Jessica Bangkok

She grew up in Oakland, which already sets her apart from the Southern California pipeline most performers come through. The name Jessica Bangkok was always a kind of provocation — exotic-sounding, geographically vague, designed to signal something she technically isn't. She has addressed this directly in interviews rather than letting the assumption sit, which says something about how she prefers to manage her own narrative. She identifies publicly as multisexual, and that label showed up in her work — the lesbian nomination for Asian Eyes was considered one of the more genuinely charged performances in that cycle. The career took a strange turn when she landed a hosting role on SiriusXM's Radio Sex, which ended abruptly after she was fired for allowing a performer known to have had syphilis to have sex on air during the show. Debi Diamond and Nicki Hunter were caught in the same incident. It's the kind of story that doesn't appear in any award citation but tells you more about where her career went than the nominations do.