Back at the beginning of the month, we sent a full team of correspondents over to the first annual RVA Adult Expo so we could learn what it was all about. Held at the Clarion Hotel on N. Boulevard near I-95 on Saturday, June 1, the Adult Expo was no stranger to controversy in the run-up to its occurrence. But when the time came, what would it actually be like?
Back at the beginning of the month, we sent a full team of correspondents over to the first annual RVA Adult Expo so we could learn what it was all about. Held at the Clarion Hotel on N. Boulevard near I-95 on Saturday, June 1, the Adult Expo was no stranger to controversy in the run-up to its occurrence. But when the time came, what would it actually be like? Here’s a full report from multiple members of our press coverage team, along with photographic documentation from Richard Perkins.
Part I: The Female Perspective, by Melina Bee
After having lived in Oregon, where the sex industry has no doubt been shaped by the “wild west,” I expected the 2013 Adult Expo in Richmond to be shocking and salacious. I quickly realized that though I was attending an adult expo, I was still in Virginia. Basically, you could get a similar experience at Taboo lingerie, only with more explicit and diverse merchandise. That said, putting on an X-rated convention in this state takes guts, and who knows what and how this adult expo may grow and change in the upcoming years.
The expo took place in a typical hotel off the interstate–too normal to be described as seedy. The main banquet hall had been turned into a showroom with a bar, vendor booths and a DJ running a multi-color strobe light in the brightly lit room. A nearby lounge was the VIP room, with another bar as well as hot chicken and various snacks.
Some of the booths didn’t really have an adult theme at all, but were instead selling jewelry. Other booths featured adult actresses, strippers, porn and toys. A local all-female Christian organization dedicated to “serving the sex workers” had set up a booth to provide female performers with gifts, flowers, and foot washings. Another booth was set up by a male porn star who also ran a martial arts studio. His studio’s business cards featured a picture of his 9-year old son. Call me a prude, but an adult convention is not where I wanna see pictures of anyone’s kids–sorry.
Overall, I was happy for the relative mildness (there was no live nudity or realistic depictions of male genitalia) as well as the general diversity. The vendors mixed togerther different merchandise appealing to a variety of sexual interests. The crowd also featured a mix of race, age and gender. Sadly, I missed the memo about showing off lower-hip tattoos–I could have displayed my own. Oh well; next year, I guess.
Part II: The Male Perspective, by Andrew Necci
Prepared for the idea of an adult expo by legends of LA and Vegas events taking up mile-wide convention floors, I was a bit surprised to arrive at the first RVA Adult Expo and find it taking place in a medium-sized banquet room on the second floor of the hotel. The tables with vendors took up about half of the room, with the majority of the rest devoted to a dance floor. Maybe some actual dancing happened later, but we were around for about two hours in mid-afternoon, and saw no dancing, of the normal or exotic varieties.
Even if you’ve seen a million pornographic magazines and movies, it’s weird to be in a room with a bunch of porn stars standing behind tables waiting to talk to you. I handled my shyness by clamming up and letting my fellow reporter ask all the questions. She talked to all sorts of different vendors (while I quietly listened), everyone from an artist who drew comics about furries to a sex toy salesperson who arranged in-home exhibitions of the products she sold (like an X-rated Tupperware party). For a convention featuring only around three dozen booths, it was pretty amazing to see the wide variety of sexual interests covered by the expo.
Richelle Ryan and Lisa Licious, two porn stars who were sharing a booth, stood out as the most obvious representatives of the California porn industry, aka “The Other Hollywood.” Both of them had an aggressively sexy look that emphasized their secondary sexual characteristics to an overwhelming extreme. On camera, a look like this can be hot as hell, but in person, it feels more intimidating than anything, which didn’t make it easy to walk up and talk to them.
There was another booth staffed by tattooed alt-porn stars showing off DVDs in which they had starred. While they seemed more approachable at first, it was a bit weird to realize that I’d actually met a couple of the girls in the booth at parties around town. I had the same kind of uncomfortable reaction when I saw the booths for local sex toy shops and strip clubs, and recognized a few of their booth girls as well. It was all a bit too real. Maybe this is the downside of a locally-focused adult expo–are you going to see people you know? Best to be prepared for it to happen. Well, I’ll remember next time.
From watching the other attendees interact with the booth girls around the room, I could see that some men were just as intimidated I was. But there were other dudes who didn’t let it bother them at all. I watched one guy spend a minute setting up and posing for a photo with a female porn star, keeping his hand on her ass the entire time. The place wasn’t a wall to wall creepy-dude fest, though. Thankfully, quite a few women had chosen to attend as well, and with several booths that featured straight male strippers and porn stars, they seemed to be finding plenty of entertainment for themselves.
Despite my awkwardness, the RVA Adult Expo was ultimately a fun experience. It would have been nice for there to have been more vendors; by the time we’d been there for an hour and a half, there wasn’t really anything left to see, and for the price of admission, I’d like to find a bit more to check out. However, the organizers intend to do things on a larger scale in future years, which will allay a lot of my concerns about the expo’s relative size. The floor was packed for most of the time I was there, so the local audience for such an adult entertainment convention certainly exists, and would no doubt support a significantly bigger sales floor. In conversation with organizer Anthony Mijares, I learned that he hoped to expand the expo to include LGBT-related adult content in future years, which opens up a whole new potential audience that I imagine will be receptive as well.
In spite of all the controversy there’d been beforehand, everything went off without a hitch. Expo spokeswoman Sun Karma told me that they’d encountered no actual attempts at obstruction from local authorities on the day of the expo. “They were just blowing smoke,” she said. In light of what an entertaining and successful event the first RVA Adult Expo proved to be, it seems like the potential for growth in future years is huge. What will next year’s event be like? We look forward to finding out.
Words by Melina Bee & Andrew Necci
Images by Richard Perkins
