Page 80 - AVN August 2019

“I started to feel like I was
limiting myself … and for a while
I was a slave to my own brand.”
The Princess of Punk Porn. The Queen of Alt. The Grande Dame of Tattoos.
Whatever such title has at one point or another become synonymously tied to Joanna Angel,
she has always maintained one signature attribute as the core of her image: marching boldly,
often defiantly, to the beat of her own drum.
It was that spirit, of course, which stoked her—along with Rutgers University classmate
Mitch Fontaine, who joined her this year in the AVN Hall of Fame—to launch a renegade little
website in 2002 called BurningAngel.com.
“My entire life existed in this bubble called the punk scene,” Joanna recalls. “It was a
subculture that encompassed my whole life. In the original inception of BurningAngel we called
ourselves ‘punk porn.’ There was a particular aesthetic to girls you would see at punk/metal
shows (me kind of being one of them) that my peers and I would call ‘scene girls’ and these
were the original BurningAngel girls.”
In much the same pound-the-pavement manner that a young journalism graduate by the
name of Paul Fishbein got his fledgling circular Adult Video News in front of people roughly two
decades earlier, Joanna imparts, “BurningAngel got its first fan base from literally me going to
shows and handing out physical flyers. It sounds so absurd when I think about it now!”
Absurd or not, it struck a chord. The only question was, what chord, exactly? “I think no one
quite knew how to put a label on it,” Joanna reflects. “In the first few years of the site’s launch,
there weren’t even any videos at all there. Our first DVD came out in 2005 … BurningAngel only
had photo updates from its inception to that time. It’s hard to go back to the brain I had in 2002,
but I really wanted to show the world what my version of sexy was. I wanted to work for myself,
and I didn’t want to do what ‘society expected me to do.’ … I wanted to do something punk.”
And that was the guiding principle by which she led her career as a performer/director/
writer/all-around-mogul for the next decade and a half or so. But then came a turning point—of
sorts. As Joanna explains it, “I started to feel like I was limiting myself … and for a while I was
a slave to my own brand. Sometime in the past year I said fuck it, I’m just going to do what I
want—which is the ideology punk rock taught me when I was about 15.”
So for the first time since her early porn days, she began making herself available to other
companies, both as a performer and a director. She shot for Brazzers, Hard X, Evil Angel and
Sweetheart Video. She also wrote and directed Corrupted by an Angel for Penthouse and A
Trailer Park Taboo for Pure Taboo, the latter racking up nine 2019 AVN Award nominations.
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