To use a reality TV cliche, Angel Youngs is in porn “for the right reasons.” Which is to say: She really, really wants to be here.
At age 20, Youngs is already used to standing out, and not just in the crowded field of porn starlets with around two years in the biz: the so-called “COVID babies” who joined the industry in late 2019 or early 2020, only to experience its total shutdown in those crucial first months that can make or break a career.
Before being scouted, before creating an OnlyFans, Youngs was already blowing the minds of regulars at her home stripclub, Perfect 10 in Austin, Texas. That’s where she showed up, days after turning 18, to live out her destiny as a self-described “superslut.”
Before that, as she has told podcast audiences, Youngs stood out in high school, raising hell and changing schools a lot while secretly masterminding her future in sex work. Finally, after years of being misdiagnosed and traumatized by “the system,” Angel Youngs was really, truly done with being a minor.
“And then one day I turned 18,” she tells XBIZ. “Got this job, and everything changed. I mean, my whole outlook on life. I actually felt happy.”
That turning point came a couple of years ago. Youngs arrived in Los Angeles ready to break into the big leagues of porn, with a look that was and is unmistakable and instantly poster-ready. The long blonde hair. The absolutely disarming killer smile. Those eyes. The bangs, somewhere between hipster and road warrior — a baddie “bih” who would not look out of place in the 2010s hanging out with Kreayshawn and Lil Debbie, or with the fluorescent-bikini-and-ski-mask gang in “Spring Breakers.”
Unlike other newcomers who were taking their tentative first steps into adult work, however, Youngs was immediately catapulted into rarified echelons. Scoring an XBIZ nomination for “Best New Performer” and then landing an exclusive Brazzers contract this past June, fueled her meteoric rise toward making her mark as, in her words, “a horny bitch.”
These days, if memories of the chaos and confusion of her teen years bring her down, Youngs turns to one of her lifelong passions, music.
“I’m not very good at playing music, but I love it,” she says. “I’ll be in the worst mood ever, and I listen to music and then everything changes. I mostly listen to rap, but also alternative and rock and some indie. Especially Kanye, when he talks about being the greatest. Makes you feel like you can run the world.”
Youngs says she can relate to West on many levels, personally and psychologically. “Growing up, I was diagnosed with bipolar,” she says. “But I don't think I am. I think I was young and confused, and just rebelling.”
Shortly after puberty hit, Youngs was sent to what she describes as “residential treatment centers,” part of the highly controversial, highly profitable “troubled teen” industry.
“They sent me there for being depressed, and then just for being ‘bad,’” she explains. “I moved schools a lot, and I don't think it helped me at all. Some of these places were medical, and they were like, ‘Oh, she must be like this because of a medical reason rather than a social one.’ That's what they were pinning it on. ‘Oh, she must be doing this because she's bipolar.’ Or she's having a chemical thing. But it wasn't the case. I think I was just a product of my environment.”
Before diving head-first into sex work — at least those in the industry are accepting of highly sexual people — Youngs was only seen, she recalls, as “a superslut who was getting STIs.” She didn’t know how to take care of herself, she says, because no one taught her. Sex work became a kind of safe space, where she could be herself sexually and find “a good balance of life and work.”
Like many minors in the U.S., Youngs suffered from a lack of information. “I mean, my doctors weren't telling me anything, my mom never told me. The first time I had chlamydia, my mom took me to a doctor, and I got the medication. That was that. She didn’t teach me about it, and instead I was judged for doing that, when I didn't know. Everyone kind of just looked at me as like a minor as opposed to a person who needs to learn.”
Stripping did wonders for Youngs’ self-esteem, although after religious conservatives in Texas pushed through a bogus “anti-trafficking” law during COVID, the minimum age to dance was raised to 21 and she has not been able to work there since.
One of the main reasons she misses being onstage at her home club is her fondness for Austin men.
“I wasn't looking for hella money dancing. I just love them, they are awesome people,” she says, adding that she also loves being onstage because “you don't really feel the other people around you. Like, you're by yourself. It’s like confidence just fucking jolts you.”
Even before she walked through the doors of Perfect 10 to audition, though, Youngs already had her sights set on porn. But COVID restrictions hit two months after she turned 18, so Youngs, like many at the time, started an OnlyFans. As soon as the industry was back up and running again, she contacted her favorite male performer and studio, looking for work.
“My friend showed me DickDrainers because he was obsessed with it, and then I started watching it and I loved Branden Richards right away. Specifically, I love the roughness of it, the ski mask. I don’t know why, but I do. I told myself, ‘I want to be there.’”
Once DickDrainers’ producer/talent Richards took a look at Youngs and gave her a chance to show what she could do, he immediately placed her under her first contract, in September 2020. Youngs says that working with him made her first foray onto a porn set “really easy.”
“Branden is so cool,” she says. “He just helped me a lot in that experience.”
Youngs says she also became obsessed with Adriana Chechik. “She’s just a legend,” she gushes. “I haven’t met her. I want to shoot with her so bad. But I know that I'm still making my way. What she does is beautiful. I love the way she has this confidence in herself and it just radiates.”
The Chechik name-check leads to another fun fact about Angel Youngs: she effortlessly manages to project, simultaneously, two seemingly contradictory vibes: the blunted-out, chillest Austin stripper you’ve ever met — and a relentless, hyperfocused seeker of unusually extreme and hardcore sexual performances.
Her crystalline eyes light up when she says she wants to be famous for her “energy,” and that she is eager to do a DP showcase. “I want it to be fucking sick! My agent said I should wait, maybe do it next year, but I like doing DP in my personal life. It's going to be amazing. I keep thinking, ‘How do you make this spectacular masterpiece that doesn't look like what anybody else did?’”
This subject matter galvanizes her interest like few other things during our chat. Talking about extreme fucking seems to make Youngs feel, Kanye-like, as if she can run the world.
“I wanna come up with something that's like, so fucking different and crazy that I can just…” she trails off, visualizing something she can’t even put into words yet. “As much as I would really love to do something like what Adriana did, I don't want to copy her whole thing. Honestly, I'm trying to have my own style. But the goal is to get more and more fucking psychotic in my scenes.”
Youngs is also very clear and explicit about maintaining control over such extreme fantasies. There is a fine line, she says, between the heavy BDSM she favors and what she calls “degradation,” which she defines as “being looked at like an animal, or fucked like a fuck doll.”
“I feel so strongly about women’s rights,” she explains. “This is not just about porn — it’s a society thing. A lot of men talk about women like they're worthless.”
The Brazzers contract star praises MindGeek’s consent checklist and pre-scene protocols, which she says make it easier to communicate with male talent.
Youngs turns 21 in January, and is looking forward to being able to legally dance again at Perfect 10 in Austin. She enjoys living in Los Angeles, but it’s clear that her real home is under that storied Texas moon.
Still, the fact that she gets to have her own place in the Valley is a testament to her rapid success, and the rising curve that maps her unusual career.
“Once I got my place out here in Los Angeles,” she says, “that was a big turning point. Because I was living in my agent's house, and then my friend's house in Vegas and my mom's house in Austin. Once I got my house, that kind of changed a lot for me.”
Youngs calls her first year in the industry “such a blur, because it all just happened so fast.” She was shooting for smaller companies, then for bigger companies, and then suddenly the biggest studios in porn were vying to cuff her.
“I'm very ‘go with the flow,’” she confides, reverting back to chill Austin girl mode. “I don't really like to stress about my career too often — even though it can get stressful, of course.”
Meanwhile, Angel Youngs keeps saving and grinding, seeing where it leads. She’s still standing out, this time among the next generation of purveyors of what she calls “the dirty, alt shit.”
Ever since she can remember, she says, she has always felt a strong need to express herself.
“Now I do it through sex,” she adds. “And I use that to my advantage.”
