Let’s say it one more time for the people in the back: Sex work is work. It’s a job and all the pleasure and arousal you see during a scene isn’t always genuine—it’s Oscar-worthy acting by skilled performers. “After one of my first mainstream shoots, my agent came to talk with me and was like, ‘We’re really going to have to work on your faces,’” pornstar Indica Flower says. “Because at one point, when I was sucking dick, I looked disgusted, which I was a little bit. I still love my job and I love my costars, but I only date and sleep with women in my personal life. I’d slept with men in high school, so I thought to myself, ‘I did it back then, it can’t be that hard.’ But it was very challenging at first getting used to being with guys; men are very different from women.”
Flower has always approached sex work as a job, a job she’s extremely passionate about. Growing up, she attended a private Catholic school in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, but she was raised by progressive parents and began exploring her sexuality from an early age. As a sixth grader she was so enthused about her future career she started telling everybody she was going to become a stripper. And lo and behold, that dream came true as Flower spent four years as a stripper.
Photos by Calvert Productions
Flower flourished during those four years, and her time in the club helped open the door to a successful career in porn. However, that journey also presented many obstacles. “I was struggling with addiction and stripping can be a pretty bad environment for people with addiction,” Flower says. “I’d been sober for about a year and then around six months into dancing, I started doing drugs and drinking again. That first year was pretty rough, but once I got sober again, dancing was amazing. I traveled around the country and ended up finding a home club in Louisiana where I stayed for the next two-and-a-half years. It was a wonderful experience and stripping got me to where I am today.”
After being sober for several years and making the most of her time as a dancer, Flower was ready for a change. She’d come a long way from being a 19-year-old newbie at the club and was looking for a job with more stability. “I wanted to have a paper trail and work on my credit, then somebody at the club mentioned that they were in contact with a porn company who shot amateur girls,” Flower says. “I shot my first video when I was still dancing and it got over 20 million views. And at that point, it wasn’t really a decision. People liked me and wanted to see me, so I went with it.”
Photos by Calvert Productions
One might think getting through the door of the adult industry would be relatively easy after shooting a video that popular, but there was one thing still holding Flower back—her ink. “In porn, they prefer you to be blank: no tattoos, no piercings, normal hair,” Flower says. “Obviously, I go against every single one of those things. When I started porn, a lot of companies turned my agent away. They were like, ‘Oh, that girl has dreads and a lot of tattoos, we’re not shooting her.’ Then, as they watched me become famous, they came back saying they wanted to shoot me. It’s interesting because in the beginning, I was getting rejected by all of these big companies and now I’ve shot for every major porn company that exists.” Flower has only been in the industry for two years, but in that time she’s grown immensely as a performer and a professional. After hundreds of video shoots alongside some of the most renowned performers in the game, Flower has learned a lot about how the industry works. One of the most important things she’s realized is that lesbian porn is by no means a representation of real sex between women. “All lesbian porn that’s mainstream is geared to entertain men,” Flower explains. “So for lesbian women including myself, we have a hard time finding porn we want to watch. We want to see real lesbian porn and we know the difference.
Photos by Calvert Productions
“In lesbian porn that’s geared toward men, they have us do positions that are very open for the camera angles,” she continues. “With boy-girl sex, you can see a good amount of penetration from different angles, but with lesbian sex at home, you can’t really see much. I also think that a lot of lesbian porn is super hardcore, when in reality, it’s pretty intimate and they don’t really show a lot of that. I’ve already transitioned my OnlyFans into mostly lesbian content and my goal is to start my own site that caters toward lesbians. I want to make real porn with real lesbians—that’s the ultimate dream.”
With her rookie years behind her and a big goal in mind, Flower has quite the career ahead of her. She’s going to need to put in the work to give lesbians the porn they’ve been missing, but if anyone can do it, it’s Indica Flower. And if there’s something we can all agree on, it’s that lesbians get shit done.
Photos by Calvert Productions