When Demi says “sex work” (and the subsequent “good times”), she puts an asterisk and clarifies something: she means consensual sex work after she was 18.

“I say I started when I was in art school around 2018, and I was doing like a little bit of stripping to pay for things,” she explains. “But prior to that, when I was in high school, I had a boyfriend who kind of like pimped me out. So I was sort of traumatized by all that, and I really didn’t know if sex work was the kind of life I would want for myself, just because of like the way I was introduced to it originally.”

As a teen, Demi was a gifted artist and also more practically minded than other people her age. Describing her path into one of the top art and design programs in the country, she describes herself as gravitating towards commercial art to guarantee an income, and also feeling like a class outcast among her cohort, who had the luxury to use their college experience to experiment.

“I love the artsy stuff, but commercial is where the jobs are,” she explains, digging through her phone for examples from her past life as an apprentice commercial photographer. “I still had fun with it. I loved doing product photography, and I would make much more elaborate productions than close-up stills of the texture of the makeup and food. It’s Pop Art, in a way.”

Before being switched to a vocational high school where her artistic skills were recognized, Demi was suffering through the “regular classes” at her school.

“I was so bored by them. I hated high school. But then I switched to a vocational school and was determined to get into college for commercial photography. I wanted the credibility of having a degree. That was important to me, and also really important to my mom. She was a nurse, she had gone to college and all that stuff, and I felt like the only way I was gonna get into college was the arts. I was like, ‘I’m not fucking going to college for anything else.’”

Turns out Demi was underestimating herself. Her vocational school work was assessed at the National Portfolio Review Day when she was a senior and got offers to several schools, including one of the top programs in the country, a prestigious East Coast school of design you would immediately recognize if we weren’t editing its name for privacy reasons.

But getting in was just part of the challenge. Now Demi had to find a way to thrive in a new, hypercompetitive environment, while supporting herself with side gigs.

“I felt like I came from a different background from a lot of my friends, like economically,” she shares. “I just had to work more than they did. And then that ate into schoolwork time. When you’re doing your homework for a photography class, you have to be producing an entire photo issue, essentially. It’s a big thing. So it’s not like I could say, ‘Let me do this in the middle of the night when I have time to be doing it,’ which is also kind of why I started stripping. Because then I can work for money in the middle of the night, and then do my school stuff during the day.”

Keeping that pace, naturally, turned exhausting. Minimum wage jobs were not the answer either. Here’s where we should point out that behind that freckles-and-throaty-giggles fantasy persona, and even the stoner Barbie aesthetics of her everyday self, there’s a real, street-weathered hustler in Demi. At some point during the interview she drops in passing the nugget that she spent a few months in, of all places, Genoa, Italy when she was 18, between high school and college.

How did she swing that?

“I emailed this photographer guy I met on Instagram, and he was talking about opening his new studio in Genoa, and I was like, ‘Oh hey, do you need someone to help you out around the studio? If you pay for me to get to Italy and get me an apartment, I will’.”

Did you learn about photography?

“Not really. No. We mostly chain-smoked cigarettes and hung out, but it was really cool to be in Italy and he would give me a long weekend most weekends. So I would go travel. Like I spent a weekend in Venice!”

So, back in college, stripping would have to do.

“I was just like, ‘I know I’m cute. I know I can make money popping pussy.’ So I started stripping, but I didn’t do extras. Nothing wrong with girls who do. It just wasn’t my bag, it wasn’t what I wanted to do. And I didn’t post about it online anywhere and I didn’t tell a lot of people, so I could just walk away from it if I wanted to, and no one would know.”

We are now in 2020. You know what happens next—this is a recurring theme on these Crush of the Month profiles of starlets born around 1992-2002. Demi is a 1999 kid.

“Then COVID happened, and honestly, I was so stressed out and burnt out in art school too, and I was like, ‘This is fucked up.’ But I was also a little bit relieved that I had an excuse to drop out, and I just felt like nobody would judge me for dropping out. And the clubs were shut down—I was in New York, so everything was shut the fuck down. So I thought about it for a couple weeks…”

It?

“Doing the OnlyFans thing I was hearing about. That would be a big kind of commitment because ‘Once it’s on the internet, it’s forever.’ And I also did some research and some looking around and learned it was really hard to be a faceless creator and get a good start and make money. It just seemed harder to me. I was like, ‘If I’m gonna do it, I’m gonna do it full send! I’m gonna make it worth it!’ And I did it. And it materially improved my life—a lot.”

Her commercial photography training was about to come in handy again. The next step? Camming. For a whole month, Demi carefully studied other girls’ cam shows.

“Everyone runs their room differently and everyone has different menu items and different ways of interacting with their fans,” she explains. “So, I studied what different girls were doing and what was working for them. Everyone always says, ‘Oh, just be yourself!’ Okay, but how do I write a tip menu? You have to look at other people to get some ideas.”

She also researched different platforms and settled on Chaturbate, her camming home for several years now.

“I found their user interface really intuitive. And I also listen a lot to the fans in my chat who will make recommendations based on their experiences. They’ve been around the sites and they’ve known a lot of models too. So there’s a community of fans on Chaturbate too that will actually help you. The company just had their big anniversary and they rented out a whole boutique motel in Arizona for us. Chaturbate really takes care of the models.”

Demi rose in prominence among cam models, her rise powered by Chaturbate’s foregrounding of some of their biggest earners and most committed models. At events like XBIZ Miami she was also being noticed by some stakeholders in the world of mainstream porn. “Who was that really cute petite girl with the freckles and the voice?” was a common question once the pandemic restrictions eased up and in-person events resumed. Porn was fully ready to buy (and sell) the Demi Hawks fantasy.

“At first on OF I only posted nudes and masturbation videos, but the fans kept asking me for more, so shortly after that I was like posting blowjob videos, and kept evolving,” she reveals. “Once they saw a little bit of it, they were like, ‘I want more, I want more!’ I remember pretty early on, I posted a picture with my boyfriend’s dick in my mouth, and people were all like, ‘Oh! There’s a dick available!’”

Demi says she never had a hang-up about sex, or checking people—men—who tried to control her sexuality.

“I don’t like possessiveness and jealousy,” she notes. “It’s always a big turn off for me. I’ve never been a jealous person. When I was in high school, me and my best friend used to literally pass guys back and forth and compare notes. It’s just sex. We’re all having fun. Like, who cares?”

How does she navigate her sexual life between OnlyFans content, studio shoots, sex parties, and her private, no-cams intimacy?

“My sexual appetites are pretty similar,” she confesses. “Although, I think I probably don’t have sex as often as people expect. I mean, I’m sure there’s people who think I’m like 24/7 orgy, orgy, orgy…”

But you do have more orgies than most people?

Demi laughs and coughs out her bong hit.

“I do work at Kinky Rabbit, and so that’s an orgy like every month,” she admits, referring to the members-only, full-costume Los Angeles sex party.

“Anyway. I like sex?” She starts laughing again.

Okay, wait—that could be the headline: “Demi Hawks: I Like Sex?”

“‘I Like Sex!’.” The buzz is contagious.

“I truly am an exhibitionist like that. Because I get off on performing.”

Maybe that’s the headline?

“Ha! I have all the attention. I’m so hot and I have all the attention and not even at Kinky Rabbit, just in any sense of performing, I’m just like, ‘I’m totally in control of these people’s attention right now’.” She shivers. And breaks into laughter again.

The mainstream porn industry loves Demi: her look, her drive, her professionalism. But four or five years into her career, they also may be taking her for granted. There may be an irony here: Demi spent years learning how to create and market images, but the studios mostly want her to stick to the one that enticed them.

Part of it is her youthful looks. Demi is 27 but could continue booking “what are you doing stepbro?” cookie-cutter roles for a few more years. She’s at the age when some of her friends are already being nudged by bottom-line-oriented agents into transitioning towards MILFdom (not an ideal reality for anyone, but them’s the options in 2026 studio porn). But she still “reads teen.”

Some directors are taking chances on her, and they should. Last year Demi was featured in Adult Time/Pure Taboo’s “Camp Conversion,” Bree Mills’ elaborate all-lesbian retro feature. She got a taste of more involved acting, although still in the role of someone barely legal.

“Believe it or not, that was my first time being in a feature. Can you believe my character had a name and a couple of lines before fucking?” she chuckles. “It was a big ensemble cast. The set was really, really fun, because we got to focus on one project for a whole week. It was also a 1980s vibe, so I let my hair be natural! It was an all-female cast and just a bunch of cool ladies and we all got to hang out all week. Also to see everyone on the crew was just so dedicated to the vision and the story and the characters and the aesthetics. I really appreciated how committed everybody on set was. It was so inspiring for my own content.”

Adult Time and Pure Taboo continue offering her more challenging roles. She recently finished shooting a scenario with Sophia Locke and Lucas Frost, where he plays her stepmom’s younger boyfriend (aka, What are you doing, step-not-yet-father?).

“I get in a fight with my stepmom, and so I fuck her boyfriend in front of her,” she bemusedly explains. “Sophia said it was her first time being cucked! But I got to cry on camera. I think sometimes I feel frustrated that nobody ever gives me a chance to show my dramatic acting skills. But to be fair, I haven’t been asking. Sometimes a closed mouth doesn’t get fed…”

(Memo to directors and studios: feed Demi Hawks some meaty roles. She can handle them.)

She’s also recently achieved a porn milestone: shooting for Kink.com, one of her (and of many, many, many adult performers we interview) favorite studios to watch “for orgasmic research purposes.”

“I couldn’t get too crazy because it was VR and the camera has to be kind of still, though. But I was dommed by the camera POV. And I got to do electrical play for the first time.”

How was that?

“Oh. My. God. I loved it. Even though that’s not necessarily the kind of sex I’m having in my personal life, sometimes I do feel like getting… a little frisky. I do watch a lot of porn. I watch a lot of anal—but I don’t do anal! I’ve played with my butt. Like, you know, I like a cheeky little finger and stuff, but I haven’t had anal, anal sex.”

Does it hold a special charge for you? Like a second virginity?

“No! Not at all. It’s just like too much prep. It’s too much work. I just want to roll over and have sex.”

That’s the headline!

“Ha ha ha—I dare you!”