COVER STORY: RENO GOLD

With a brain for business and a body for sin, OnlyFans superstar Reno Gold is on the way to earning his second million.

With a brain for business and a body for sin, OnlyFans superstar Reno Gold is on the way to earning his second million. At just 25, the former stripper has parlayed his talents into a business that now includes a real-estate portfolio and philanthropy. Sex sells, sure, but how does Reno deliver more bang for the bigger bucks?

Reno Gold is sitting patiently on a bed in his Los Angeles AirBnb. He’s wearing shorts and a soft, gold, loosefitting silk shirt that’s unbuttoned to just below his smooth sculpted, tanned pecs and the top of his abs are visible. His dark blond hair is feathered up at the front; a quirky touch that he creates with a flatiron. His hairstyle fluctuates from feathery to classic side-part to casually tousled depending on his mood that day and today’s is light and playful.

That said, he’s a little jittery – eager to deliver but conscious of everything else he still has to do. He’s only in Los Angeles for a few days before he has to fly back to Fort Lauderdale, Florida where he’s based. Every moment is accounted for. He leans in and smiles brightly, and his angular face radiates. We have exactly thirty minutes to cover everything.

“With the amount of content I’m putting out every day, I have to be super regimented,” he says, shuffling himself down to the floor, he runs his hands up and down the collar of his shirt. “I feel like OnlyFans collaborations can be spur of the moment. It’s like, ‘Hey, you around? Let’s do it.’ They can’t always be super planned out. Other than that, my schedule is pretty strict.”

Prior to the time allotted for our late afternoon Zoom, he’d filmed YouTube content with model-turned-YouTuber Travis Bryant, he’d been to see samples of his forthcoming sex toy and fashion line that will bear his name (in three words: “it’s sexy, explicit, and aesthetic”), he worked out at the gym, and he found a sliver of time to check out Rodeo Drive. But he’s not done yet. After talking with me, he’ll film a scene with porn star Mathew Crawford for OnlyFans and then he’ll settle in to personally respond to every single message he’s received on OnlyFans; a task that, alone, requires around four hours a day.

“The payoff is that I love what I do. I made more than $100K last month and I recently bought five condos, which I paid for up-front, in cash,” he says.

The amount of money Reno makes and has given to charity recently has been a major hook for his recent round of press coverage and, in a way, he’s unprecedented. Sure, celebrities like Bella Thorne have famously raked in millions on OnlyFans, but she was already an established celebrity actor. Reno started from nothing, and in December he donated $27,000 (a week’s income on OnlyFans) to Elton John’s AIDS Foundation. Later that month, Forbes magazine ran a story calling him a “phenomenon” and “an expert in branding and marketing online” and it’s not hard to see why. Beneath the fun, playful, sexy veneer, there’s a clear method to everything he does.

Reno’s Youtube and Instagram content is a less explicit version of his OnlyFans content. It features anything from him sitting on his couch alone answering fan questions, talking about skincare or telling crazy stories from his life as a stripper to hanging out with friends and talking about their experience as sex workers; always sex-positive, he doesn’t like to kink-shame.

He takes you into the operating room as he gets Scrotox (Botox for your balls) and a vampire facial – a treatment where your own white blood cells are extracted and applied topically to your face after micro needles have punctured small holes in your skin.

He documents wearing a full-body lycra Superman costume (without underwear) in public. All of it features him shirtless and sometimes pant-less, but it’s never explicit enough to get him into trouble with YouTube or Instagram. Very short snippets of the explicit content goes on Twitter and all of the platforms drive viewers to his OnlyFans, the only place you can find his full-length explicit stuff, where you can subscribe for $US14.99 month (less if you opt for a promo), which lets you pay to access longer videos of him fully nude, showing off, jerking off, and fucking guys – amateur and porn stars alike, as well as fitness and other lifestyle content.

We all crave human connection and if we don’t get that it can be damaging. That’s where someone like me comes in.

He responds to every message personally. The more you’re paying the quicker the response, and judging by his expanding subscriber and fan base, which at the time of this interview stood at over 6,700, and the money he’s making, he seems to have figured out a formula that works.

But the 25-year-old ex-stripper, high school gymnast, sees his success as stemming from more than just shrewd strategy. Everything he posts is professional enough that it’s clear he means business, but never polished enough to feel too slick and distant. He speaks directly to the camera like you’re a friend he’s excited to hang out with. It’s never phoned-in. In fact, sometimes he seems almost earnest, and he often leaves in slight hiccups or goes with longer one-shot takes.

Case in point: the hardcore content on his OnlyFans is well-lit and considered, helped in no small part by Florida’s natural golden light, and while it’s clear Reno knows how to direct a shot and move his sculpted body like a dancer, there’s usually a point in each video where he gets close to cumming and just lets go completely and rides the wave not caring how he looks or what he gives away, his mouth open, he’ll moan, gasp and cum like he would in bed without the camera there. Because, at the base of it, he sees himself as a sex worker and a performer and you can’t be good at either without being authentic.

“I wanted my body to work for me from the beginning,” he says, moving back up to the bed, adjusting his shirt again. “I really just love showing off. I’m an exhibitionist, it turns me on. When I’m filming something, all I have to do to prepare is think, ‘Oh my God, someone’s going to see my dick’ and that gets me hard. I also only work on camera with guys I’m into. It’s really just my natural horny state recorded on camera and uploaded online.”

In keeping things real, Reno makes sure his professional circle is small. His family knows about the kind of work he does, his mother manages his real estate investments, his camera operator is a close friend whose name he won’t reveal out of respect for their wishes, and he’s hired a publicist, but the rest he does himself.

“At first it was pretty weird to talk to my parents about what I do, but they’re super supportive and they got on board,” he says. “They’re religious but they’re the best kind of religious. They’re not judgemental, and they believe everyone should have a chance and deserves love. They’re my rock. I wouldn’t have been able to achieve what I’ve achieved without them.”

That said, with his rapidly expanding subscriber base and the precedent he’s set for being accessible to every single one of them, he knows the time is coming when he will have to expand his team.

“I have to hire more people if I want to stop scrambling every single day,” he explains, back on the floor, leaning into the camera. “It’s just that I like controlling my own image. I’m a perfectionist because I’ve built up my brand so much. Like if I make a joke while filming one of my YouTube videos, I want it to make the final cut.”

One content creator he met recently and has teamed-up with on several videos is German model, YouTube and Onlyfans content creator, and aspiring stand-up comedian Mario Adrion. The two met after Mario made a video in which he and his best friend reacted to one of Reno’s OnlyFans videos, they tagged him in it, and got in touch.

One of Mario’s most successful videos is his audition for American Idol, which shows him walking out on stage in a speedo and rapping/ singing (sort of) about how he wants to be thought of as more than just a dumb model. While the skit didn’t get him a nod from judges Katy Perry, Lionel Ritchie and Luke Ryan, he still managed to convince all three to participate in a hilariously silly walk-off that lasted several minutes and got almost 600,000 views for American Idol’s YouTube channel. That video gave way to several spin-off

I love showing off… It turns me on…

I think, ‘Oh my God, someone’s going to see my dick… …and that gets me hard.

videos Mario created to capitalize on the success, several of which featured Reno, and it all led to a massive boost for his own subscriber base as well as more collaborations between the two.

“I actually gained more followers from my collaboration with Reno than I gained from American Idol,” says Mario. “I was surprised because it was a pretty big segment on the show. Maybe I’m not surprised though. Reno is a legend in the business.”

Mario, who identifies as straight, feels his new friendship with Reno has helped him break down personal boundaries. On a recent collaboration, he and his friend Jeff Kasser, another male model influencer, filmed a trip to a gay nude beach in Florida where, inspired by Reno, Mario filmed his first full-frontal scene for OnlyFans.

“Reno was just running around the beach naked the whole time,” says Mario. “It was clear he just loves being nude. I admire that openness and I respect that a lot. He has so much confidence in his own body, and I thought to myself, why not?”

Mario says he was pleasantly surprised by how genuine and real Reno turned out to be.

“I’m always curious to meet the real person behind the persona they present online,” he says. “It’s usually vastly different from what you expect. With Reno, I think I expected him to be serious and arrogant. When I met him, he was just so joyful and accommodating and, honestly, a bit like a little kid. He was just living life, having fun.”

“What I admire about Reno is that he’s so pure and genuine about his profession,” says Mario. “He doesn’t hold back. He’s not trying to hide anything. He also talks about what he does as though it’s a regular nine-to-five job. If he was a veterinarian, he would talk about it the same way. He’s just like, ‘Oh, I’m shooting a jerk-off scene on Sunday.’ I really respect that.”

Like many creative entrepreneurs, Reno’s journey to success began with a difficult time at school.

“I’m good at real world stuff,” he says. “I can run a business. OnlyFans? I can do that. In school it was a struggle all the way until I graduated. It was just super hard for me. I would always just be in la-la-land when we were supposed to be doing something else.”

He loved drawing and still draws when he has time, was good at movement and sports, and he had an athletic build, so he focused where he could. Adding to the challenge was the fact that his family moved around a lot so it was hard to put down roots. His father, a house appraiser, would get jobs all over the country and the family would move every few years. By the time he left home, Reno had lived and gone to school in Illinois, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Nevada, and had then landed back in Massachusetts.

“I was switching schools so often that it was always a different curriculum and different people,” he says, moving back up to the bed, slightly more settled. “I’m still in touch with all my friends from Nevada though, which is cool.”

Despite its challenges, the nomadic lifestyle of his childhood rubbed off on him and when he left school and discovered he could make money by stripping, he found himself once again traveling to different cities, this time alone and on a weekly basis.

“I lived in hotel rooms,” he says. “I just went from hotel room to hotel room. I didn’t have a lot of friends, I was just kind of a loner. I was really driven, but all I would do is work at different clubs. Through OnlyFans I’ve discovered that I actually don’t want to travel as much. Friends and family are important to me and a lot of my friends I’ve met online.

“We all crave human connection and if we don’t get that it can be damaging,” he continues. “Some people don’t have the tools to make and keep meaningful relationships, and I think that’s where someone like me comes in. People go online and they connect with me in a way they can’t in the real world. But I’ve learned it’s a two-way street. Especially during the height of the pandemic. It was really nice to connect with people from all over the world. Since I started OnlyFans, I’ve learned that I have a soft spot for a lot of people and that I really need these connections as well. I’m actually a much more social person than I thought I was.”

Having the opportunity to do interviews and to share his thoughts about life on his own social channels seems to have led Reno to spend time thinking about what it means to him to be a person in the world. While he was raised in a religious household, he seems ambivalent about the idea of God and he isn’t afraid to die, something he discovered through psychedelics like LSD and DMT, with which he’s experimented a few times.

“What I learned from doing DMT is that we really know nothing,” he says, quickly moving back to the floor, leaning in, newly inspired. “The experience was amazing. I feel like I realised the universe is so enormous that consciousness has to go somewhere and I think that’s pretty incredible. I guess I don’t rule anything out completely, but I go back and forth with the idea of God. Christianity is a little scary to me: just like the concept of Heaven and Hell. I feel like if I died tomorrow I’d be fine with it, though, because I’ve done everything I’ve wanted to.”

With that in mind, Reno concedes he can’t do what he’s doing forever so he’s planning for the future. Aside from his real estate investments, he’s setting aside money for his sister’s kids’ college fund, and since donating money to Elton John’s AIDS Foundation last year, he’s keen to do more with the organisation.

“I’d love to be 80 and still jerking off on cam for people, but I don’t think that’s realistic,” he says. He looks around the room and fidgets slightly. Moving back to the bed, he says, “Before I have to go, I want to say that the best thing I’ve been able to do because of my success on OnlyFans is to give something back. I really encourage all other creators to do that. You have to give a little to get a little. If you think your success is all your own doing then you’re an asshole. There’s a certain amount of luck that plays into it and you should never forget that. You gotta thank the people who helped you. When you do it comes back to you tenfold.”

And, just like that, he politely thanks me and the interview is over. He’s off to film another scene for OnlyFans. Our interview lasted exactly 29 minutes and 59 seconds. Right on schedule. •

My parents are religious but the best kind – not judgemental. I wouldn’t have been able to achieve what I have without them.