September Reign on Dancing, Performing, Industry Changes

LOS ANGELES—“A dancer has a good work ethic,” says September Reign, “and she knows how to connect with people—that one guy—who she can take from the bar, to the rail, to the VIP room. I took that skill to camming, and I think that’s the way I made it through this pandemic.” When talking to Reign, you can imagine how easy it would be to drop a thousand bucks just to make her laugh. (“Oh, and it works both ways,” the 26-year-old tells AVN: “Someone who can make me laugh can make me cum.”) When the lockdown began, Reign, who entered the industry as a dancer and then began camming before her first scene with Reality Kings in 2015, easily slipped back into her gig as a webcam girl. “I’m a performer at heart,” she says. “I like drawing people in. And sometimes I feel bad for people who got their start shooting movies, because when you’re doing it alone, or if you’re onstage, you are really focused on the viewer.” Reign, who grew up in Sacramento, entered an amateur contest at a San Francisco strip club the weekend of her 18th birthday (“I think I won,” she says, “or came in second”). Her birthday is in September, so that took care of the first part of her nom de porn, and the “Reign” part is both a tribute to Prince “and the fact that I’m a queen.” (Reign says that at no time did she consider naming herself September Cherry Moon, September Graffiti Bridge, or September And the Revolution.) She has taken “September Reign” through the three stages of her adult career, and notes that she is now friends with a “busty blonde girl” named Ember Reign with whom she was often confused on her cam platforms. “This industry is constantly changing,” she says. “And I don’t consider myself a veteran, but even the way it’s changed since 2015”—when she walked out of what was then known as The Adult Webcam Awards at the Alexis Park Hotel in Vegas, walked across the street to the AVN Awards at the Hard Rock, and met Gianna Michaels, whom she knew from her dancing days, and who suggested she contact Reality Kings—“when the idea of ‘content’ (trades) was a bad word, and now it’s what everybody does … I’d really like to switch bodies with a new person in the industry just to see how she’s experiencing it all. “I mean: bush goes in, bush goes out again, bush comes back. I keep my bush because if I strike you blind you can still find my pussy.” The changes 2020 has brought to the adult industry are welcome ones, Reign says. She lauds the removal of the “interracial” category, noting that there is a difference between fantasy and harmful stereotypes. “I get that it is a fantasy in porn to be gangbanged by thugs in an alley,” she says. “But the ‘thugs’ shouldn’t all be black. It’s the associations those words have that are the problem.” She also acknowledges that the industry, by virtue of racial stereotyping, has created a world in which performers of color only get cast in roles where “color” is part of the niche. “I want performers of color to be cast in roles where color (isn’t part of the character description),” she says. Reign, whose ancestry is Cape Verdean by way of Brazil, says she has always been comfortable in her skin because her mother walked around naked. And she sometimes finds herself trying to make other people comfortable, especially on set. “If I know it’s a new guy I’m working with,” she says, “I’ll show up on set early. I’ll go outside and smoke a cigarette with him. I’ll say something flirty, or goofy. And I will totally be the fluffer for my own scenes.” Tell us more! “I think we owe something to the audience,” she says. “The girl may be a diva, the guy may be a tool, but if we can get that chemistry going, that’s what the audience likes, and I will do my best to make that happen.” Photography by @kingbigtre