Page 69 - AVN Men 2022

“I’m a big advocate of diversity and inclusiveness in this business, and I also get talked about a lot because of that.”
Konnor then continued to dabble in directing, helming his first two scenes ever for Noir Male (including a GAYVN Award-nominated threeway); and he appears as a celebrity guest judge/ mentor in OUTtv’s Hot Haus, a mainstream reality competition for sex workers (“I’m going to be Tim Gunn-ing the girls for an episode”). Konnor also signed to appear in a scripted reality TV show filming in New York that will premiere this year (“Like Housewives, but with porn stars”).
All the while, he’s also continued to head (and will soon revamp) Haus of Konnor—a boutique talent management company focused on furthering performers of color, a mission close to Konnor’s heart.
“I still think we’re getting a lot of lip service. The fact of the matter is, even though certain studios have kind of made it key to try to diversify their roster of models, it’s still a certain type of Black model, you know? If I’m a Black model with dreads or an Afro, or I dye my hair blond, I’m probably not going to work. But if I’m a clean-cut Black model like Max Konnor, then I can work. So I’m not going to say that the steps that we’ve taken in the past year or so are invalid or unsubstantial, but I still think there’s a lot of work to do,” he says.
“I do think we’re moving in the right direction. I just think that it’s going to take time to undue the racial damage that has been done within the porn industry. I’m a big advocate of diversity and inclusiveness in this business, and I also get talked about a lot because of that. Me, DeAngelo Jackson, Reign, Adrian Hart—we’re kind of seen as the ‘token’ Black men of the industry. And people think that, ‘Oh, the only reason you guys can do what you do is because you bow to the white man or you kiss the white man’s ass’ and all that. We’re always going to get that. And so I want to see the industry become a place where—and don’t get me wrong, I enjoy where I’m at, I enjoy the position that I’m in—people don’t look at a studio’s roster and say, ‘Oh, there’s the token.’ There should be no tokens.
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