This story is part of GQ’s Modern Lovers issue.
Online dating is tricky enough when you're not famous and often naked on the internet. But having potential suitors mistake your real dating profile for a catfish is just one of the many occupational hazards that the adult performer, activist, and—coincidentally—my new Brooklyn neighbor Janice Griffith is forced to navigate on the daily. “When I was on Bumble, my account got reported for being fake,” she tells me. “And I was like, ‘You deleted me!’ ”
Griffith, 25, is one of the most outspoken and in-demand porn actors on the planet—someone who cares deeply about normalizing sex work. She and I have been online acquaintances for a few years now, and when she said she was down to talk all about her dating life as someone who works in the industry, it seemed like a perfect reason to finally connect IRL. Her challenges, I'd learn, aren't so different from any other millennial's, though she does have some wisdom we can glean. “Porn years,” she explains, expedite maturity very swiftly.
When I arrive at her door on a cold afternoon in December, I can hear her pleading with her 50-pound pit bull mix, Opal, from the other side to refrain from accosting me. (One of the reasons she settled on this new multi-bedroom duplex is it has a backyard for Opal to run around in.) Griffith is wearing an elegantly flowy satin pajama set befitting a wealthy eccentric auntie, and she immediately apologizes for the state of things: There are pantry deliveries that need to be put away, as well as a few boxes still awaiting unpacking. A DVD sleeve of Lesbian Anal Virgins, starring my host, rests on top of one. As we settle onto her sofa, she fixes us tea using one of her vintage tea sets and rolls a joint. Opal hops up and melts into my lap.
“It's fun to want to be the best version of yourself after a breakup. When you get revenge hot.”
Originally from New York, Griffith flew to Los Angeles when she was 18 to shoot “just one scene” and then subsequently continued to work for nearly every adult production company under the sun. She tells me she fell in love for the first time not too long before that, at 15, and it was a “perfect intense puppy love and it taught me I can be absolutely bananas in love,” she says. The guy was “kind of stupid” and showed her how to drive (even though she still doesn't have a license), but things ended abruptly and she wound up with a broken heart. At one point Griffith pulls out her phone to look for the guy on Instagram, but nothing comes up and she shrugs it off. “Heartbreak is fun, though,” she says. “It's fun to want to be the best version of yourself after. When you get revenge hot.”
Her visibility means she gets a ton of DMs from fans—which range from extremely bad to just very bad—but they don't seem to faze her much. (“Do not use a weird, dirty joke in the first few messages,” she advises.) For Griffith, any potential partner has to be sex positive and open-minded about what she does for a living; even the faintest whiff of possessiveness is a non-starter. “I'm friends with tons of people I've had sex with,” she says.
At another point during our conversation, she scrolls through the text messages of one of her more well-known exes, the political Twitch streamer Hasan Piker. This was maybe the only one of Griffith's relationships visible online, and although they don't talk anymore, she says he's partly responsible for why she got Opal—she loved spending time with his dog so much that she wanted a canine companion of her own. For the most part she believes exes can still be in each other's lives, although it takes hard work and care. The friendship has to feel intentional. “It'd be such a shame to not have someone in your life after they were so important to you, just because you aren't romantic anymore,” she says.
Hollywood seems to love portraying sex work as some sort of cautionary tale, even when it's well intentioned. (See: The Netflix docuseries Hot Girls Wanted, which Griffith and her peers have criticized as exploitative.) Reality, however, is tamer—at least for Griffith. She's picky about her partners. And even though she can be fiery online, in person she strikes me as a romantic optimist—the kind of person who chooses to see the latent good in others. The pandemic has made dating tricky, and she's not eager to jump into a new relationship anytime soon. But she has thought a lot about what she wants in a partner. “If I fall asleep on the couch, I need you to carry me to bed and tuck me in—I think that's my love language,” she explains, laughing. “But I've taken a couple of love-language tests, and I'm almost equally split between the five of them.”
Sable Yong is a writer based in Brooklyn.
A version of this story originally appeared in the March 2021 issue with the title "The Radical Adult Performer With The Very Regular Dating Life."
