It’s been a year of firsts for trans star (and now director) Lena Kelly.
She kicked off the year nabbing not one but two titles at the 2019 Trans Erotica Awards for Gender X Model of the Year and Best Self-Producer, her first award wins to date.
I’m historically a starving artist … but porn just works for me. When I do the work, I get the reward.
Following a prolific 2018, she’s continued to topline for TransAngels, Grooby, TransErotica, Evil Angel, Kink.com and Gender X, to name a few, and held the titular role in Adult Time’s “Kissing Lena” alongside Athena Rayne for their TS imprint, Transfixed.
Along the way, Kelly has been pioneering her own unique content in the world of trans porn, the culmination of her efforts being her upcoming debut DVD release with Evil Angel. As the studio’s first trans director, Kelly is shaking up the game with plans to deliver TS porn like we’ve never seen before. And as the trans genre continues to grow from niche status more into the mainstream, the sensual trans porn that we’ve grown accustomed to is about to get seriously reinvigorated.
Starring herself, Aubrey Kate, Natalie Mars, Goth Charlotte (Charlotte Sartre) and Khloe Kay, the new release is being trumpeted as just about the “nastiest” trans porn we’ve ever seen — and if Kelly debating with Evil Angel owner John Stagliano behind the scenes over the appropriate consistency of vomit gives us any idea of just how nasty that is, it’s sure to hit the mark.
Kelly sat down with XBIZ recently to discuss the forthcoming release, her entrée into adult, past lives and previous struggles, and a career trajectory that seems only to be going up and up these days. With humility and blunt honesty, Kelly shared her journey from bohemian artist to porn celebrity.
Regarding her new DVD, she noted, “I don’t want people to sleep on me as a performer,” only half joking. Don’t worry, you have our full attention!
XBIZ: First and foremost, let’s talk about the DVD you have coming out with Evil Angel. We saw a photo of you wearing a pink cowboy hat and holding a banjo — is that part of it?
Kelly: It’s a little all over the place in terms of themes but it’s definitely not a cowboy movie by any means. The original idea was to do a feature about a sex cult, but ultimately I decided to focus more on the actual sex and do something a little more Evil Angel. I did want to formally announce it’s called “TransNasty.” The title pretty much says it all.
XBIZ: How nasty is it?
Kelly: The nastiest. You don’t really see a lot of super-nasty, over-the-top TS porn these days. A lot of it is very delicate and very produced, so with this DVD, I really wanted to do something fresh and aggressive. I’ve had a lot of pent-up creative energy that I’ve been holding onto for a number of months now so I’m so excited for it to come out and to show TS porn fans something they haven’t seen before.
XBIZ: We’re excited too! It’s the first Evil Angel DVD to have a trans director, but this isn’t the first thing you’ve directed, right?
Kelly: No. It’s my first DVD, but I’ve been directing my own stuff for ManyVids and OnlyFans for forever. I’d show up to these content trade shoots with full-blown scripts and everything. It wasn’t just content for me. This is kind of like a culmination of everything I learned doing that.
XBIZ: So would you say you’re more of a director or a performer?
Kelly: I’d say that I’m more of an artist in general. I don’t want to pigeonhole myself into “just a performer” or “just a director.” I like both, but for different reasons. I’ve always loved performing but any time I was on set, I was always paying attention to the camera and which angles, what lights we’re using [etc.] without even realizing it, so directing was sort of a natural next step in my career.
XBIZ: You started off your career in adult as a cam model, yeah?
Kelly: Yeah. I was actually homeless at the time when I started camming. I was living in my car that my friend let me park in the back of his building in Albany, New York. I kind of just needed some money. I’m a very non-conventional person and I’ve had a million jobs before, but nothing for too long and nothing that I felt dedicated to or passionate about. I don’t remember exactly how I discovered that camming was a thing but I’d hop on his laptop when he was at work and explore. I always liked it, though — it’s very low-pressure.
XBIZ: How so?
Kelly: With porn, there’s a lot of planning that goes into it, but with camming, I can do what I want. I’m usually just talking the whole time. I do sex stuff for a few minutes, but it’s borderline a podcast. I don’t want to say that I was bad at camming but I’m very scatterbrained — I didn’t take it to a regimented, professional level.
There was no system, I would just wing it every time and have fun with it. Which was fine, I made good money and it was definitely a good intro to porn in terms of learning my body and figuring out how to be sexy in front of the camera.
XBIZ: So how did you transition from living in your car in New York to shooting porn out in Los Angeles?
Kelly: When I started camming, I had nothing going on in my life. I was stuck in a rut doing a ton of drugs, drinking a lot … I was not in a good place. I wasn’t taking care of myself or my body, or looking for work — I wasn’t doing anything. A friend of mine had come back from a trip to California and told me that she’d met a bunch of porn people. I was interested, so she gave me some names and numbers and I eventually got in touch with Steven Grooby.
I took a bunch of pictures in my friend’s kitchen, sent them in and a few days later I got a positive response. It was basically like, “We’d love to have you. Let us know when you’re going to be in Vegas and we’ll give you some shoots.” I had been considering moving to Venice Beach to do the whole beach bum thing because it was nearing the end of summer and when you’re homeless in New York it gets very cold. Vegas wasn’t even on my radar, but when the opportunity came up, I thought, “Screw it.”
XBIZ: That’s incredible. How’d you get to Vegas?
Kelly: I had saved about $600 from camming, which was a lot for me at the time. My piece-of-crap car wasn’t even running at that point, it was just parked in the back of my friend’s place. My friend’s dad [who had been injured in the Navy and was using medicinal marijuana] had been cultivating weed in his backyard and he gave me a pillow sack of trimmings.
So, I took all of my cam money and this big bag of weed to the local mechanic and was like, “Can you give me a car that’s gonna get me across the country?” I told him I preferred black and two days later he had a black 2002 Subaru for me. I was so strung out I didn’t even ask him for a title or registration — I just gave him the money and the weed and then, with a bag full of clothes and nothing else, I started driving across the country. I told Grooby I’d be there in a week.
XBIZ: What an adventure.
Kelly: It was epic. I learned a lot on that trip for sure. I was originally going to go with two girlfriends but they got in a fight with each other days before, so I went by myself. But I’m glad it worked out that way. I could stop whenever, I could listen to whatever music, I could smoke weed in the car if I wanted to. I was so stupid — I’d brought 10 hits of acid and all these drugs with no title in the car but, God knows how, I made it across the country with no flat tires, no police, no anything.
I had arranged a little $300/month room on Craigslist before I’d left so when I got there I just started living in Vegas. I got my first couple of shoots with Grooby and slowly over time I was just doing porn. I’ve been building off of that ever since.
XBIZ: Going on a solo trip across the U.S. is such a huge fantasy for so many people, but few actually do it. It really goes to show just what you’re made of.
Kelly: Definitely. Looking back, I learned so much about myself. At the time I was just kind of throwing shit against the wall and seeing what stuck. I had very self-destructive tendencies and no direction. [The journey to Las Vegas] showed me that I could take a big risk and end up with a big reward and nothing like that had ever happened to me before. My life had always been one misstep or miscalculation after another so this was my big adventure, my big break.
XBIZ: You pointed yourself in the direction of Las Vegas and that was it.
Kelly: It definitely gave me an inner strength and confidence that I didn’t have before. My whole experience in porn has been that way, pretty much. I’m historically a starving artist: I’ve spent so much time working my ass off on projects, only to have zero reward, but porn just works for me. When I do the work, I get the reward. It’s just a very good fit for me.
XBIZ: You’ve even won a few awards now.
Kelly: That’s another thing. I’d never won a thing before that so that was a very novel and exciting experience for me.
XBIZ: Totally! Even if you can say to yourself that it’s just an award, it still feels fucking good to win.
Kelly: It feels really good! And not even 10 minutes after I won the first, I won my second one. I was already so amped up, it was just such an amazing moment for me.
XBIZ: So at what point did you consider yourself to be a bona fide porn star?
Kelly: It took a while for me to feel that. I started [shooting in Vegas] at the end of 2016 and I just did a shoot or two that year. My career really started picking up at the beginning of 2017, but that’s when I started having really bad problems with my back.
XBIZ: What happened?
Kelly: Basically it was a chronic back issue from years of not sleeping in a bed. I had a herniated disk and — between shooting and exercising — I just did all of the wrong things and it flared up really bad. I ended up with no money, back in my car again because I couldn’t shoot for six months and that was just horrifying. I used to curse, fists up at the heavens like, “How the fuck did I end up back here? What did I do to deserve this? I finally got my life on track, I finally got this awesome job doing porn and now I’m bedridden again.”
So, I was homeless again, in that same dark place I was in before porn. It came to a head one night when I couldn’t sleep and had to go to the hospital. They had to come pull me out of my SUV because I was in absolute agony. I was told I’d need surgery, but obviously I couldn’t afford it; I didn’t have any insurance. So that was another adventure in learning and self-discipline because I had to rehabilitate myself.
I got an X-ray and learned exactly what was wrong with my back; got on YouTube and started looking for physical therapy — I would get up every day and walk just to stay active. And then I got back into porn. I was shooting in severe pain and it took me a long time to get over it but I did rehabilitate myself. I fixed my back and got back into it, and now I’m in better shape than I’ve ever been. It was one of those hard things that you just have to get over and then you’re stronger in the end for it.
XBIZ: And then 2018 came along.
Kelly: 2018 was the best year of my life. I got a new car, I got a new place, I had steady work the entire year, I won a couple of awards — I absolutely killed it. It was just a really magical year for me and 2019’s been really great too.
XBIZ: Let’s hear some highlights!
Kelly: “TransNasty” is definitely at the top. I also pitched a series to TransAngels, which they bought. It’s a three-part series that I wrote the bulk of the script for and cast, so I’m really excited about that.
XBIZ: You also worked on “Trans Confessions” for TransErotica, right?
Kelly: That’s another one that I directed. It’s not really my movie — I was kind of given the template for it. But it was a lot of fun. Basically [the idea] has been done before, but we interview a girl about her life, she confesses something naughty that happened and then we reenact it.
What’s cool about this one in particular, though, is that we interviewed all trans girls, so the first 10 to 15 minutes of every scene is about her experience of being trans. So not only is it a sickeningly hot porn with a really awesome, naughty premise, but also there’s an emotionally deep element to it.
And it’s not all horror stories — it just allows you to establish a more personal connection with the girls before you see them fuck, which to me is great. When I watch porn, I like personalities. My favorite porn stars aren’t always the hottest ones, they’re the ones I find quirky and fun to watch.
XBIZ: Are you performing in that one?
Kelly: I was going to, but I wanted it to be just me directing. In my Evil Angel DVD [“TransNasty”] coming out, I do have a scene in that one. It’s really awesome.
XBIZ: You also starred in “Trans Glam” for Evil Angel. How was it to be a part of that?
Kelly: It was amazing, honestly. I really liked working with Jonni Darkko because I have a particular interest in the director’s side of things, so it was really awesome to see a master at work. Katrina [Jade] and I had amazing chemistry too. There’s almost nothing off the table for us and we just really hit it off. We’re both super nasty.
As far as my performance went, I definitely put 110 percent into it, because I was super excited to be a part of this movie. I topped the whole time and that’s very physically laborious for me — I really pushed myself to the limit. I was fucking her up and over and DP’ing her from behind with this huge, 18-inch dildo while I’m on top of her — it was challenging but very rewarding at the same time.
XBIZ: It seems like a lot of people took notice.
Kelly: I’m hoping my movie [“TransNasty”] gets the same attention!
XBIZ: What makes it so nasty, exactly?
Kelly: I’m into really hardcore porn, so there’s some humiliation and a lot of vomit. At one point, they use me as a broom to clean up my own mess. We really took it to another level.
XBIZ: Oh my. Was your previous content in the same kind of vein?
Kelly: My scenes that I directed before had a very distinct look. I had eccentric outfits and the scenes were funny and goofy — I like to do everything like it’s a cartoon. That’s kind of the world I live in. With this DVD, I wanted to take what I’d done in the past and give it new life.
If you can imagine, it’s like a band that puts out a demo tape. A label will then come along and produce those songs — really make them amazing. I approached this the same way. I have fans of those old scenes and like a music group, I didn’t want to lose myself through the production. I wanted to give my fans something that’s true to my style, but even better.
