Page 48 - AVN April 2016

Grooby’s Transformation Out of one paysite came a multifaceted media company
by MARKKERNES
couple had their first child, but he yearned to return to
England. He moved the offices to Burbank and commuted
“across the pond” every six or eight weeks to take care
of whatever business couldn’t be handled electronically.
Eventually, though, he gave up those offices, and now his
entire staff telecommutes. Grooby uses the savings to pay
his employees “a little bit extra to take care of themselves at
home”—and, he says, “Productivity went through the roof!”
But getting to this point has been something of an
education for Grooby, who recalled some of the first trans
people he ever met, including Gia Darling, Kimberly Devine
(“She just passed. She was huge back in the day, 1999”),
Meghan Chavalier, Brandy Scott, and even Dana Douglas
from the 1980s. He added that he expects to create a
Transgender Hall of Fame in time for the next TEA show.
“The mid ’90s was the first VHS stuff, the stuff John [T.
Bone] was doing, that Joey [Silvera] was doing,” he recalled.
“His first Rogue Adventures was shot in Brazil, though. We
started producing in Brazil in 1999; the first company
to produce regular content from there. Gigi Appleton of
Androgeny was our first distributor.”
In fact, Grooby was the one who first got Silvera started
online.
“I’m in Hawaii, very early on—this was my first year
there—when I get a phone call, ‘Hey, Steven, it’s Joey.’ ‘Joey
who?’ ‘Joey Silvera.’ He’s so unassuming. And I’m like,
‘Wow! Is this really Joey?’ And I’m whispering to the others,
‘This is Joey Silvera on the phone!’ … I was on a plane
the next day to L.A. to meet him, and we set up a website
transgendered people, arrived at our offices for an interview, he’d just come from spending
When Steven Grooby, founder of Grooby.com and more than a dozen other websites devoted to
two hours with his marketing and editorial director, Kristel Penn, trying to figure out seating
arrangements for the following weekend’s Transgender Erotica Awards, or TEAs.
The TEAs—formerly the Tranny Awards—are in their eighth year and bigger than ever, but that’s
overshadowed by the fact that this is the 20th anniversary of Grooby.com, the first transgender paysite
on the internet.
British-born Steven Grooby didn’t set out to be “King of All Trans Media.” He began his journey as
a film production major at Kent University in the United Kingdom. After graduation he worked for the
BBC off and on, but the lack of steady employment led him to investigate other avenues, even as he
managed to get his hand on a computer—hardly ubiquitous in the early ’90s—and tried writing film
scripts.
“Of course, what happened is, once I was on the internet, I started finding porn, and porn took up
a lot of time back then, because you’ve got a 28.8 [modem] connection, and the image, you could see
it slowly, slowly loading from the top down,” he explained. “So I started looking around, and Asian
women are my thing, and of course, I very quickly saw some few scans of ladyboy stuff and it was in
newsgroups; all the porn was really in the newsgroups.
“I was just always kind of fascinated by anything that was different, and when I first saw them, it was
in peepshow video booths in New York in Times Square in 1988.”
With the help of HTML for Dummies, Grooby began to learn the fundamentals of programming, and by
early ’96 he’d created his first website, Grooby.com.
“’Groovy’ wasn’t available, so I bought ‘Grooby,’ and I could only afford one domain name; they were
$80 apiece back then,” he explained. “I could have probably bought Shemale.com back then; I could
probably have bought Ladyboy.com, but I could only afford one, so it was Grooby.com/Asian, Grooby.
com/BBW, Grooby.com/black and Grooby.com/trans or shemale.”
But in those early days before digital cameras, being a webmaster wasn’t easy. Though his travels
through the newsgroups had put him in touch with plenty of amateurs who’d send him scans of their
photos just to see their creations on the internet, Grooby yearned for more reliable sources of images.
“Then there were the people who photographed girls in Thailand, the Philippines, places like that,”
Grooby noted, “but they were only coming in three or four photographs at a time; they weren’t sets.
The next step was being contacted by a guy from Texas who calls himself ‘The Commander,’ who said, ‘I
can get photographs of girls in Texas. Would you be interested in putting them up on your website? Can
we do a deal?’ So I paid this guy $150 a roll, and after two weeks, I went to the P.O. box; there was an
envelope with these rolls of film.”
FEATURE
Grooby scanned them, posted them, “and the stats just went through the roof. That’s why we can
say we’re the first company to have shot transsexuals specifically for the internet; there wasn’t anybody
before us.”
Before long, Grooby had established his company base in Hawaii, where he met his wife and the
48 | AVN.com | 4.16
Happy Anniversary Top, Steven Grooby (far left) with some of his staff at the
Transgender Erotica Awards after party at Bardot. Bottom, Jamie French, one of
Grooby’s directors. “She’s got a really, really amazing creative mind,” Grooby says.