King Noire: When Kinky Sex Is Antiracism
[photos provided directly by King, I didn’t put credits because he didn’t send any but im sure I can get some if you need them]
King Noire’s one of the most impressive names in the Adult today, both as an award winning performer and filmmaker. King and his wife Jet Setting Jasmine have been bridging the gap between the mainstream industry and the world of “ethical porn” for over a decade. He’s a co-owner and founder of Royal Fetish Films, a production company focused on creating blazing hot Adult films without falling into the racist tropes that so often plague porn featuring people of color. He’s kinky enough to make a career out of it, throwing Fantasy Flight kinky parties with Jasmine and offering professional fetish training in a variety of BDSM skills both technical and interpersonal. None of this is to mention the fact he’s a musician, activist and outspoken advocate for antiracism in the Adult industry and beyond. Oh, and he’s queer and poly so you know he’s got to be pretty cool.
I admit it, I was nervous to interview King Noire, and not just because of that ridiculously impressive resume. I knew we were planning on discussing some of the most horrific parts of American history and their impact on Black men today: things that couldn’t possibly be easy for King to talk about and that I felt unequipped to discuss without spiraling into unhelpful guilt and self consciousness. I was in my head, palms sweating all over the list of questions I’d prepared and wondering if I was really the right person for the job. Still, I knew I couldn’t pass up on the opportunity to chat with someone so accomplished in my favorite field and he’d been gracious enough to accept the interview request, so I sucked it up and started the call.
Getting on call with King I’m sure my nervous energy was palpable, but he handled it with a grace I couldn’t be more grateful for. He was open with me about a string of stressors in his personal life that might impact our conversation. In a cozy kitchen, he asked if it was alright to heat up some food to snack on during our talk. Even with so much on his plate, he’d made the time to talk to me and the mental space to do it right, chatting with me about the small town I was calling him from and connecting on a human level before jumping into questions. As we did get into his life and career, he had an earnest candor that caught me off guard.
A Loving Mom & Dad’s Dirty Secret
King grew up in New Jersey. The son of a white dad and Black mom who separated at a young age, King learned self respect against racism from his mother’s example. I could see the warmth flowing out of him when he started to talk about her. “I love her so much,” he smiled, remembering the values she instilled in him during his childhood. “She desegregated her elementary school in Camden, New Jersey [...] She’s dealt with this shit for her entire life.” But King’s mom didn’t just face racism and white supremacy; she actively fought against it. “She marched with Dr. King. She did sit-ins in DC at the [...] five-and-dime or the Woolworth.” He remembers the lessons she instilled in him: “Do not tolerate people disrespecting you;” “Don’t let people question your intelligence or your worth or undermine what it is that you are there to do based on the color of your skin;” “Whatever it is that you do, even if you’re out here shaking your ass (as she would say), those principles still matter.” King’s done his best to live up to her standards throughout his life. Unfortunately, it’s always been relevant and not always easy.
King experienced racism in porn far before he ever set foot in the industry. His relationship with his white father had never been easy, but that didn’t make him any less shocked and disturbed when he found his dad’s hidden porn stash. Where most kids in the 80s might have stumbled across Hustlers or Playboy magazines, what King found sent chills down his back: photo after photo of Black women being fucked by white men dressed up as Klan members. Black women who, not uncoincidentally, looked like King’s mother. Women with her hair. It was shocking, upsetting, and left King with an impression of Adult Film as anti-Black and misogynistic. “It definitely turned me off from porn” King shared in an interview with Holly Randall, “I wasn’t really seeking out porn after that.” Maybe King would have avoided porn forever if it weren’t for the turn his life took.
What’s A Little Porn Between Friends?
King’s experience in sex work began, like that of so many, out of necessity. As a teenager he’d found himself homeless and desperate for income and stability. That was when his friend asked for his help with something. She’d been offered money for a porn shoot, but she really didn’t want to perform with a random man and asked King to do it instead. Despite the aversion his earlier experience had left him, King couldn’t turn down the opportunity. It was good money and he was comfortable enough with the girl at the time that it didn’t seem like such a big deal. It’s not like it required playing a racist caricature or anything, either. He liked sex, he liked money, and he was already discovering himself as an exhibitionist. King remembers thinking
“Oh shit! I got paid for doing something I love to do that…I don’t think I’m gonna get arrested for. This good, right?”
Fucking Wives For $ Isn’t All It’s Cracked Up To Be
With a fresh experience of porn, King felt a bit more open to sex work. He started looking for other opportunities and, like a significant amount of Black men, he found that much of the gigs available to him were in the sphere of professional cuckolding. Simply put: men wanted to pay him to fuck their wives. Sounds like a pretty good gig, right?
Well, as hot as it sounded, King still went into professional cuckolding with some hesitation. The magazine he’d found in his dad’s collection hadn’t inspired much faith in sex work. “Having that first really fucked up introduction as a young person I kind of thought it was going to be racist” he shared with me. Unfortunately, the reality of professional cuckolding matched his low expectations.
The world is full of Anti-Blackness, but cuckolding specifically is a kink that often heavily stereotypes Black men. Black men are regularly treated , in the cuckolding fantasies of white couples, as a degrading object or sex toy more than a third person who happens to be Black. The paying husbands would frequently say things to their wives about King like “I got you a big black cock” or even use racial epithets that King would have to decide whether or not to address and risk his income. King remembers thinking “This is just how this shit is,” feeling resigned to racist bullshit if he wanted to work and feed himself. “I was in a survival mode,” he recalls, thinking of the times he held his nose through racially degrading situations. He wanted to stand up for himself like his mom had taught him: he’d set boundaries around people’s language and did his best to hold to them. That was easier said than done, though. As he admits, “I won’t even lie: there were times where I was like ‘I’m just gonna have to eat that little thing right there because I need to get paid.’” He did his best to check people when he felt he had to, “but that might lead to never working with that person again, you know what I’m saying?” His rule of thumb was “Check them where you need to check them and get your money.”
A Vision Of Better Sex Work
Despite all the insulting and painful experiences that kept coming up in his sex work, King found joy in the world of professional pleasure. “I definitely was super sexual. I loved being an exhibitionist. I enjoyed the sexual attention” he laughs “I could just do without the racism! The other shit is fine.”
Even as he worked in professional cuckolding for survival, he was getting a taste of sex work that felt fun and exciting without all the racism. “When I was dancing at parties and clubs and doing things like that it was primarily within the Black and Brown community.” There, racism “wasn’t even a thing.” Who knows how long King could have stomached the prejudice and stereotyping that saturated the professional cuckolding sphere if it weren’t for the breaths of fresh air he got around other sex positive people of color. “It was kind of getting an opportunity to see what it could be like and then also dealing with what it is at the same time.” With those parallel experiences, King was inspired to move towards a vision of Black and Brown sexuality and kink outside of the narrow, fetishizing framework he saw while cuckolding. “I think that exposure kind of made me think of how I can shape it to what I wanted it to be.” He remembers thinking “If you’re going to last in this shit, you’re really going to have to carve out your own shit”
Art, Music, Community
‘Carving out his own shit’ came in time, but the road was winding. King even quit sex work all together for a while. He’d started his music career at that point and ended up pouring a lot of his time, energy, and passion into his art. That became working at a school in his neighborhood— a career choice which, unfortunately, is very treacherous to try to balance with sex work. “My mentor was like ‘You can’t be doing other shit that’ll get you in trouble.’” Of course being a sex worker didn’t make King any less qualified as a teacher, but it wasn’t worth the risk to his reputation and employment. So, he switched gears. Instead of sex work he focused entirely on helping local kids. He played chess with them, taught them Creative Writing, and worked with the Urban League Of Hudson County in Jersey City.
With the ULOHC, King did work he’s especially proud of today. “The program I was working for— it was amazing [...] I was working with kids who were either coming out of the Youth House or had court ordered community service. My job was to help them find actual community service.” It felt extra meaningful to King because of his own experiences with the ‘Justice’ System at a young age. “When I got arrested as a kid and they made us do ‘community service’ we were, like, picking up needles behind the Methadone clinic or some shit.” It felt more like a degrading, dangerous punishment than rehabilitation or participation in a community. “Like, yeah that shit needs to be cleaned up, but you shouldn’t have people doing that shit who don’t have gloves or know what they’re doing.” Working for ULOHC, he got to help kids in a similar situation to his fare better and experience real growth. They made art for the neighborhood and created projects the kids could feel proud of. “A lot of these kids have been through some fucked up shit or had bad interactions with people in their community, so now the community service is to help get them back into the community.” It was an extremely meaningful experience…until the program got cut.
Sex Parties With A Sweetheart
Once King’s opportunities working with kids had run dry, he was back looking for gigs. He was still doing music, touring and signed with Viper Records, but that wasn’t a full time job. He knew someone who started throwing sex toy parties, so he got back into dancing to help her out and started dabbling in erotic touch massage.Then, through his longtime friend DJ Victoriouz, he met his future wife Jet Setting Jasmine.
Jasmine was beautiful, in tune with herself and direct. She interviewed him for a podcast about sex work, which led to a spark that couldn’t be ignored. While Jasmine wasn’t a sex worker at the time, she was involved in the periphery throwing sex toy parties and teaching pole dancing lessons. There was an immediate attraction and mutual respect. Plus, Jasmine thought there was an opportunity to make money together and King was happy to explore the idea. “Being that I had lost my other job, I was just doing music, so I had time to do whatever”
It was the perfect time to start throwing sex and kink parties together and traveling the country spreading bacchanalia and making memories.
The Fantasy Flight parties were a great experience for King. He was finally working with sex and kink in a way that felt liberatory. “I danced for everybody. All genders,” he says proudly. An openly pansexual man, King has never wanted to restrict himself to sexual connections with one gender. “I like turning people on,” it doesn’t matter how they identify, present, or what’s on their pants.
Fantasy Flight parties centered people of color, a welcome change for King in the world of sex work. Most of the Fantasy Flight attendees were “Black women between the ages of, like, twenty five and forty five” he remembers, and those women were who inspired him to get into Adult Film. While they were sex positive, “So many of these women would be like ‘Porn is terrible.’” They were interested in porn, but found that “everything [was] disrespectful to Black women” and, as King added, “Everything is racist to Black everybody.” That’s when the partygoers and people in that scene started suggesting King and Jasmine help change that. “I hadn’t made porn in a while and people were like ‘You should make it.’”
This Time, Porn’s On His Terms
Even though King was woefully out of practice and Jasmine had never even tried making porn before, the couple decided to take a swing at it. That was the origins of Royal Fetish Films. “We had a submissive film us,” he shares, which was fun for them and the submissive while also being a creative endeavor. They ended up making Orally Yours, a feature length film full of, who could guess, plentiful oral sex (among other things). Even though it was their first go together, they decided to enter it into the 2016 FetCon Fetish Awards. To their surprise, they won best full length feature on their very first real project together!
It was an unconventional start for King and Jasmine. Instead of having to vie for studio work from square one, King used the marketing strategy that had worked so well for his music career. He remembers thinking “I got signed because I sold lots of mixtapes [...] If it works for music it’ll work for porn.” As he traveled with the Fantasy Flight parties, he’d attract new fans. His live sex shows and stroke sessions turned people on enough that they wanted to see more. When people approached him after the performances, he’d say “You wanna see us? Oh, well go to our website. You can see more here.” That plus the award Orally Yours had earned meant King and Jasmine were quickly gaining exposure. “Our fan base grew from just what our parties were to be people of all races, all genders, all orientations.” As King got more well known, other performers and studios started reaching out and bringing more opportunities. He was able to work with big names like Sara Jay, Angelina Castro, and companies like Lucy Hart’s independent adult film network Pervout and Miami based studio Scoreland.
Porn’s Still Racist
As exciting as it was to have a foot in the door, it was frustrating to see the racism so prevalent in the mainstream industry, even though King had already become so used to it in the world of professional cuckolding. “It was really extra with some of the ways [porn featuring Black performers] was portrayed. How it was tagged and the description of people was very, very racist.” The landscape of porn featuring Black performers was dominated by stereotypes that stem from slavery. Stereotypes that depicted Black men as insatiable, wild, and animalistic were more than just insulting to King. They smeared over his real personhood to replace him with a caricature.
Even stereotypes that might seem flattering to outsiders, like the idea that Black people have “natural rhythm” or athleticism, flatten Black individuals and ignore the years of hard work and discipline that goes into developing skills. The idea in porn that Black men are naturally hotter, stronger, and better at sex did the same thing to King. “I do this because I want to do it. I do this because I’m good at this. It took skill and talent to be able to get to this.” None of King’s attributes, positive or negative, are the natural result of being Black.
A cursory google search shows how much even King’s conscientiously antiracist work gets stolen and uploaded with racialized titles and captions.
Erotic Respite From Racism
The good thing is, since the beginning of his porn career with Jasmine, King has been able to be picky about who he worked with and what roles he took on. He’s made a point to avoid scenes when he notices an element of fetishizing or stereotyping his Blackness. “There are studios I would never work with” he says, describing the racism he’s seen normalized by production companies in the business. For him, scenes that play with storylines related to racist stereotypes or the real systemic oppression Black people face in the world feel repugnant, adding to people’s biases and making the world a worse place for people of color. “For me, those kinds of scenes aren’t healthy for anybody.”
In the years since he entered the industry, King’s changed the landscape of porn featuring people of color. While there’s still plenty of stereotyping and racism out there, it no longer feels like there’s simply no place for Black people to see themselves having fetishes instead of being the fetish. King and Jasmine have won numerous awards for their work in Royal Fetish Films. Most recently, King was crowned (see what I did there?) Pansexual Performer Of The Year by UrbanX. He’s also won other titles like Favorite Male Fetish Webcam Performer and Favorite Male Fetish Performer at the Fetish Awards in 2022. Along with, Orally Yours (2016), Royal Fetish Films has won accolades for Collared in Shadows (2017) and Sacred Sex (2018).
Fear & Future
Unfortunately, looking into the future, King’s not feeling very hopeful. Talking to King about the state of the country today, it’s clear he’s frightened about the future of porn, sex work, and the wellbeing of marginalized people.
The current administration’s assaults on Civil Rights and Diversity, Equity and Inclusion initiatives looms heavy over the conversation, as does revocation of the rights of Queer people and constant tirades about whatever “wokeness” is. “They will not teach Black history in school because…it makes white people uncomfortable? That’s insane” he comments with passion, talking about the attacks on education he’s seen in his current home state of Florida in recent years. It’s a terrible injustice to rob people of color of their history, and it puts everyone in a worse position. “Not knowing what happened in history is why you’re doomed to repeat it,” he says ominously, bringing up the treatment of trans people in Nazi Germany before the Holocaust and its eerie parallels to what’s happening in the US today.
In King’s mind, it's of utmost importance that we all not only educate ourselves on our own people’s histories, but also stand together with others under threat. “I think it’s super important, within the Black community, for us to be standing with our Black trans folk, Black gay and lesbian folk,” he states. “At Stonewall the village removed T and the Q when literally that shit wouldn’t have happened without a Black trans woman.” His commitment to intersectionality may have inspired his recent appearance performing at the TEAs this year. In such a frightening time for everyone in the US who doesn’t fit a white nationalist Christian ideal, King knows we need to stand together.
When talking about the perils porn is facing in particular, King feels some amount of respectability politics might be necessary to protect the industry: “Because our shit is on the fringe, it’s important to maintain certain decorum if we have to go before Congress, before the Senate, before whoever to justify our industry even being here when people are constantly trying to take it away.” One place where he thinks change should be made is the words we use to describe performers: “Referring to adults as boys and girls is detrimental not only to how our industry presents to the rest of the world, but it is also demeaning to the people involved.” In King’s mind, cleaning up porn’s public facing image is necessary to ensure the survival of our right to explicit media. “The industry itself is taboo,” but fixing some of the more insidious aspects might be necessary “in order to make sure that our industry can survive.”
Loving Porn Despite It All
King Noire’s relationship with porn feels best summed up by the phrase “tough love.” The values instilled in him by his activist mother have encouraged him to stand up for what’s right, even when it’s daunting. Since the beginning of his public facing career he’s vocally called out racism, sexism, and other problems he sees harming folks in the industry and beyond. Yet he’s not here to bash porn or sex work. He adores making erotic art, turning people on, and spreading kinky love to his fans and clients. He knows the issues he combats in adult entertainment are far from unique. As he puts it, “You pull people from all walks of life and there are some people who have some real fucking problems. But there’s also people who have real fucking problems in every job, it’s just those jobs are also mainstream jobs. ” “I am not a person who hates this industry,” he says. “Speaking for myself, if I didn’t have sex work, who knows what would have happened to me or where I would be” King’s criticisms come from love. Love for the work, love for the art, and love for his fellow creators. “I want it to be better for everybody.” That’s what he’s dedicated his career to. Check out King Noire here, follow him on social media, and watch out for him and Jasmine’s future work from Royal Fetish Films.
