LOS ANGELES – Trans erotica studio Grooby may be located in Tinseltown, but a big chunk of its heart is halfway across the country with Hurricane Harvey victims in Houston. The Category 4 storm struck the Texas Gulf Coast Aug. 25, dropping as much as 52 inches of rain in four days and leaving the fourth-largest city in the U.S. under floodwaters more than 10 feet deep. At least 38 people died.
Grooby has mounted an online fundraiser to help Houstonians put their lives back together. The company will donate to Harvey relief operations 100 percent of the revenue earned by TGirlTexas.com, a new site created specifically for the humanitarian effort.
“One hundred percent of the income will go directly to GlobalGiving,” owner Steven Grooby said. “That means for every $15 purchase, $15 will be donated.
TGirlTexas.com features 50 scenes of Texas-based Tgirls who appear across Grooby’s network of more than 30 membership websites. According to Grooby, studio staff volunteered their time and worked around the clock to produce the standalone site, which features Texan models. Surfers may choose from a range of donation amounts, and then receive unlimited access to the site, including downloads, for a one-time payment.
“There are many, many Grooby Girls who come from Texas and surrounding states, and it’s an area we’ve always worked in, with our first-ever shoots coming from Corpus Christi in 1996,” Grooby said. “[Photographer/videographer] Omar Wax works with many models there, and we want to do something that can get some money back into those communities that are suffering through this disaster.
“We went through the models across our sites from the past year or so from Texas, pulled out some great sets of them and decided to create this site as a fundraiser,” he said.
Grooby is working with GlobalGiving’s Hurricane Harvey Relief Fund to distribute the aid donations will provide.
“We decided on GlobalGiving as a charity that supports everyone, regardless of any labels,” he said. “Many of our models may not be directly affected, but their friends, families and neighbors may be and we want to reach the whole of society. We just hope that the little we raise can go some way to providing relief to those affected.”
