For the final installment of our Pride Model Spotlight Series, we caught up with Emma Magnolia. After acquiring a biology degree, her passions became top priority and led her to start her own harm reduction program, where she worked to keep her community safe. A lifelong lover of gardening and food justice furthered her passion for community advocacy, a virtue she brought with her into the adult industry. Keep reading to see how she celebrates Pride outside the public eye, learn about her devotion to community work, discover her favorite new collabs, and more.
Tell us about your experiences before creating adult content! Is it true you studied biology?
Yes, it is true! I had a lot of odd jobs before working in the adult industry. I started by getting a degree in biology, then leased a vegetable farm, had a few different teaching jobs, worked as a cheese monger (working with cheese was the most fun, honestly), started and directed my own harm reduction and street outreach program, did a short stint as a self-managed abortion educator, and then I finally became an adult dancer, which led me into the porn industry in 2020! I have had a long and winding road through a lot of different passion careers, and I am so thankful for all of them. I never actually used that biology degree but learning about botany and ecology made me OBSESSED with agriculture and turned me into a lifelong homesteader.
Your background is impressive! When did you become a dancer?
I started dancing in 2019. I got into it because while I was starting my harm reduction program, I needed a more flexible job that could support me while I was organizing dayside. This changed pretty much everything in my life. Suddenly I had so much freedom! When all the clubs shut down about a year and a half later due to Covid, I did not want to give up what I had found through the sex industry. I wanted to keep being my own boss, making my own schedule, and being sexy for a living! So, I started an OF the same day everything shut down, and I never looked back. Everything just kept snowballing and has fortunately brought me to where I am today!
Let’s get into Pride. What does it mean to you and why is celebrating it an important part of creating a culturally rich society?
Pride is a celebration of ourselves and everyone who walked so we can run. It is important for us to remember we came so far to be here and have so much more to be excited about. I feel drawn to gay and lesbian history and the more I learn about it the more thankful I am to be surrounded by this culture that I did not know existed when I was growing up. I am so happy that I can live this life and hopefully do something to help carve a path for more people like me. I love being gay.
Well said! What are some ways you share love with those close to you during Pride month?
As I have grown my following on the internet, it has become more and more important to experience gay love outside of the public eye, in a place where it is not designed for anyone’s consumption other than mine, my lovers, and sometimes also our real life community. It brings me joy to be able to celebrate my gay love outside of the context of capitalism, so I celebrate Pride by doing things that I do not post, that are just for me and the people around me. I will say I hope this Pride month has some leather and latex in store for me!
We hope so too! Speaking of the public eye, with almost 100 million video views on Pornhub, your popularity has been steadily rising. How does working with studios play a role in your success?
Working with studios has increased my visibility and has been a fun adventure. But my success on the platform has been primarily driven by homemade videos, especially high quality POV content. Pornhub makes it very possible for creators to experience massive viewership without having to rely on studios for exposure. I seriously recommend using it as a business tool to any creators wanting to grow their audience!
Let’s switch topics a bit. Tell us about your love of gardening and how it contributes to community welfare and ties into your advocacy work.
My love of gardening is one of my deepest ties to the world around me. For years, I have been extremely passionate about food justice, environmentalism, and pleasure activism via food (for those of you who are not familiar with pleasure activism, I highly recommend the book Pleasure Activism by Adrienne Maree Brown). I think of this as my ultimate life calling! I firmly believe that food is the backbone of society and our relationship with food determines our outcomes in so many ways. The way we grow food determines whether we will have a healthy earth, the food we put in our bodies determines whether we as humans have healthy futures, the way we produce food and move it around determines the workplace welfare of migrant farmworkers, the way that our food tastes determines our relationship between eating and pleasure… this list could go on forever!
Over the years my focus shifted from slow food systems preservation and food literacy to HIV prevention and overdose prevention because I felt the need was more urgent in my community, but someday I hope to live out my lifelong dream of having a huge farm where I can grow tons of heritage crops and give them all away to people in my community who need food.
What other community resource initiatives have you been involved in? Have you done these all on your own or with the help of a team?
Apart from working in food justice, my focuses in community work have been in LGBT+ transitional housing, abortion access in red states, and harm reduction. My greatest accomplishment in my life has been starting a harm reduction program that has been serving the community for six years now. I am extremely proud to say that this program has provided resources that have reversed thousands of overdoses, along with tons of free plan B, sterile tools, rapid HIV tests, condoms, and substance testing strips.
All these ventures have been with a team. It would be impossible to do any of them on my own. Our program has always been 100% made up of LGBT+ community members! Some of the people who joined me to kick start this nonprofit are treasured friends of mine who I admire and look up to. I am extremely thankful to my team at the harm reduction project, especially those who carried on our work once I moved away from home to pursue a more serious porn career.
You have such a powerful and influential safe for work (SFW) social media presence, so powerful in fact E! News named you amongst the Top 10 Influential Powerhouses of Winter 2024. How do you incorporate this into your branding and how does user-generated content play a role in that?
Safe for work content is a huge driving force for traffic in my business so I try to focus as much time on it as I can. The more active I am in the safe for work sphere, the more excited my fans are, and they love that I genuinely interact with them on my platforms. One of my superfans even runs a meme page of me (shoutout @dehydratedsimp)! I think that the memes honestly get my other fans excited because they can bond over it.
We could not help but notice that you attend some anime expos! Do you have a favorite character to cosplay?
I LOVEEEEE cosplaying. It is so fun! I have cosplayed many different characters. But honestly, my fans will go wild for any redhead cosplay, from any anime. They just want to see me have fun.
You have been involved in some top viewed collabs on Pornhub. Do you have a favorite and are there any upcoming collabs we should keep on our radar?
I do have favorites! It is hard to pick, but I love the POV roleplay stuff I have made. If I had to pick two, they would probably be “We fucked a random guy we met at a house party” with Elly Clutch and Jak Knife. Also, “Perfect Step Mom Has Fun in Miami” with Alex Adams. Honestly, anything I have done with Alex will not disappoint. I have some exciting videos coming up soon! I just dropped a fun step sister roleplay with Jak Knife on my page and coming up next, I have a video with Cami Strella where we fuck a lucky guy from our Instagram DMs. Stay tuned!
If you found Emma’s Model Spotlight inspiring and want to make a positive impact on your community, you can start by joining our Model Program! Learn more about it here.
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