James Bang and the road to adult film success

James Bang had the kind of strict immigrant Asian parents who made him go to Chinese school on Saturdays instead of letting him play with his friends. This is important, because if he’d been allowed to attend birthday parties and ride bikes with the other kids, Bang probably wouldn’t have become the unicorn he is today: One of a handful of mainstream male porn stars of Asian descent currently working in the United States.

Born and raised in the LA area to Chinese parents who emigrated from Vietnam, the 38-year-old has shot more than 150 professional scenes for nearly all the major porn studios and racked up a roster of famous costars such as Sherry DeVille, Kira Noir, and Ryan Keely. (He modestly doesn’t claim Bonnie Blue because they were shooting a group gangbang). He’s received several Xbiz and AVN award nominations, but has yet to win. In fact, no Asian male performer has ever won an AVN award—the Oscars of porn—though an Asian Canadian VR specialist did take home production trophies in 2018. 

When I spoke to Bang over Zoom on the morning of our interview, he was fresh off a 2 a.m. flight home to LA from Florida, where he was shooting a scene for a male-oriented straight-sex website. The grind never stops: He had a collaboration for his own content set up for later that night, then had to be up at 7 a.m. the following day for another 8 a.m. collaboration. “People think collabs are hookup time. No, this is my 8 a.m. for tomorrow. I have my camera set up, my equipment set up, everything’s ready to go, and I have to shoot the content. It’s a serious thing,” a slightly groggy Bang tells me.

Porn is a serious thing for Bang, who speaks about filming cream pies and blowjobs with the earnestness of a crossfit convert, and approaches the adult industry with the same workaholism that defined his previous pharmaceutical job. While most adult content creators outsource message replies or use AI chatbots, Bang insists on personally answering all his fans, even if it means losing income when he doesn’t respond in time.

This impressive dedication is vital for straight male porn stars in general, and Asian males in particular, to sustain a full-time studio porn career. Straight males in porn face a similar situation as females in sports. Other than a few household (okay, the household in this allegory may be a fraternity house or a crusty-sock emporium) names, they are paid less, boast less brand recognition, and draw fewer sales than their female counterparts. 

For Bang, being an adult film star is the cathartic reckoning of a hemmed-in childhood. On our call, sporting a grey hoodie, pale forehead gleaming under a no-nonsense buzz cut, Bang repeatedly hones in on his frustrated upbringing. His parents were event videographers (perhaps where he inherited his love for the camera) who often worked weekends.

“I was basically locked in as a kid. My parents didn’t like me playing outside like normal kids, even if it was something simple like riding a bike through the neighborhood, or going out to birthday parties,” Bang tells me. “I would be so upset when my friends would ask me, ‘Hey would you want to go to Disneyland or Knott’s Berry Farm for my birthday weekend?’ And I would be like, ‘Oh yeah, I’m down.’ But it would be on a Saturday and I would be like, ‘Oh, I have Chinese school, I can’t really skip that.’”

Stuck at home on the weekends, Bang spent puberty on the computer discovering the delights of websites like TeamSkeet.com. He became fascinated with a world where, it seemed to him, adults were free to express their most straightforward desires. “I was like ‘Man, that’s something in the future I would like to do,’” he says.

Bangin’ out a career

Until he was almost 30, Bang lived the life his parents expected of him. He graduated with a degree in finance from CalState Fullerton, worked long hours as a pharmaceutical sales rep, and though Downey, California is predominantly Hispanic, got engaged to a “Chinese girl (his) parents approved of.”

The engagement didn’t work out. Sick of the LA dating scene and staring down the barrel of a disheartening pharmaceutical career, Bang decided it was time to take the leap towards his childhood ambitions as an adult film star. “It wasn’t even about promoting Asian masculinity,” Bang says. “It was more so that I didn’t want to turn into my dad or my mom, and have kids and force my kids to go to f*cking Chinese school every Saturday.”

His best friend happened to own an Asian male-centric interracial adult site called Banana Fever (to date, still the only site promoting Asian male porn stars). At the time, Banana Fever was only shooting POV (no face, point of view) due to a lack of Asian male performers. “I said, ‘You know what, f*ck it.’ I told him, ‘Your numbers are slipping, I think it would be a good idea if you popped me in there—and I’m willing to show my face,’” Bang says.

That was in 2018, and after confirming that Bang was willing to blow up his life, his friend allowed him to select the female talent from any agency roster, booked at the studio’s expense—a highly uncommon situation for first-time male performers, who typically start out at the bottom of the totem pole. His first scene was with established adult actress Carolina Sweets, a petite girl-next-door brunette. Everything clicked, from onset chemistry to having his experienced friend coaching him through the scene, which helped cement his performance. “I knew from the first day we were finished,” Bang tells me. 

Being a prodigious lover doesn’t always translate to being able to perform on-set, where you have to deliver under glaring lights and the watchful eyes of a crew, sometimes with directors yelling “cut” mid-plunge. Bang was a natural. The quiet, studious boy who spent most of his life in monogamous relationships and lost his virginity at the late-for-LA age of 18 to a Chinese girl he ended up dating for a year, turned out to have zero qualms about exchanging bodily fluids with cameras filming inches away from his private parts. “You know when you talk about the honeymoon phase of dating. That feeling comes in the very beginning. I think in a relationship that feeling eventually dies out, not to be f*cked up or anything. When you do porn, that feeling is brand new, every single time. It sounds corny, but it feels like a honeymoon,” Bang relates.

The road to his dream of a full-time career was more circuitous. For the next three years, he kept a part-time job at a medical office while sporadically shooting for Banana Fever. He had bills to pay, and $500 or so a month wasn’t going to cut it. “I did the whole Clark Kent/Superman thing where I would hide my identity behind these thick Ray-Ban glasses so that if you were a porn fan working at the medical office, you wouldn’t recognize me because I had these thick nerdy glasses on,” Bang says. This was in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, which put a damper on his industry career, but made it easier to hide his identity behind a mask. 

By the time Bang signed to OC Modeling in 2021 and dove into a full-time career, direct-to-consumer platforms like OnlyFans meant “porn stars” were becoming “adult content creators.” “Right now we’re facing a shortage of scenes in the mainstream, studio-set industry. Content is so important just to survive. You have to brand it well, you have to promote yourself in a different way, in a different light,” Bang says.

Like with mainstream media, major studio work draws fans into a creator’s personal content, which they use to further build their brand and bankroll. Bang started shooting his own content at the end of 2022 and learned how to edit videos with iMovie, creating his own trailers to post on ManyVidz, Clips4sale, and OnlyFans. He recently started a mini-studio, the James Bang Couch, a riff on the black casting couch. “I think what the fans want is a little bit of both in terms of amateur content and your pro stuff,” Bang says. 

Freedom from stereotypical expectations

Many of Bang’s self-produced video captions highlight interracial tags like “Asian Cream Pies” or “Asian Guy F*cks XXX,” and his X tagline reads “The Greatest Asian C*ck In The Universe,” but it’s more for SEO purposes than taking a stand for diversity. Bang tells me he doesn’t think his ethnicity either helped or hindered his porn career. “I would never hear, ‘We booked you because you’re Asian,’” Bang tells me, noting that there’s no affirmative action in porn, where our basest desires are simultaneously exposed and shaped by search terms. “I should talk about Asian masculinity more and promote that, but I’m not on Twitter blasting out stuff like, ‘We need more Asian representation.’ That would never be me. It’s not something that’s really crossed my mind.”

In an era of belated cultural appreciation for Asian masculinity, from Chinamaxxing TikToks, to the ever-engorging BTS fandom, to a slew of actors of Asian descent finally getting their Western flowers, the lack of Asian male porn stars has become mostly a supply issue. Asian immigrants tend to prioritize stable careers and social value—two things you don’t get out of a career in porn. Ironically, though Bang says he doesn’t think about how being Asian American impacted his porn career, his decision to forego archetypal norms is defined by exactly that. Today, he’s copacetic with his mother, although (or perhaps because) they never discuss his career. “Growing up…I told myself, ‘Later down the road, when I’m older, there’s going to be a point where I’m going to decide for myself,’” Bang says. “And even if I did porn, it’s okay. I see it as my childhood was taken away from me, so for something good like porn to happen in my life was a blessing in disguise because it allowed me to go outside of the whole ‘strict Asian expectations.’”