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I paid the $25 entry fee and put my camera together. This in itself was an embarrassment to me—I suddenly felt like one of the thousands of fans, each sporting their own digital contraption to capture personal glory posing alongside their favorite porn star.
Strange I should feel awkward, given my career to date. But it was alien to me to be at this side of the show counter. Sure, I basically knew that all these guys were there for the same reason. But somehow, now I felt like a pervert—doing something I shouldn’t. Finally I had a sense of impropriety that seven years
of making porn films had failed to bestow upon me! It was bizarre.
The queues of guys of all ages—some with their, um, girlfriends—stretch for blocks. Pretty young pornstars grin and smile and pose with their adoring fans. The young stars are clogged with makeup, and sometimes [which is quintessentially porn] the black roots can be seen through bleached hair.
Everyone is smiling. And the dollars keep rolling in, here at the yearly Adult Expo in Las Vegas.
The screens at each stall play the latest offer. It’s the same ol’ same old: women getting fucked or playing with each other’s titties—utter excitement! Glancing around, I’m quickly reminded that “facials” [wherein a guy shoots his load over the face of his maiden] are still the staple diet of straight porn movies [usually another keen guy watches on and is simultaneously screwing her]. In straight porn movies, guys are always bearded and so plain-looking as not to warrant any attention from viewers. This is no coincidence. It plays to the macho majority in the Midwest who pay, in droves, for that sort of scene.
And they do pay in droves. Hollywood makes 400 films a year. The porn industry makes 10,000.
But if there are so many porn films made, who is buying all of them? xI decide to ask an expert. I consult Linda Williams, a film studies professor at the University of California in Berkeley. “Everyone,” she says. “It’s not just dirty old men watching.”
A recent University of Chicago survey found that 50% of people aged 18-29 have watched an x-rated film in the past year. The real percentage is surely higher, if only because a lot of embarrassed people lie about their porn use.
Clearly the academics have been looking at pornography lately. Porn, Williams reveals—that is, adult films, magazines, retail stores and a variety of online content—is a $10 billion industry in America alone.
The country that stays together prays together and buys porn together. Clearly, while America is busy arguing and feeling guilty, most people are buying and using pornography, and they’re quite happy about it.
How did we get here?
Suburban Pornographers
But before we get to Hollywood, cut for a moment to the other side of the world. Picture Highgate, a quaint little village near London, England.
If you’ve seen “The Avengers”—the old TV show—you can imagine Diana Rigg speeding up Highgate West Hill. This was where, over a six-year period in the 1990s, I produced soft-core porn—43 videos and 63 movies—for Prowler Press, the top UK producer of gay porn.
Themes for the titles included Euroboy, Steam, Prowl and Hunk—titles so obvious that no explanation is required whatsoever. But when I look back at a list of my films, they reflect what turned me on at the time.
How could they not? I mean, if someone was going to pay me to act out my fantasies with the cutest boys I could find, there was little I could do but enjoy it.
When I started in this work, as a teenager, I came up with a number of scenarios from which we would produce a film: Soccer Boys, Holiday Hard On, Squaddies, Detention—the list goes on.
What mattered was that the theme be common enough to facilitate the most enjoyment for the greatest number of people. It was pointless developing a theme only a few hundred people would get off on because we would never get our money back. And face it, we wanted profit. [Larry Flynt may not be our idol, but he’s made a lot of money from making a lot of guys cum. So that was our business model.]
Unfortunately the British market is not big enough to subdivide into too many genres of sex. If you were to make a gay SM movie where the protagonists are bearded, 40+, and wearing rubber and ropes, you would eliminate 99% of the British market. So my secret was to keep it sexy yet general: appeal to more people and you sell more tapes.
This economic reality of blandness is not new. In fact it’s the lifeblood of the porn industry. But it’s amazing how often you have to remind people who have a “great idea for a new gay porno” that it might be hard to sell anything very good.
But I did not leave the porn industry because my creativity was stilted. I left because I finally realized that if I was ever going to have any kind of normal relationship, I had to get out of the way of temptation.
That meant not having 20 cute twinks come into my office every week, drop their pants, flash me a big smile and get a woody. While it sounds just a terrific way to spend your work week, it meant that by the time I got home, I was either too horny to cook dinner, or so over the idea of sex that I just wanted to do something else. That’s no way to live for more than a very few years.
What does a porn office look like? Prowler Video had cute little offices above a realtor. So sweet, so suburban, so quaint: it was the most improbable porn office ever. You had to walk through people buying houses to get to our offices and when you got there, the layout was just like any other small business.
During my six years in the porn industry, I traveled all over Europe and the US working on films. And I was routinely in Los Angeles, where the porn industry looks just like it does in London. The American porn industry is mostly located in ordinary suburban buildings north of Los Angeles—could be a cute suburban bakery from the outside.
There was nothing remarkable about it. At parties when it came to introductions, I would be trapped into detailing the “ins and outs” of being a real live pornographer.
To me, of course, there was no novelty value.
But to a teacher or a bus driver or a shop keeper or office worker, I represented something else: the real live embodiment of their interest—coupled with fascination, lustful thoughts, and disgust. Yet—of all the strange things about porn—this high level of disgust and reprobation is the thing that surprises me most of all, since most porn is so boring.
How to Buck the Formula
A regular gay porn movie is a formula.
There will be at least six actors. Three or four of them are in their first-ever video. At least 5 scenes where various couplings of the cast screw each other. At the end there will be an orgy or three-way, resulting in some kind of action-packed climax. Sometimes there will be a “reunion fuck” at the end instead: the two guys who started the movie will return and finish the story in some romantic slosh.
One of my favorites is a video that ironically bucks The Formula. It is by Bel Ami Video and is called “101 Men Part 3.”
This video may cause the overthrow of the government. It only shows snippets—no longer than two or three minutes per model—of guys J/O and coming. Then the film moves on to the next model. Supposedly a sort of “test tape” to see which models are suitable for a “real” porno film, “101 Men” actually is better than the Formula Gay Porn Movie. Why? Because it is so much more real than a contrived plot line with actors who can’t act and whose one saving grace is that they’re big.
How do all these boring guys get in films anyway? That’s a complicated subject, but there are professors of pornography and courses in pornographic studies to help you figure it out. Can you imagine going to class at 9am and sitting down to a showing of “Deep Throat” or discussion of “Powertool”? There was an academic forum in Los Angeles called the World Pornography Forum, which in 1998 drew professors in fields including sociology, philosophy, English, and film.
But there’s not a lot to study, and it ain’t rocket science. The porn industry is a high-volume, lowest-common-denominator product with a standard set of rules.
“What I professionally think is sexy, isn’t exactly always what I think is sexy personally,” says porn producer Freddy Berkowitz. “Professionally, I always encourage our producers to feature ‘seduction’ rather than ‘coercion’ or ‘fantasy’ situations. Seducing someone can be easy or difficult, but sometimes it’s clever and that’s when I think you get people excited the most.” Freddy is the President of Video 10, a sizable Los Angeles porn production and distribution corporation. In his 30s, he is just about the nicest guy in the Los Angeles gay porn world.
And that is saying something, too, because 70% of porn is made in Los Angeles, and mostly in the whitebread northern suburbs of The LA Valley. The arteries from this central hub run throughout the western world in exactly the same way as mainstream Hollywood film genres.
Other than the subject matter, there is only one difference, and it is economic. Unlike Hollywood, the porn industry is nearly 100% straight-to-video.
That means its income comes entirely from video rentals and sales. Of course, there’s always internet sales, mail order, and cable TV licensing, but nearly all the money comes retail through video stores. So Freddy Berkowitz is the best Porn Video Professor of all. On the front lines, having to make money from this trade, he is in a strong position to know what sells and what doesn’t.
The Seduction
So I ask him.
“Seduction is witty repartee, coercion is sex consented under the threat of some punishment, even if it’s a traffic ticket or a bad grade in class, and fantasy is daydreams, dreams, voice-overs of past experiences,” he tells me. “Anyone can fantasize about having sex with the hunk standing next to you in the elevator, but watching someone figure out how to accomplish it in reality is more of a turn on. Sex with someone for money or just because you’re both in a sex club is easy sex and therefore not as sexy.”
“Sex in the bushes under the threat of discovery is hard, furtive sex, therefore much more exciting and adrenaline producing. Sex with someone you shouldn’t or never thought you could be having sex with is sexy—forbidden fruit—like your new boyfriend’s roommate, or the ‘straight trade’ cop, service man, repair man, athlete, boss.”
Fred has clear thoughts on the titles that will bring a sense of horniness to the viewer. Presumably these concepts will sell well from reviews and word-of-mouth marketing, so important in this market.
And then I realized: what he’s saying is bigger than that. Essentially, he is saying that the anti-porn campaigners actually increase sales, because by demonizing porn they make it taboo.
And taboo is part of the seduction. Taboo sells. A combination of “forbidden fruit” and “fantasy” are core conventions when planning a porno.
But what really sells is beauty. Biology makes us want to look at someone sexy on screen. No matter how “right” the script is, no amount of planning will make up for un-cute actors. It’s crucial is to find a look that viewers can identify with and feel sexy about.
How easy is that?
Making a porno is instinctive. To make people want to jack off, you have to give them something they can’t get anywhere else. What they see must be close enough to their own life so that there’s always a nagging thought that they could maybe bump into this guy at the mall or even behind the counter of the next AF store they visit.
In fact, that chance does exist. For example, Falcon Studios model Jeremy Penn was a Falcon porn model, than an Abercrombie model, then a Falcon porn model. And Jeremy Penn is hot.
But then, it’s not hard to choose models. I always tried to work with boys that, in some other context, I would have wanted to sleep with. In the 43 films I’ve directed through my twenties, there was a similar streak running through all of them. The guys always looked accessible [maybe that’s the wrong word] or at least approachable. I didn’t plaster the boys with make-up or put them in an unreal setting. It was vital that they were clean and tidy of course—everyone wants to look their best when they are about to be immortalized in the most compromising role of their career.
Boy-next-door was always the overriding perspective for me. I had learned the meaning of “boy-next-door” from Bel Ami Studio—sort of ironic since Bel Ami comes from Slovakia. But before returning to Eastern Europe to start his boy-next-door empire, Bel Ami trained at film school in California.
See what I mean about the tentacles of the LA porn industry? But back to our story. After returning to his native Bratislava, Bel Ami took advantage of the diet and lifestyle of the local young men and has turned many of them into household names. You are probably aware of Lukas Ridgeston and Johan Paulik.
I learned a lesson from Bel Ami. He realized he had a gold mine in his boys if he matched them up with a poorly served market in the US and Europe. The focus of the LA porn studios was to use the bigger, slightly older models. In this way they were largely assured of bypassing a watchful but unofficial censorship lobby in the US. But there remained younger viewers in the US, who weren’t being satisfied, and also the mass market in Europe where relatively younger stars had always been the focus of production volume.
Bel Ami filled this void. I would do the same.
The Fluffer
In its heyday, Prowler was the closest thing to a family-run suburban London gay porn business the world could offer. I tried to include my friends in what was going on. At least that way I was assured of them believing me when I’d come back from a shoot with another outrageous tale of salaciousness.
One job all my friends wanted was that of fluffer. A fluffer is, or was, a hot boy whose job it is, or was, to make the stars ready for action by turning them on.
Fluffing involved very little brainpower but a lot of suction and some nifty finger work. It was made redundant in the US by Pfizer’s invention of Viagra—now most porn stars use it.
Actually, until recently there was no need for a fluffer in the UK market, because erections were illegal there. Or specifically in porn. Her Majesty’s Finest had already decreed through the BBFC [British Board of Film Classification] that an angle of dangle greater than the Mull of Kintyre [see map on previous page] was not allowed to be shown to the subjects of Great Britain for fear of corruption.
That law was only rescinded in 1996. As the Prowler videos became more erect, we started to deal with the States, and then we needed the services of a fluffer much more. Viagra was difficult to obtain in the UK, so we obtained the services of the hottest guy in the village.
His name was Ian and he was happy to make out with the porn stars. “I had always had the impression that it would be fun to see what happens on a porn shoot just to watch and help out if necessary,” he says. “Little did I know! The filming took place on a sports field—all the boys taking part being roughly my age, and all wearing soccer uniforms. Simon had them run around kicking the ball. This was amusing, as none of them had a clue about soccer.”
“Anyway, this led to a shower scene and the guys seemed to do their jobs really well. Then there was this scene with two boys that took place in a house. One of the boys was cute, while the other—lets just say—was not to my taste. Everything was going fine, I was sitting on the stairs as they pretended to watch a match on the television, then they moved on to the stuff that happens in porn films.”
“At some point during a sex scene the cute boy still wasn’t um, up to his performance. He was apologizing to everyone and me being as I am, I asked if I could help. The cute guy’s face lit up, we went someplace and kissed and made out. As he headed down the stairs he said he would rather be doing the scene with me but as he couldn’t, he would imagine me instead.”
“Every time I think of that guy and what happened in that room I get a smile on my face,” Ian says. But making porn is always an adventure.
The porn is under the bear
While making porn I have traveled all over the world. Whatever you’ll say about porn, I can think of no other career where you get to travel to exotic islands and far-away countries, make movies with the sexiest boys in the world, and occasionally lead a life of intrigue just like a spy film. Sound good? It was. And that is only to imagine 10% of the stuff that really happened.
Sometimes filming abroad brought with it great adventure. First of all, it’s important to understand that I’m a very ordinary person. I have a very good relationship with my family, I went to a good college, I live in the suburbs with my boyfriend, and my life—like that of most pornographers—could not be described as unique in any way except that I made porn.
When these adventures were upon me, I had to be at my most confident and competent to cope with the vagaries of the project in hand. There were amazing journeys—like in Russia. We were held by the authorities in Minsk and then driven to Moscow in the back of a police captain’s off-duty car.
Why? He was trying to force us into filming his friends so that we would make a dramatically worse movie than planned—but he would get all our filming dollars. I suppose the right word for that is extortion. However, I didn’t have the option of turning up at the British Embassy and telling them, “Oh we’re just filming a porno over here and I think we’re being duped!” That’s not how that works.
Once, I was alone on a train crossing the Slovak-Hungarian border. The guards who patrolled the border were very keen to make an easy buck, and were on the lookout for anything they could extort. My boyfriend had given me his teddy-bear for the duration of my journey and I made a quick decision to put it at the top of my sports bag anticipating trouble.
This turned out to be a huge cash-saving decision. The guard came into my cabin, prodded my Teddy with his rifle and cast a look of total contempt in my direction. He left without even asking for my passport and carried on until he came across a man with a suitcase or someone with a few bags of shopping.
My heart must have been beating at nearly 200 beats a minute, for underneath the bear were two rolls of 70-millimeter hard-core porn and about $12,000. He would have surely stolen the money and arrested me to secure the film for himself.
I speak not out of some bizarre anti-Slovak racism, but from experience and in the knowledge that his job was difficult and surely underpaid. The temptation and risk in turning me over would have provided him with too much temptation. How I am grateful for that teddy bear.
I have no idea why I took that risk. I know I would never take it again. I had traveled already extensively in Eastern Europe and knew the “rules of the game” but somehow I was not going to be pushed around and, besides, I had heard it was a lovely journey and I wanted to finish Gore Vidal’s Palimpsest!
The porn world is exciting. Porn led me to famous people and cute boys in Budapest’s Gellert Sauna, a murder and secret trip round the Kremlin’s jewel room, Bondi Beach in Sydney and the sun island of Ibiza—all of which place we filmed. And I think I am lucky to have started this when I was a teenager.
The King Of Feet
Yes, I had one genuine actual advantage I had over many of my competitors. I was a contemporary of the models.
In fact, they were often older than me, and as such didn’t feel intimidated as they might have with someone older. I was often aware of this advantage, and I often made friends with models in order to create a happy shooting environment.
I thought I would approach someone in a similar position in his community. And so, between visiting with 69,000 of my closest porn friends at the glitzy Adult Expo in Las Vegas, I took a break in the bedroom community of La Mesa, Southern California.
I was there to visit the king of feet. Like me, Sean Bentz was in his 20s. He runs modelguys.com and run-away success, modelguysfeet.com.
Sean has been a serious model agent for a few years, so he always had a mob of cuties hanging around his suburban home. He hosted model evenings and tried to help out models by being a kind of “agony uncle” for some of their problems with drugs and other things.
One of the problems many of them had was that they never had any money. And that was how Sean Bentz became the king of feet.
Modelguysfeet is strangely innocent. It would be possible to argue that the images aren’t even pornographic at all—I mean, there is no nudity and everyone is wearing fabulous casual clothes.
So who looks at modelguysfeet and why? Sean—tall and modelesque, he could be in Vogue—is charming as ever. “Guys, I suppose. Maybe they find the pictures aesthetic and find beauty in my photographs.” Sean smiles.
Being somewhat more cynical—after all, I am British!—I personally suggest people enjoy jacking off while looking at beautiful boys’ feet. Economically, it is keeping Sean’s feet and a lot of cute boys’ feet up to their ankles in cash.
But who is a foot model, and why? Trailing around San Diego, I asked them. At least half of the models are straight and go on the site for the cash. They can sell their old socks and sneakers, and visitors who to the site pay good money for them.
While this idea is not new, I’ve never seen it done by someone who appears to have no sense of how horny it all is—for them, modelguysfeet is simply an amusing moneymaking venture.
The Unporn
Now you have to accept that I come from Europe, where there aren’t the American taboos about sex. But I was left wondering, why doesn’t modelguys.com go further than some nice shots and a little teasing? Surely if it’s porn the visitors want—why not give it to them? That way the site would certainly make more money.
Sean explained that he doesn’t feel comfortable with the concept of being a pornographer. Maybe it didn’t fit with the no drink or drugs policy that he enforces with religious zeal amongst his models. The truth is that Sean is a complex mix of a caring “mom” figure to his models, advocating abstinence as a way of life that suits him [if sometimes not them?] and a friend who is searching for answers amongst his posse. Meanwhile it seems to me that the models at least are in tune with their sexuality, which can’t be bad.
I spoke with Myke, a 21yo who describes himself as “a model—a standard, normal guy.” He graduated from high school and lives with friends in San Diego. I probed a little as to his alleged straightness and his answers left me in no doubt. A guy who enthuses so genuinely about which parts of a girl he likes, and who glazes over when he is talking fondly of the love of his life [a girl of course!] is decidedly hetero.
So having established his sexuality to my dissatisfaction, I delved into his motives. Myke is a real show-off and is rightly proud of his cute and tight body. He enjoys being the center of attention and can be a shade grumpy if not properly acknowledged. I notice though that he is totally at home in the presence of gay boys.
One of the cuties on Sean’s foot-model-books is young Jason, 16, who knows he is gay as much as Myke knows he is straight. Jason is a big fan of Myke and they are clearly close. As I ask Myke about his ambition of traveling to the peaceful Highlands of Scotland, I notice Jason curled and cuddled into the crisp, fresh and chiseled older model. Myke is masculine and warm and Jason looks so comfortable. As he chats away to me, Myke caresses little Jason’s feet, Jason looks on with admiration and more than a little love.
But why feet, though? While Jason and Myke carry on with their ersatz make-out session, I find Sean in another room and ask him if feet are his cup of tea.
“No,” he says. “I originally had a site called modelguys.com which had 6,000 unique hits a day but then I just began to get messages about the models’ feet and I thought it would be a fun thing to do.”
“In fact it’s nipples and underarms that get me going,” he says. “I don’t really get off on feet.”
Viral Marketing
The boys on the site are just gorgeous. They are simply beautiful. And as I head out of town, I think how calming their indeterminate sexuality was—strangely, it feels like progress in sorting out our societal sexuality. I don’t know if they are typical of what San Diego has to offer, but I suppose they are. Sean, Jason and Myke wowed me for sure.
I’m headed for the belly of the beast. Up in Los Angeles, it has long been a trade where, when models are no longer the flavor of the month, they need to find other ways to earn their way. One way is by currying favor with their old bosses, perhaps by turning their talents to rigging or editing, or even camerawork. This does not always pay off, as there is not always work available in a small production company to accommodate more than a couple of ex-porn stars at any time.
Some of them go it alone and make their own movies—after all it’s not rocket science and most of the boys have been around the industry long enough to have done all the networking required to give a new venture a fighting chance of making it. The vast majority slinks back into suburban “gayville” and remember with amusement their brief fifteen minutes of notoriety.
Drew Warner is a shining example of a young guy who worked the industry—first in Miami, then in LA—who, although never appearing himself, [he’s putting that right in 2002] worked behind the scenes as an assistant on many productions then decided it could be done better. He is now a studio owner and has developed an approach to commercial gay pornography, which may well become a model of how gay porn will operate in days to come.
These days it is no longer enough to pump out hot guys making out with other “hotties” in a series of well-molded scenes. As much as it pains me to say it, in the 21st Century, success in any market is about marketing communications.
So I went to see Drew in Hollywood. At his apartment-studio, he explained to me how his unique background in this industry as a business graduate has given him some key in-sights to succeeding where other start-ups regularly fail at the second movie.
Phrases like “viral-marketing,” “word-of-mouth,” “entry-tactics” and “e-business environment” roll off his tongue like he was born as a marketing executive. This is refreshing in a sector where simple push-pull economics have been the trading basics for decades.
Drew has only two full-time staffers: a graphic artist and a webmaster. Now it’s all about database management and web presence. The days when a review in Adult Video News [the industry bible] could make or break a new release are truly gone. These things are important, of course, But a new movie now will move about 1200 units in the first six months—down from 2500 five years ago.
The cream has gone out of porn budgets. It’s now the clever guys who are finding not just new income streams, but also new and cheaper ways of selling the product. It is the entrepreneurs who will take porn to new markets and succeed, while some of the dinosaurs growl and bow out to Palm Springs.
Drew Warner also brings a unique lifestyle choice to his work, because he actually lives in the studio where he shoots. [You can log on to his website, drewwarner.com, and see the action as it happens, in the raw.]
Walking into his studio, I am greeted with a long line of photos of some beautiful men who have starred in his work. In the main body of the well-lit and relaxed working area you notice that the all-white walls don’t quite reach to the ceiling. This whole place is moveable, I realize. His whole life is a set!
At the back there are four showers—side by side as you would see in a gym: lockers against the wall and a bench to get changed on. It’s not the Versace bathroom you might expect to see alongside the boudoir of an LA businessman. But here, it doesn’t look out of place. From a side door you can get to Drew’s “real” bedroom, a tidy and comfortable zone, off-limits to all but the closest companions.
To the right of the studio there is perhaps the most incongruous of scenes. Drew has built a sling fixed to the walls—a sling big enough for a guy to fit in and get fucked from every angle. And again, there is enough space for a camera to follow the action, even from above.
Drew edits his own work using digital editing software that has now become affordable, to the extent that almost anyone can take it up. Previously filmmaking was restricted to those who could justify the hardware investment, but ever-cheapening equipment gives him not only a cash advantage when he produces a movie, but allows him to put across his own style, something that a director can lose when he hands over his work to the editor.
How to attract jock models
Drew’s work has a style very similar to R&B music videos. Innovative and funky, he appeals to a younger audience of guys who have more sex than the traditional porn buyer. They are net-savvy, and able to sense they are being talked to by one of their own.
This younger market is getting more and more important. In fact, it seems to have become the mainstay of gay porn customers now, and even the “big boys” are trying to serve it.
Even Falcon—the grand-daddy of pornos, with 30 years of success on all kinds of models—has pretty much become a twink studio.
Falcon is in a glamorous high-tech development in South of Market, San Francisco. In fact, their upscale office could be a bustling dotcom office. But it’s not. It’s a porn studio.
Down a long hallway decorated in muted tones and designer furniture, I’m sitting in a room with Falcon’s promotions director Mark; their photo editor Burnie; and 100,000 slides of hot boys. After three decades of the hottest models ever [Billy Brandt, Joey Stefano, and Matthew Rush all come to mind] it’s a veritable hall of fame de porno.
Mark is a trendy young guy who just moved here from Dallas. I ask him who he thinks are the three biggest gay porn models ever. With some prodding from me—after all, he should be promoting this year’s Falcon models, rather than other people from the 1990s!—he names Joey Stefano, Ken Ryker, and Jeff Stryker: “Joey Stefano cause he was one of the prettiest boys in porn, Ken Ryker because he’s tall and blond and has a big dick, and well Jeff Stryker—well you know about Jeff Stryker!” He laughs.
There was a time in the 1990s when Jeff Stryker—he of the line “you like that big cock dontcha”—was bigger than big. He would attract thousands of people to his signings [including one set up by Mark in Dallas, which drew 1500 people]. But today, Mark says the biggest star is Matthew Rush, who is pretty well known as a young gay man in Ohio.
Matthew Rush is different from most Falcon models, says Mark—not just because of the simple fact of his ethnicity [African Aferican/ German], but, “just because he’s physically such a big boy. He’s six feet and 190 pounds of solid muscle.”
Plus, Mark explains, “he’s gay. Everyone just loves everything about him. He can draw a crowd. He’s a personal trainer, he’s a competitive bodybuilder, he’s out... He’s just got that star quality.”
Like the gay community, the porn industry has moved more and more toward Abercrombie-looking stars. JetSet 2000 Studios re-formed two years ago with the goal of tapping into this market for very boyish looking buff guys. This, if there is one, must be a key to porn success.
[JetSet’s Producer Dave Crowell sits, as expected, in a suburban office park in the LA Valley. “People would have no idea that these kinds of businesses are here,” he says.]
Dave says that when he joined Jetset two years ago, his goal was to attract college and high school jocks to do videos. “I wanted guys who could be viewed as hot people, but they’re real,” he says. But what makes them hot? “It’s more than looks. It’s their sensuality. The way they project themselves in person and on video. It’s a feeling that you have. It’s the way they project themselves in body language.”
Dave used to be a high school coach, so he has excellent rappor with the type of guys he attracts to his videos. “I just get along well with those guys,” he says. “So I just decided I would show them that it’s fun and that they can make an honest living this way. All I try to do is provide them with the opportunity to showcase themselves with body worship through the camera. I’m lucky to be able to show their talents.”
True to the type of model Dave says he’s been looking for, JetSet has released three volumes in its College Jocks series. Yet although it has the hottest young jock models, there is less straight-up sex in a JetSet video than you might expect. But JetSet’s marketing is based on the hotness of the models rather than what they do, which flexibility has allowed Dave to attract better models.
“You might not be ready to jump into a hardcore porn scene” he says, “so with some guys I just try to understand where they’re coming from. For example the college jocks series is a no fucking series.”
I look through a catalog of JetSet’s models. They are all extraordinarily beautiful, and Brett Mycles, for example, is breathtaking.
I begin to wonder why they aren’t all fashion models. Why isn’t there more crossover? After all, both the porn industry and the fashion industry feature hot young guys. Yet Falcon’s Mark Lock said he can’t recall any other crossovers—besides, of course, Falcon-cum-Abercrombie model Jeremy Penn.
JetSet’s Dave Crowell explains it to me: “Well, we have a lot of models who have appeared in fitness magazines,” he says. “But usually these guys are a little too physically big for Abercrombie and stuff. Although Abercrombie does have more of an athletic young look right now.”
Dave says the reason is that his models are “too good for the fashion industry lately.”
“If you look on tv, or in magazines, today there’s a look that’s kind of strung out on drugs and stuff. Our models look too good. That’s not a look that’s trendy now. Probably the only place that’s using really hot models now is Abercrombie.”
It is hard to feel sorry for Matthew Rush and Brett Mycles. But porn may be the only part of the entertainment industry that’s not too scared of their beauty to hire them.
Fat Convention
I had just hung out with some of the cutest and horniest boys on the planet, and now it was time to see what mainstream porn had to offer. was impressed wtih Sean, Drew, Dave and Mark and their efforts to introduce quality into a sector not known for its quality. But arriving back at the porn convention in Las Vegas, I realize: porn lust is not a concept lost on those developing the industry’s annual bash.
Like everything else in Las Vegas, the Adult Expo is absolutely massive. Of course, its website had warned me. “For four days the adult entertainment industry comes together under a single roof! The most comprehensive gathering of adult exhibitors, buyers and products in the United States! The show is the largest adult trade show of its kind in the world!”
It is sure a contrast to Falcon’s understated office or to Sean’s suburban posse. Today, the convention entrance sports huge 30-feet inflatable lube bottles on both sides. But that is not the first huge thing I notice. The huger thing today is the attendees. Massing around the various stalls are far more than the average percentage of obese people. I wondered whether these were people whose sex life revolved around fantasy much more than reality.
Now perhaps this was a jaded and jaundiced perspective maybe, but it was what I saw. And it did make me think about the role porn can play in some people’s lives. For some of us, perhaps, it is simply a fun addition to a normal sex or love life. But for some—perhaps those who find it difficult to strike up relationships or those disfigured by accident or even disabled by misfortune—well, these people may have a greater and genuine reliance on porn to provide them with the outlet that is common to all humans.
I tromped through booth after booth after booth—football fields of identikit porn—picking up enormous volumes of catalogs, leaflets, photos, flyers, and other marketing material until I could hardly walk. After six hours, I was hardly 1/5 of the way through the vast Las Vegas Convention Center. I began to philosophize. Doesn’t porn simply demand physical perfection? Doesn’t it adds to our shallow perspective when seeking our sexual partners? Yes it does. But that’s a market reality. Ugly don’t sell.
I eat another donut.
So does that leave us with—just a ten year span to model, or be sexy?
Of course not. I bumped into an elderly lady in black knickers, stockings, suspenders and the flimsiest of bras. Boy, was that a wake up call. She was shocking. I stood close by her, minding my own business, nonchalantly munching on another donut. I watched as groups of youths noticed her and berated her for looking as she did.
They shouted abuse and hollered at her appearance. I thought she was really brave. I couldn’t muster up the courage to enter into much of a conversation with her, but I did ask her what she was doing there. She cheerfully explained that she was there to promote her latest movie, “Granny Fucker 2.” Speech-less. It must sell or it wouldn’t exist.
Enough said.
The Granny
Granny was not the only new-style addition to the ever-expanding universe of porn. At mid day, there were still hordes of guys queuing to get into Adult Expo with their digital equipment.
They were all just one hour of material away from being able to release their own title, I mused. We can all be pornographers these days. Maybe that’s where the industry is going. Plus, the internet gives anyone a ready-made medium for distributing and broadcasting any material they want. And the internet—ruled by chaos and anarchy—can’t really be challenged by nanny-state governments.
If anyone wants to make something available to everyone, essentially they can. Chatroom marketing and online exposure can cheaply turn a new idea into a “brand,” an experience—or even a cult. If we accept that porn is there to serve our lust for carnal knowledge, then the next step may be for the industry to fragment dramatically as we each make and broadcast our own sex.
Pornography does have the makings of a hobby for the new millennium. It is something that participants can be over-the-top passionate about. They can perform, make and edit their own material and they can share their completed pieces with other similarly-minded followers of the art. Right now, a relatively small band of us have the requisite combination of computer, software, camera and connectivity and the ability that makes it all possible.
But not for long. The Las Vegas Expo made that fairly obvious.
The direction of the Expo, from year to year, must worry the traditional sellers of sleaze. As technology enables more of us to fulfill our fantasies and share them, sales of videos in adult stores must be falling off dramatically.
At the Expo, I visited the video retailers association—the VSDA. They were worried about the possibility of downloaded porn replacing the traditional revenue source for their retailers. Strange how people always resist the inevitable. Why bother? A better way would be to meet the challenge, and think of ways to join the revolution.
The benefits to the end user of this new technology are undeniable. When anonymity is so critical to many buyers, the home computer is the natural retailer of choice. In a few years, when broadband is the norm for the residential PC user, this will no longer mean logging on to a mail order site. It will mean simply logging on to a server, downloading the movie and moving on with whatever you were doing.
In the final analysis, this is what it’s all about. We want our porn to be personally relevant. We want it to be new, available where and when we want and as close to three-dimensional as possible. The online solution takes us a step closer. And our impending ability to make and broadcast our own material and fantasies takes us even closer.
The niches and the complexities of gay porn mean we will always need the mass producer. Plus, some people will always want someone else to handle the sexing of their sexuality. There remain many [and for the foreseeable future, there will be many] gay men who are not ready to challenge their sexuality in an everyday setting. But one thing is for sure. They will all still want to jack off.
The pornographers’ days are far from over.
—Simon Black
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