It’s one thing to flash your tits and take a few pictures. But to carry out a gutsy topless shoot in the middle of the night on a moving New York subway car, you better have a plan.
Hardcore star Stoya rules the Internet. In her insanely popular blog and columns for Vice magazine she talks openly about sex and porn and makes serious efforts to educate people about both. Fans have flooded the web with gifs of her and her not-so-secret boyfriend James Deen having sex. There are blogs that obsess over everything she does; her Instagram has 30,000 followers despite her almost exclusively posting photos of her cat; and every time I upload a picture of her on Tumblr, it gets hundreds of comments.
The first time I met Stoya, she had just become a Digital Playground contract star. I remember thinking how cool it was that a girl who came out of the “alt porn” world had made it to the mainstream. Stoya was smart, interesting and funny. And she looked nothing like your stereotypical porn star. We ate food in a hotel lobby after the first Exxxotica Expo in New Jersey and talked about doing a photo-shoot in a taxicab. She liked my raw aesthetic and my public nude work. I liked pretty much everything about her. Over the years we became friends. After she moved to a place a few subway stops away from me in Brooklyn, we had more dinners. But other than a few photos here and there, we never did a real shoot.
