When Demi says “sex work” (and the subsequent “good times”), she puts an asterisk and clarifies something: she means consensual sex work after she was 18.
“I say I started when I was in art school around 2018, and I was doing like a little bit of stripping to pay for things,” she explains. “But prior to that, when I was in high school, I had a boyfriend who kind of like pimped me out. So I was sort of traumatized by all that, and I really didn’t know if sex work was the kind of life I would want for myself, just because of like the way I was introduced to it originally.”
As a teen, Demi was a gifted artist and also more practically minded than other people her age. Describing her path into one of the top art and design programs in the country, she describes herself as gravitating towards commercial art to guarantee an income, and also feeling like a class outcast among her cohort, who had the luxury to use their college experience to experiment.
“I love the artsy stuff, but commercial is where the jobs are,” she explains, digging through her phone for examples from her past life as an apprentice commercial photographer. “I still had fun with it. I loved doing product photography, and I would make much more elaborate productions than close-up stills of the texture of the makeup and food. It’s Pop Art, in a way.”
Before being switched to a vocational high school where her artistic skills were recognized, Demi was suffering through the “regular classes” at her school.
“I was so bored by them. I hated high school. But then I switched to a vocational school and was determined to get into college for commercial photography. I wanted the credibility of having a degree. That was important to me, and also really important to my mom. She was a nurse, she had gone to college and all that stuff, and I felt like the only way I was gonna get into college was the arts. I was like, ‘I’m not fucking going to college for anything else.’”
Turns out Demi was underestimating herself. Her vocational school work was assessed at the National Portfolio Review Day when she was a senior and got offers to several schools, including one of the top programs in the country, a prestigious East Coast school of design you would immediately recognize if we weren’t editing its name for privacy reasons.
But getting in was just part of the challenge. Now Demi had to find a way to thrive in a new, hypercompetitive environment, while supporting herself with side gigs.
“I felt like I came from a different background from a lot of my friends, like economically,” she shares. “I just had to work more than they did. And then that ate into schoolwork time. When you’re doing your homework for a photography class, you have to be producing an entire photo issue, essentially. It’s a big thing. So it’s not like I could say, ‘Let me do this in the middle of the night when I have time to be doing it,’ which is also kind of why I started stripping. Because then I can work for money in the middle of the night, and then do my school stuff during the day.”
Keeping that pace, naturally, turned exhausting. Minimum wage jobs were not the answer either. Here’s where we should point out that behind that freckles-and-throaty-giggles fantasy persona, and even the stoner Barbie aesthetics of her everyday self, there’s a real, street-weathered hustler in Demi. At some point during the interview she drops in passing the nugget that she spent a few months in, of all places, Genoa, Italy when she was 18, between high school and college.
How did she swing that?
“I emailed this photographer guy I met on Instagram, and he was talking about opening his new studio in Genoa, and I was like, ‘Oh hey, do you need someone to help you out around the studio? If you pay for me to get to Italy and get me an apartment, I will’.”
Did you learn about photography?
“Not really. No. We mostly chain-smoked cigarettes and hung out, but it was really cool to be in Italy and he would give me a long weekend most weekends. So I would go travel. Like I spent a weekend in Venice!”
So, back in college, stripping would have to do.
“I was just like, ‘I know I’m cute. I know I can make money popping pussy.’ So I started stripping, but I didn’t do extras. Nothing wrong with girls who do. It just wasn’t my bag, it wasn’t what I wanted to do. And I didn’t post about it online anywhere and I didn’t tell a lot of people, so I could just walk away from it if I wanted to, and no one would know.”
We are now in 2020. You know what happens next—this is a recurring theme on these Crush of the Month profiles of starlets born around 1992-2002. Demi is a 1999 kid.
“Then COVID happened, and honestly, I was so stressed out and burnt out in art school too, and I was like, ‘This is fucked up.’ But I was also a little bit relieved that I had an excuse to drop out, and I just felt like nobody would judge me for dropping out. And the clubs were shut down—I was in New York, so everything was shut the fuck down. So I thought about it for a couple weeks…”
It?
“Doing the OnlyFans thing I was hearing about. That would be a big kind of commitment because ‘Once it’s on the internet, it’s forever.’ And I also did some research and some looking around and learned it was really hard to be a faceless creator and get a good start and make money. It just seemed harder to me. I was like, ‘If I’m gonna do it, I’m gonna do it full send! I’m gonna make it worth it!’ And I did it. And it materially improved my life—a lot.”
Her commercial photography training was about to come in handy again. The next step? Camming. For a whole month, Demi carefully studied other girls’ cam shows.
“Everyone runs their room differently and everyone has different menu items and different ways of interacting with their fans,” she explains. “So, I studied what different girls were doing and what was working for them. Everyone always says, ‘Oh, just be yourself!’ Okay, but how do I write a tip menu? You have to look at other people to get some ideas.”
She also researched different platforms and settled on Chaturbate, her camming home for several years now.
“I found their user interface really intuitive. And I also listen a lot to the fans in my chat who will make recommendations based on their experiences. They’ve been around the sites and they’ve known a lot of models too. So there’s a community of fans on Chaturbate too that will actually help you. The company just had their big anniversary and they rented out a whole boutique motel in Arizona for us. Chaturbate really takes care of the models.”
