I knew, or I really believed at this time in space, that I needed to keep my career as an adult film actor on the down-low.

My name is Anthony Camargo. I’m from Austin, Texas.

1995. I am living in South Beach. I have a gallery on the infamous Lincoln Road, and I have a client who comes in regularly to buy furniture, one of kind pieces of art that I’m creating. One day he asked me if I knew who he was, and I’m like, “Well, yeah, I have your credit card receipt, blah, blah, blah.”

He’s like, “No, do you know who I am?”

I’m like, “Do you want to tell me?”

And he said, “Well, my name is Kristen Bjorn.”

And back then, this is 1995, Kristen Bjorn, if you watch pornography, you knew who Kristen Bjorn was. Because there was Falcon, there was Catalina, but then there was Kristen Bjorn, and he was the top notch, the top of the game.

And he said to me, he said, “I would like for you to do a film for me.”

And I was like, “No, I don’t think so.” He was relentless. For a year, he kept after me and kept asking me if I would do it.

And finally, one day he said to me, “Anthony, let’s go to lunch.”

We went to lunch and he said this to me. He said, “Look, I come in, and I buy your work all the time. You’re an amazingly talented artist.” He goes, “Can you look at what I do as art?”

And I was like, Oh wow. That was an interesting perspective for me. I still said no. But he told me to think about it. I thought about it.

And I thought, Anthony, you’re an artist. How can you make a judgment call on somebody else’s form of art unless you know what that art form is? And with that, I made the decision that I was going to do my first porn film.

I became one of the Kristen Bjorn boys, so to speak, and I wasn’t a boy at that time, I was already in my thirties. But there was a status that was attached to that. After three or four films, I ended up doing films for other houses, Catalina, Falcon. In the process, I learned a different take on what the industry was, and I eventually exited. Years later, I moved from South Beach to Manhattan. I met my partner, who was a clothing designer for Joan Rivers. And I was going to open up an art gallery in New York but we quickly realized that wasn’t really realistic. My partner was from Austin, Texas, so he said, “Let’s move to Austin.” He had gone to UT. He loved it here. We actually spent a year just kind of understanding how the city worked. Eventually it worked in – the Dell stock split, is what happened. So when the Dell stock split, all of a sudden, you had money in Austin. Before that you didn’t, right? It allowed us to start our company. We built a very well known jewelry brand here in Austin, Texas, and it quickly became one of those brands that was synonymous with celebrities.

I knew, or I really believed at this time in space, that I needed to keep my career as an adult film actor on the down low. My fear became that that’s going to come out, and it’s going to destroy everything, but we kept growing. We got more accounts, our employees, we got more and more employees, and so all of a sudden we had all these people depending upon us.

And one day I was sitting in Neiman Marcus and the buying office. And the buyer happened to be gay, and he said to me, I was across from the desk, he said, “Oh, I know you.”

I’m like, “No.” And I’m in my head going, Holy shit. This guy knows something. And I pretend like nothing’s happening.

And then he looks up at me and he says, “I watched two of your films last night.” Neiman Marcus, we’re in one of the top stores in the world, and we were selling to seven stores at that time. And I thought, This is over. I’ve now destroyed my livelihood, my partner’s livelihood, everything. We ended up leaving that day with 13 stores. So what I learned in that lesson was that, yes, it was a safe zone. There was a safe zone. He happened to be gay. Had it been anybody else? I don’t know what would’ve happened, but the favors were on my side, and it didn’t have a negative impact on my business because once he said it, I had to acknowledge it. And once I acknowledged it, it was done.

Couple years go by, brand gets more and more successful, more and more famous, and I just do a five page spread in People magazine. I had just done the jewelry for the White House inauguration. By the way, George Bush found out I was a porn star and was like, “Hey, it’s okay!” It was a wonderful spread. And it spoke about my relationship with the White House, with the Bush family, and also some of my personal relationships with some other celebrities.

About a week later, my publicist in New York got a phone call saying that NPR wanted to do an interview, and she said, “Well, they came – they wanted to do something about a gay businessman that’s successful.”

I said, “When do we do it?”

And she said, “No, no, it’s not we, it’s you.”

I said, “But Anthony Nak is a business partnership. My partner.”

She said “They only want to speak to you.”

Well, that was a red flag. I knew in my heart of hearts that my adult film career was going to come up, and I didn’t know really how to handle it. I called this friend of mine who had built a very… probably the biggest career in the industry at that time in the music industry. I’m not going to say her name here. Somebody that really was revolutionary, who changed the dynamics of how we looked at things, especially sex. We got on the phone, and we were chatting and I told her exactly what was going on.

She said, “Look, I think that’s a great opportunity. You can be a voice to be supportive of youth of the LGBT community.”

I said, “But what happens if they bring this question up?”

And what she said to me was, “Hit it head on.” She said, “Hit it head on because if you hit it head on, there’s nowhere they can go with it.”

And I took that advice and of course I went, did the NPR interview, and it was live. And I was shaking. I remember shaking in my boots. And of course, the question came up and I just smiled.

And I said, “Yeah, I have. I’ve been in adult film business.” And there was nowhere to go with it. My employees jobs became very, very secure. My business grew. I became much more confident. I lost my fear, and because of that, is why all the positive things started to happen.

In order to succeed in life, in order to move forward in positivity, we have to take ownership over all of our actions. When you own whatever decision that you’ve made, nobody can weaponize that against you. We can only be our best to ourselves. We can only be the best for others if we can truly be authentic and true to ourselves. That’s it.