How P*rn Saved Lena Moon’s Life

Lena Moon poses in The TS Life 2 (2019)

A lot of folks outside of the industry imagine porn as something they’d only do if they were hitting rock bottom. What most don’t imagine is that porn could set them on a trajectory to a better life. That’s what happened for Lena Moon. The Adult industry brought her from broke and homeless to a successful director/performer in a life twist she never expected. This is how porn saved Lena Moon’s life…

One of Lena Moon’s many cute selfies with the backdrop of a stock image of a car incase you can’t picture her with a car

Lena describes her life before porn as “a whole lot of nothing.” Minimum wage jobs, drug use, and listlessness filled most of her time before she found her calling. After an ex boyfriend dumped her at his dad’s house in New York, Lena felt totally hopeless. She was surviving off of “pickles, beer, mushrooms and that was pretty much it.” Lena had always been a “starving artist,” but the era right before Adult was extra grim. With no job, no bank account, and no real support network, once she stopped living with her ex’s dad Lena was just a car away from sleeping on the streets. The car in question didn’t even have breaks, making travel pretty much impossible. But, as the summer ended, Lena knew she couldn’t survive New York in the cold. “I was like ‘I can’t do winter here— I’ve got to figure something out.”

Luckily, an opportunity came to Lena (no pun intended). Her motivation to travel had just been “go to the West Coast to get out of the cold,” but she’d been imagining her future life there as pretty bleak.

“I gave up. I was just going to go be a bum”

she says, looking back solemnly. Thankfully, before she left to go out West, she just happened to catch up with a friend named Casey. Lena remembers Casey saying “I met all these porn people in LA” and just having a lightbulb go off. She’d never even considered porn as an option, especially growing up on the East Coast and so far from Miami. “Before you talk to anyone from porn it feels very foreign,” she muses now, “you have all these conceptions about it.” Porn “would have never even occured to me,” she says, if it weren’t for Casey. Somehow, that tiny bit of luck changed the outlook of Lena’s entire life.

Steven Grooby, acclaimed CEO of Grooby Productions and host of the Trans Erotica Awards poses with superstar Natalie Mars and Casey Kisses

With nothing left to lose, Lena decided to shoot her shot. She asked Casey for a connection and soon she was rushing to take photos. With no place of her own, she had to ask her friend to use his kitchen as a set to shoot an audition tape while he was at work. It was worth the awkwardness, though. She caught the eye of Steven Grooby, the man she didn’t yet know was basically the king of porn featuring trans girls. He offered her two scenes in Vegas, she said yes, and that was that…except for the fact her car still didn’t have breaks and she had no way to get across the country. 

Thankfully, Lena took a leap and brought her junk car to a mechanic with a big bag of weed her ex’s dad had given her. She remembers telling the mechanic

“I need a car just to get me across the country. I don’t give a fuck if it breaks down when I get there. I don’t care how ugly it is. I don’t care what it is. I just need something.”

So he took the pot and hooked her up with a sketchy 2002 Subaru Forester. It didn’t have air conditioning or even a title, but it had four working wheels and breaks so Lena took it.

2002 Subaru Forester, from YouTube account Grayson’s Garage

“I just took my crap, put Vegas in my GPS, and started driving there.” 

Lena’s first scenes were almost as hectic as her journey into porn. Despite asking Lena to head to Vegas, Grooby had booked her scene at Rick Fantana’s house. Rick Fantana…lived in LA. That meant Lena and Radius Dark (the Vegas based photographer for Grooby) had to take an almost ten hour road trip to and from Fantana’s house in one day together. “When we got back that night, he was like ‘I’m never doing that again.’” It was ridiculous, but at least Dark’s car had air conditioning, and the shoots went well.

“I thought I was gonna be nervous, you know?” Lena says about her first scene, but once they were about to start everything changed. She remembers thinking about how many people Dark had seen naked, how many porn shoots he’d experienced. “That was all I needed to be like ‘Fuck it!’” She wasn’t nervous at all, even despite the extra stress trans girls are under to be hard for the camera. “It went off without a hitch!” she smiles “It was a good time and I felt satisfied.” 

It was because of those first shoots that Lena’s life really turned around. Suddenly she had money in her pocket and fans on Twitter. Other directors were reaching out and she could imagine a future for the first time in years. The groundwork was set which eventually lead to her becoming the first trans director for Evil Angel. Today, she can’t believe how lucky she was. “It just fell in my lap” she says with some incredulity in her voice, “It sounds so cliche, but frankly it saved my life.” Now, Lena credits porn for not only her financial security and better mental health, but also a new sense of maturity. “It grew me up” she says, making her more punctual, teaching her financial skills, and helping her care for her body. “I finally found something creative I can do that I make money doing.” Check out her work here!

Author

Jude D. Grey is a sex nerd, fetishist, artist and porn enthusiast currently based in New York. Their writing is informed by an academic background in Sociology and Sexuality Studies as well as a personal investment in sexual liberation for all.