Lexington Steele

Clifton Britt (born November 28, 1969), better known as Lexington Steele, is an American pornographic actor, director and owner of Mercenary Motion Pictures and Black Viking Pictures Inc. He is the first actor to have won the AVN Male Performer of the Year Award three times.

Early life

Clifton Britt was born in New Jersey. After attending Morristown High School, he attended Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia for two years but graduated from Syracuse University's College of Arts and Sciences with a double degree in History and African-American studies in 1993.

Career

After graduating from Syracuse, Steele became a stock broker trainee at the brokerage firm of M S Farrell in 1993. Once he earned his Series 7 trading license he moved to Oppenheimer Financial in the World Trade Center. He has stated that he would have been in the buildings and been a victim of the September 11, 2001 attacks had he kept his old job as a stockbroker. In a 2015 interview in AVN magazine, Steele commented about his transition into the adult industry, "Once I was licensed, it opened the door to a whole new recreational side of the industry. The guy who trained me invited me to a party in a hotel suite, and it ended up being a sex party like the ones in [the film] Wolf of Wall Street. It wasn't long before a bigger director from Los Angeles gave me a job and suggested I attend the annual porn industry convention in Las Vegas...". With regard to his decision to switch careers and industries and in consideration for how lucrative securities trading can be, Steele stated, "I tell them it's not like I was already a master of the universe. I was working 12 to 14 hours six days a week. I made six figures, but my quality of life wasn't commensurate."