This feature appears in the April issue of AVN magazine.
LOS ANGELES—Before joining the adult industry, trans performer and content creator Variety Itsol (an acronym for ‘Is the Spice of Life’) worked at an ice-skating rink by day while uploading graphic images of herself on Reddit by night.
She was 20 and had not yet transitioned, but change was in the air.
“I had just turned 20 when I started working at this ice-skating rink,” Itsol recalled. “I had the biggest crush on one of the ice-skating coaches. I was like, ‘Oh, I really want to learn how to skate.’ And I did want to learn, but I also thought we’d be like, ‘Oh, hey, what’s up, baby?’ But that never happened, and we just became good friends. I continued to work there while I was making content. I wanted to keep skating for free.”
An exhibitionist at heart, hailing from a Southern Baptist home, the Little Rock, Arkansas native had started exploring and pushing her boundaries on the popular online community and content-sharing site Reddit. The experience, while thrilling, helped Itsol build the fortitude necessary to perform in adult.
“Prior to doing porn, I posted free stuff on Femboy Reddit,” Itsol said, shaking her head. “I’m not going to say what my old handle was because no one deserves to see what I looked like pre-transition. I didn’t look great; I look much better now! But that’s why I was so open to doing porn. I was already desensitized. It made me resilient.”
Itsol joined OnlyFans, Pornhub, and other subscription sites as a content creator in 2022, officially introducing the online world to her empowered, kink-fueled alter ego, Variety Itsol.
Shoots with pioneering trans studio Grooby Productions soon followed and were everything Itsol had hoped. But, in the back of her mind, she worried about the dismay her uploaded content would cause her family if they came upon it, despite their years of estrangement.
“Uploading my content to Pornhub and OnlyFans—that scared me,” Itsol said. “I worried about my family or friends seeing those videos because…well, they’re more likely be on Pornhub than GroobyGirls.”
That need to shield them, Itsol explained, was a gut reaction produced by the “guilt and trauma” they had instilled in her at a young age.
“My parents were missionaries and very strict Christians,” Itsol said. “When I was younger, they would call me slurs. And, I’d say, ‘You’re a bad parent,’ and my siblings would come after me. That’s a trained response learned from my parents saying, ‘Hey, you need to defend me. I’m the good guy here.’”
Today, Itsol has found community in the adult industry and feels empowered to experiment and explore for fun, film, and fulfillment.
“I enjoy exploring my kinks; I’m a very kinky person,” Itsol said. “Whether it’s electroshock stuff, crops and whips, fire play—I always want to try something new or something I may not even like, like sounding.”
Sounding is “when you stick something up your urethra,” explained Itsol, who was sounded during her Prince Albert piercing with a toothpick (“That fucking hurt…but felt good too because it was lubed up first.”).
Itsol’s commitment to kink made her feel like the belle of fetish balls in Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and San Francisco this year, where she impressed as the only attendee in a “bitch suit,” an outfit that ties ankles to hips and hands to shoulders, forcing the wearer to crawl on knees and elbows (“Like a puppy!”).
“It has been incredibly liberating to come from such a repressed family,” Itsol said. “I grew up very sheltered in the South, in Arkansas. Doing porn is so freeing because I’ve escaped the guilt and shame I used to feel whenever I would pleasure myself.”
Shaking her head with an incredulous smile, she continued, “I would masturbate, and I’d feel so awful, like I had fucking murdered millions of people. Because that’s what I was told. That my sperm, my seed, was all of God’s children that I had just fucking massacred. Like, worse than the Holocaust. Oh, my fucking God...these people!”
Photography by @kogafoto
