Deyci Alejandra Omaña Ortiz was sworn into Colombia’s Senate on July 20, representing Bogotá under the left-wing Historic Pact party. She is a former adult content creator and porn actress who ran on a platform of advocating for adult content creator rights, mental health services, and measures to prevent sexual abuse, and now she’s a senator.
“Why can’t a woman who was in the adult industry aspire to a popularly elected office?” she asked critics during her campaign. Ortiz proved that a woman like her doesn’t have to settle for aspiring to this: she can do it.
Growing up in Cúcuta, a Colombian city persistently marked by poverty led her to working in a nightclub by the time she was sixteen years old. She went on to work in the adult entertainment industry for two years before leaving after witnessing misconduct on a film set. Several actors contracted HIV during a shoot she was present for but did not participate in. She took that experience and turned it into a policy position.
“These women have been unprotected by the state because, due to misinformation, prejudice, and double standards, no one has declared it to regulate it,” she said in a campaign video, speaking about the women she had worked with. “My experience allowed me to understand inequality, the struggle for freedom and the popular economy, arguments that I now promise to bring directly into legislative debate.”
She’s not the first person to make the leap from adult entertainment to elected official. Ilona Staller served as a Member of the Italian Chamber of Deputies. Moana Pozzi ran for the Italian Parliament, and Alexandre Frota was elected as a Federal Deputy for São Paulo. This path isn’t unprecedented, but it is rare enough that each time it generates a lot of press coverage – and backlash.
Ortiz’s story goes beyond a personal narrative, though. She isn’t running as a reformed adult performer seeking redemption through public service. She is running as someone whose lived experience inside an unregulated industry gives her a specific and credible policy perspective that legislators without that experience don’t have. “The problem is that society consumes adult films but denies us the possibility of speaking in spaces of power,” she said. It’s the most concise explanation of the double standard in adult content policy that exists. The industry is legal, and the revenue is taxed, yet the people who do the work are systematically excluded from the rooms where decisions about their work are made.
Ortiz in the Colombian Senate is one version of the adult content and political power story, but there is potentially another version developing. Not with adult content creators getting into politics, but politicians getting into the creator economy.
George Santos, the former U.S Representative from New York who was expelled from Congress amidst a federal fraud indictment, launched an OnlyFans following his removal (notable because he allegedly spent campaign money on the platform). Stephen Bates, an Australian Parliament member and Greens LGBTIQA+ spokesperson, launched his own page specifically to announce a policy to make PrEP and PEP prescriptions free. Alexandra Hunt, a progressive congressional candidate in Pennsylvania, created an OnlyFans account during her 2022 primary as an unconventional fundraising and voter engagement strategy. And Miami-Dade commission candidate Martha Bueno used the platform to raise funds and make a point about conventional campaign finance.
None of these candidates used OnlyFans in a traditional way, but what connects them is the recognition that OnlyFans has cultural reach that conventional political infrastructure doesn’t. The platform’s built-in directness from creator to subscriber has value in political communication that hasn’t been fully explored yet.
The pipeline between political power and the adult content economy isn’t just moving in one direction. Whether that shifts how either institution treats the other will be the big question moving forward.