by Peter Berton

YNOT – Sammy Mancini knows shemales. He made his name as a producer of shemale adult movies, and won AVN Awards for his DVD work. But Mancini’s real claim to fame is the website ShemaleStrokers.com, one of the first transsexual sites to gain a devoted following for its online video content.

A staple in the online adult world today, at one time shemale websites were rare. When Mancini launched Shemale Strokers, the concept of a transsexual masturbation site was untested ground. Mancini decided to push the boundary, and he told YNOT.com all about the experience.

YNOT.com: How did Shemale Strokers come to be?
Sammy Mancini: I had a friend, Chimera Chase, who had been shooting transsexual porn for some time, so I was a little familiar with the genre. In 2002, my camera girl Mason left to start directing her own movies, so I hired Allenina, an Asian transsexual who had done some camera work for Ed Powers.

It came up in conversations with Allenina and Chimera that there weren’t any transsexual solo masturbations sites. I checked out the two leading TS sites at that time, Shemale Yum and Bob’s Tgirls, and noticed they mostly just had photo sets of the girls. So I thought there would be a market for a TS site that primarily featured movie clips as well as a DVDs of solo masturbation scenes.

Seeing as how I already had Allenina working for me, I asked her to be the first model, and I shot her doing a solo scene. After I had about five or six scenes [ready to go], I started the site Shemale Strokers and put out the first DVD of the same name through OGV.

What interests you about this niche?
A lot of straight men find transsexuals fascinating. I thought it would be something different and fun to do. I personally didn’t want to shoot sex scenes with transsexuals and men at that point, but the solo idea seemed interesting.

OGV incorrectly marketed the first DVD to the gay market, but for the most part gay men aren’t interested in she-males; they want other men. The transsexual market is mostly [composed of] straight men who like “women with something extra.” The more feminine and passable the transsexual is, the more popular she will be, but having a big cock and cum shot is just as important.

Are you using all original content?
Yes, we use only original content. For the first few years, I shot everything myself. Now I have someone else shooting about half of it for me in my style, plus we occasionally buy self-produced content, but only on an exclusive basis.

For a while we tried buying content from Brazil, but there’s so much of that out there that our members complained.

Where do you find your models?
Either from running ads on TS escort sites or from referrals from other girls, and sometimes male actors who like working with them.

What are the biggest challenges in promoting and selling the shemale niche?
When I started, there were only two other well known TS sites around, and they mostly did photos. I believe I was one of the first — if not the first — to offer primarily movies online, so the site became hugely popular very quickly.

It continued to grow until about three years ago, when the combination of 50 gazillion other TS sites, piracy and the tube sites started stealing content and members from us and the other legit TS sites. So now, the biggest challenge is trying to compete with “free.”

Where do you hope to go next with this site?
We hope that by continuing to provide high quality original content, we will be able to stay ahead of the competition. Even though there is so much free content available, we hope enough people will be willing to spend a few dollars a month to get a higher quality product, and therefore we’ll be able to stay profitable.