This Is What the ‘Golden Globes of Porn’ Looks Like

“I’m here to celebrate and show off my cleavage,” a woman leans in and tells me, raising her voice over the noise of the crowd. The venue is packed — the unexpected LA rain driving even the red carpet indoors — and everywhere people are glistening with beads of rain and sweat, shimmery make-up, and plunging, skin-tight fabrics.

Sometimes likened to the “Golden Globes of porn,” the XBIZ Awards is the awards show in the adult entertainment industry. Filmmakers, directors, actors, production companies, and hosting sites have been flocking to XBIZ since 2003 to network, collect their golden trophies, and—more than anything—have fun and show off. I was invited to this year’s ceremony by Erika Lust, the powerhouse indie adult filmmaker and founder of Lust Cinema, Else Cinema, XConfessions, and The Store.

As a sex writer, it’s pretty much my job to have a finger on the pulse of sex and how we talk about it. Lust beats louder than most. I’d watched her TED Talk on Big Porn (which Lust compared to Big Pharma, for all the problems it causes), listened to her treatise on the “female gaze” (an answer to the ubiquitous and often industry-defining male gaze), and seen the Netflix documentary Hot Girls Wanted: Turned On, which went behind the scenes to Lust’s studio in Barcelona.

While I already knew about Lust, I wasn’t sure what to expect from a star-studded, potentially racy night in Hollywood. I did, however, know what I wanted to find out. Given the tumult of COVID, the Trump-era passage of FOSTA-SESTA, the rise of OnlyFans, and an increasing demand for ethical and queer-centered erotic content, I had to ask: What is the future of porn?

“I can see the industry transforming, to be honest, because of OnlyFans,” says Tomie Tang, an independent queer creator who got her start in the industry during the pandemic. Tang came to XBIZ with her real-life best friend and on screen co-star Ivy, and the two make what they call “farm-to-table porn,” featuring real-life queer people and their organic connections.

Sites like OnlyFans have given creators the freedom to make the porn they want and connect with their fans directly—rather than going through an agency or production company. For most of the people I spoke to at XBIZ, power over your content meant more power over your life, more behind-the-scenes rights, and more money. As one performer put it: Why spend 13 hours on set when you can make just as much at home for half the fuss?

Tang hopes creators will continue to move toward indie content creation. “It’s better for us, especially women, to be able to own and produce our own content. We’re less likely to be exploited and we make more money from it.”

Both argue their success lies in connecting with their fans directly and making porn that shows authentic queer sex—meaning they often nix many golden standards of mainstream, male-gazey porn, like cum shots (and sometimes even coming altogether).

“What people actually are looking for in porn is a connection,” says Ivy. “Not always, but especially with a lot of independent creators. We’re chatting with [customers]. People are talking to me about their lives, right? I’m playing naked therapist more than anything.”

I met Romeo later on in the night. He was hard to miss, dressed in a blazer patterned with swirls of gold sparkles. We went off to a corner to chat, and he left a little trail of glitter as we talked. He told me he got his start in feminist adult cinema six years ago in Berlin, and says the scene is just now starting to get the attention it deserves. “The feminist scene is now finally coming to the light and it’s finally getting put in the same sort of [award] categories as these mainstream studios and brands that have been heavily promoted for years.” He says this kind of porn can translate to more relatable sex for viewers because it shows people of diverse backgrounds, tastes, and bodies doing the things that are “actually very common in most people’s sex lives.”

“I can see myself in 20 years and say, wow, I’m happy that I did this,” says Romeo. “I didn’t do it for money. I did it because I wanted to create something beautiful.”

In the swelling crowd, I spoke to everyone I could about where porn is headed. The answer was always complicated, but each person spoke with pride and excitement about their work and emphasized how much more they wanted: more diversity, more queer and trans representation, better pay, more intimacy coordinators, more power and protections for performers, sex workers, and woman-led crews. All-in-all? They saw a world where porn was unabashedly itself— an ode to the spectrum of human sexuality and intimacy, rather than a cis man’s wet dream. It was a dizzying picture, one that makes me, a feminist and a lesbian, deeply hopeful. I started writing this article in my head, with a blitzy headline that went something like: “Porn will be normalized, entirely ethical, and somewhat communist!”

And then I sat down for the awards show.

The auditorium was artfully crammed with dozens of round tables, with screens surrounding the elevated stage featuring slowly-spinning golden statues. The statues had the same vibe as the Oscar trophy, only the XBIZ version was a naked woman, with an arched back and generous bust. As nominations were read aloud, the spinning women were replaced with quick clips of sex scenes, corresponding with each category and nominee—and very few showed anything other than what Romeo had described as “bang, bang, bang” porn.

The ceremony was fun and congenial and a little raunchy (one winner took their winning trophy and proclaimed, “I’m gonna shove this in my pussy!”), but with every clip that rolled, I realized how deeply ingrained conventions of gender and sex still were in the industry.

It’s not that there weren’t genuine efforts being made. In addition to more traditional categories like Best Sex Scene, there were categories honoring trans performers of the year, gay performers of the year, and older performers of the industry. Yet only trans femme performers were nominated for the trans category, with no trans masc representation; the gay performers’ category was all men without a dyke in sight; the girl-girl category was all femme-on-femme (a dead giveaway that the scenes are for men, not girls who actually have sex with girls), and the category honoring older performers was for MILFs only. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the awards were also overwhelmingly white.

The ceremony sobered me up and reminded me of my conversation the night before with Lust at the snug-but-trendy lobby of the Holloway House Hotel.

“People are still scared of sex,” Lust told me. “[Mainstream porn] is teaching people that systemic violence towards women is okay, and that it’s part of a normal sexual experience. It’s teaching people that fetishization of race is totally acceptable, that sexualizing teens is no problem. And it’s teaching people that gender roles should be maintained and applied [during sex].”

Lust says this fear of sex is learned. It’s why people feel ashamed to talk about their desires, to communicate their fantasies and turn-ons to their loved ones, and why young people are force-fed abstinence-only sex education, only to end up re-digesting those fears when they turn to mainstream porn. It’s also delayed the full arrival of representations of sex that don’t fetishise performers and sideline their work to so-called niche markets and categories.

But at the same time, the presence of feminist and ethical porn at XBIZ—and the desire to make and see more of it—was undeniable there. The performers I spoke to, especially the ones just cutting their teeth in the industry, were sharply aware of what needed to be done differently and how they were going to do it — namely, on their own as indie, DIY production houses. And if their vision is any indicator of what’s to come, the future of porn is in good hands.