This feature appears in the August 2020 issue of AVN magazine. Click here for the digital edition.
LOS ANGELES—When she was 18, in 1995, Lasha Lane turned to the back of a then-popular Los Angeles kiosk circular called the LAXPress and found an ad seeking BBW models. The ad was placed by BBW pioneer Sindee Williams. “This genre has been around for a lot longer than just a few years,” Lane says. “Longer than internet porn. And it was just this year that a BBW—April Flores—made it onto the stage at the AVN show. It was a big deal and I’m glad it was done, but these women, BBWs, have been fighting for a long time to be seen.”
Lane, born and raised in Los Angeles, knew very early that she wanted to be in porn. “I wasn’t exposed to it,” she is careful to point out; “I went looking for it.”
In her grandfather’s garage she found his porn stash. “‘Oh, I like that,’” she remembers thinking. “‘I want that.’ I saw all these amazing breasts, and hips, and thighs, and vaginas. I’d take the magazines up to the bathroom and read all the stories.”
While there are personalities on AVN Stars who had their Great Porn Awakening in their late 20s, or 30s, or 40s, Lane, who also works as a pro-domme, says she knew from the jump. “I wanted to fuck on film as soon as I knew that I could fuck on film.”
But as enthusiastic as Lane is to show her curves on camera, ”I’ve always thought of myself as an Aphrodite figure, or a succubus, drawing people in and awakening their sexuality,” she says.
After her first foray into the industry in her teens and early twenties, she left, disappointed.
“I’ll just say this,” she says, choosing her words carefully, “A young woman comes into the industry looking to have fun, to explore, and there is nothing wrong with that. But she is inexperienced and there are people who bank on that inexperience. They capitalize on that inexperience. As I’ve grown in this business, as I’ve taken breaks and have come back, I recognize that (porn) doesn’t define me but also that this is a system in which women are meant to compete with each other, and which men profit from.
“That’s tough for some people to hear,” she says.
Now 43 and a veteran of multiple businesses, and cities, and scenes (she is deeply into the current and historical goth and industrial club scenes in L.A. and Long Beach, regularly rocks blue hair, and rattles off club nights like Perversion, Das Bunker, and Helter Skelter with wistfulness), Lane openly challenges the hegemony of white male control of the porn industry, and is getting some traction.
“Maybe I’m popular,” she says, laughing, “but I gotta admit that I may also be despised.”
Why is a platform like AVN Stars different from other fan portals?
“I left OnlyFans because, while it has adult content, it is not a fully adult platform. AVN Stars is, and has the backing of a trusted name that gets what the adult performer is, and does. That’s not to say there isn’t room for improvement. The world is going through a moment, and it will touch everyone.”
Lane is passionate, and community-minded, and possessed of 25 years of industry knowledge across an era that has seen tectonic shifts in the way adult material is made, distributed, and consumed. “But our attitudes have to evolve, too,” she says, and offers one more pitch for why Black women should run things for a while.
“We also have filthy, filthy minds,” she says. “You just have no idea.”
