Lance Hart is the most sincere enigma I’ve ever met.
It’s not that he’s trying to be mysterious or coy, or that he’s concealing a boring core with vague aloofness. It’s that he’s into so many diverse interests, so many devil-may-care kinks — some of whose devotees would rarely share the same water cooler — that any attempts to define or label him are bound to fail.
I’m crazy in love with my wife. She turns me on more than anyone I’ve ever met. She’s a woman, and I also bone a ton of dudes on the internet.
It would be tempting to say he is complex, and perhaps he is, compared to the vast majority of mankind with their three shades of self-oscillating humdrum mediocrity, their sludge-crawl of mundane appetites, their pompously overwrought opinions, their excessively educated thick-headedness and varying degrees of emotional pollution, their total lack of Zen or their overly fragile Zen.
Instead, he is rather crystal clear, but not like finely made glass. Neither like a microscopic nor a telescopic lens, he zooms in place, a silence forged from chaos, which is the only true kind. A quiet space in the maelstrom. And the closer you get, the further he gets. The further you get, the closer he gets. He is a mirage that is not an illusion.
And for all his smoke, for all his fire, he is utterly grounded. He is quicksand with a strong foundation, the infinite dunes of a sandy desert nonetheless soaked beneath an ocean. I mean sure, there are cracks and striations in his geology, the kind of luminous cuts that eclipse a lizard’s eye as it twists in strange directions, heaving bits of sclera and irises like an all-seeing gyroscope, with cold awareness and hyper-tuned flicking.
Yet he is surely mammalian, bearing corded musculature and bristling brutality, at once submissive and fully in control. He could snap a neck, quick like the special ops folks he befriends, but he’d rather you choke him while he spins those spurs and purrs.
Amidst all this, he is the ultimate anti-brand, in a market obsessed with branding. He doesn’t give two fucks about branding, or staying on brand, or being brand-new to this or that, or heating up an iron to brand his name on some cowhide bullshit. He’s rawhide, like Clint Eastwood with assless chaps, and more than one kind of pistol poking out of his belt.
And speaking of pistols, he loves guns, proudly repping the second amendment. But don’t go trying to lasso him into a political corner. He just does as he pleases, thank you ma’am, miss and mister. Take a number, give a blister. Fire a shot and stick it in that holster, because this gun reloads itself aplenty.
With so potent an allure, his carefully cultivated and ever-growing fan base thunderously carried him to victory at the 2019 XBIZ Cam Awards in Miami, where he was named Best Male Clip Artist in recognition of his indie producer proclivities, perversions and professionalism. So it was, that Hart came to be Clip Star of the Month for October. It is a fitting month, for a man whose very nature is a Halloween sex party of fishnets, leather, a killer collection of Levi’s wear and silken panties.
Kick back now, and let this man’s intelligence wash over you.
XBIZ: From software salesman to Sean Cody contract star, then Clips4Sale content creator and XXX performer, you’ve had an eclectic career. What are the biggest ways you’ve evolved as an independent producer and star, especially with regards to clips?
Hart: When I started making clips, it was very much an impulse thing. I’d already had a two-year contract as a Sean Cody gay porn model, but almost no one in my personal life knew about that. I still had a “career” as a software salesman.
It was like 2 a.m. on a weekday, and I couldn’t sleep. I was trying to decide between getting a hooker and going to a strip club. Instead, I went to Walmart and bought a cheap camcorder. I already had some construction lights. I put an ad on Backpage that said, “Hiring Fetish Models for Adult Video Work.” By 3 a.m., my ad had already been flagged and deleted, but one lady was able to respond. She showed up at 4 a.m., and I just gave her all my money, because she was incredibly hot. That was Kelly Rockstone from my clip store, She Owns Your Manhood. I was super excited about paying her to kick me in the balls and jerk me off on her pantyhose and leggings. We filmed until the next day.
All my adult life, I had been ashamed of the things that turned me on. I was used to hiding my browser history and bashfully paying strippers to do weird stuff with me in the lap dance booth. I had ex-girlfriends freak out and shame me after finding out the things that I was into. I had friends and acquaintances make fun of me and treat me like a weirdo when they heard what I was into. All of a sudden, what I thought were my worst defects became my greatest assets. It’s like Hunter S. Thompson said, “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.” I guess I really lived that one out.
That content got me in the Top 50 on the front page of Clips4Sale, and I made my money back in about a week. Within a couple of months, I was making more money doing fetish stuff at home, than I did from my B2B software sales job. So, I quit my job.
From then until now, a few things have changed. Now, I make a lot of higher film quality content, and that came mostly just through practice and experience. I’ve gotten better at things like lighting, angles, sound quality and outfits.
I now shoot with my DVD/VOD line “Lance Hart Studios” as the priority. I have to, because that’s how production constraints play out when you make DVDs. I also use that content for my membership sites ManUpFilms.com and SweetFemdom.com (which make me more of my income than anything) and put what makes sense as clips on my Clips4Sale stores.
Shooting for DVD is a lot different because I have to think about the box cover, overall title, what stills to get, etc. I love it, though. It feels good to do all the stuff that big porn companies that pay me to perform, do. I’m doing it all by myself, so when it works, it’s a huge win every month. I’m still a huge pervert with a bunch of kinks. But after over a decade of living out all my ballbusting, pantyhose fetish, pegging, bi, trans, crossdressing, gay superhero, dominant, submissive and vanilla sex fantasies, I guess I’m less motivated by lust and more motivated to make the best porn that I can.
XBIZ: Beyond traditional video-selling platforms, you also run your own sites like SweetFemdom and ManUpFilms. Can you describe your approach to marketing, production, and customer retention for these fetish destinations?
Hart: Growing revenue for stand-alone membership sites is a different game from trying to climb the top rankings of a clip site like Clips4Sale or ManyVids, or competing for paid views on Pornhub. I have to get 100 percent of my traffic from scratch. I’m not competing for buyers or viewers on one or two platforms. I’m fighting for buyers on the entire internet, but I love it. I had to learn a lot to win.
I set a plan in action about nine years ago to figure out everything that the big companies do. When I was just making clips at home for Clips4Sale, my average cost per update was about $80. I’d make back about $300 per update over a year’s time, which is not bad considering that I updated daily. I figured if big companies have the money to pay my full performing rate plus another $3k to $10k per shoot and they’re just getting one update per shoot, there must be a huge return for them. I needed to figure out how Kink.com, the MindGeek sites (Brazzers, Men.com, etc.), Gamma, Falcon and everyone else got their customers and retained them. I had to learn what stuff they were doing that worked and what stuff was just “fat” in their companies that I should avoid. I’m a one-man show, so I needed a plan that I could actually execute with my own limited time and independent budget.
I used what money I had from clip sales and performing to go to all the conventions I could. XBIZ Miami helped me a lot over the years. Phoenix Forum was great, and I’m sad it’s not happening anymore. I went to those shows and listened to everything. I did a lot of standing alone in the crowd, trying to tune into everyone’s conversations. This helped me figure out who was in charge of what, who was listening to whom, who was envious of whom, and who was scared of whom.
Once I figured out who knew what I needed to know, I had to talk to them. I dressed as slutty as I could and flirted with all the gay ones. That was a good start. I got a lot of help from some nice successful leaders of the gay porn industry. Anyone who didn’t want my butt, I had to just make friends with. All I could do with straight heads of companies was try to find the insecure ones and be a good listener. It’s amazing what a man will tell you when you offer him a coffee and listen to how some lady isn’t treating him right. I got some luck along the way, too. I got called in to speak on a panel last minute, because someone else couldn’t go. James Deen was also on the panel. We became friends on that trip, and over the years he’s gone out of his way to help me more than once. He really didn’t have to, but he just found me in the crowd a bunch of times and introduced me to important people over and over. That was huge. Cindy Fam also helped me a ton.
Eventually, I learned how to assemble a porn business with all the things that the big companies have. You really need all the parts to make it work. Lights, camera, talent and studio space are good enough for OnlyFans and clip platforms, but for a scalable business I needed all the backend stuff: a real affiliate program with regular payouts, email marking, traffic trades, merchant processing at a decent rate, press releases, bookkeeping, a war chest of lawyers that know the adult space, traffic/conversion tracking, customer support, model releases and 2257 record keeping. It’s taken a lot of fine-tuning, but lately I’m able to run all of that by myself with just a few paid contractors who work part-time remotely. It’s been a journey, and I’ve loved it. Also, it’s totally paid off. I never knew I could make this much money.
XBIZ: How do you balance your time and energy, pursuing so many revenue streams, while wearing multiple hats?
Hart: When I have everything dialed in (which isn’t every month), I spend the first seven days of the month doing all the stuff I need to for my membership sites and DVD line. I do my editing, updates, set up my email blasts, pay my affiliates and schedule all my shoots (talent, makeup, locations, camera people, PAs, etc.) — that gives me the rest of the month to take whatever paid bookings come my way as talent.
Sometimes, I get booked a lot and scramble all over the place for the rest of the month. Other times, when I don’t get booked a lot, I get to spend more time on hobbies and being at home. It’s great. Time management-wise, I consider a shoot for my production that I’m directing the same as a paid shoot as talent. It feels the same, even though the effort and energy spent are different. Typically, I can get away with only producing/directing three to five days a month.
I’ve found that manufacturing principles translate to porn production really well. So, I refer to the theory of constraints when I make decisions on how to run my shoots. That’s how I get multiple updates per shoot and keep my costs per update down while overpaying the talent a little bit at the same time. The best months tend to work like that. Then, there are the occasional crazy months where all my shoots keep getting pushed and rescheduled for reasons out of my control, and I just have to cowboy up and work my butt off.
XBIZ: Given the “mainstreaming” of trans and bi content, has this led to more traffic for you or less, due to more competitors entering the market (be they indie in nature, or big-budget studios)?
Hart: It’s hard to say overall if mainstreaming of past niches hurts or helps. My market consists of internet users and DVD buyers over the age of 18 in countries where porn is legal, which is growing overall. My revenue has increased every year, and some years drastically. I have had to adapt to some things. Pegging was almost an untapped market when I started making movies of hot girls doing me with strap-ons. Any pegging I put on the Internet just made a ton of money and got a lot of love. Now, it’s much harder to make the same splash with pegging porn, so I have to try to make my pegging porn better and better.
On the other hand, IR content (black men with white women) has become more than mainstream thanks to Blacked.com and a few other companies. This opened a little door for me to alter my cuckold scenes a tiny bit by booking black male talent as bulls for them and increasing their return significantly. It’s hard to say for sure, but I have to assume from the results that a lot of Blacked fans are thinking about cuckolding while watching. Then, they’re seamlessly jumping over to my site.
XBIZ: What is the “Lance Hart” brand, if you had to describe it, given your diverse array of specialties, love of cats, gun ownership and marriage to Charlotte Sartre? You’re a very captivating fellow!
Hart: Oh man, I have a little twitch on the inside when porn people talk about their “brand.” When I ran PervOUT.com as a network of indie porn sites, my mission was to help porn performers start their own stand-alone sites. I built my little production operation, and it was making great money, so I figured I’d show others how do to the same. I spent a few years handholding porners, while they learned how to make content, edit content, update their sites, etc.
Out of 120 sites (120 porn performers trying to be producers), all of them quit before they made any good money. Out of those 120, most never started making money, because they had so many “brand” excuses. “I don’t want to make porn in my apartment with these cheap lights; it’s not my brand. I’m a star.” Or, “I can’t make solo videos, it’s not my brand.” I’ve done the opposite my whole career. I let the internet give me whatever brand they want. I’m just here to try to give them something to jerk off to.
It’s much easier to make the moves and decisions necessary to succeed in business when I’m not tied to down to a brand that I made up in my head. I’ve noticed in life that if I walk into a party planning to be the funny guy, no one thinks I’m funny. If I try to be the smart guy, everyone notices my dumb mistakes. If I just try to be useful and sincere, everything tends to work out better.
I guess I do have some convictions that give me a following that would typically not get along with each other. I’m crazy in love with my wife. She turns me on more than anyone I’ve ever met. She’s a woman, and I also bone a ton of dudes on the internet. I don’t consider myself “gay for pay,” because I really do enjoy boning down twinks and bottoming for muscle dudes. Occasionally, some gay fans speak up about not liking that I’m in love with a woman. It is what it is.
I enjoy shooting guns as a hobby. I also all-in with the 2nd Amendment belief that American citizens should all have the right to a well-regulated militia to defend ourselves from tyranny with arms. In my case, my “militia” is my gun-loving next-door neighbor and handful of friends with AR15s and body armor. It may sound silly to most, but if shit goes down in my neighborhood, we’re pretty set up for safety. I carry a handgun everywhere I legally can and train very regularly so I can draw very fast and put bullets right where I want to very fast. It’s a fun hobby, but also a conviction I have. I want to be able to protect my loved ones and myself. I never debate the issue online or really in person either. I completely respect and understand the people who feel the opposite way.
I get it. Mass shootings are terrible and scary. If I didn’t already have a passion for guns, I would see why some people just want them to go away. I believe that if people are out there shooting innocents, I want to have as good or better guns than them. I’ve been bullied, and I’ve been weak. Now that I have a strong body and financial resources, I want to do what I can to make sure anyone I care about is safe. So I spend a lot of money and time finding Special Forces guys and traveling to them to train me how to maneuver and shoot my AR15s and stuff. I think it’s really cool that I can learn all the drills and tactics that our elite military uses, so I go out of my way to get more and more of that stuff. I keep a plate carrier with Level IV bulletproof plates handy.
I also like to wear fishnets. Currently, I’m wearing cute red lace thong panties under my Levis. It all makes sense to me. I’m queer. I felt the need to hide that for so long. I had to pretend I didn’t like dick for fear of getting pushed around. Interestingly, in my travels, I’ve had more than one Army Ranger or Teams guy pull me aside and tell me about dudes he boned when he was overseas. One Green Beret told me in private, “Some guys are just so manly, they end up fucking men.” So to me, it’s not really a conflict. It makes sense. Also, sex workers get assaulted pretty often. I have to think about protecting my wife. We are a fairly gender role fluid couple. She does me in the butt from time to time, and we sometimes wear each other’s underwear and stockings. But, if there is a bump in the night, she turns to me in bed to make sure she’s safe. Or if the AC is too loud, she turns to me to turn it off. Either way, there’s some stuff I just feel the need to be good at as a man. I don’t think it’s crazy to learn how to be as dangerous as possible to evil, in case something terrible happens. Currently, guns are the most effective tool for that.
XBIZ: Speaking of Charlotte, how do you navigate the complexities of personal and professional dynamics in a way that is healthy and mutually beneficial?
Hart: Charlotte and I keep our money and business separate. I know a lot of sex worker couples that do things other ways. I’m not saying we know the best way; financial independence is just the way to go for us. I don’t ever want to end up in a position where I feel the need to depend on her to get fucked in the ass so that I can have money. I’ve met some real suitcase pimps that pretend to be partners, and it gets my goat. I love her. I love her with me and separately from me. I’m amazed, amused and enamored by the things that she randomly does just to get through the day.
If I needed her to perform for my site for free all the time, I think some of my love might get eclipsed by desperation. So when she performs for my site, I pay her full rate. There have been occasions when she’s done some scenes for free or held camera for me in exchange for me working on her merchandise site. It was a very clear and discussed transaction, though. We keep it that way. That way, when it comes to us, I just need to be a partner and focus on what I bring to the partnership while trying my best to stay out of her way when she needs space to grow or whatever.
It’s really nice that we both understand what it’s like to perform. We’ve both subbed for hard scenes and gotten the crap beat out of us. We’ve both had days like that and feel awesome about it, and days like that when we just feel beat up. We’ve both topped and had excellent and mediocre days. I’ve had way more mediocre days than her, and she’s an outstanding performer. I’m more of a pervert with a dream, but I do my best. We can feel out what the other might need after work, which is really useful. Also, our cats get along. That’s lucky. On top of that, we’re both sober and used to be aggressively not-sober, so we can be there for each other and celebrate each other’s sobriety. We are really lucky.
XBIZ: Describe your epic wardrobe and where you shop to keep it fresh, how often you change things up, where you find fashion inspiration, etc.
Hart: The good news for my wardrobe is that Levis and fishnets are cheap. A couple of times a year, I shop around to find new and interesting spandex stuff for my superhero shoots. I’ve found that buying a bunch of leotards for cheap on Amazon and throwing half away because they don’t fit is a lot less expensive than paying for the nice stuff. I kind of stick with the classics in terms of inspiration. I watched Rocky Horror Picture Show when I was young and got really turned on, so I end up dressing like Frank-N-Furter a lot. I also have a huge fetish for women in leotards and pantyhose, probably from growing up in the ‘80s, so I run with that.
XBIZ: Talk about a few of your highest-selling clips and the way you use analytics to shape your overall business strategy, as far as repeating previously successful scenarios vs. experimenting with new ones.
Hart: Now that I’m focused on revenue from my member sites, I can’t really tell which scene got which member to join. I can see what they watch the most, but that’s not always the same thing. For clips, I’ve been at it so long that I rarely have outliers. There’s a decade of clips in each report, and the old ones keep selling, so nothing really sticks out anymore.
I make decisions based on trends overall by category (ballbusting, handjob, cuckolding, gay super hero, gay hypnosis, etc.) or by model type (muscle daddy, handsome twink, big dick, booby lady, young lady, extra pretty face lady, etc.) and then finally by outfits. I’ve found that many customers are looking for a woman in leggings or maybe a bodysuit, then secondarily they are concerned with what she’s doing in the clip. I try to dress everyone for a good reason.
I have two email blasts per site. One goes to affiliates, and the other one goes to past customers. I pay attention to which of my affiliates are making the most money and try to film what they need as a priority. Two or three good affiliates can make you a ton of money very fast.
XBIZ: What was it like attending XBIZ Miami this year, advising the community on panels and then winning the trophy for Best Male Clip Artist at the XBIZ Cam Awards?
Hart: I had a blast at XBIZ Miami this year. I’m going back next year for sure. I love that it’s a fancy pool party. That’s the whole thing, having fun at a pool with other successful and up-and-coming porners. I love that everyone likes to help each other there. I had a nice time talking with some of the people from Pornhub for a while at the pool, and learning about their traffic. Speaking on the panel was fun. I’m happy to help anywhere I can. There were some excellent questions.
Most of all, the award show was really well-done. I was starving. Because all award shows are during dinner time, I had a subway meatball sub delivered from Uber Eats and ate it at my table like a barbarian with no manners. No one seemed to mind and I got extra cookies for other people. Winning the award was awesome. I called my wife right after and was just so happy about the whole thing.
I think I’ve won seven awards this year. I don’t know how many I’ve won in total. This one is different. I’ve worked my butt off for so many years as an indie porn producer, and that all started with Clips4Sale. I’ve never been recognized for that. I’ve gotten awards for scenes I’ve been in, or overall performing, but never as a producer. Most interviews only ask about my performing, which is silly to me because I spend almost all my effort directing and producing. It’s been my primary focus the whole time. I only perform for fun, to make new friends, and learn how other productions do things. So having something to point at that at least recognized my effort is a special thing for me.
XBIZ: Any grand plans for 2019 and beyond?
Hart: I’ve shot one test scene for a bi site that I plan on starting. We’ll see about that. I really want to do it, and think I can do it well. I’m on the fence between that and doing a step-taboo gay site. The taboo gay site would really just be for the money. I know I could crush it. The bi site would be more my cup of tea, sexually. We’ll see.
Meanwhile, I’m releasing at least one DVD a month now, and so far the numbers look great. I’d love to knock it out of the park with one of those and win something. DVDs open up a whole other world in terms of awards. Even if I never break into that world of awards, the sales are good, and I can be proud of building that little empire with no investors or help from a big company.
