Results tagged “evanstone”

                                   

Last Wednesday, the inaugural edition of "Sex, Drinks, and Rock 'N Roll Freedomfest," hosted by Hustler Hollywood and benefiting the Free Speech Coalition, took place at the Whisky a Go Go in West Hollywood. While it's easy for recent punching bag Perez Hilton to snark that "...porn stars want to be able to say what they want in and out of the filmed orgies," the reality is that the adult industry has been targeted by the federal government, with XRCO Hall of Fame inductee Max Hardcore currently serving a 46 month prison sentence and Evil Angel founder John Stagliano indicted last year.

                                   

When Tori Black, whom LAist first met last March, walked the red carpet at the XRCO Awards, she almost broke into tears when confiding to a nearby photographer friend about how hard she's worked this past year. And while she again lost to Stoya for New Starlet, her excitement at winning Cream Dream, against an impressive lineup that included Lexi Belle, Dakoda Brookes, Alexis Love, and Faye Reagan, was widely apparent.

                            

If the AVN Adult Movie Awards are the Oscars of the adult industry, then the X-Rated Critics Organization (XRCO) Awards would be the equivalent of the New York Film Critics Circle Awards.

                    

When visibly-shaken Digital Playground contract girl Stoya walked onstage to accept her AVN Adult Movie Award for Best New Starlet -- against a formidable lineup that included Lexi Belle, Tori Black, Faye Reagan, and Ryder Skye -- she concluded her speech with, "And thank you to just about everyone that jerks off to my smut."

                                   

As mentioned previously, AVN's annual Adult Entertainment Expo and Adult Movie Awards took place earlier this month in Las Vegas, with the convention running for four days at the Sands Expo and Convention Center and the awards show taking place at the Mandalay Bay Events Center.

                                   

So what's the Adult Entertainment Expo like? Scenester photographer Igor from Driven By Boredom explained that "This is just a huge room filled with booth after booth of sex related things. Mostly porn companies in the front, but towards the back there are booths for hookers, strippers, sex toys and a lot of ugly clothes that only the biggest manor of scum bag would wear. (Discounting the rad kids at the I <3 Vagina booth)... I met a bunch of people and saw a lot of friends." It should be noted that while Igor didn't mention the marketplace on the lower level, his description of the upper level is mainly accurate.

                            

Longtime Adult Entertainment Expo patrons such as Dan Kartz also noticed the decline in business, stating that "'My girlfriend is Czech, so I really like European women, and because it has become so expensive to fly internationally, you don't have nearly as many international women here... Before, you could fly women over from the Czech Republic, from Germany, England, Spain, but it has gotten so expensive that it's mostly an American crowd. There are a lot less foreigners, a lot less foreign companies, too... There used to be a lot more free DVDs and free publications, but they've gotten pretty stingy. There are not a lot of quality giveaways this year.'"

       

NOTE: See LAist's coverage of world premiere and UC Irvine's Sociology 69: Sociology of Sexuality.