The beautiful beaches, parks, historic sites. Even the bowling alleys.
Everywhere in South Florida is a film set — just maybe not the kind of film you’re imagining.
While movie-making for the silver screen long departed the Sunshine State for tax breaks in Georgia and Louisiana, the industry behind adult content consumed in the small — and very small — screen is booming.
Yes, we are talking about pornography.
Porn, it would seem, is an integral part of South Florida’s DNA — even dating back to Miami’s earliest days. It was over a century ago when the sight of a woman’s breasts divided the city.
In July 1913, city police chief Charles Robert Ferguson received a flurry of angry phone calls. They were demanding to know:
Why was there a prominently displayed portrait of a nude woman in an area bookstore — and why was it allowed to remain?
“You can’t have a picture like that on public display in Miami,” the chief reportedly told the store manager, threatening arrest. “She hasn’t any clothes on at all.”
That’s according to reporting from a daily newspaper at the time, the Miami Daily Metropolis.
The painting, called “September Morn,” depicts a naked young woman standing in a shallow body of water, illuminated by the morning sun.
“September Morn may be a beautiful production of art,” opined an op-ed at the time in The Metropolis, “and it is perhaps to be regretted that the great majority of men and almost all boys under 20 cannot see art as art when it is dressed up in undress.”
In the bookstore later that afternoon, Miami Morn was taken down almost as quickly as it had been raised.
All this took place in the region that would — in 111 years — grow to become the adult entertainment-production mecca of the American South.
South Florida — and the Sunshine State at large — has long been an industry hotspot.
In Broward and Miami-Dade counties, many may have been on a porn set without even knowing it.
At bowling alleys, like Pembroke Pines Lanes. At cozy watering holes, like Gramp’s bar in Miami. On public land, like Flagler Memorial Island. On Miami-Dade transit. In the Fort Lauderdale suburbs.
Just ask Gerard Damiano, who wrote and directed the infamous “Deep Throat,” which was filmed in 1972 across Fort Lauderdale and Miami.
“It was freezing in New York, and they kept talking about palm trees and wide stretches of beach and sunlight,” Gerard Damiano told High Society Magazine in 1977. “They said Florida was a perfect place to film … I hadn’t taken a vacation in four years.
That was almost 50 years ago. But there was an inflection point: March 2020.
At the onset of the pandemic four years ago, states shut down — and largely remained shut down.
But Florida entered phase one of reopening in May 2020, just shy of a month after Gov. Ron DeSantis issued his stay-at-home order.
The free state of Florida, as he liked to trumpet, was back in business.
And when DeSantis opened Florida, the porn stars — and people who wanted to be porn stars — came. Many of them from other major production hubs.
Mike Stabile is the communications director for the Free Speech Coalition, a nonprofit, non-partisan trade group for the porn industry.
Pre-COVID, he said in offering his own perceived estimates, upward of 30 percent of porn was shot here in South Florida. The other major hubs being Las Vegas and Los Angeles, with an estimated half of productions happening in LA.
Some of the most popular studios in the industry are based in Miami and frequently shoot throughout the region — studios like Bang Bros, Reality Kings, and Nerd Pass.
Take it from Ivy Davenport, who uprooted her life from Ohio in 2018.
“I think, during the pandemic, a lot of performers kind of had the realization that there was this industry in Florida,” she told WLRN. “Florida has become such a hot spot itself, especially during the pandemic. Everyone moved to Florida because, you know, we could do whatever we want here… and people aren't really going to bat an eye.”
“I think that's kind of perfect for the adult industry,” Davenport said.
While it wasn’t the pandemic that brought her to Florida, Davenport relocated to the Tampa Bay area after traveling back and forth for years to produce adult content.
“Pretty much the majority of the performers that I've talked to who have relocated from elsewhere to South Florida or the Tampa area,” Davenport said, “they all did it because there were so many more opportunities here in the industry than there were where they were living.”
And by the time she was already an established creator by the spring of 2020, something shifted.
“There were quite a few performers that were like, ‘Hey, I'm seeing Florida's really kind of like the place to be,’” Davenport recalled. “‘You don't have a lot of restrictions going on. Like, what do you think about me coming down to film there?’”
Following shutdowns, paid work was extremely limited outside of self-managed platforms like OnlyFans or live cam sites.
When it comes to South Florida’s newly bolstered standing in porn production, industry observers like Stabile credit a combination of the lack of restrictions plus a critical mass of industry infrastructure — the natural subtropical setting, studio locations, broad consumer demand — coupled with Florida’s lack of state taxes.
That’s what made Florida so appealing.
“They had a little bit more freedom in terms of what they could do,” Stabile said. “And I think that that helped take off.”
As of 2023, data from the Free Speech Coalition show there were an estimated 175,000 adult content creators in Florida, with the majority clustered in the Miami-Dade and Tampa Bay metro areas.
That makes Florida one of the nation's largest communities of adult entertainment creators — second only to California.
For scores of entertainers working in porn during the pandemic, Florida represented a promised land of new opportunities. But for those who relocated, there are no precise official figures.
Data from the state shows that nearly 1 million people moved to Florida between the summers of 2020 and 2023.
READ MORE: South Florida: An outpost of outlier economic data on jobs and inflation
As it did with just about every other industry on the planet, the pandemic challenged conventional business models in porn. Especially with the rise of sites like OnlyFans popularized by independent content creators.
Variety, the national publication that covers the entertainment industry, reportedthat U.K.-based OnlyFans subscribers spent a reported $5.6 billion for the fiscal year ending Nov. 30, 2022. OnlyFans creators raked in about $4.5 billion.
Despite the explosive growth of the industry during the pandemic, there’s still not much of an appetite among lawmakers to regulate porn, or those who produce it, beyond what’s already on the books.
This year, Florida legislators passed a bill establishing mandatory age verification for accessing porn online. DeSantis later signed it into law. It is slated to take effect in 2025, though legal challenges are all but certain.
Otherwise, the Florida statute governing porn consumption is pretty broad.
In Florida, adult entertainers can be prosecuted when activities involve the “promotion, production, filming, performance and distribution of obscene materials.”
Prosecutors say it’s typically invoked when child sex abuse is involved. Rarely ever else.
Lawmakers in Florida though felt strongly enough in 2018 to pass a House Resolution recognizing porn as a looming threat to families and public health.
Former state Rep. Ross Spano, a Republican who represented parts of Tampa Bay when Ivy Davenport first moved there in 2018, sponsored the measure.
“It’s a dirty little secret nobody wants to talk about,” he said at the time when introducing the resolution. “But we had better start talking about it.”
Except when it comes to Florida, porn — whether consuming it or producing it — it's not much of a secret at all.
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