the best of 2020

surprise, surprise! i am once again rousing this blog from its semi-permanent state of hibernation to share, for the second year in a row, what i liked best in girl/girl porn released during the last twelve months.

it was a strange year, as nobody needs me to inform them. porn production was heavily curtailed for much of it, and the kind of porn that did end up being most frequently shot during the covid era was the kind of porn i least enjoy: home-video aesthetics, largely performer-produced, with static cameras, bad lighting, dull compositions, and little to no narrative. also, halfway through the year, the studio that had produced much of my favorite work over the past few years (gamma/adult time) had yet another scandal with a prominent producer accused of sexually assaulting talent, and i felt morally obligated to cancel my subscription. three directors who had worked closely with chief creative officer bree mills being outed as creeps in three years (stills by alan, stef onzo, and now craven moorehead) is just too damning of a pattern to keep being able to support the platform in good conscience — and as if to tip the scales, one of alan's new ventures had a (short-lived, admittedly) partnership with adult time at the same time. so i'm more or less done there. i've still been keeping tabs on their output, and with a few exceptions i haven't felt that i've missed much.

which means that the bulk of my paid porn watching over the course of the year was among the unambitious but endlessly serviceable mindgeek brands. don't get me wrong, i'm skeptical as hell that one big montreal-based tech firm that owns a sizeable chunk of porn production is morally any better than another — but since complaints about unprofessional behavior on mindgeek sets (at least since august ames' infamous final scene, r.i.p.) haven't reached me, i'm still willing to give them cash. for now.

in any case, my interest in (and perhaps more importantly my willingness/ability to pay for large quantities of) filmed pornography has undoubtedly waned over the course of the year, as a cursory scan of the dates of the posts on this blog can confirm. when the mood strikes, i've turned more frequently to written or drawn porn over the past twelve months than i have video, and my enthusiasm for watching porn for non-functional purposes has shriveled accordingly. i have little doubt it will return — the history of my life is the history of interests waxing and waning over time — but if this post ends up being quite a bit shorter than last year's, there are reasons for that even beyond what can be blamed on a global pandemic.

quite a lot can be blamed on that global pandemic, though. much of what i was most looking forward to in last year's entry never came to fruition. big productions were mostly shelved or put on hold until post-vaccination conditions prevail. many performers have retreated from the hectic and potentially risky exposure of mainstream production to the safety and steady income of onlyfans and similar direct-to-consumer platforms, which my finances and emphasis on performer variety put out of reach. the promise i had placed so much stock in, of performers writing and directing their own productions for major studios, has (casey calvert at gamma and lust cinema aside) mostly failed to materialize: the likes of whitney wright, serena blair, kristen stewart and lena paul seem to have scaled back some of their ambitions, or at least deferred them until a more favorable season. porn as a category of consumption remains a bull market, but production is a bear: almost no new sites and very few new sub-brands have emerged, at least as far as my attention has kept up, and every existing site has significantly scaled back its offerings, at least temporarily.

but that doesn't mean nothing of worth was released in 2020. there was, of course, a significant chunk of material shot in the back half of 2019 and first few months of 2020 that trickled out over the course of the year, and a lot of it was very good, even great, and stands up against any porn that i've loved in previous years; and as the year wore on and producers adapted to the new normal, some very good scenes came out of it. still, 2020 is going to have to end up with a permanent asterisk next to it in the annals of porn history. i wouldn't go so far as to say that the quality of scenes i celebrate below is overall worse than that of those i celebrated last year, but because there was less to choose from, finding the good stuff felt harder. maybe if i had been paying better attention it wouldn't have been.

anyway. on with the listmaking!

best feature

granted, i haven't been paying as close attention as i could have been all year. but as far as i can tell, there were very few all-girl full-length feature releases this year worth noticing. here's hoping that once the coronavirus vaccine becomes more widely available a high standard of production can return. until then, we have this.

sweet sweet sally mae

performers: ana foxxx, valentina nappi, misty stone, kira noir, sizi sev, julie kay, noemie bilas, scarlit scandal
site: adult time (gamma)
production credits: ricky greenwood (dir., scr.), ricky greenwood & maddy barton (scr.)
release date: november 20, 2020 | trailer

ana foxxx and scarlit scandal

i said above that i was done with adult time, and then i say that a feature they released after i cancelled my subscription is the best of the year? hypocrite much? well, i didn't resubscribe; nor did i pirate it (pay for your porn). i bought the vod from a third-party vendor, which, yes, will put money in gamma's coffers, but since adult time likes to trumpet their partnerships with independent producers, my perhaps misplaced hope is that some of that money goes to the director and maybe even the performers. in any case, bree mills apparently had nothing to do with it; and a few hints in the publicity around the release seem to suggest that ricky greenwood shot it as a labor of love without having a home for it, or perhaps even that mile high, his primary employer, rejected it as unsuitable for sweetheart video, and adult time picked it up. if so, it's sweetheart's loss. greenwood came to porn after having gotten his start making cheap genre (a.k.a. "exploitation") movies in europe, and sweet sweet sally mae is an obvious homage to the blaxploitation cinema of the 1970s (the title is even a reference to sweet sweetback's badasssss song), perhaps filtered through tarantino's jackie brown. ana foxxx was born to play the titular heroine; i could wish that everyone else in the movie was as good, but really only kira noir as a sadistic guard and isaiah maxwell in a nonsex role as ana's martial artist mentor (by far the best thing about the movie, merging kung fu and blaxpoitation in a very tarantino way) keep pace with her. the total lack of budget is evident throughout, as everything very obviously takes place in one porn house, but given the cheap aesthetics of source material, i found it kind of charming. the color temperature, on the other hand, was less so. i get that greenwood was going for a 70s noir aesthetic, but the colors being so washed out and muddy failed to honor the beautiful richness of the performers' actual skin tones. the story is campy and over the top (as it should be), but ana foxxx makes the emotional core of it work, and even if the nonsex elements of the movie end up being less than twenty minutes all together, it was still a fun ride. i wish that all-girl, (nearly) all-black features weren't so rare; but until there are more, this is one of the best ever made.

honorable mentions:

the producer ii (all her luv), girl friday (lust cinema)


best featurettes

the distinction between a feature, featurette, and vignette, at least as far as porn awards are concerned, can be a little vague; but i've defined a featurette for my purposes as a scene, or collection of scenes, with a unified storyline and at least two but no more than three distinct sexual encounters. four (or enough plot to cover the time a fourth encounter would take) makes a feature; a single sexual encounter, no matter how long it (or the nonsex portion of the scene) lasts, is a vignette.

1. another life ii

performers: avi love, charlotte stokely, eliza ibarra, scarlett sage
site: all her luv (missax)
production credits: whitney wright (dir., scr.)
release date: january 27–february 1, 2020 | trailer

scarlett sage and avi love

honoring this two-parter when i spent a good portion of my admiring review of the second part trashing the first part might be considered hypocritical. perhaps it is. but that second part is so good that it retroactively justifies the shallowness of the first. whitney wright's writing and directing is so exactly my speed when it comes to girl/girl porn that her relative absence from it this year, after an amazing 2019, was a significant reason why my attention wandered away from porn in 2020. her twitter bio still calls her a director for various brands, which is a sign of hope: i hope to see whitney projects in 2021 that blow me away as much as this did.

2. dreamcatcher

performers: evelyn claire, emma starletto
site: sexart (metart)
production credits: marc rosewood (dir., scr.)
release date: may 8–june 26, 2020 | trailer

emma starletto and evelyn claire

i had assumed that this two-part fillip of a story, released in pieces several months into quarantine, was the result of european studio metart, seeing content shortages on the horizon, negotiating with u.s. producers to fill in some gaps; but both scenes bear a copyright date of 2019, indicating that they've been in the can for a while. i can guess as to why they might have been held back until the covid drought forced every porn site to empty its vaults in the face of increased demand: much more of a verbal narrative than usual for metart (even voiceover! some of it not embarrassing!), brief runtimes with edit points that suggest perhaps not all the footage shot was usable, and some stiffness between the performers that might be due more to a novice director (i can't find any other credits for marc rosewood) than the models, who i've seen turn in excellent work elsewhere. but the narrative and the briefness are both pluses in my book: i appreciate a scene that doesn't wear out its welcome, and the gorgeous sun-drenched photography made up for any minor awkwardness in the performance or editing.

honorable mentions:

romantic charades (all her luv), body swap (girlsway)


best series

last year i said the best series were we like girls, lesbian revenge, and transfixed, all produced by bree mills for adult time. there was one we like girls scene in 2020 and no transfixed scenes, while whitney wright directed only a handful of further lesbian revenge episodes before the brand was taken over by a rotating cast of directors, resulting in visual and tonal incoherence. and over the summer, i cancelled my adult time subscription anyway. i will say that none of the series i'm highlighting this year come close to reaching the heights of those i highlighted last year; but they have their pleasures anyway.

1. we live together

performers: gina valentina, sloan harper, kendra spade, gia derza, autumn falls, carter cruise, emily willis, demi sutra, vina sky, sabina rouge, lacy lennon, gabbie carter, lasirena69
site: we live together ◅ reality kings (mindgeek)
production credits: none listed
release date: april 17–august 28, 2020 | trailer

sabina rouge, lasirena69, gabbie carter, demi sutra, vina sky, and lacy lennon

i've noted a couple of times over the past year that it seemed like reality kings was sunsetting their classic we live together brand — presumably mindgeek, now having a dedicated girl/girl site, doesn't want to compete with themselves in that arena — but if it had to go out, at least it went out with a bang. the site finally lived up to its name with two four-episode seasons of a reality-show format, one in april and one in august, both presumably shot long before covid (so long ago in fact that carter cruise, who was winding down her porn activities in 2018, shows up in the first, although she doesn't have any on-camera sex). the premise is pretty basic: six (or so) pornstars share a house for a long weekend, have some planned activities, and share lots of unscripted, unfiltered interaction. funnily enough, unlike the reality-show format in mainstream television, there ends up being virtually no interpersonal conflict, since maintaining a veneer of professionalism with people you will probably have to work with again is a critical skill in porn, and none of the girls chosen were either brand-new or particularly volatile. so absent that reality-show staple, the quality of the series varies a lot episode to episode, especially since in the first season there didn't seem to be any required amount of sexual activity, so the girls who were horny (or at least confident that performing horniness was good for their image) had sex and those who weren't, didn't. even so, kendra spade and sloan harper experiencing a deep connection in the shower and fucking long after everyone else was bored with the tease is one of the most remarkable things i've ever seen in porn. the second season had more of an emphasis on fresh faces and a lot more challenges to egg the girls on into sex; which, because the sex was more or less structured, meant that there was little room for the kendra-sloan kind of volcanic, damn-the-cameras sex. but for someone like me, more interested in porn's personalities than in its bodies, it was the conversational setpieces, in which the various performers talk shop, tell stories from their lives, and forge bonds of friendship, however fragile, that made a series like this fascinating, much more than the professional, sometimes mechanical sex they may or may not have gone on to have afterwards. it was a consistent delight to get to know (a mediated, performed and very much edited version of) these young women at moments when they didn't necessarily feel the need to perform sexuality for perverts like me.


2. girl crush

performers: emily willis, alexis zara, lexi lore, mackenzie moss, jenna foxx, brooklyn gray, tana lea, bella rolland, demi sutra, desiree dulce, savannah sixx, payton preslee, lacy lennon, kyler quinn, emma hix, vina sky, abigail mac, romi rain, gianna dior, jade baker, abella danger, whitney wright, sovereign syre, sabina rouge, daphne dare, laney grey, scarlit scandal, jewelz blu, isabella nice, vanna bardot
site: when girls play ◅ twistys (mindgeek)
production credits: holly randall et. al. (dir.)
release date: december 7, 2019–november 21, 2020 | trailer

scarlit scandal and jewelz blu

i only noted it in passing last year, but mindgeek's version of gamma's we like girls, since gamma produced only one episode this year, became a consistent source of interest for me, a way to regularly see two women very much into each other, if not necessarily having spontaneous or unrehearsed sex. the premise is that the girls are eager to work together (although the frequency with which girls from the same agency are paired makes it just a little questionable), and although the camera work is sometimes stiff and the lighting is often unnaturally bright, when it works it really works. the pandemic affected the series the same way it did all porn: i would consider a bunch of recent episodes virtually unwatchable, as they're shot by tripods in dingy light and "directed" by someone not even on set. but the hit rate in episodes shot in the standard way by people in the room (whether shot pre-covid or through layers of ppe) was good enough that the series still makes my list as worth noticing in a year when so little was. it's probably not a huge surprise that the best entries generally feature veteran performers who are totally comfortable with each other, and also take place primarily on a bed. let people have sex comfortably in 2021 is my new campaign slogan.


3. femme

performers: brooklyn gray, jenna foxx, charlotte stokely, lyra law, hime marie, jade baker, kiara cole, scarlett sage, emily willis, emma hix
site: cherry pimps (pimp.xxx)
production credits: dean capture (dir.)
release date: october 22–december 11, 2020 | trailer

jenna foxx and brooklyn gray

the pimp.xxx collection of brands, as far as an outside observer can tell, went through a bit of a crisis this year: apparently their backlog was not deep, and so when quarantine hit they had to go months without updates before production cautiously resumed. they seem to have now consolidated everything into the flagship cherry pimps site, spinning off several new sub-brands in a perhaps smart attempt to cater directly to a bunch of different fetishes. it worked to hook me, because femme is the girl/girl brand, shot by master photographer dean capture, and pound for pound it might be better than girl crush: but because there's simply less of it (it only started in october), i felt i had to rank the series with more quality content higher. but the extremely high caliber of performer and visuals makes femme a force to be reckoned with already. the format is not particularly innovative: a few minutes of individual tease in lingerie followed by gorgeously-lit, unhurried sex, with no pretense at narrative or attempt to accomplish anything other than high glamour erotica. in which case the scene, of course, lives or dies by the individual pairings, and so far the batting average has only been solid. (in my estimation, your mileage may vary.) in the brand's debut, jenna foxx and brooklyn gray leave their girl crush entry earlier in the year in the dust, but every scene since has featured at least one performer i've come to be skeptical of. which is neither capture's nor the girls' fault: it's one of the hazards of consuming too much porn and thinking about it too hard.



best vignettes

i should perhaps explicitly spell out how this category, always the most crowded, works. i limit each site to a single release, and i limit the total length of the list to a baker's dozen, which should be more than enough to honor the diversity of expression in girl/girl porn in a given year. a site being left off the list (including honorary mentions) is a statement either about my perception of its quality or my ignorance of its output. when i don't include runners-up, that means i wasn't subscribed to the site and bought the scene à la carte based on the trailer or my own piqued interest.

1. love, lust, respect 

performers: angela white, courtney trouble
site: shape of beauty ◅ adult time (gamma)
production credits: bree mills (dir.)
release date: february 14, 2020 | trailer

courtney trouble and angela white

this was one of the last scenes i was on the ball enough to write about earlier this year, and despite my current reservations about adult time as a platform and gamma as a company, my virtually unqualified rave at the time still stands. this is a magnificent meeting of two sexual virtuosos at the peak of their powers, and it gives me almost everything i want in porn: deep emotional connection, ravishing visual style, ecstatic experience of pleasure, intelligent verbal communication — the only thing i really subtracted any points for was the cast's unavoidable whiteness, which neither of the two performers at the center can help. i deeply love the celebration of courtney trouble's unabashedly fat, unabashedly queer body, and i love even more their mastery of their craft and over angela. if the intensity and intentionality of this production was representative of a significant portion of what gamma had to offer its girl/girl consumers i would probably still be subscribed today despite my ethical concerns; but even as a near-one-off i'm grateful to have experienced it.

adult time originals runners-up: somebody's watching me (girlcore), dormmates (model time), casey and kylie (we like girls)

2. super femmes

performers: natassia dreams, estella bathory, luna corazon
site: xconfessions (erika lust films)
production credits: erika lust (dir.), tr"eat" your girl right (scr.)
release date: july 9, 2020 | trailer

luna corazon, estella bathory and natassia dreams

another scene i already reviewed because i was just too deeply excited about it when i found out about it not to. it's still a minor miracle of production ambition, with fluid animated segments from local spanish artists that much more effectively state the campy superheroic premise of the short film than the live-action sketches leading up to the sex. my increasing investment in racial, physical, and queer diversity in porn means that this cast was as close to ideal for me as possible: luna corazon has been my favorite eurozone performer for years, natassia dreams is my favorite trans performer, estella bathory is one of my favorite plus-size performers and my favorite british performer hands down, and their passion and enjoyment together was unmatched. if all sjw-marketed porn was this vibrant, stylish, and sexy (let alone this sjw), i'd be much less conflicted about my continued financial support of the industry.

xconfessions runner-up: ignite

3. bad company

performers: riley reid, ryan reid
site: deeper (vixen media)
production credits: kayden kross (dir., scr.)
release date: december 17, 2020 | trailer

riley reid and ryan reid

i had already written the bulk of this post when the trailer for this scene dropped, and with a sigh i subscribed to deeper again for a month. last year director kayden kross's sole girl/girl scene topped my vignettes list; the fact that she's only at #3 this year doesn't mean that this scene is worse than that one (in some ways it's better), but that despite my suggesting otherwise above, the game has been raised. still, the one thing i can always depend on kayden for is visual lavishness, and for sheer cinematic beauty this scene has no peer among the girl/girl competition: the way the camera captures and plays with light sources is not just masterful, but almost more erotic than the unfolding action. the two ms. reids play janitorial staff at a theater who are stunned by the rehearsal of a sensual burlesque routine between kayden herself and her current muse maitland ward (the deeper commenters wished that the scene was starring kayden and maitland instead; kayden replied hinting at a sequel). once the rehearsal is over and the cleanup begins, riley and ryan fool around with the leftover props, flirt a bit, then, as if overtaken by the electric atmosphere of the mood lighting and the copyright-free soundtrack, kiss — and so on. riley is an old pro by now, but ryan is still relatively new (and in fact initially went by a different name, but apparently she and riley get off on pretending to be related; she even has riley's signature spine tattoo), and so mannered that i didn't particularly believe the sex, but it was hard to care when it was so ravishingly presented: the play of light over their bodies was as erotic as whatever they were doing in the moment. i can't help agreeing with the commenters that grown women kayden and maitland would be more intensely fascinating than these pseudo-teens (although riley is pushing 30), but the expensive location, set dressing, props, and lighting are themselves fascinating: kayden is one of the few pornographers who agrees with me that standard porn budgets break immersion, and so making her scenes as close to mainstream movies as possible makes them more, not less, erotic. i'll also note that sister brand vixen released a couple of girl/girl scenes from the vault over the summer, presumably because they were getting low on content, but that the commenters protested so much against the lack of penis that they've stayed on the b/g or b/g/g train ever since. so it looks like they definitely were building the catalog for a girl/girl site; and that, coupled with kayden's hints, has me anxiously awaiting the next vixen media press release.

vixen media runners-up: influence part 2 (tushy) perfect pair (vixen)

4. can't always get what you want

performers: evelyn claire, izzy lush
site: all her luv (missax)
production credits: whitney wright (dir., scr.)
release date: january 8, 2020 | trailer

evelyn claire and izzy lush

once more, i wrote about it already, because it was released early enough in the year that i was still bothering to regularly review scenes i liked. but whitney wright's intelligent writing and evelyn claire's prickly performance have only grown in my estimation since january. and whitney's disappearance from the missa x sites as a director post-covid was a major contributor to my cancelling my subscription earlier this year; the boldness of her choice to represent the sex in virtual reality by means of a blue filter (vocally loathed by site members who want nothing but pseudo-verité imagery forever) is the kind of go-for-broke visual experimentation i'm always hungry to see more of in porn.

all her luv runners-up: spare the rod, father's day

5. grinding ghosts

performers: abella danger, gina valentina
site: when girls play ◅ twistys (mindgeek)
production credits: none listed
release date: october 31, 2020 | trailer

abella danger and gina valentina

in my wrap-up last year i was really looking forward to the coming twistys renaissance, as the brand expanded and allowed more creative input from performers. well, that didn't happen. (although we'll always have the first quarter. sigh.) one of the mindgeek brands hit hardest by the production shutdown, twistys was forced to pivot to a lot of very dingy-looking solo material, and even when production resumed, it was mostly shot on tripods from twenty feet away, leaving the scenes visually dull and free from any particular narrative juice. this late-year entry was defiantly mold-breaking. no production clues can be gleaned from the website, but my best guess is that it was shot a while ago (gina valentina has had one foot out the door for a while), that some essential footage got corrupted, and that it was saved (and, i'd argue, improved) in the edit by a few extremely daring choices that work extremely well. rather than being a straightforward shower tease followed by on-bed sex, as presumably intended, the editor seemingly mashed up two different scenes, stitching them together with atmospheric music, as though the participants' consciousness was drifting between encounters. the result is heady far beyond the usual limitations of porn, and the natural lighting, genuine passion (abella is an old pro whose scenes i usually skip these days because i feel like i've seen her bag of tricks, but pairing her with her good friend gina is a dream), and dreamlike narrative ambiguity ends up making it one of the most avant-garde pieces of girl/girl porn released by a mainstream studio in forever. that it probably would never have been released if twistys wasn't desperate for content is one of the few silver linings to the devastating effects of the pandemic on porn production.


6. please make me cum

performers: aidra fox, noemie bilas
site: lesbianx (xempire)
production credits: mason (dir.)
release date: january 25, 2020 | trailer

noemie bilas and aidra fox

one of the biggest casualties of the quarantine was lesbianx, mason's gonzo girl/girl brand within xempire, which had been producing a scene a week for years but sputtered out in the spring and has only sporadically dropped anything since; the brand's last scene (a compilation of previous ones) was released in october. i might not consider it a huge loss, since a good 75% of the brand's output was out of my area of interest (i don't care about anal, dp, or squirting), but over the past couple years it had been one of the few places that regularly showcased black women deeply engaged with other performers. this scene between girl/girl standardbearer aidra fox and babyfaced relative newbie noemie bilas was one of the most intense sessions i've ever seen, and lesbianx as a brand rather prides itself on intensity. noemie's energetic pursuit of orgasm is one of my favorite things about her girl/girl scenes, and aidra is one of the few who can keep up with her. despite lesbianx's usual unflattering setting and chintzy lighting, mason's handheld camera remains exceptional at finding and displaying passion; i just hope that she gets to get back to showcasing that skill in the future.

7. maddy o'reilly and honey gold love to get romantic with girls

performers: maddy o'reilly, honey gold
site: elegant angel
production credits: sid knox (dir.)
release date: april 13, 2020 | trailer

maddy o'reilly and honey gold

back to back gonzo scenes on my best vignettes list, especially given that i'm not particularly a gonzo person, should tell you something about the state of scripted porn in 2020. but even in a normal year, i think i would have fallen for this scene. both maddy o'reilly and honey gold are vocal on twitter, which means that i feel like i know and love their personalities, and getting to see them form a genuine connection here and take turns giving each other the kind of orgasms that can't be faked (unless my estimate of their acting skills is way off) was the kind of joy i can never get enough of in porn. despite the difference in ages and backgrounds, they seemed to be genuinely into each other, and were so vocal about both their pleasure and (what is rarer in porn) their intention to give pleasure, that the scene, in addition to being scorchingly hot, was also surprisingly heartwarming. i wish only the best for both of them, and it seemed that they got a bit of the best during this shoot; so i'm satisfied.

8. a perfect body

performers: ariel x, jade kush
site: sweetheart video (mile high media)
production credits: ricky greenwood (dir.), ricky greenwood & maddy barton (scr.)
release date: july 6, 2020 | trailer

ariel x and jade kush

no matter how girl/girl porn evolves, it seems that the massage scene is eternal. jade kush, a chicagoan of chinese descent, could easily have been cast as a stereotypical asian masseuse, but the script here gives her a voiceover intro to make her very much her own person, and there's nothing stereotypical about her performance, gliding from professional to suggestive to sexually passionate in a way that plays off her scene partner extremely well. ariel x is a veteran of the porn industry, usually sidelined to wrestling fetish material these days thanks to her hardbody physique and lack of interest in playing stepmom bullshit, but she's one of the most passionate performers in the business, and as soon as she kicks things off jade, who i've seen be very low-energy with low-energy partners, rises to meet her. ricky greenwood's sweetheart material can be hit or miss for me, but his camera angles and lighting are inspired here, resulting in one of the most visually delectable massage scenes i've ever seen. the massage format is often terribly samey (cough cough gamma's fantasy massage cough), but with two performers who really connect and filmmakers interested in capturing passion rather than positions it can reach incredible heights.


9. double double charlotte trouble

performers: charlotte sins, charlotte sartre
site: bellesa house ◅ bellesa films
production credits: jackie st. james (dir.)
release date: september 9, 2020 | trailer

charlotte sins and charlotte sartre

the success (aesthetically and emotionally if not commercially) of we like girls has spawned a bunch of imitators, probably the best of which is jackie st. james' bellesa house for the newish studio bellesa films, which advertises itself as catering to the women's market. only a small minority of bellesa house scenes are girl/girl, but those that are have been uniformly endearing even if they're not shot particularly creatively and the backdrop can be drab. (the second camera on we like girls is very much missed here.) but the premise — ask great performers who they want to work with, interview them briefly about who they are and why they want to have sex with each other, and then film them having raw, unrehearsed, and authentic sex, with no pretty-girl photoshoots, no required outfits, and no script beyond whatever they want to say to each other — can have just as charming results as we like girls. my favorite girl/girl episode of bellesa house was this meeting of two women with the stage name charlotte: extrovert sins is a relative newcomer, while introvert sartre is primarily active on the extreme fetish side. but their immediate rapport and eager desire to not just pleasure each other but understand each other deeply makes for some of the most adorable porn i've ever seen: sartre's concern about whether she's getting unattractively red is as honest and unvarnished a performance as there's ever been. this is the level gonzo should always aspire to.


10. caught voyeur domination

performers: maserati, kendra spade
site: hot and mean ◅ brazzers (mindgeek)
production credits: none listed
release date: september 1, 2020 | trailer

maserati and kendra spade

(again, i already wrote about it.) every vignette i've given props to so far this year is either gloriously filmed or captures extraordinary chemistry, or both; none of it is particularly fetish-oriented. this one is filmed in the standard brazzers shiny-but-sloppy style, and combines several fetishes i don't care about (flashing, physical domination, strap-on, squirting), but the chemistry between kendra and maserati even in spite of the formulaic, unconvincing premise of the scene makes it wonderful anyway. i've had a soft spot for maserati for years, so the fact that she's become one of brazzers' go-to pseudo-dommes for the hot and mean brand is great for me; but kendra is the first younger performer she's been paired with by brazzers who seems to genuinely be into her, and masi responds in kind. this kind of scene is undoubtedly coded low-rent and vulgar compared to a lot of what i like, but that's all the more reason to point it out as valuable. my dream would be to see maserati's virtues celebrated as exquisitely as those of her white peers; until then, her accidental slices of genius for brazzers will have to do.


11. delicious

performers: tiffany tatum, sarah cute
site: sexart (metart)
production credits: andrej lupin (dir.)
release date: january 24, 2020 | trailer

sarah cute and tiffany tatum

a good proportion of this list is scenes that were released in the first two months of the year before i drifted away from porn, so i've written about them before. this one too. but i've checked it against the rest of the year's girl/girl scenes that appealed to me, and it's still an astonishing tour de force of passion and filmmaking. a significant proportion of sexart's girl/girl output features rookies, and (the occasional exception aside) rookies will just never be as proficient at pleasure or posing as multiyear veterans like sarah and tiffany. but then i've seen both of them be terminally dull in girl/girl too: sometimes lightning just gets captured in a bottle.

sexart runners-up: gentle moving, no regrets

12. a part of her world

performers: mary moody, sabina rouge
site: lesbian revenge ◅ pure taboo (gamma)
production credits: whitney wright (dir.), fistopher nolan (scr.)
release date: april 7, 2020 | trailer

mary moody and sabina rouge

last year i said lesbian revenge was the second-best series in girl/girl porn; this year i enjoyed only a single episode, and it's so far down on my list that a critic might suggest i hardly enjoyed it at all. but being the twelfth best scene out of thousands is still quite an accomplishment. my qualms, such as they are, are not with the quality of the performances or even the ludicrous premise (the director makes an appearance as sabina's sister, usurping her life for unclear reasons; after the opening scene, confusingly enough, sabina is playing whitney's character), but with the exhaustingly ominous tone of pure taboo scenes and the too-real emotional manipulation by which whitney!sabina pressures a reluctant, even traumatized, mary moody into having sex. i had never really warmed to sabina until i saw her in we live together season 2 (see above), where she (very rarely among active porn performers, and perhaps singularly among girl/girl-only performers) outright calls herself a lesbian. mary is also a girl/girl-only performer, and their work together is remarkable: mary's ability to maintain an air of hesitant naïveté throughout the sex is maybe the first time i've ever bought the performance of inexperience in a porn scene. the casting was superb: sabina plays sinister very well (even if no one can match whitney's crazy eyes), and mary's yielding innocence made an incredible canvas for her to work on.

13. one mistress and three kittens

performers: sybil a, lika star, eva elfie, sasha sparrow
site: ultra films (wow network)
production credits: none listed
release date: february 19, 2020 | trailer

sybil a, sasha sparrow, lika star and eva elfie

i don't often admire scenes with more than two performers. it's not that i don't find the idea of more than two women having sex erotic; it's just that it's difficult enough to elicit and capture chemistry between two people, and the difficulty increases exponentially with the addition of each new participant. unless chemistry isn't what's needed. the emphasis that sites like ultra films and its sister site wow girls put on youthful looks squicks me out, but occasionally their scenarios are too good to ignore. like this scene in which sybil a plays an unspecific authority figure toward three younger performers, none of whom can act at all, but sybil's character work and the slow, tantalizing filmmaking is good enough to cover it. like a headmistress interrogating schoolgirls, she can smell cigarettes and demands to know which of them has been smoking, which they all deny; and like a domme with three submissives, she punishes them first with riding-crop spankings, then by making them pleasure her, then by pleasuring them but denying them orgasms. finally, she stalks off and they masturbate to relief. i don't usually detail the sexual activity in these scenes, because it's usually so samey, but the complete rejection of standard reciprocal porn practice here is a breath of fresh air, and gave this scene so much more tantalizing zest than it would have had if it had just devolved into the usual three-minutes-per-position-then-change-partners nonsense. the setting and costuming were both lovely to look at, but it's sybil, and the attention she demands from the others, that steals the show. special shout out to some very good captioning work translating what i assume is her native ukrainian into english; as her scene partners were all russian and ukrainian, it felt so much more natural than if they had tried to stumble through it in english or, worse yet, without speaking.

wow network runners-up: can't be hotter than this (wow girls), go lesbian overnight (ultra films)

honorable mentions:

sapphic getaway (21sextury), california dreamin' (dorcel), sensual yoni massage (fantasy massage), between heaven and hell (girlsway), a day on the beach (hegre), an exiting [sic] view (letsdoeit), her first lesbian experience (mofos), color me horny (reality kings), petite entrepreneur needs to relax (sexyhub), home sweet home (viv thomas)


other notable releases

scenes (or releases) i want to highlight which don't fit in any other category go here. you'll notice some variation in category between this year and last year, since i always reserve the right to change things up in order to better celebrate what i want to celebrate rather than sticking to an arbitrary template in a year with a vastly different release landscape.

best girl/girl scene in a non all-girl feature

primary - episode 4

performers: ana foxxx, kira noir, serena blair
site: lust cinema (erika lust films)
production credits: casey calvert (dir.), casey calvert & mark logan (scr.)
release date: august 7, 2020 | trailer

kira noir, ana foxxx and serena blair

in a normal year this would presumably have been a more crowded field, but the big feature-driven studios like digital underground and wicked had to pivot to archival material, gamma had almost no features worth the name, and erika lust's lust cinema project had to launch more slowly than i think they had hoped. but casey calvert's primary, originally meant as a feature but turned into a six-episode "season" because she shot so much in the fall of 2019, was one of the best-written and smartly filmed narrative-driven events in porn in 2020, a fictionalized (though based on her own experiences) examination of polyamorous relationships in modern los angeles. because i only watched the 4th episode i only have a hazy idea of how the rest of the cast (derrick pierce, small hands, and penny pax) fit into the relationship web, but as a stand-alone story this works well: ana foxxx and small hands meet up at an escape room with kira noir and serena blair for a double date, at the end of which ana chooses to go home with the other two women, and they have enjoyable, strings-free sex. the extended escape room setpiece (with karla lane in a cameo as an employee!) was almost more exciting and interesting than the sex (and would definitely have been with almost any other trio, but ana, kira and serena are goddamn rockstars of girl/girl sex), and seemed so in-depth that i couldn't help wondering whether casey calvert wrote and created her own escape room in her warehouse studio just so she could film her peers solving it: if so, more creativity (and budget) like that in porn, please! the eventual sex was lovely, if a little drab after the bravura escape room: two black women on a brown couch made for a lot of visual muddiness, though of course it was more or less "realistic" for the crunchy-seeming serena/kira ménage.

runners-up: prom night revenge part 1 (babes), lucky seven episode 6 (digital playground), my name is zaawaadi - part 3 (rocco siffredi)

best individual episode of a not-great series

what set us apart

performers: alina lopez, kendra spade
site: true lesbian ◅ adult time (gamma)
production credits: bree mills (dir.), alina lopez & kendra spade (scr.)
release date: march 9, 2020 | trailer

kendra spade and alina lopez


looking back, it was really with the release of true lesbian, bree mills' series based on real stories from her stable of queer-identifying performers' histories, that the writing was on the wall between me and adult time. not that i didn't consider it a wonderful idea, and deeply respect what it produced. but the portentous tone, the emphasis on unhappy or even partly unwilling scenarios, and frankly the weird turquoise filter apparently chosen to keep it visually unified, made it tough to sit through. i've considered the oversaturated, goofy girlsway a near-total writeoff for years; lesbian revenge was a breath of fresh air in the stale gamma girl/girl formula. but turning anything with any remote hint of seriousness to it into the pure taboo style is just trading one formula for another. the fact that it was the last girl/girl project from mills before the covid shutdown suspended everything but the most immediately profitable factory-line product didn't help; and then girls started naming names on twitter in the summer of protest and revolt, and i was done. but all this isn't appreciation of the scene at hand.

spiegler girls alina and kendra shared what was undoubtedly the most emotional episode of we like girls in 2019. their friendship is deep, in part due to their shared upbringing: they were both raised mormon and left the church in their teen years. this scene, in which they play young mormons on their mission year who fall for each other while trying to evangelize, is the most authentic and least sensationalized depiction of religious practice i've ever seen in porn. which isn't surprising: the two of them co-wrote it as well as starring in it, and the emotional honesty and vulnerability they can share with one another makes for an unforgettable slice-of-life narrative. i particularly admired how little handholding the script gave the presumably non-mormon audience to keep up: alina and kendra know what they're talking about, and only communicate what they need to understand each other. the result is another deeply emotional encounter, almost as raw and real as their we like girls.

the other two scenes from true lesbian were bound to suffer by comparison, although they both have a lot to like: jay taylor as a housewife exploring her hidden desires with her husband's boss's wife and kloe kapri being bullied for being gay at a teen slumber party are both great; but they're also standard porn premises, however true to life. missionaries being forced apart by the church hierarchy (but retaining their strong faith) is something new, and a much more subtle kind of story than just about anything on this list.

best performer-generated release

dirty little sluts

performers: breana khalo, hadi hart
site: manyvids
production credits: none listed
release date: january 7, 2020 | trailer

breana khalo and hadi hart

the distinction between the amateur-clips porn ecosystem and the mainstream studio-based ecosystem has been breaking down for a while, and pandemic-era isolation has only accelerated that dissolving of boundaries, as many mainstream stars have pivoted to self-produced content not for a side hustle but for the bulk of their income. meanwhile, the performers who were never mainstream (whether because the mainstream would never have accepted them or because they never saw any need to subject themselves to its indignities) can, when they want to, achieve production values on par with the big brands, because they're making plenty of money and decent a/v equipment is available to anyone who can pay for it. because of that, i've taken to occasionally scrolling through the cluttered "lesbian" tag on sites like manyvids, modelhub, and clips4sale, mostly to stay aware of the field rather than because i was looking to purchase much. but recently i kept noticing the remarkably well-lit and photographed work of the beautiful miami-based cuban-american performer breana khalo, who tags her videos with bbw and latina and has a charming enthusiasm in performance. her scenes are relatively basic, with the usual amateur flaws (the male camera operator sometimes speaks), but i've never seen plus-size girl/girl sex shot with such crisply-detailed flair: the subject matter may be verité gonzo, but the cinematography feels more like classic 70s documentary filmmaking, with its intelligent, inquiring lens, than like the prevalent digital-era point-and-record hackwork that demands that the audience's fetishes do the work of making the images erotic. this was just one of several superb girl/girl scenes breana released over the course of the year to various platforms: the intensity of her connection with fellow online sex worker hadi hart, as they take turns playing the dominant before breana breaks out a cattle prod and strapon and reduces hadi to quivering ecstasy, is remarkable even within her fascinating girl/girl library. the visual stylishness of breana's self-produced clips are why my attention was initially caught, but her casually intense performance style is why i'm sticking around.



i warned at the top that this post might be a shorter entry than last year's. well, i've checked and it's actually longer, perhaps because over the course of writing this blog post i engaged more deeply with the porn industry's output than i have since february. i don't know that i made a lot of discoveries, but i confirmed some suspicions, revised a few opinions, and spent too much money on what will no doubt end up being only a single month's worth of porn; call it a holiday present to myself. like i said, 2020 is going to have a permanent asterisk next to it — but holy shit, the amount of worthwhile material it produced anyway.

which means that 2021 will be the real test. in some ways 2020 was saved (from my perspective, anyway) by a backlog of older work; without that stockpile to fall back on, how will the remainder of the covid era fare? i guess we'll see. production seems to have resumed to a certain extent, although many performers and production companies are still being cautious, and big lavish productions seem to be a ways off yet. two late-breaking pieces of news — wicked's acquisition by gamma, and pornhub's nuking of all non-verified videos after the credit card companies pulled out — seem likely to set off unforeseeable ripples throughout the industry, including the portions of it that most directly concern me. whether it means the cratering of the mainstream or a new renaissance (or possibly both, as fewer and fewer companies produce more and more lavish work), remains to be seen.

it's so difficult to love porn as a medium of expression. in some ways it seems like the industry actively attempts to prevent you from loving it, with an assumption of exploitation baked in not just from anti-porn moralists on both left and right but also from many longtime producers and even performers. the very notion of ethical porn is considered an oxymoron in many quarters, both for legitimate reasons ("all labor is exploitative due to the power imbalances inherent under capitalism") and illegitimate ones ("ethics are a bullshit concept designed by the weak and credulous to handicap the strong and savvy"), and the endless needle-threading that is my attempt to consume as ethically as i can while still chasing the specific kinds of porn i'm interested in seeing has led me at various points to want to give up on the effort entirely.

dredging through hundreds and thousands of videos that elicit no interest (or even active repulsion) in order to find the handful that spark joy, as i have been doing for the past three years after a lifetime of more or less casual porn consumption, can feel exhausting when all you have to show for it is a few minutes' worth of dopamine. sometimes i wish my tastes weren't so specific, that i could be satisfied with the sheer fact of bodies engaging in some form of sexual activity and not need engaging narratives (meta- or otherwise), beautiful photography, credible performances of mutual enjoyment, and as diverse a field of participants as i see around me every day in order to derive pleasure from watching porn.

speaking of which, i am conscious that although one of the metrics of diversity i insist on is that trans women are just as much women as cis women and equally belong under the girl/girl umbrella, i've only celebrated a single scene with a trans woman in it above, and i subscribe to no trans-specific sites. trans angels (mindgeek) and transsensual (mile high) are producing excellent work from the previews, and even some cut-rate sites appear to have elevated their output since transfixed changed the game. none of them, of course, are dedicated solely to woman-on-woman (whether trans or cis) action, but then neither are hardly any of the all-cis sites i'm subscribed to now. if i continue engaging with mainstream porn so thoroughly, my pledge for 2021 is to be more trans-inclusive in my spending and consumption. not that paying corporations is comparable to directly supporting sex workers. sigh.

it's difficult to forecast much about 2021 right now: with mindgeek in paralysis at the moment due to the major credit card companies refusing to do business with them, and extremely onerous anti-porn legislation making its way through the house of representatives, the industry can feel like it's in freefall. when the best-case scenario resulting from these moves is pushing all explicit material behind a paywall so that a) nobody can sample anything to find out if they'd like to buy it and b) artistic freedom of expression in every medium, not just porn, is severely limited, the fear that a new dark age is setting in is unavoidable. but that may be apocalyptic thinking seeping in from, oh, every other element of the world as it stands at the end of 2020. in the face of accelerating climate change, rising fascist terrorism, the increased corporate stranglehold on all culture, routine police brutality, and record unemployment — not to mention the very real menace of an unchecked pandemic — the sidelining of a minor aspect of the entertainment industry can feel unimportant. but of course it's important to the workers who depend on porn to survive, and despite all my caveats and concerns it's important — ethically, aesthetically, emotionally, and even spiritually — to me too.

the three most important directors in porn right now remain bree mills, kayden kross, and erika lust. all three have been under something of a cloud for me this year: mills because of her repeated close collaborations with accused predators (although once allegations emerge they are always cut loose); kross because of rumors of unprofessional handling of models' time and energy, especially black women; and lust because of accusations of predatory behavior among her crew. i deeply admire the work all of these women produce, but i refuse to adhere to the romantic notion of the abusive genius who must be allowed their bad behavior in order to produce their masterpieces. no porn is worth abuse, and i'd sooner go without the very best porn i can imagine than support abusers if i can at all help it. since none of them have been directly accused of abuse themselves (the worst accusation is ignoring it until it went public, which is bad enough), i'm still tentatively giving myself permission to support their work when it speaks strongly to me; but if i end up having to walk away this year, this might be the last thing i ever write publicly about porn.