as CES made it more affordable.

As such, most of the industry was staying at the host hotel rather than the backup hotel. The show itself was hosted in a smaller area with less exhibitors compared to last year. That was fine because I didn’t have to move around as much. Even though there was less attendance due to the lack of CES crossover, the crowd density remained the same. At some point, I was jostling in a river of crowd traffic with my camera banging against people including one person that was carrying a motorcycle helmet for some reason.

CC Doll, Aria Valencia, Sky Pierce, Rissa May, Harley Haze at Hookup Hotshots

The best booth at the show was a new one from Hookup Hotshots. The beautiful starlets signing there were accessible and there were backgrounds to shoot them against without a crowd. Angela White, Abella Danger, and Violet Myers had the longest lines at the convention, and Brazzers seemed to have the busiest booth.

I did not party too hard this year with all of the distractions and was more busy walking girls back to their room since there were so many predators out and about.

I stayed away from the awards red carpet and watched The Royal Rumble instead. Congratulations to the deserving Chanel Camryn for winning Best New Starlet though.

Exxxotica Chicago 2022

The second show in Chicago after the pandemic, the attendance was almost overwhelming as people ventured out in full force compared to last year’s antsy group. I didn’t see any mask wearing, and people treated any other precaution like spacing as an afterthought. There was a good balance of the genders, especially on Ladies Free Friday. I saw numerous fangirls excited to meet their stars compared to the usual creepy awkward or entitled obnoxious male attendees that you see at any porn convention.

The talent must have been happy as I saw steady lines waiting patiently, sometimes even hours when it came to the most popular stars like Angela White, Abella Danger, and Violet Myers who signed on tirelessly. Brazzers had the busiest booth at the show, and it was actually cool to see the support staff actively greeting attractive attendees that may become future stars for the website.

The convention would stay busy deep into the late hours on Friday and Saturday, and that became somewhat of a problem with the availability of food options. Not only that, the after-parties started around that time. I was smart enough to choose food rather than drinks but would visit the parties in their closing hour, only to be dragged into the after-after parties by my friends (thanks, Lacy) and strangers that seemed to recognise me somehow.

I mingled quite a bit with cam models like Hime Marie, Ivy Minxxx, and Demi Hawks from the Chaturbate booth. From hosting the parties, their staff, and even the layout of their booth, I found the booth much more accessible to the fans than their main competitor at the convention.

Photos on Flickr

This might have been the busiest Chicago Exxxotica I’ve been to, and I am already dreading the crowd at the upcoming Exxxotica New Jersey in October.

AVN 2020

Two weeks along with a bout of the AVN flu have passed and I still feel fatigue from thinking about the show. Must be because of all the “lived experiences” that happened in the frenzy of that week.

Adult Entertainment Expo

Photos on Flickr

In reviewing my photos, I can see the mortality of continuing to cover the show. I took much less photos this year, not because the show was smaller (it was only slightly smaller than last year). I had broken my foot in September, and it started swelling again during the show. I was content to have longer conversations with my friends and then allowed random people to stop me from doing what I did best which is take more photos. I even had an assistant for the first time which unintentionally slowed things since everyone tried to flirt with him. This, in turn, led me to see less of my industry friends overall.

The most popular people signing were Angela White, Riley Reid, Abella Danger, and Adriana Chechik. I don’t like cutting in line, but I did for the first three because they agreed to it beforehand while the logistics of doing so with Adriana due to the placement of the Evil Angel booth was impossible. If I were to line up to see all of them in a day, it would take a combined 2-4 hours of waiting to see them. They are popular not just for what they do on the screen, but how they interact with the fans. Riley absolutely crushed it by signing for her own booth from opening to closing every day despite a bout of food poisoning on the second day.

Jules Jordan had the best booth overall in terms of talent and access. Angela had her lines there. The Evil Angel – Manyvids corridor was the most frustrating since it wasn’t navigable whenever Adriana was signing. Having the Manyvids women elevated inside their booths made them inaccessible in general.

AVN Awards

I attended the AVN Awards for the first time in four years. It felt weird going this time as a guest without my camera, but it was fun to catch up with friends that I didn’t talk as much to on the convention floor. There weren’t too many surprises with the winners since I knew many of the voters. Even though we didn’t practice groupthink, there seemed to be a consensus around specific winners in polling the voters.

Congratulations to Angela for winning Female Performer of the Year for the third straight time and to Charlotte Stokely for repeating as G/G Performer of the Year. Congrats also go to Gianna Dior for winning Best New Starlet.

About Ginger Banks

I used to spend a lot of time on camsites. So when I first met Ginger Banks nearly five years ago in Dallas, I knew her as the girl who cammed from her university library. I’m not sure exactly how we hit it off, but I found her to be more mature and adept at engaging people than the typical camgirl I meet at cons. The years go by, and Ginger became more prominent advocating on issues pertaining to the adult industry. If you have read an article about performer rights or mental health in the past three years, Ginger is likely to be quoted. Why do I bring this up?

Because I photographed her before the con! She was a riot. If you would like to see more of the photoset including the naughty, it’s probably on her onlyfans.

Acknowledgements

I would like to give a shoutout to my boys at IAFD, ADT, and XCritic. I’d also like to thank Mark Spiegler, Miles Long, and Evil Angel for their hospitality that week.

Thank you to Ginger, Paige Owens, Kira Noir, and Jocelyn Sweets for making magic with me.

Exxxotica New Jersey 2019

The New Jersey show is the capstone of Exxxotica’s annual tour throughout the country. The largest and busiest show in terms of square footage and attendance, you definitely would be waiting in line at various moments in the show for your favourite performers. Friday was the most packed with the Ladies Free promotion while Saturday was steadily busy even with the extended hours of the show.

Abella Danger and her Brazzers booth had the longest lines at the show. Abella’s line wrapped around the entire booth while she greeted every fan making them feel like they had reached the pot at the end of the rainbow. She even had to call me on my cell phone so that I could snap her photos while she would take a mini-break from the line. Teanna Trump probably had the second longest lines in the show in that I was only able to photograph her on the quieter Sunday.

New Jersey is also the only location where Exxxotica hosts its afterparties at the site hotel. They had fun house bands playing mostly eighties and nineties covers and the stars were more easily accessible in that you didn’t have to wait in a line to mingle with them. There was a roped off section in case the stars needed to hide but for the most part everyone was flittering around the ballroom engaging their fans in selfies and such. I mostly hung out with Vicki Chase, who is my closest friend in the industry. She humoured me while I was focusing on the World Series.

For the rest of the photos