In conversation with Alexander Cheves
Happy Pride, Berlin! If you missed the first installment of this new series, here’s the idea: A Berlin club stall is where the best, most unguarded talks happen. People squeeze in, trade stories (and other stuff), and leave knowing each other a little better.
This time, meet Troy Daniels, an erotic artist and content creator working between Los Angeles and Berlin, his home for the past 15 years. A celebrated face of Berlin’s gay scene, Troy Daniels is a heavily tattooed power hunk with, um, sizeable assets, and has achieved major success on OnlyFans and JustForFans.
For me, Troy is no stranger. In full transparency, he’s my former boyfriend and, now, a close friend. To start Pride month right, here’s a sweet, honest chat between two queer men who know and love each other.
Later this month, Troy is host and headliner at a weekend-long Pride event at Massive, Seattle’s legendary queer nightclub, from 24-28 June. Ahead of this event, we talk about porn, supermodels, and how Berlin’s party culture has changed.
This is Stall Talk with Troy Daniels.
Alexander Cheves. First things first: How do you explain what you do to somebody new?
Troy Daniels. I say I’m a content creator. It’s the polite, socially acceptable job description. But it depends on who I’m with. With friends and friends-of-friends, I say I do pornography. I like to say “pornography” instead of “porn.” It sounds fancier. [laughs]
AC. I know you do much more than that. You do styling, makeup, photography, hair, photo editing, video, lighting, film editing. You can work a camera as well as perform in front of one. You’re a full creative suite. But you hesitate to call yourself an artist. Why?
Troy Daniels. Honestly, I tend to not like people who call themselves artists in the porn and nightlife worlds. I think it can sound very affected. Often people who call themselves artists don’t know much about practice or discipline or visual communication. There’s certainly something to be said for work that’s grassroots and lo-fi and has its authenticity in time and place, but I’m talking about people who just glue things to their faces and call themselves artists.
AC. What first pulled you into this work?
Troy Daniels. I was young and needed money. [laughs] Although, I guess that’s not fully true. When I was 16 or 17, I don’t know why, but I knew I wanted to do porn. I grew up in LA and went to newsstands and bookstores to see the adult photography books, and I remember seeing men and women modeling naked and thinking, “That’s for me.” I also really liked fashion and models, the superstars, and hoped someday I’d walk the catwalks of Paris and Milan, but I wasn’t deluded enough to think that was my birthright. Porn seemed like a more accessible way in.
AC. There is a pipeline between those two industries, though.
Troy Daniels. I’d say there’s a symbiosis to some extent, but even for the porn performers who have done it, it’s almost always a publicity stunt, a novelty. Like François Sagat modeling for Bernhard Wilhelm. He did it just one season. When Colby Keller posed for Vivienne Westwood, it was one campaign. He walked one runway. He wasn’t used again by another house. Having worked a long time in retail, I can tell you that muscular porn bodies aren’t the slender ones still preferred on most runways. You can’t give a porn person much more than underwear to walk in unless it’s bespoke. We’re not good models in that sense.
AC. Did anyone inspire you in the beginning?
Troy Daniels. François Sagat. I admire him a lot and geek out when he likes one of my photos on Instagram. I think his trajectory, the way that he’s done it, is admirable and interesting. And going back to fashion, Linda Evangelista, the chameleon. I love her so much.
AC. Porn and nightlife aren’t the same industry, but they go together. From an outsider’s perspective, nightlife is often positioned as one channel of a content creator’s work. Is that a fair description of the relationship?
Troy Daniels. Historically, yes. Today, maybe less so. Back in the day, porn was an advertisement for escort work or private meetings. Often, men and women would go on tour, go-go dancing or stripping. The nightlife was a promotion of the porn, like Stormy Daniels headlining the Spearmint Rhino in LA, for example. Jenna Jameson: Video Vixen, now available live at this event. So nightlife was the ad for the porn, which was an ad for the clients. But it’s also a chicken-or-the-egg question, because a lot of people start in go-go dancing and stripping, then do porn, then go back to events, and by then, they’ve raised their profile so they can ask for higher booking fees. There’s also, on the gay side, an event called HustlaBall, a huge nightlife event where you can see live stage performances of men fucking. The porn is an advertisement for that, just as the event is an advertisement for the porn. The head eats the tail.
AC. What’s your relationship to nightlife now?
Troy Daniels. I started as a stripper in San Francisco at Nob Hill Theater in 2006 [which closed in 2018 after 50 years], so twenty years ago now, and did many nightlife events there in the 2000s, like go-go dancing at many different parties and events. After a long break, I’ve recently been back doing a lot of nightlife events in LA, since I started living there half the year. I have a lot of friends who are party promoters in LA who I’ve known for years, and I’m always happy to jump on the box. I guess I’ve done the most work with Mario Diaz, a party promoter and nightlife legend for the last thirty-plus years in New York, LA, and San Francisco.
AC. You’re sober. Interestingly, many people we interview are sober. I feel like I know more and more sober-adjacent people working in nightlife. Do you feel like you have more sober people with you in clubs these days compared to, say, ten years ago?
Troy Daniels. No, because I’ve always known sober people in nightlife. The people who have worked a long time in the industry are the ones who have to be sober. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be doing their jobs today.
“Jobs are done better when you’re sober. That is true across all means of employment.”
AC. Give our readers a sense of what your day-to-day work is like.
Troy Daniels.
“My job is 90% admin, 10% fucking.”
I release one sex video a week and sprinkle in other solo videos and content and photos. I have 52 releases a year. Almost everything, I would say 85% of the videos, is edited by me, and the others are outsourced to outside editors. I cut all my own trailers and do all my own promotion. I have a trailer that I launch on different social platforms one to three times a week, depending on how much I have in backlog. Content is scheduled out six to seven weeks in advance. I’m constantly doing photo shoots for pictures I can use on Instagram, and secondary shoots for content I release on OnlyFans and JustForFans. I do kink content exclusively for JustForFans because a lot of that isn’t allowed on the OnlyFans platform.
short film HEAVY LOAD, starring Troy Daniels, premiered at HUMP! and was featured in dozens of porn film festivals worldwide.
AC. How do you stay organized? I imagine all this as a big spreadsheet.
Troy Daniels: [laughing] No, I just use the Notes app on my iPhone. I have every Friday for the next six months scheduled with the name of the person whose video with me will be released. I’ve been doing this online for seven or eight years now, so it’s all pretty automated in my head.
short film HEAVY LOAD, starring Troy Daniels, premiered at HUMP! and was featured in dozens of porn film festivals worldwide.
AC. You also shoot on film.
Troy Daniels. I do a lot of photo shoots with 35mm film, and I’ve started playing around with 110 pocket film. What’s tricky is, I travel a lot, and sometimes I accidentally fry my film in the airport X-ray machines. I’ve gotten better about putting all my film in a Ziploc bag and pulling it out of my carry-on. Last year I fried two or three rolls. Another thing that can happen is leaving my backpack in a hot car in LA to go have lunch and melting the film in the camera in 35-degree Celsius heat. The pictures came out kind of cool. That’s the thing about analog. There is more room for error, and sometimes the error is more interesting than snapping pics on an iPhone.
AC. Do you ever train that creative eye on another subject?
Troy Daniels. Yeah, often! Colleagues take pictures of me, and I take pictures of them. I don’t get tagged as a photographer, but that’s okay. I don’t tag them either. [laughs] I’m happy to snap pictures for parties and for friends. I don’t see it as a full-time gig, but I really enjoy doing it for fun.
AC. You’ve been in Berlin since 2012. You’ve watched this city evolve and have been a participant in nightlife all that time. How has it changed?
Troy Daniels. Well, I know this might sound like a small thing, but they used to let you bring food into clubs. All the door people tell me you’ve never been allowed to do this, but as someone who eats six times a day, I can tell you that’s not true. When I used to go partying on Sunday in the Berghain garden, I would bring lots of food with me because I would be there six to eight hours, so I would bring three or four meals in Tupperware. This was in 2012 or 2013, and at the time, no one said anything about it. I wouldn’t bring baked chicken, but I would bring sandwiches, or if I had spaghetti the night before, I would pack that. And I would bring cutlery. A fork and a spoon. Now, I show up at a club with my meal prep, and I’m told I can’t bring it in, that this was never allowed. I can tell you for a fact that fifteen years ago, it was allowed.
AC. [laughs] That’s amazing. Why do you think that changed?
Troy Daniels. The official reason I’ve been given is that they’re afraid of people bringing drugged food in. They say you’re allowed to bring in packaged protein bars or packaged fruit with a peel, like a banana or orange.
“I guess they don’t realize it’s possible to put drugs in a banana.”
AC. How else have Berlin clubs changed?
Troy Daniels. Something I don’t think has gotten better, and has in fact just gotten worse, is fentanyl in people’s drugs and the lack of education in Europe around Narcan and what a fentanyl overdose looks like. That information is everywhere in the US. In LA, every gay bar has Narcan behind the bar and can revive someone if they have to. I don’t hear much about that in Berlin or even in Europe.
AC. What was life like before Berlin?
Troy Daniels. I went to UC Berkeley and came here as a study abroad student. I met my ex-husband in my second semester. We had a long-distance relationship, and after I finished my degree, I moved here permanently. That was 2012. My degree was in media studies and mass communication.
AC. How did you learn German?
Troy Daniels. My family is German, and I took German in high school and at the university level. When I moved here, I worked retail and learned more there. I’ve spoken German fluently for the better part of 25 years. When people move here and ask me how long it took to learn it, I say I’m the wrong person. Ask someone else.
AC. You stayed after that marriage ended.
Troy Daniels. Yeah, I stayed after we split. I had another partner shortly after that. He wanted to get married too, but I had already seen what that was like, so I didn’t want to. And then we split. It was a good choice not to get married. Otherwise I’d have had two divorces before forty.
AC. After building a successful career in Berlin, you’re now spending half the year in LA, which strikes me as a kind of an epic return, since you’re originally from Pasadena. And you’re doing this during what is, by every account, a tough time in the United States. Why now?
Troy Daniels. I was planning this long before the 2024 election. I was traveling to the US a lot for work. Most big gay content creators are in the US, in LA or Miami or New York. When I was shooting there, it would be everything very quickly in a two or three-week burst, and it’d leave me absolutely exhausted. I thought it’d be better for my mental health to do things at a slower pace and spend more time there, just filming and shooting. And it’s no secret that the weather in LA is a little better than in Berlin.
AC. Would you ever choose a single home base?
Troy Daniels. That’s been the question of the last year and a half. Right now, I’d say: No. But you know, I’m always interviewing places. I was just in Zurich recently and was like, oh, this is great, do I want to live here? Every time I go somewhere new, I wonder if I should move there. A couple of weeks before that, I was in Antwerp and was like, oh, maybe I want to live here, I love it!
AC. What would you tell someone who wants to do what you do?
Troy Daniels. I’d tell them to temper their expectations, because the gold rush is over. It’s not the pandemic anymore, when everyone was locked up and masturbating and happy to subscribe to twenty different OnlyFans accounts. It will be a slow build. You’ll have to commit to a lot of content and a lot of work with very, very little payoff at the beginning, and maybe ever.
AC. You know me well, so you know I was a sex worker too, for over ten years, and honestly I’m thinking about coming out of retirement! I’ve been asked by many people how to get started in this work, and I think the biggest surprise for people is the operating costs. When I was a hooker, I’d buy ads and ad space, and it was a big but necessary expense. If I didn’t pay to boost my profile, it disappeared. Anything I earned per hour had to be subtracted from the cost of paying for that profile boost.
Troy Daniels. In this day and age, we’re lucky that the tools for creation are relatively simple to come by. Most shoots are done with an iPhone and a light set from Amazon. I’m not a DJ. I don’t need two CDJs, a mixer, and ten thousand euros worth of vinyl. I’m using what I have. You just have to know how to use it. The advice I give someone new is to experiment a lot with their camera or phone, refine their editing technique, and see if there’s a way to stand out in a large crowd of competitors.
AC. Soft skills were the most important thing in client work. I was never good at videos. I could never do what you do. It was too difficult. How much do soft skills matter in your work?
Troy Daniels. They’re everything. Whether it’s dancing on a box and being polite to the person giving you money, or chatting with someone online who wants to give you money, you have to be personable and polite and smile and all that.
AC. I know you sometimes struggle in social spaces because people recognize you. I know it created anxiety at events when we were dating.
Troy Daniels. Yeah, it does. If I’m working, that’s one thing, because then I’m in work mode. If I’m booked as a host or go-go dancer, there is a finite amount of time I’ll be there. I show up at 10 pm and my leave time is 2 am. You can keep me until 3 or 4 am, but you are paying more money for that. But if I’m going out privately, just for fun, it’s difficult to know how much I will be recognized or how much people will want to talk to me. I want to be polite, but I’m also there in a private capacity. It does create anxiety going out, not knowing if I will be approached or how much I will have to talk to people.
“I’m very, very appreciative when people come up and say they like my work. But at the end of the day, I’m going out because I want to enjoy the evening and don’t want to spend it talking about my job.”
AC. I have to talk about this, because it’s impressive: You cut up and rhinestoned a Louis Vuitton bag, and a Gucci bag, and turned them into harnesses!
Troy Daniels. I’ve been told many times to sell harnesses and jocks made from old Louis Vuitton and Gucci bags. For one, I would get sued for trademark infringement. Another, I don’t want to work that hard making something just to sell it. But if any curators want to approach me about an art exhibition or a show with repurposed fetish wear from Louis Vuitton, I’m available!
AC. You have a huge online following, so you have to think about what you put out publicly versus what is private. Do you ever share photos, for example, of your private life?
Troy Daniels. No, not really. The private work is the quiet afternoons I spend with friends where I don’t take my phone out.
“For as much as I post online, my real friends don’t have selfies with me. I’m too busy being in the moment, just enjoying it.”
AC. I think you travel more than anyone I know, and for me, there’s nothing more stressful than air travel. What’s something you do to keep stress levels down?
Troy Daniels. Pay for extra leg room! [laughs] But really, I try to practice self-love and patience. I set my own deadlines, but the world won’t end if I don’t drop a video on Friday. If I need more time to edit, I give myself grace to do that. I’m not curing cancer.
AC. What’s some music you’re loving lately?
Troy Daniels. Don’t laugh, I’ve been listening a lot lately to “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” album version, which is like seven minutes long and has an extra bridge. I also love “Chains of Love” from Charli XCX, from the Wuthering Heights soundtrack.
I love “The Power of Love” by Jennifer Rush. Only female singers speak to me. And Ikkimel, a German rapper. All of her songs are, like, 2.5 minutes, and they all sound the same. I was listening to her at the gym in London recently and had to pause the music because it was too good. She is so smart. The couplets she comes up with are so good. I was giggling while I had heavy weights over my head and thought, “Ooh, this is dangerous.”
AC. I want to talk more about Berlin, which has a reputation among gay men as a hedonistic sex pit where you visit and go wild. It’s the Berlin mythos. I know it’s what my readers in the U.S. imagine when I say I live here, a kind of nonstop club, and I think part of me hopes to capitalize on that mythos, that branding, because it carries an edge of cool, and I know you capitalize on that too. I see in marketing you are “Troy Daniels from Berlin,” and that matters. But I don’t know if I really believe there’s much reality behind that myth now. Do you think it’s still real or just an impression tourists take back home?
Troy Daniels. I think we’re living in the second Weimar Republik where you can fuck who you want at a lot of places in Berlin. So the Berlin mythos is, to some extent, real. But it’s not as exciting as it used to be, because too many people are in on the secret.
“Ten years ago, Berlin was the quiet, cool place you could go and have a crazy weekend. Now the secret’s out, and people want to buy it. It’s sex tourism.”
When I’m at a sex club, I like to put on a show. But when half the people are just standing there, watching and not participating, it’s not sexy. They’re standing next to other attractive people they could be having sex with, but they might as well be tapping their feet.
AC. When did you notice that change?
Troy Daniels.
“I was in a sling in 2016, getting railed by lovely gentlemen, and noticed a lot of, dare I say it, Americans, with their arms crossed, just watching and not doing anything to enhance the experience for others. That’s when I knew Berlin had lost something.”
That was ten years ago. For youngsters: If you think Berlin parties are wild now, you have no idea what they were like before.
AC. After the pandemic, when clubs reopened, people tell me something shifted.
Troy Daniels. It did. It was no longer the crazy queue at Berghain going all the way to the taxis. The crazy queue is now six hours long and goes all the way to Hellweg. Because people were allowed to travel again, they all wanted to experience this thing they had heard so much about. When I first started going out, friends would say, Oh, I waited an hour to get in. That’s unheard of today. Now it’s six hours in line, and you’re not even guaranteed entry. Not experiencing it is now part of the experience.
AC. All that aside, what’s your calm, happy place?
Troy Daniels. Home. I need to recharge my social battery often, so I’m happy to be home and look at pretty pictures and think about Madonna’s SEX book and Linda Evangelista photographed by Steven Klein. Someone has to sit at home thinking about this stuff. [laughing] It’s important work, sitting at home and thinking about whether I prefer blonde Linda or red Linda!
AC. [laughs] Which do you prefer?
Troy Daniels. Red Linda, no question. Red Linda is better.
AC. Thanks for doing this. I love you.
Troy Daniels. I love you.
Follow Troy Daniels on Instagram and visit his website, where you can find links to anything else you might want to see, and catch him at Massive Pride in Seattle, 24-28 June.
Alexander Cheves is an author and essayist exploring sex, culture, art, and music. Winner of the Geoff Mains Prize and an NLGJA journalism award, he can usually be found dancing shirtless in Berlin or working on his next book.
This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Words: Alexander Cheves
Images: Mara Menzel + images courtesy of Troy Daniels
