How I F*ck as a Fat Porn Star

NATALIE RIVERA: Hi, you guys, just a disclaimer before we start the show: In this episode we’ll be using the word “fat,”which has been widely used by the body-positive movement in efforts to destigmatize the word. Our lovely guest gets into this later in the episode, but just thought we’d say a quick note before we get into her story. Thank you, and enjoy the episode. 

Hi, this How I F*ck, a podcast that explores the sex lives and sexual health of, well, everyone. I’m your host Natalie Rivera, a journalist who is not a sex expert but who is using her storytelling skills to better understand how people of all backgrounds and identities navigate sex and their sexuality. As you can probably tell by now, I am a millennial. I was in high school when America’s Next Top Model crowned their first plus-size model and I can still remember when department stores slowly started replacing their rail thin mannequins with mannequins of different sizes. Growing up, I wanted to be a magazine editor. I started collecting magazines when I was about 12 years old. Looking back now, it’s pretty insane to me just how much women’s media has shifted. Articles exploring how celebrities remained so thin were later replaced by essays about body positivity. Don’t get me wrong: It wasn’t an overnight thing, but it’s still pretty impressive just how much has changed in the last decade or so.

But if I’m being honest, how bigger people are portrayed or thought of doesn’t necessarily affect me because I am not fat. Yes, my weight has fluctuated and there was definitely a period in my life where I felt that I was “at my biggest,” but I have never been fat. I have never not been taken seriously by doctors who insist that any medical issues I have is a result of my weight. I’ve never been given unsolicited dieting advice by strangers, and I have never been singled out by a flight attendant or a theme park ride operator who suggested I have two seats instead of one. 

And I definitely don’t know what sex and sexuality is like as a bigger perosn, especially if that bigger person is an adult performer like our guest today, April Flores. April has been doing porn for well over a decade now yet she’s not sure whether porn is the right word to describe what she does for a living.

APRIL FLORES: I'm playing with the idea of calling myself a sex artist. Porn star to me it's cheesy, it's a cheesy title to call myself. But I do perform in sexual acts on film, so that's what I do.

NR: If you watch porn, and I’m sure a lot of you probably do. I mean, come on, you are listening to a show called “How I F*ck,” right? Well, if you watch porn then you might have come across one of April’s videos. April has bright pink hair, flower tattoos on several parts of her body and usually wears bright red lipstick. Her filmography is pretty versatile: She’s done videos with men, with women, with both men and women. Videos with costumes and plots, foot sex, and even a VR 180 video of her having sex outdoors. But there are things April won’t do.

AF: I don't do anal in porn, yet. And I don't really do any BDSM, bottoming and I don't like pain. But other than that, I'm pretty open.

NR: April Flores was born in Los Angeles to a Mexican mother and an Ecuadorian father. She grew up in a household that just didn’t talk about sex or what it meant to feel pleasure. 

AF: I came from a religious household, not crazy religious, but my mom was raised Catholic. And even though we weren't raised Catholic, we were raised Christian. I think that those values or those shames, all of that stuff, she learned growing up, she passed on to me and my sister. And so it was a lot of shame. Don't do sex is basically the extent of... Well, she did tell us the biological stuff about sex, but in terms of a more comprehensive conversation around sex, and sexuality, and navigating and consent and all that, I didn't learn about that until I was an adult. But yeah, so even masturbation was like, I got caught masturbating, I got in trouble. So there was a lot of abstinence talk, waiting for marriage. Don't masturbate. A lot of negativity and shame surrounding sex for me growing up. ‘

NR: Growing up in a household where sex talk was taboo didn’t mean April wasn’t exposed to pornography, it just meant that the porn she did see didn’t register with her. 

AF: So I had seen magazines from friends' dads, and I had a friend and her brother we watched his porn. But it was more funny, because it was this lady and she was fucking a banana, and she kept saying banana, banana. It was so weird. We would watch it in the context of, "Oh my God, this is hilarious."

NR: Wait she was really like... Okay.

AF: Yeah. She was using the bananas like a dildo. And she was like, "Banana, banana." It's problematic now looking back at it, but she had an accent and her accent made it even funnier. So we were just always laughing. So we would watch porn, but we wouldn't get too turned on. We would just get, "Oh my God, this is crazy, it's funny."

NR: I'm just curious, was this peeled or not peeled?

AF: Not peeled.

NR: What? That sounds so messy.

AF: Yeah. I mean like a banana either way is going to be messy. Right? Peeled, yeah that's mushy.

NR: Eager to learn more about sex, April lost her virginity at the age of 17 to her then boyfriend. She also did it so she didn’t go into college as a virgin. She pretty much just wanted to get over with it. 

AF: I remember the first guy I was with, I was just staring at his dick for hours. Just like, "What is this? It's so weird." I hadn't seen it. I don't have brothers, you know. And my parents didn't show me books or whatever. So the first dick I saw was the dude and I was just like, "Oh, this is crazy". Yeah, so I would say with my first serious boyfriend, when we had sex regularly, I was 18. That's when I was like, "Okay, yeah. This is pleasurable."

NR: She and this boyfriend would visit sex shops together on Melrose. That was really the start of April’s sexual exploration. She learned that sex could be enhanced with stimulators and that there was a whole industry out there, a world that celebrated sex. 

AF: Back then it was early '90s, there was no Pornhub, tube channel, whatever. So we had to buy it. We'd like buy VHS back then. VHS they were crazy expensive. And he was a photographer, and he had a video camera and we just did it. So we just did a lot of exploring together. Which is kind of sweet now that I'm thinking back to it because it ended badly.

NR: As you may have guessed by now, April’s fascination with sex didn’t stop after that relationship ended. She found herself associating herself with more and more people who were open minded about pleasure, particularly people in the porn world, which was a little ironic given that April doesn’t get too aroused my porn.

AF: My second serious boyfriend was a porn editor. So the first time we fucked, I was like put porn on, and he's like, "Why? I watch this all day?" Now looking back, I can identify with what he was saying too. But I was just like, "No, put it on." I wanted to watch. I never really got aroused from porn, I always felt I'd rather just be fucking than watching porn. So yeah, I don't know.

NR: Well, that's really interesting because of what you do now.

AF: I know, now looking back, I see these little hints of me becoming you know me.

NR: As years went by and as she met more and more people who celebrated human sexuality, April too was growing more comfortable with sex and her body.

AF: I've always been fat or chubby, I've never been thin. Well, actually that's a lie. I was thin for a little while in my life, but for the most part of my life I've been larger. And I struggled with that just like most people do. And finally in my 20s I lost a lot of weight, because I was in unhealthy relationships, and I didn't have any money. And I just got very skinny and I realized that life was the same. Because I had idealized this thin body as equating to happiness. Just ease of life, all these things. And guys would be nicer to me. And when I was skinny, I was like, "Wait, life is the same. It doesn't matter if you're skinny or fat, you have to work on yourself. And if you want a certain type of life, then you have to work towards that." So I decided to stop basing my happiness on my weight. And at the same time I met Carlos Batts. 

NR: April and Carlos met in an art gallery in Echo Park. Carlos was an award-winning      director and photographer who loved to capture human connection and sexuality in his art. He approached April and asked if she could model for him someday. Back then, Aprils’s modeling experience consisted of a few photoshoots with friends and hobbyists, where she would wear wigs and costumes, nothing raunchy or revealing. Nothing like what Carlos had in mind. 

AF: I saw that the shoot with him was going to be more on the sexy side and I was nervous. So when I saw Carlos' portfolio, I saw these are going to be nude or sexy. And he was like, "I want to shoot you in this bikini. I really want to shoot someone with your body," and I was a lot smaller back then. "Someone of your body in a bikini." Because he had gone to Italy and saw this billboard with a fat woman up there, being sexual and it really stuck with him. And during our first meeting, he came to my job and I worked at a coffee house and he showed me his portfolio and he's like, "I want to change the world with you. We can do this. We can change the world." And I was like, "Who is this fucking guy?" Sexy as fuck, talking about changing the world, shooting me in a bikini, I don't care, whatever he says, I'm going to fucking do. Because I was so into him. So the shoot it was fun. I had some wine to loosen up and yeah, I loved it. The next morning I woke up and I felt just super empowered and I was like, "Whoa, what happened last night, that was amazing. I want to do this forever.”

NR: When you met him and you found out that he did all these erotic shoots, was that ever... Not a turnoff, but was that ever a concern?

AF: Yeah, it was a struggle for me, for sure. Because when we first got together, I was 24 or 23. And I had zero knowledge of the industry. The guy I was with before who had edited porn, he would tell me all these stories. Who knows if they're even true? But he would tell me stories where a lot of boundaries would be crossed between people making adult and people performing in it. And I took his words and I transferred that onto Carlos, and I thought he was being inappropriate with the girls he was shooting.

AF: Because when he shot me for the first time, he was saying stuff where I thought was a little bit inappropriate. But I was into it because I liked him, you know? So I was like, "Oh cool." So I thought, "Okay, he's probably saying this to all the girls. Maybe he's flirting with all of them>" But he insisted that he wasn't. And so, yeah, that was hard for me to digest. It wasn't really until I started becoming involved in the shoots, helping him on set, doing makeup, he would be the main photographer, but I can do little stills off the side. And just being part of the process, I really learned like, "Oh shit. No, this is really a business." And it's fine. Not everyone crosses the boundaries.

NR: April and Carlos continued creating erotic art togethr, developing a strong, intimate relationship along the way. They married in 2003 and continued exploring sexual expression together. This exploration of art and sex lead April to her first porn shoot in 2005 which she did with an already very experience adult performer who is a woman. 

AF: Carlos had shot Belladonna, who's a very legendary porn star. And he shot her for a Japanese magazine, and she was looking at his portfolio and she loved my look.. And so at that time we thought maybe we can shoot stills with her, sexy, flirty stills.

AF: Because I was doing nudes next to other models or whatever, but nothing like touching, nothing sexual, just very figurative poses and stuff. And she declined that. But she said, "Do you want to be in one of my movies?" And I was like, "What the fuck? I never even thought about that." Oh, I was like, "Okay. Yeah, fuck it. I'll do it. I'll be in one porn. I'll have a story to laugh at." And when I'm old, I'll just think back, "Oh yeah, I did a porn a long time ago, whatever." I even wore a wig. So I could not be recognized or whatever. Because I thought it was going to be a onetime thing, but I loved it once I did it. So yeah, I'd never looked at porn and thought, "Oh, I could do that.” I just did. And that's the first time I had sex with a woman too. It was just following her lead. I haven't seen that scene in a long time and maybe I will. I'm sure it wasn't that good. Right when the cameras started rolling, I just went down her I'm like, "I don't know what the fuck I'm doing, but I'm just going for it." And your first porn how did that play into your relationship with Carlos? Being asked by someone else, "Hey, have sex with me on camera"? He was into it. He was very open minded, very adventurous, not jealous at all, ever. So it just became part of our sexuality. He was on set. It was a very small set. It was just Belladonna and her husband at the time, me and Carlos, it was just four people on set. And I just wanted to do a good job for the project. 

NR: As April puts it “it just snowballed” from there. Porn director after porn director started approaching her asking her to star in their films. April decided why not. It wasn’t too long after that April was shooting porn two to three times a month. It quickly became her new career, and while April was happy with the work, she did have to take a step back and really think hard on why she was doing this. Why she found this path or rather why this path found her. 

AF: Why am I going to keep doing this?" "Oh, yeah. To represent for fat people, just show other fat people, and even not fat people that we are sexual, and we don't have to wait to lose weight, to feel worthy of sexuality, desire, exploration, any of that. We can do it now in the bodies we currently inhabit."

NR: Did you know any fat performers or seen any fat performers before you started doing more performing?

AF: I didn't really meet any fat performers until a few years into my career, because I'm just the people I was around were all straight sized or skinny. So I had to seek out other fat people through other people. Yeah, I know a lot now, but back then, no I didn't know any. I was just another performer in this movie, which is something that I really was proud of and excited about. I did shoot with one studio and once you sign your release, they own the images, they own the film, they can do whatever they want. And they put me in a movie called Whale Watching, yeah. And I was on the cover and I was so pissed off. I went off on the producer, the director, because that wasn't my brand, that's not what I had agreed to. But it's just a lesson to like, when you sign a release, if you have all your rights, you gave them away.

NR: April and Carlos documented April’s then 12-year career—the empowering parts of it of course, not stints like Whale Watching— and together they released a book with the cheeky title,“Fat Girl.”

AF: I thought “Fat Girl” was a cool name, because it took two words that are charged already and put them together. Which is also “Fat Girl,” I think it invokes a lot of just thoughts from most people. And yeah. So to answer your question, my embracing of the word fat is just to change the negative connotations that it has for most people. I know a lot of fat activists and some people who are larger, they do embrace that word and they identify as fat. But I think for the most part, people are still uncomfortable with that word.

NR: “Fat Girl” was finally published in 2013. That same year, Carlos unexpectedly passed away at the young age of 40. (SOURCE) (SOURCE)

AF: In a sense I was deep in my grief. I was in a not very informed, wise, healthy place. So I would either not tell... I didn't really have any serious relationships. They were all just one-night things or people where you just had fuck buddies, I guess. So I didn't tell them, or it wasn't really a thing because they weren't with me.

NR: April continued performing, carrying on her late husband’s legacy and building her own. In order to do so though she had to learn how to properly make the shift from DVDs to sites like PornHub and most recently OnlyFans, where April is currently actively producing content.

AF: Back when I started in 2005, the model was DVDs sales. There wasn't any cam sites, or clip sites, none of this existed, not even the tube sites, it was all about DVDs. So these major companies existed, and they would hire directors, give them huge budgets. And then the director would create these films depending on the budget. Right? So if it was a low budget, then that would be reflected in the quality, the production, all that stuff.

AF: So me as a performer, I would get hired for a scene. I would get a really nice rate and that's it. I would go perform, get paid, leave, be done with it. But now since the tube sites, the internet affected everything. So it's the same with porn. The tube sites really changed how people consume porn because people get horny, they just go online type in whatever, get off after like what, 5 to 15 minutes, I don't know, and don't buy DVDs. So the porn industry struggled for a while. "Oh my God, our business model, no one's buying DVDs." So the budgets became a lot smaller, performers rates also were affected negatively. But now there are these channels where performers can create their own work and sell it directly to the fans, the consumers. For me, it's taken awhile for me to adapt to the mindset, because before I would just be hired, show up, fuck, leave. But now I have to coordinate with friends. "Do you want to shoot together? Let's get together. Okay, he's the footage. We're going to share the footage." You have to edit it, upload it, promote it, all this stuff. And for me, it's exciting, but also, it's totally different. I have had to really change my hustle because I didn't really have one before.

NR: April’s new hustle seems to have paid off though. She has a relatively large fan base across social media and she is a pretty Google-able performer. Her pink hair and figure are pretty much her signature look, and her influence, her mission to change the world—the one Carlos proposed to her when they first started working together— well, it seemed to have worked. 

AF: Lots of people would email me and say your work really inspires me. Or just seeing someone that looks like me in porn makes me feel comfortable, makes me feel like I don't have to have the lights on when I'm fucking. A lot of husbands would email and say, "My wife she feels so sexy now." Even people who never saw my work in porn, but read my words would say, "I keep your interview in this magazine. I keep it with me. And whenever I'm having a down day, I read your interview and it helps me. It makes me feel better."

NR: Well April, thank you so much for your time.

AF: Thanks for having me.

NR: Yeah, of course. And where can people find you if you want to be found?

AF: Yeah, I want to be found. I'm @TheAprilFlores on Twitter and Instagram, and my website is fattyd, F-A-T-T-Y-D.com. And yeah, just follow my work and let me know if you want a custom video.

NR: Perfect. All right, thank you April.

AF: Thank you.

NR: And that was our show. This episode was produced by me, Natalie Rivera. I’m also the host and creator. Ben Quiles is our audio engineer. Shyanne Lopez did copy and fact check. Music is by Miguel Gutierrez. Find his music online under his artist name Magh. Chelsea Kwoka is our vocal coach. Our marketing team includes Gabriela Sanchez and Alissa Medina. Our sponsorship manager is Mouna Coulibaly. Make sure to check out our sponsor Fembot Magazine. We’re also on Instagram and Twitter at howickpodcast, that’s “How I Fuck,” without the “u” so “fck.” We also have a website, howifckpodcast.com, again without the “u” where you can find all of our latest episodes, show notes and our list of articles and stats we used in this episode. And if you like this podcast please subscribe to it, rate it, review it. Reviews are a big deal for podcasts. They help us gain more listeners which then helps us do more of what we do, so we’d really appreciate it if you took a couple minutes to rate us on Apple podcasts. Help us keep doing what we’re doing. Thanks again, and stay tuned for our next episode!