After 20 years in the industry, adult film star and sex educator Jessica Drake continues to earn accolades.

One of Drake’s most recent honors is the 2020 AASECT Audiovisual Award she won with Joan Price for their collaboration on the erotic sex ed film Guide to Wicked Sex: Senior Sex [NSFW].

AASECT is a highly regarded professional organization and certifying body that stands for the American Association for Sexuality Educators, Counselors, and Therapists.

Senior Sex was recognized as “a significant contribution to AASECT’s vision of sexual health and to the clinical and educational standards of the field.”

If Drake’s successful partnership with Price, a senior sex expert, proves anything, it’s that she is breaking the mold when it comes to celebrating sexual diversity in the mainstream—and that time can also bring great new opportunities.

RELATED READ: Senior Sex Expert Joan Price and Jessica Drake Break Taboos with Adult Film on Sex and Aging

Earlier this year I had the chance to speak with Jessica Drake at the 2020 AVN Adult Entertainment Expo in Las Vegas.

The industry veteran opened up on many topics, among them were her sex-ed series, managing a chronic condition and her journey to finding her own sexual voice.

In the first part of my interview series with Drake, she offers a glimpse into the future of Jessica Drake’s Wicked Guide to Sex and how she’s working to squash the stigma against sex workers.

On making a kinky sequel to Senior Sex:

“We’re going to do a second version because people were so fond of us introducing the idea of kink for seniors. I think that we have a really unique situation on our hands where people are getting older and they’re losing a spouse through death or divorce.

“And maybe these people have been married 30, 40, 50, 60 years, and maybe they have a kink that they’ve hidden or they’ve always wanted to be different or try something different.

“How would they possibly know how to navigate that at this point in their lives? So we integrated kink into the first one and we got such a great response that I want to have even more of it in the second one.”

On why she started Jessica Drake’s Guide to Wicked Sex in 2011:

“Fans kept coming to me who had just watched my movies that I perform in and they were asking me sex advice questions. At first, I thought, well, they’re asking me these questions because I have sex on camera.

“Then I became increasingly aware that they were asking me these questions because they’re seriously lacking in sex ed. Once I became aware of the problem, I became a certified sex educator. So I could backup the knowledge that I already had.

“I went to a few different training programs and I started doing workshops. Then as I was first doing the line I did the popular topics first, you know, fellatio and anal and positions and things like that.

“I also gendered them more than I would currently do. In retrospect, we don’t know what we know until we know it. But the first ones were fairly gendered. But as the line has progressed and I’ve grown as an educator as well and a person, I’ve just realized the need for better education for every group of people.

“When I am when I’m not able to do that, because it’s not my lived experience, I collaborate with someone who has that experience. And that’s sort of how Senior Sex came around.”

On her plans to create a Wicked Guide to Sex video on sex and disability:

“My goal is to do sex and disability at some point. It’s something that I’ve just started working on. I’ll be collaborating with people and we’ll be covering as much as possible.

“In one of the [sex ed certification] programs that I went to, we had a module on sex and disability and the film resources were seriously lacking. It wasn’t their fault; we’re just really lacking those resources. So I am compelled to change that.

“So far I’m talking to five or six people and also asking them for recommendations and people that they work with and possibly partners, they’re real-life partners.

“I think that it’s really important to have all the conversations instead of just portraying sex and disability as something that is a situation where one person has strictly physical limitations. I think that we need to go way beyond that.

“I want to include as much information as I can. And what that looks like in the final product, I won’t know until we’re there.”

On how she went from feeling like an outcast to an AASECT honoree:

“I feel in part because I’m a sex worker, I feel like that’s the biggest barrier,” Drake said when describing her mixed experiences with AASECT in the past, before becoming both a conference speaker and honoree.

“The first year that I went to AASECT I thought it would be a great idea to attend a SAR [Sexual Attitude Re-assessment].

However, her excitement turned to anger after participating in a group word asociation excercise:

“Words were like porn, sex work, sexting and sexuality things, threesomes, bisexuality, anything having to do with porn or sex work, everyone was only writing really negative things that were rooted in stereotypes.

“I was the only sex worker there. Nobody knew who I was because I was trying to be under the radar and I’m sitting there and I’m so mad my ears are burning.

“I thought this was going to be the place to be with all these people with letters behind their names. They are therapists and doctors and they’re helping people and these are the beliefs they held.

“So I got so angry about my first AASECT experience. I gave them my feedback and then I stayed. I almost walked out. I thought maybe this is why I’m here maybe I’m here, to write better words on each one of those pieces of paper

“Because if I wasn’t, I see what would be there, right, so I stayed. Then the second year it seemed like attitudes were changing, and the third year was the first year I was offered to present there.”

*Interview edited and condensed for length and clarity.

Image credits: Jenna Owsianik, Wicked