Sexpo's "Punk Rock Porno Princess" Joanna Angel: Interview and photo gallery
With the third annual Chicagoloand Sexpo: All Adult Exposition hitting Excalibur and Vision tonight (9pm–4am), our fair city is going to be awash in adult-video entrepreneurs, porn stars, strippers and the fans who love them. Increasingly, in porn, the video star and the entrepreneur are one in the same—and sometimes, largely because of the Internet, they’re not even based in the Valley. Take Joanna Angel, “punk princess of porn,” for instance. She writes, directs, acts and runs an online porn company, Burning Angel, which she and a partner started in New Jersey, no less. We caught up with Angel, who rarely gets to the Midwest, by phone, and among other things, talked about her fairly unconscious DIY punk ethic. Angel appears at the Chicagoland Sexpo tonight.
I read that you started in the business when you were in college at Rutgers with college friends. Had you ever considered the porn business before that? I had never considered it. It was something I didn’t think about until the end of college when me and my friends were trying to think of interesting things to do with our lives. It definitely did not pay the rent for along time. From day one, I think that’s part of why people like Burning Angel. My motivation in life was never to make money; it was to be happy. I never wanted to be stuck in a job that I didn’t like. My main goal was to make just enough money to pay my expenses. I never looked at porn as an easy way to make money. Which I think is why the website is the way it is. It was always kind of like a passion project that expanded into a bit of an empire. There definitely were opportunities that came up for us in the past couple years for us to have sold out in one way or another—where we could be making more money than we do. But we’re determined to do this our way and get there how we want to get there.
There’s obviously a punk aesthetic to the way you present yourself—is there a punk ethic at all? Is this a punk-rock way of doing things? We definitely run our company; this might sound childish, in a very punk way. We started it ourselves; we didn’t start with an investor. Everything we made we put back into it. We don’t really look at what the standard is; we do what we want. Not to mention we have band interviews and record reviews and the type of girls that we use—and the fonts and the design we use… Everything from the outside to the inside, I think is pretty punk. As punk as a company can be.
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