PENELOPE DARIO in conversation with KISSCAM TONY
IN A GLOBALIZED WORLD, YOU NEVER KNOW WHAT WILL WASH UP ON YOUR LOCAL SHORE.
Though these shores are less related to sand and sun, but rather where the surfing is done with a screen and keyboard and not with wetsuits and longboards. While we owe a lot of our modern comforts to the proliferation of the internet, we are now craving to find a soft underbelly within it—a space that allows artists to exist, thrive, and celebrate the imperfect beauty of analog processes. The tender glow of romantic nostalgia is shattered by the all time highs in resolution and definition that digital tools can instantly provide us. Enter Tony Verdello AKA Kisscam Tony, a Chilean born Sex-Tech entrepreneur with the heart of an artist. He has created the first modern-day pay-per-view porn site dedicated exclusively to footage shot on film and vhs, and who believes medium is as equally important to message.
PETIT MORT (PENELOPE DARIO)
We spoke a couple of days after I went to the Bad Gyal concert and you were saying that Europe has a different relationship to their pop stars…
KISSCAM TONY
Europe and America have this thing in common with idolizing in general, especially with soccer culture, like European and Latin American football—the way they see the players, the way they see the teams. It’s the exact phenomenon with music. When you take the case of someone like Anuel and Karol G, they became huge because they were also pushing a lifestyle in Latin America that’s so looked up to, and everybody started doing it. I feel the progression with reggaeton in Latin America, nowadays with Spotify, every country has their pop stars, but there are only a few huge ones like Maluma, Karol G and Becky G, J. Balvin. In Europe, especially for Latin music fans, it's just one country. It's from Spain, or you can hear some reggaeton tracks by French or Italian artists. And that's a good phenomenon. But Europe and Latin America have that thing in common with idols. But in Europe, with Lamella Rodriguez, she's a pre-Spotify, female Spanish rap artist. I think that Bad Gyal got in at a really good time for music in Europe. At the same time, it's niche but it's worldwide. It's like a worldwide niche. I think she's huge. For the people that are in the scene, she's a reference. The DJs are certainly different in the electronic music scene. But in reggaeton it’s Bad Gyal in Spain, and Miss Nina in Argentina, and Tomasa Del Real in Chile. Those are the underground girls of reggaeton, but they're still huge.
They're huge. It's something that I think is a really new phenomenon. In the days of The Beatles and Elvis Presley the streams of media were limited to radio, television, and magazines–before the internet, and before social media. Even when the internet happened, little niche communities started to build up. But I think just before social media, if you were a star, you were worldwide.
You see it in the way that musicians struggle to make money nowadays with streaming, they only really make money if they go on tour and sell merch. Otherwise with streaming, they make less than a penny every time their song is streamed. Back in the day The Beatles were selling millions and millions of albums. You'd go to a remote village on an island in the middle of the ocean and they'd be singing Elvis Presley. Even with TV—shows like Seinfeld were a worldwide phenomenon. Now with streaming sites, there's so many shows, and they each have their own nice followings. It's interesting, when you look at cancel culture nowadays, someone feels like the whole world is against them. But it's not the same as a Monica Lewinsky scandal where literally the whole world was watching her. Now it feels like their entire world is against them and their entire world is watching, when it's really just their little micro-community on the internet. The idea of being canceled—what is the global context of that? I think that with music, and most media, even in the sex industry, it's this huge worldwide industry. But there's all these little niches in between. Someone might be huge in porn, and they might have something happen or whatever, but people that are doing in-person sex work, or or stripping don’t necessarily know about it, even though they're still under that same umbrella.
Mass media before the internet and niche media nowadays with all these streaming services, and how idols are made, the only consistency between the two is that there's agencies behind artists of that scale. Taking a step back to the conversation before about Latin American Idols, if you see Anuel and Karol G, I think they're signed with Sony or Universal, but those are huge, old labels. And that label is putting in all the money to get this artist on a world scale, on a mass media scale. Whereas all these other female artists we're talking about—all of them used Spotify and micro agencies that weren't really agencies. Most of them were what you would call ‘el tio,’ meaning the uncle, which is usually how people refer to a drug kingpin. What happened in Latin America is that drug kingpins realized they could use Spotify plays to launder money, because the SEC entities in Latin America even track digital income. That's how all these micro agencies had guys that were selling cocaine and were connected to nightlife—they started funding all these artists locally in Argentina, in Chile, Ecuador, Venezuela, Colombia, etc. Once you take into consideration how technology serves a few, and when I say a few, in my experience, what I know is how it served the tech world with people that raise money and funds through venture studios or venture capitalists that get into technology because it's so cheap to make if you have the contacts—it's the same logic that applies to the cocaine pushing in Latin America with all these reggaeton dark scenes being used as a channel to keep a promoting the lifestyle while you're selling the product.
That's so interesting, because it's making me think of hip hop and rap in the U.S., looking at Lil' Wayne, and the whole Birdman lineage, the Young Money lineage. Even looking at Jay Z—he started out as a drug dealer. There was a big pipeline from street culture into the music culture and industry. A lot of that came from laundering money and small labels being built up—Gucci Mane was a really big example. I'm wondering if that was transferred over into Latin America, as a kind of business model?
100%. Since neoliberalism became the norm in Latin America, art and culture was funded by the state, which was mostly private decisions made for the state to pass certain laws, etc. Same with weed once it started becoming something acceptable legally in some states. Most rappers stop talking about selling drugs and they start talking about consuming them. If you think about the change between what Wu-Tang Clan was rapping about, just pushing, pushing, pushing, and then Wiz Khalifa and Curen$y and the more YouTube artists, the first viral artists, all of them were rapping about smoking, not selling.
I feel like in the sex industry, a lot of it has also been promoted through hip hop. Nowadays with house music and techno music using samples that are super hot or hypersexual talking about empowerment through sex, it's part of the same trend. For example Miss Nina, she had an OnlyFans for a long time, and she was rapping about her own content.
It's really interesting. Talking about singing about selling drugs and singing about doing drugs… I think a similar thing happened with a lot of male rappers, especially in the early 2000s and the 90s. It was a lot about that pimp culture, the male rappers selling women. Now with a lot of the female artists that I'm seeing, especially the Latin American female artists, the women are talking about selling themselves, charging for it. I was talking to a friend last night about Bad Gyal and one of her early songs “Mercadona” where she says “solo quiero el money. Donde esta el cash, where you find me. Espero cobrar, do you feel me?” shes saying how she only wants the money, where the money is, that's where you'll find her. She expects to charge, do you feel her? It's making me wonder—were they also sex workers as they were coming up as artists? I think that's a common thing nowadays, where you see young strippers, young sex workers, whether they're painters or filmmakers or an *indie publisher, using sex work as a way to fund these creative passions. It's interesting how many of these girls sing about it in the music, but they don't talk about it in interviews. Even someone like Julia Fox, it’s very much a part of her story that she was a dominatrix in New York, but that's the only part that I feel she really publicly talks about, whereas I think the people that knew her and were around at the same time before she blew up knew she was more prolific than that. But that doesn't get talked about in the same way. I'm wondering if that's gonna start to change, where people can actually be open about those things, and not have to hide behind lyrics.
I feel like it's the other way around. As an artist you need to be a little controversial. We could be naive and think that they're hiding it behind the lyrics, but I think they're just using the lyrics to make more plays because what do you want? You want your songs played at the club. For that you need the DJs and for people to stay in the club, you need men to buy those drinks and to pay for all the things that the nightlife economy is based on. If you go back to the 80s the 90s, house music lyrics were mostly about nightlife and people that they met in nightlife, and taking drugs. That way they can keep their microcosm of nightlife with a product that has been pushed, sold, and therefore completed a circle and it's sustainable. Nowadays people attach themselves to sex work in ways that are profitable not just because they have a backstory. I think it was Bella Thorne—that actress who was a disney kid and then all of a sudden came out with an OnlyFans.
And then she broke OnlyFans. That's where I think it's so interesting because you have the people that maybe did sex work, and they obscure the story a little bit, for public acceptance. Then there's people who never had the necessity or the balls to actually do it, but covet the lifestyle so much that they use it as a marketing tactic to be “edgy”.
That’s what I’m saying. There are artists that are in the realm of sex, and artists that were either pushed into it, or just use it as a channel. You know the Marquis de Sade? That's a pornographic expression for its era, but if you put that into context today, it would be closer to what you and Dirty Magazine do, it's not the work that’s being discussed; it’s the art.
Exactly.
Let's shift gears to talk about your evolution with DGAF. I met you out one night at Old Flings and was captivated by your sort of Latin beatnik vibe and was stoked to hear about your platform DGAF World. It's a very unique website, synthesizing analog video and pornography and this alternative method for profit sharing. What was your journey up to this point? I'm assuming you weren't always doing adult content and in the adult industry—where did your career start in your early 20s? How did you end up here?
I started as a DJ, actually, in nightlife in Santiago, Chile. Music has always been a huge part of my life, to put it like that. I was in the early techno house queer scenes in the city, and I was also producing music. At some point, I got to meet all the people that were running the scenes. That's also how I had a very close experience with guys that were funding things to push cocaine. But I already wanted to pull apart from that niche.
So when I got my laptop stolen, I bought a camera and started hanging out with some of my DJ friends that were still throwing parties. One night at an after party—it was six in the morning, and they were all rolling. And this girl’s like, hey, we're gonna be in the other room on Chaturbate if anybody wants to come and join us. So I asked them if I could shoot that. I started shooting and then they asked
me to join them, and we went on and on and on. I got those films to the lab, sold them to them, and they asked me to shoot more often with them. That's how I pretty much got dragged into it— meeting cam girls and then shooting analog for them.
This was 2017, 2018. That got me into it, and I had an Instagram account for it that grew super big. I was over 50k at one point and then Instagram started changing and I started getting deleted more often. At one point, one of the CEOs of this tech company texted me saying that they want me to make my own website. When they asked me about designing my own website, I asked them for a few days to think about it. In those days, I approached all the other film photographers that were shooting adult content on Instagram– we were all in the same realm, sharing each other's posts, following each other's backup accounts. And I made a little group chat with a few of them. And I told them, hey, I have this tech company that wants to be on my website. I'm thinking of making a network. They were into it. And if this is just ours, we can keep 100% of what we sell, and we can share that with the models and make it a sustainable system for this niche art. It's still explicit, and it's porn, but it's not really like porn porn, you know what I mean? So they were in, and we opened three years ago. That's when I started coming to New York more often to meet other photographers and to meet other models. I didn't expect to meet all the people that I've met. I've been lucky and I'm super grateful for that. I came here the first time to meet with some of the people that I was already talking to on Instagram who wanted to be a part of this. And that's how we started.
It’s so interesting, the way that one underground community and scene thrust you into this other underground community and seeing it organically grow. What’s interesting about the adult industry and the drug industry, even though drugs are sold worldwide, there’s not the same camaraderie across borders. That's something that I think that adult entertainment and music have in common. You see someone like Bad Gyal starting her thing in Spain and uploading stuff to YouTube and Spotify, and then she connects with someone like Miss Nina who's doing the same thing in Argentina. I think that's similar to what we experience in the adult industry—someone might be creating content in New York, and you're doing great stuff in Santiago, and you start talking on social media, and that pulls you to New York. I've had that same experience: people I've been following since I first started doing my market research entering the industry are people that I'm now getting the chance to feature, and I'm traveling to France and London and working with them because we were all connected through the internet and you see what someone's doing and you respect them and they see what you're doing and they're like “I fuck with that.” And you start making your own version of mixtapes together; I think that's a really cool crossover.
Did you have a background in photography and filmmaking before you bought this camera?
I went to college for advertising and studied some photography, and there were film industry, marketing history, and music production classes. When I worked in agencies, I worked mostly as a copywriter and graphic designer, but my first approach to cameras was through my mom, she also worked in advertising in the 90s. I grew up with film rolls, going with her to the lab to drop rolls then coming back to see the print videotapes of castings or outfit tryouts. I guess that's the first dip into photography, but then it was mostly in college. I had classes, but then my life was music and being a DJ and producing. It wasn't until my laptop was stolen that I was like, okay with what I have left, I'm just gonna buy a camera and get into shooting nightlife. I was already into nightlife, so it was a pretty easy decision.
That makes a lot of sense. Do you feel that your commitment to analog methods and practices is a response to the oversaturation of digital media?
I feel like my commitment to it doesn't have much to do with the trends. It's definitely more attached to my perception of romance and nostalgia. And also the fact that when you're shooting film, nobody can see the results immediately. That delayed gratification keeps everyone way more invested in the actual shooting, and more of the scene itself.
That's so valid. I mean, I think that romantic nostalgia is what initially sparked the trend.
Do you have any statistics on who the demographic is that's watching and subscribing to your platform?
On DGAF, we don't have subscriptions. It's only pay-per-view. We keep track of everything, every purchase has a whole form of data that the customers need to fill out to actually get to see the content. It's mostly men, at least 70%. I know there's some random places like Hawaii or Bangladesh. We've got a lot of Australian people buying too. But mostly America, Canada and Europe. Mostly men in America and Canada,aged25to32. It’s young men but also men getting into their 30s. I think it has to do a lot with the type of models and approach to the site. Half of them are professional sex workers but the other half are amateur women that wanted the experience because of the aesthetics. That says a lot to the customer base, because that's what they're after, not the big porn stars of the 90s or the porn star trope.
I feel like you're saying that you pull in a different kind of talent than a lot of mainstream porn, and maybe even OnlyFans, because people that maybe wouldn’t normally do porn see what you're doing and they feel like it's capturing something a little bit more nostalgic, for lack of a better term—a little bit more artistic in some ways, and they feel more comfortable with it.
Definitely. I've met people in clubs or bars. They see me with a camera hanging and they ask for my Instagram, and they're like, oh my god, I would love to shoot with you. I get DMs from models sometimes wanting to work with me. My steps to take after that is usually having them bring some ideas and talking to them about what they want. How do you see yourself doing this,etc. And then see what happens after that. Most of what I do ends up being documentary.
What do you mean by documentary?
I'm not really directing that much. I'm really trying to just capture the atmosphere of me being in front or behind the camera, it's just a language. I'm trying to capture how this is feeling.
It’s like elevated amateur porn— you're trying to capture that amateur feeling, but sometimes you're working with real stars.
The people that I've worked with that are big stars and whatnot, when they DM me to shoot, I was like, fire. I would love to, knowing that they are big names, this is something they want to do. This is something that has nothing to do with work. It's something that captures their attention and the experiences have been huge. When I met Chloe Cherry I was like “you’re huge”, and she was like “yeah, I’m huge dude.” And it was so much fun to just hang out with her.
Did you shoot with her?
I shot her two years ago, here in New York. It was funny because I was exchanging DMs with the guy that runs Have a Great Day magazine, Will Mahogany. He's such a character. He DM’d me and was like, hey, a friend of mine is gonna be in New York. And she has some of my merch. I would love you to shoot her. And I asked, “who is she?” And he sends me Chloe Cherry. And I'm like, you're shitting me. We started talking on Instagram a little bit, and she pulled through my apartment with these shirts that say ‘I love alt girls.’ It was a really good shoot and I had a lot of fun.
I think this is a really interesting time for you personally, because you're spending a lot more time in New York, you're figuring out how to be here for longer. Are you planning on living in the U.S. long term?
Yes, I'm getting married.
My personal plan is to develop DGAF into a second stage where it can become more social, not just a pay-per-view content shop. Something that creators can log on and be on and let themselves uplift this stuff. Because now in DGAF I'm doing all the filters for the incoming content; I need to automate a lot of things.The next step is to have a new platform and to collaborate more often with Petit Mort and Dirty. We are in conversations with one of the editors of Hot Tub publishing, which is from this printed magazine in LA, to see if there's anything we could do with them too.
I'm planning on growing a network of studios for DGAF—having a studio in New York, LA, and Miami. Those are pretty much the plans. Being able to be an outlet for people that want to explore and want to explore sex. If you want to watch porn, you could go anywhere. The point is, where is the niche porn? Where's the good stuff? Where is the editorial porn, like, what Four Chambers has been doing for the past 10 years. It's crazy to me that it's not bigger. I feel like a lot of that has to do with how they view their work, of course, which I respect and am deeply in love with. There's so many talented people, and they don't really have a place where they can actually make a living out of their art. I think that networking into having all this talent is the next step for editors like you and I.
You mentioned Four Chambers and editorial porn; I think the most mainstream example is Erika Lust. I think that appeals to women particularly, who are looking for something a little more sensual, a little more engaging to all the senses— that's not just fucking, it has a visual richness that really turns us on. What's interesting with your platform is trying to find something in the middle, where it's not necessarily a huge art house productions, but it's also not someone with an iPhone, fucking their girlfriend in a car. It's something in between where the medium itself lends to this higher visual register, but the content and the substance is still very accessible.
There’s a book called The Medium is the Message—essentially what it’s trying to say is that the channels that you choose to say or do something matter in the result of the communication, or of the idea that you're creating and how people are perceiving it.
That's also marketing in general, how you're presenting the product. That's something I definitely want to do with Petit Mort. I'm looking to grow into a bigger production company, not necessarily adult content production, but everything around it in terms of the marketing of adult content. Maybe a lubricant brand or a dildo brand wants to elevate their content or create marketing that
feels modern and feels sexy—I want to be the go-to company that says okay, we know the adult industry, but we also understand the creative world and an elevated visual language. How can we bring these worlds together?
It's so easy to sell sex, and sex is used to sell everything else. How do we apply the visual language of art to sell sex products? I think a lot of times sex products don't have to lean as hard on branding, or are at least up until recently. They haven't had to work too hard to polish a brand because at the end of the day, people just want to get off. But what happens when there's new innovation, and what happens when the market gets more and more saturated?
As OnlyFans and sex work become more popular in the cultural zeitgeist, products around that are also becoming more popular. How do you distinguish yourself in that market? That's what's so interesting about your platform. When OnlyFans came out, all of a sudden, there were all these other little spin-offs, all these other brands that were trying to be the next OnlyFans, because they saw this thing working and they wanted a piece of the pie. But the problem is once something blows up, there's not a lot of room to come in and copy that business model. Even all the streaming site spin-offs are suffering and becoming conglomerates because people don't want to have 10 different subscriptions. There's some porn stars and some people who have pulled away from OnlyFans, because of the Palestinian genocide and OnlyFan’s owner’s financial involvement in it, but it seems like a lot of times with these companies there is a little bit of that too big to fail energy. How do you actually start pulling the audience to diversify and subscribe to a different platform, if you're not offering something radically different? I think what you're offering is something radically different.
The way that I see it is that everybody wants a piece of the same pie. This pie is a billion dollar pie, the porn industry and the internet is the biggest it’s ever been. If you try to get a piece of that pie, the pie just gets smaller. And nobody cares about the crumbs that are still like, hundreds of millions of dollars. Those are the niche markets. That's how I see the market as a whole right now, on the internet. What you're doing in upgrading into editorial and having all these talents is the way to go to make it more locally appealing for brands.
Because if you’re pulling up clients locally, you immediately know within your network what photographers, models, and production people to send to the location. I understand how easy it would be logistically to have a network for all of us and get rich off all of these crumbs.
I think that plays into the immigrant mindset and the Latin American immigrant story, saving all the crumbs and seeing the value in those little things that people want to discard because they only want the big, store-bought perfect pie. They don't realize that there's so much value elsewhere if you can find ways to glue it all together. You can actually make something really substantial for yourself. That's always the story of the underdog too, rallying together the community to build something and have it be a closed loop that aims to feed everyone within it.
I've had this conversation with men, and they don't understand. They think I’m crazy. For the sole fact that we're surrounded by women the entire time, they're like, how? I tell them it’s different, there's a lot of things that I still have to endure and that I've learned. But it's a whole world, as you were saying. It's part of understanding how to put all these pieces together to make things work. There's so many people that I know that I've introduced to each other and they've had their own relationships, whether it's romantic or business, I've seen those relationships grow and that's something that I'm so grateful for. That mindset of putting things together and making them work—I didn't know that was an immigrant mindset but now that you’ve mentioned that it definitely is. We're making stew with all the pieces of whatever we have in the fridge, we can make something gourmet.
I don't know if you're familiar with Venezuelan hallacas, it's literally the sociopolitical history of Venezuela all in one dish—legend goes that during the holidays, when the Spaniards would throw away their olives, almonds, and the meat after their huge parties the Black and Indigenous folx would collect all the scraps, mix them with cornmeal, wrap them in banana leaves, then boil and smoke them so they would last weeks. This is still the most quintessential Venezuelan holiday dish. Every year the abuelas, mamis, tias, and hijas gather together and make hundreds of hallacas (and bollitos!) to feed every friend and family member that walks through the door through the new year. Although in modern times we make them from scratch and freeze them after boiling instead of smoking them, the traditional elements of this dish have remained the same for generations.
This is the mindset that I'm talking about—how can we pull together all these different scraps and make something delicious and nourishing?
It's a community mindset.
It's definitely a community mindset. Do you see yourself settling in Miami once you have your residency?
I think we're going to base there, but we're gonna move a lot. We have a lot of plans—we'd love to get a van and tour the South. I think the plan is to move around, do as much as possible while the energy’s there and try to make these networks of talent, both behind and in front of cameras, more tight and more sustainable. The point is to get people more jobs and money in something that they love doing. In the end, if we can put two and two together to work in whatever place on earth, that's enough. The way that we've been doing it with DGAF has been working great. The people that we have on board right now in the UK are touring, and they’re posting and that's fine. But I need the website to be more social and easier for people to connect. So that's the next step. All in that mindset of connecting dots and making the whole thing spin.
You shoot a lot of the content yourself, whether it's with you and a partner, or it's you shooting another couple. How much of your content is other people sending you their own creations and then you upload it?
I would say half. Maybe a little less. I have my cameras with me all the time. A lot of other photographers need a budget to shoot film because film here in America is very expensive, and they take it to certain labs. I take it to my friends and it's not that expensive. We’re also trying to figure out how to make the shooting more accessible, whether it’s film or videotape. I've been talking to my friend Ross, who's my other half on the website because he does all the coding, he also shoots film and he just got a high eight camera and is setting up this lab with a friend of his, and I've been telling him we should put on the website that we're also offering services here in New York to develop film. And offer a more friendly price for people that are making content for the website. That will make it spin faster and more fluidly for everybody, and we could have that same deal with another lab in LA and Miami that would allow creators to keep creating with touring talents.
And vertically integrate the process.
One of my goals for the next year is to be able to spend time with people that I know could benefit from being a part of this network. All of us, essentially. Especially if it's marketing. There's so many clients that everybody's pushing their elbows to get when we can all just join this niche and run it locally.
Absolutely.
I'm so excited for the development of DGAF world. I think it's such a great concept. We're really rooting for you. I hope that everything goes well with all of your visa stuff, and that you're able to stay here and really build on that. My last question is if you see a cross cultural conversation with Latin America. Do you see yourself setting up a studio in Buenos Aires or Santiago?
We already have partners in Colombia, Panama and Argentina. Those are the places, especially Colombia because the DGAF partners from Colombia are really into punk rock scenes and they get a lot of content. I've never been to Colombia, but I've heard that everybody's into the nightlife.
There's a lot of things moving right now. I think Colombia is doing well, it's in a really progressive place right now. There's obviously still some political instability, but that's the way it goes with all of Latin America and the world at large. I think Colombia can be great for you. They seem to have a really good infrastructure and a really progressive mindset in terms of sexuality. I think they are really following the U.S. and the West in terms of the conversations around sexuality, gender, and creative expression. A lot of my cousins that live there are artists, and I think there's a lot of really cutting edge stuff happening. I think that the audience and the talent would be really ready for that. So that's really exciting!
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