Fresh Faces: Janey Doe

A version of this feature appears in the December issue of AVN magazine. Click here for the digital edition. LOS ANGELES—“I’m dripping in ink,” says Janey Doe, who crossed over to porn from a career stripping around California. “My tits are tattooed, my pussy is tattooed. My family was always saying, ’Stop getting tattoos! Where will you get work?’ and I was like: ‘Well….’” Despite a name that suggests anonymity, Doe is anything but invisible. At the same time, she wants to normalize tattoos to the point that being a tattooed lady doesn’t automatically make someone a niche performer. “Oh, I get typecast a lot,” she says, laughing grimly. “I’m trying to break out of those ‘bad girls trying to corrupt people’ roles, where I’m very aggressive or I’m a thief because I, you know, have tattoos.” Doe wants the porn world to know that people covered in tattoos don’t need to be a threat to one’s household. “Why can’t I be the average porn stepmom covered in tattoos?” she says. A self-described hood rat, Doe grew up running around the beach communities of San Diego County, got her tongue pierced at 12, and her first tattoo at 14. “Yeah,” she says, “there was a guy in the neighborhood who didn’t give a shit. But I loved tattoos. Every new piercing and tattoo gave me a little more confidence. I can’t describe why they did, but for me, I just wanted to grow up and be a woman, and that’s the effect tattoos had on me.” At age 19, Doe walked into a strip club for the first time, hoping to apply for a job as a bartender. “A dancer walked up to me, looked me over, and said, ‘Oh no; you’re going to be a stripper.’ I can’t tell if that was my intention all along, but this woman took on a mother role with me—you see that a lot in clubs—and I think I was dancing that very night.” Was she scared? “I don’t remember.” Doe, under a variety of names, says she danced up and down the California coast, but particularly in the “stripper hubs” of Orange and Los Angeles counties. She says that dancing for tips and another job—professional dog grooming!—were instrumental in defining her business style in porn. “Anyone who has been a stripper knows this,” she says. “You accrue a lot of skills as a dancer but it’s as if no one is allowed to take credit for it. You can’t put those skills on a resume. The persistence. You might ask 60 people for a dance before one goes off to the VIP room with you. Your confidence can go up and down, but you have to power through it.” Doe points out that the outside world often thinks that strippers and porn performers “are the same thing,” but people who work in those professions know that, though there is often overlap, the distinction is clear. “The woman who mentored me loves being a dancer,” she says, “but she would never work in porn. She’s perfectly happy dancing around California and the Midwest. But in porn, you get to choose who you work with. You get to be attracted to those people. And frankly, strippers can be mean! They pee in your outfits! They’ll steal your stuff!” Doe was always aware of the power porn stars had when one would come to her club to dance. “I’d always try to be there the night a porn star would feature (dance),” she says. “The room would just pop. One night Jesse Jane came. She showed up in a white Maserati. The energy and vibe and confidence of porn stars was just amazing.” Doe is forthcoming that she has suffered trauma in her life, and says she “went through a mid-life crisis” at 25 and stopped dancing. Among other things, she became a professional dog groomer to wealthy families. “And in many ways, stripping helped me in that job,” she says. “It was a hustle. You had to deal with a lot of entitled people, keep your business together, show up ready. And, yeah, there were a lot of single guys that called me to groom their dogs…” The name “Janey Doe” was a calculated move. When she entered porn (her first shoot was a Burning Angel movie where she felt right at home, she says) she wanted there to be an air of mystery about her. “I always dated the bad boys and (people) think they know someone who’s covered in tattoos,” she says. “But they don’t. When I got into porn, I wanted to be reborn. Who knows what you’ll find when you Google ‘Janey Doe’? You might find dead bodies! Cold cases! It’s like a speakeasy where ‘if you know, you know, if you don’t, you don’t.” (Doe hastens to add that she is not affiliated with the company Jane Doe Productions—she didn’t know about it when she chose her name—but says that “now it’s even more confusing!”) While she worked with agents at the beginning of her porn career, Doe felt that the business acumen she had acquired as a dancer and as the owner of her own dog-grooming business removed the need for a “middle man who (often) collected money for jobs I booked myself.” So, like a growing number of performers, she represents herself. “And sometimes agencies would tell me: ‘We already have a tattooed girl,’” she says. Doe is happy to be in the hustle of porn life, saying that she is happy in this world. “I know I’m a little too brass for some people,” she says, “but I can hold my own with any porn girl. At the same time, I don’t want to take up anyone’s space; I’m hoping to help expand people’s ideas of what they’re attracted to.” Book Janey at [email protected]