The male performer's playbook for AVN, Exxxotica, and expos

Expo week compresses a year of working relationships into four or five days. AVN, Exxxotica, XBIZ — the math is the same: more performers in one hotel than the rest of the year combined, more scenes booked in a week than most performers shoot in a quarter, and more ways to permanently damage your reputation in a forty-eight-hour stretch than you'd think possible.

The performers who come out of expo week with new working relationships, clean bookings, and zero stories told about them in the group chats afterward are not the ones who showed up the hardest. They were the ones who showed up the most prepared. Below is the operating manual.

This post assumes you're already a working male performer with the basics in place. If you're earlier than that, the first-principles piece on becoming a male performer is the prerequisite. This is the field manual.

How should a male performer prioritize bookings during expo week?

Not all bookings are equal, and treating them as if they were is the single fastest way to wreck your week. The honest priority order:

Rank	Booking type	Cancellation risk	Action
1	Paid shoot booked in advance	Very low	Honor it. Always.
2	A co-star reached out to you first	Low	Fill the schedule with these
3	You reached out, they were genuinely excited	Medium	Solid, but build in trade-up risk
4	You reached out, they were lukewarm	High	Decline unless you're brand new

Two things on this table that need to be said out loud:

Honor every prior commitment. A paid gig that comes in forty-eight hours before a confirmed collab is not a reason to bump the collab. It is a reason to politely decline the paid gig. The short-term math says you should take the paid one. The long-term math says nobody works with the guy who cancels at the last minute, and you'll be feeling the cost of that decision for years. The rule applies in reverse too: if a co-star bumps you for a paid shoot, they've told you what they think you're worth, and you should plan your future bookings accordingly.

Inbound collab requests are gold. If a co-star reached out to you first, they have already done the internal work of deciding they want to shoot with you. The cancellation risk on those is so much lower than on outbound that they should fill your calendar before any outreach you do.

Outreach where they were lukewarm is a flake waiting to happen. "Maybe, let me check my schedule" is not a yes. If you book one of these, expect to be canceled on the morning of, and don't take it personally — they were never really in.

There is a real version of "buying" a more reliable booking with someone you genuinely want to work with: a small paid-collab fee ($100-ish range, depending on your level) converts a low-probability yes into a much higher-probability yes. That's not bribery. That's respecting their time the way a paid producer would. Use it sparingly, only with people you actively want in your portfolio, and never as a substitute for relationship-building.

And finally: rejection at expo week is not personal. You're not every performer's type and not every performer is yours. The professional move when someone politely passes is to thank them, mean it, and move on. The unprofessional move is to take it as a slight, and it travels faster than you think.

What test results should a male performer require at AVN or Exxxotica?

Test discipline is the difference between a working performer and an ex-performer. The standards I hold to during expo week:

• Seven-day tests over fourteen-day tests. Volume goes up at events, exposure compounds, and a fourteen-day test on day five of the conference is testing for a world that no longer exists. If your co-star only has a fourteen-day, that's a conversation about whether to delay the scene until they re-test, not about whether to shoot anyway.
• QR-verified results, sent to you in advance. Before you walk into anyone's hotel room or studio, you have looked at their test results and verified them on the lab portal. Not a screenshot, not a forwarded PDF — the live record. If they push back on this, the scene was already a bad idea.
• Your test goes both ways. Send yours the same way, on the same timeline, in the same format. The performers who care about your results are the ones who have given you theirs first.
• Group scenes only on day one. Gangbang or orgy bookings get scheduled before the conference starts cycling exposures. The first day is the cleanest day everyone will be all week. After that, the STI math gets uglier with every shoot the room has been part of, and being the third or fourth gangbang of someone's expo run is a risk profile I personally won't take.

What's doxy-PEP and should a male performer be on it?

Doxy-PEP — 200mg of doxycycline taken within 72 hours after sex — has been shown to reduce gonorrhea, chlamydia, and syphilis incidence by something like 70% in the populations it's been studied on. CDC put out interim guidance on it in 2023. It is not a fringe protocol; it is a real medical option that a lot of working performers are on during high-volume weeks.

It is also not something to internet-medicine. Get a doctor — ideally one who's worked with sex-positive patients before, who you can actually talk to about the work without flinching from either side — and have them write the prescription, run a baseline panel, and schedule the follow-ups. If your current doctor isn't that, find one who is. The community can refer you.

Doxy-PEP is a tool, not a license. It does not cover HIV (your PrEP script is a separate conversation, also worth having). It does not cover the test-discipline section above. It is a layer of protection on top of the rest of the protocol, not a replacement for any of it.

What should a male performer's daily prep stack look like at expo week?

Treat expo week like the most intense lifting block of your year. Hydration, electrolytes, recovery, sleep — all of them double in importance, all of them get sacrificed first when the schedule fills up. Front-load them.

Input	Timing	Why
Water (3+ liters)	Across the day	Stamina, recovery, headache prevention
Electrolytes	Morning and evening	Sustained output, blood pressure stability
Vitamin C, zinc, magnesium	Morning	Immune load is high in shared spaces
ED meds (if prescribed)	Per script, ahead of scene	Insurance, not last-minute panic
Doxy-PEP (if prescribed)	Per protocol	STI prophylaxis layer
Real food	Three times a day, minimum	The number-one thing that gets skipped
Sleep	At least six hours	Non-negotiable. Schedule the room around it.

The performers who hit a wall on day three are almost always the ones who skipped breakfast on day one and assumed they could outrun the deficit. You can't.

There's a longer post on supplements and recovery here and a broader piece on performer health and wellness here if you want the year-round version of this.

How does a male performer handle ED reliability at a multi-scene event?

Direct version: it happens to everyone eventually, and the professionals are the ones who plan for it.

Get a prescription before you arrive. Viagra, Cialis, or in some cases Trimix — talk to your doctor about which fits your physiology and your shoot schedule. Have it filled, packed, and dosed correctly on the timing your doctor specifies, not the timing you find on a forum. Showing up to expo week without the medical toolkit and hoping adrenaline carries the day is a plan that fails on day two.

Cap your same-day bookings at two scenes unless the second one is a fake-pop or non-penetrative shoot. The performers who book three real scenes in a day are the performers other performers stop booking.

When the moment isn't happening — and it will, eventually, to everyone — here's the actual choreography to know in advance:

1. Three minutes in and nothing's there. Switch the script. Go down on her. Move into 69. Have her grind on you. Use your hands. Take the heat off the one part of your body that's currently uncooperative and let everything else do the work.
2. Still not there after that. Pivot to a softcore version of the scene. It's not what either of you came in for, but it's a real product, you can both agree to it on the spot, and it preserves the working relationship for next time.
3. What you do not do is have a co-star spend twenty or thirty minutes giving head to a non-erection while you mentally white- knuckle through it. Word gets around, and the cost of that can be high.

Limp-dick reputation in this industry is not whispered about. It is discussed openly, in detail, by the people who decide whether to work with you. The performers who handle the off-day with composure get re-booked. The performers who don't, don't.

What's the cleanliness protocol between scenes at an expo?

Shower thoroughly between every scene. Every one. Including the parts you'd be self-conscious about washing carefully at the gym — the set finds out fast which performers do this and which don't. The standard is: nothing your co-star can smell, taste, or feel that shouldn't be there. There is no expedited version of this. There is no version where you skip it because the next scene is in twenty minutes and you're behind schedule. The schedule is wrong; the shower isn't.

Going from one scene directly into the next without a real shower is one of the few things in this industry that will end working relationships in a single day. Don't do it. The math is not ambiguous.

How does a male performer handle paperwork and footage at a hotel-room shoot?

Two non-negotiables for every scene, every time:

• Paperwork before clothes come off. Government ID photographed, 2257 release signed, model release executed, scene-specific consent points named out loud and acknowledged. The fastest way to drop someone out of the mood is to interrupt arousal with a clipboard. Do the paperwork at the start of the meeting, while you're still discussing the scene plan, not at the end.
• Footage off the device before you leave the room. Onto a hardware drive, a backup card, a cloud upload — at least two copies, in two locations, before either of you walks out.

The corollary: plan the scene before the camera starts. Shotlist, talking points, who-does-what — agreed in advance, in writing if it's nuanced, verbally confirmed in the room before clothes come off. Get-in-get-out is the goal. The performers who make hotel-room shoots feel improvised are usually the ones who didn't prepare; the performers who make them feel effortless are the ones who over-prepared.

How should a male performer handle a female co-star's safety setup?

If your co-star wants a trusted person on the call with her — a friend, a partner, security, anyone — that is not a flag. That is exactly what professional behavior in this industry looks like, and the correct response is to make space for it.

• Don't push back on it. Don't make her feel like she's being paranoid for asking. Don't ask why she needs it. Don't suggest a smaller setup. The default is hers to set, not yours.
• Don't ask to know exactly who's there or where they'll be. It's not your shoot to design from her side.
• If you're the one she doesn't yet know well, the fact that she's bringing a third party is the working version of the trust that hasn't been built yet. Build it on this scene by being easy to work with, and the next collab will need fewer guardrails.
• If she doesn't have someone, don't make her feel awkward about not having someone. That's a different conversation, not a "now" conversation.

The collaborators I've come back to a second and third time all started as strangers who needed exactly this kind of setup on shoot one. The ones who tried to negotiate it down are not in my contacts anymore. There's a longer breakdown of how I think about collaborator vetting here.

What if a male performer and a co-star aren't vibing in person?

Sometimes the energy that read fine over DM doesn't land in the room. That's normal. The professional move is to talk it through.

• Name it directly. "Hey, I want to make sure we're both feeling this. How are you?" beats white-knuckling through awkwardness for the next forty minutes.
• Adjust the scene plan. Sometimes the script was wrong, not the pairing. A different angle, a different intensity, a different starting energy fixes more than people expect.
• If after that the chemistry still isn't there, call it. A no-go scene that both performers agreed to skip is a story that ends with "we'll catch the next one." A bad scene that you forced through is a story that ends with neither of you wanting to work with the other again. The first ending is much better than the second.

Calling a scene off in the room takes more confidence than shooting through it. It is also the move every working professional in this industry has made at least once. Have the conversation, make the call, and move on. Reputation-wise, the cost is zero. The cost of forcing it is much higher.

What does a clean expo week look like in retrospect?

The week is a success when:

• Every booking on your calendar got honored or got rescheduled with enough notice
• Every co-star's test results were verified before you were in a room together
• Every scene's paperwork was done before the camera turned on, and every scene's footage was on at least two drives before you left the room
• You were professional with people you'd never work with again, the same way you were with people you've worked with before
• You didn't subject any co-star to a half-hour of trying to fix something a softcore pivot would have solved in five minutes
• You showered between scenes, slept enough nights to function, and ate real meals
• You walked away with one or two new working relationships, not twenty fan interactions

That's it. That is the entire scoreboard. The performers who measure the week by view counts or scene volume are measuring the wrong thing; this industry's compounding currency is reputation, and reputation is built one expo week at a time.

If you're early in your career and feeling overwhelmed reading this — that reaction is appropriate. Expo week is a lot. The good news is the second one is much easier than the first. Build your own version of this list as you go, with the corrections you wish I'd told you, and send it on to whoever's reading mine when their first one comes around.

— Sly