Hey everyone, Marco here! During Folsom Europe 2022 in Berlin I had the distinct pleasure to moderate a panel on online sexwork at the Mister B stage. You can watch that panel here. WINGS thought it might be interesting and fun to get a little bit more in-depth with our sexy panellists. This week I’m catching up with fetish content creator and dom top dreamboat Leo Rush (he/him) from Birmingham.
Face-to-face interviews are a luxury these days, with video calls being the norm. Fortunately for me Leo Rush was visiting my hometown Amsterdam for a holiday (and some spontaneous on the spot content creation) so we actually met up in person. We sat down at an overcrowded Coffee Company in the heart of the city for an interview that covered a range of topics; from finding out who you truly are as a person, to slip-sliding on a sea of lube while shooting a fisting scene. It might be important/amusing to note that we are both diagnosed with ADHD, which basically meant we were overly loud, too enthusiastic and we didn’t hold anything back. It was quite the spectacle for the people sitting next to us, who couldn’t help but eavesdrop. They seemed to be entertained though, and I hope you will be as well!
Leo, what’s the best thing about being an online sex worker/fetish content creator?
“The freedom to express myself in whatever way I want. Yes, I have a template and a style, but those constantly evolve and I don’t need to conform to anything. I can work on my own schedule and with ADHD that’s an absolute godsend, because some days I’m super focused and I can do a whole week’s worth of work, and on other days I’m not able to do anything.”
Life with ADHD can be a struggle.
“Yeah, you can get trapped in a bubble of being unable to function. I find the less I think about what I’m going to create and how it might be perceived, the more incredible the content will turn out to be – plus it’s received so much better. That’s the cool thing about being an online content creator. When you have ADHD you also tend to need feedback, rather sooner than later. Whenever I make something, I need a reward – that dopamine kick that motivates me to keep going. I expect feedback when I put something online. Once I get it, I know I’ve done a good job.”
And what happens when you don’t get any feedback? Do you throw a tantrum?
“No, when I don’t get enough likes or retweets, or when it just doesn’t land right, I fire myself up to make more stuff (laughs).”
What has been your favorite moment filming content?
“You can’t ask me that; I shoot with so many people! There’s this one scene that I’m super, super proud of. We were filming in London in a proper playroom with a bondage wheel. We started at 7 pm and we had been filming for hours and hours, almost non-stop; we should have been absolutely knackered. As the scene progressed I got completely lost in the moment. It was probably the first time that that had happened to me during filming. I put this lad on the bondage wheel, punched and candled him to hell (editor’s note: ‘candled’ as in wax play), and then I got him on the floor on all fours. I locked his head between the bars of a cage and beat his ass with a bat. We moved on to heavy oral with some intense verbal. Then all of a sudden he collapsed back on the floor and I didn’t give a shit – completely in dom headspace. I saw from the corner of my eye that the camera guy was wondering if he was alright. I went up to the sub, crouched over him, he grabbed my arm and said ‘You’ve broken me!’ And I was like, cool, my job here is done, I’m gonna die a happy man now (he says with a voice that is a mix between sounding proud and being cheeky)!”
Which was probably his mind state as well.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. He was like, put the wood of the casket around me and just lower me down (laughs). Another fun moment happened when I was filming with RubberP1gs (you can read more on them here). We were doing this massive fisting scene that had been going on for a long time. So, I’m there with all this lube, arm going in, arm going in, arm going in, and this concrete floor is getting more and more covered in five or six pints of lube. I felt like Bambi on ice. The cameras were rolling and while I was plunging in my arm deep I felt my feet lose their grip on the floor. I was dancing and sliding around for minutes, thinking, this isn’t sexy, I need to recover. At the same time I was worried that I was going to go face down, pulling him with me by his ass. It was kinda hilarious.”
I once called Master Giacon the Prince Charming of BDSM in an interview, but it might be time to pass that crown on to you with that little Walt Disney moment you had going on there (laughs).
“The Prince Charming of Domination… that’s a really cool title. I need the branded gear for that; T-shirts, lapel pins, everything.”
What’s the worst thing that has happened to you while shooting a scene?
“There have been a few! There was this one scene that I was really nervous about at the time because I didn’t know what the hell I was doing, but in the end it turned out really well. I never had done any heavy bondage, but I thought, fuck it, let’s do this! I was filming with a sub lad who wanted to be fully hooded and restrained. I’m massively into eye contact, which felt like it was going to be a struggle for me because he wanted his eyes completely covered. I convinced him to wear a hood with removable eye pieces. I rubbered him up, put him into a rubber straightjacket and attached him to a wall with a million chains. Meanwhile I was trying to figure out what I was going to do with him as I’m used to my subs being mobile. I was staring at him, thinking, maybe I should just clean up the dungeon? Am I going to do this moody pace around him; make him feel my presence? By that time the camera was already rolling. So, I just started punching him, which seemed to do the trick. I eventually crushed him against the wall with my body. Pushing him to an inch of a breaking point; thinking, if I hear a rib cracking I’ll be content. For twenty minutes I put him through his paces, knocking the wind out of him, slowly binding his mouth and eyes, bringing him tighter to the wall. I remember doing the edit for the video and hating it. I cut a trailer from the footage, felt nervous about sharing it online, but it became one of my most retweeted posts ever. To this day, I still don’t understand how that happened.”
You made your worst moment work.
“Yeah! Everyone fucking loved it! It was insane, and it gave me the confidence to run with my instincts even if its new territory.”
You legally changed your name to Leo Rush. Why did you decide to say goodbye to your former identity? And in what way has becoming Leo Rush changed you?
“Back when lockdown happened and everyone went nuts or got depressed, I suddenly had the time to focus on myself and I loved it. I tackled a lot of negative perceptions that I had of myself, I started working out hard again, began to see my ADHD as something positive and I learned how to control it more. My upbringing wasn’t that great, there was abuse involved, and it left me with a really bad self-image. During lockdown I managed to undo years of trauma. I adopted the stage name Leo Rush and started making content because I was looking really good, but whenever I got positive feedback I still couldn’t quite accept it.”
That sounds like a case of imposter syndrome. A lot of people with ADHD experience that feeling.
“Massively! Leo Rush is strong, handsome, charming, and an excellent dom. At the same time I realized that I wasn’t like that 24/7, until I finally realized that I was. It felt like Jack – which is my original name – was who I had to be, but Leo was who I always should have been if all those bad things in my life hadn’t happened. I thought, I only get one go round in life, we only get one spin at this, and I kinda wanna live every day as Leo Rush. Not as a form of escapism, but because it’s who I am. It’s cool, and a bit weird. Someone recently said to me ‘Isn’t the point of a stage name that it protects your true identity?’ And I was like, yeah, I kinda fucked that up, didn’t I?!”
What are three kinks that everyone should try out in your opinion?
“Sub-dom-dynamics. It doesn’t matter which side you are on; both bring extreme freedom. As a sub you can completely lose yourself in having no control and being totally fine with that. We all manage so many different things constantly, so, to be able to go ‘I don’t even want to be in charge of if I’m breathing or not the next twenty minutes or more’ is freeing. Or the opposite; you’re the dom and it’s your choice whether they’re going to take their next breath or not, or if they’re permitted to move. Taking on the heavy responsibility involved in complete control is a real rush when it’s executed well. People get scared by the depths of it. They find it too hardcore. It’s not like you walk into a room and put someone in the hardest scene you can imagine right away. It’s a slow and gradual process.”
What are the other two kinks you advise our readers to try out?
“Pain is number two. Any kind of pain. Pain comes in a massive spectrum. There’s energetic and playful pain caused by punching, kicking and slapping, which is quite engaging and you both can get that blood rush going a little. And then there’s this controlled, measured pain that you get from flogging and spanking. Again, it’s a process, and it’s a logical journey that you go through. It releases something so deep down for all parties involved when done right. Number three is sensory deprivation, whether it’s covering eyes, ears, the mouth, or all of them simultaneously; it just heightens every other sense and it helps to transport you from the ‘real world’. I sometimes pop on a hood when I’m fucking. The sensation of hammering away at a sub until I’m about to collapse – not able to hear and see – is insane.”
That reminds me of that philosophical thought experiment… if you’re in a forest screaming and there’s no one there to hear you, are you actually screaming (laughs)?
“Isn’t it more like, if a tree falls down in a forest and no one is around to hear it? Yours is somehow about murder. It says a lot about your character (laughs)!
Is there anything that you’ve been thinking about lately that you would like to share with our readers?
“There’s one thing, which is almost a constant conversation in my mind; a topic that’s very polarizing. It would be nice if kink and fetish could be normalized, in the same way that drag for example has gone mainstream over the last decade or so. You can’t always express your love for kink, or your interest in it. When you’re a gamer you can wear a Mario Kart T-shirt and no one bats an eyelid. But if I was to wear a Tom of Finland top and some leather arm bands to a family event, like a birthday, people would judge me massively. Even in the content creation world there are many big names that don’t want to work with people who are kinky or into fetish. It doesn’t fit with their ‘clean’ model. Normalizing kink might water down the experience in some people’s eyes, but I would completely and utterly love to be able to live my life unfettered in every which way. Just imagine watching a big name kinkster on a prime time TV-show, and that your mom sees it and goes ‘Oh yeah, that’s that famous leather daddy, I loooove him!’”
Follow Leo Rush on Twitter and Instagram @theleorush, and make sure to subscribe to him on the following platforms:
https://justfor.fans/theleorush (The Hardcore Sessions)
https://onlyfans.com/leorush (The Lighter Sessions)
Check out the Wings Talks Panel at Folsom right here:
