My friend A. sends me a YouTube video entitled “Dead Gay Porn Stars Memorial [Revised and Expanded Edition].” By turns, it makes me sad, nostalgic, grimacing at the sentimentality. Imagine the “In Memoriam” segment at the Academy Awards, but instead of two mostly-tasteful minutes, it’s a half-hour of dead porn stars’ headshots and sex-scene screencaps floating towards you through hazy lights, all set to the soundtrack from And the Band Played On. What would incite someone to make something like this?
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Here’s where I turn toward the camera, flashing an ingenue’s innocent smile. I’m probably not wearing a shirt and there isn’t much shade, this being the world of no snow in Hollywood no rain in California. I’m not supposed to do this, but because it’s the porn version of me, I take your hand and lead you inside, while the camera tracks quietly to the uncurtained window, watches us enter the room. It’s us in uniform. It’s us, but us in togas. It’s us, and one of us is undercover and the other is offering a vial of powder. It’s us until one of our friends accidentally opens the door and we strip him naked too. It’s a new beginning. It’s everything you never thought you wanted.
I am here to surprise you into a new story of yourself, like porn does.
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Porn is best when it approaches artifice, story. The towel boy screws up one too many times, so the teammates take out their frustration, at first by turns and then by frenzy. The prisoners reach the keys. The car breaks down and my boyfriend goes for help. The pizza comes. The intruder hides. The boss is cuffed. The pizza comes again.
I like art best when its artifice dissolves. Pull back the curtain: It’s me, looking sheepish. Which me is almost irrelevant: I’ll answer to any name you call. Surrendering is only erotic when what you’ve held inside too long has named you. Made you its shape.
Art is one body pushing into another body, saying feel this big dick of a feeling, red heart, feel this, whistle and smoke, feel this train entering a tunnel in the distance, feel this disappearing in the fog, feel this mist refusing to burn off of the field until nearly noon. It gets in you and in you and in you, and suddenly you’re the train and the field, the fog and the fade, the tunnel and the headlong rush.
Art keeps our bodies in danger. Porn keeps our bodies safe.
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Porn logics include the following:
If a man in a full-size gecko suit is in attendance, he’s getting laid in the suit.
A knock on the hotel door is usually answered by the scene bottom. Call it metaphor.
Frat parties, jail cells, boot camps, Bible studies, school rooms create architectures if not the languages of initiation.
Bathrooms and barrooms and backrooms and bushes: Gangbangs.
If there is a rope or a handcuff, it must be used by the fourth position change.
Punishment is a reward for desire.
I have never seen a man in a full-size gecko suit in gay porn.
If a man is wearing glasses, they either come off or receive ejaculate.
It’s your husband, it’s your birthday, but still the intruder wears a condom in the coercion fantasy.
The wife won’t see over the kitchen counter as the neighbor guy sucks her husband’s dick. She will ask about calling a plumber as the husband slaps his cock on the outstretched neighbor’s tongue. Call it metaphor.
Mormons are hotter than Catholics.
Satanists are always down for a candlelit orgy.
If Jesus appears, he’s getting his feet and his balls washed.
Someone will always eat the cum.
Someone will slap the face and say: “Good boy.”
If there is a doghouse, the last shot will be a well-fucked ass retreating into it, pausing to wiggle it twice, signaling joy, before disappearing into protective darkness.
Porn is sexiest when it defies logic.
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In Crash of the Titans, Blue Blake’s narrator is a true-crime investigator who talks directly to the camera. His scenes are shot outside at night, just his half-lit face framed against an impenetrable backdrop of trees. As he talks, the cicadas are thick in song behind him.
The titular Titans are two brothers, Tony and Vincenzo, as impossibly rich and powerful as they are muscle-bound. “Whilst out on the town one night,” Blake tells us, setting up the movie’s fourth scene, “the two brothers picked up notorious party boy Rocky Lorenzi. This,” he continues, “was the beginning of the end.”
“Cool pad!” Rocky says, entering the living room, followed by Vinny and Tony. The slumping brown couch frowns. The sad sconces on the wall wince and dim.
Rocky began starring in gay porn around 2001; Crash of the Titans was released that same year. This is one of his first films. Rocky died five years later, in 2006, from lymphoma. He’d been HIV-positive for three years; he was twenty-six years old. His manager, the uberslimy David Forest, described him as a sweet guy with an insatiable meth habit.
In the movie, Vinny Titan produces a ridiculously large bag filled with white powder. “Do you like to party?” he asks Rocky. And as happens in film, the next thing we see is Rocky on all fours on the hardwood floors, writhing naked, ass up, presenting himself for the brothers who are lounging in their underwear on the couch, tanned gods in bright white jockeys. Their cocks are half out, ringed still in purity. Rocky slides his hand over his ass, spreading and shaking it, fingers playing in the hairy crack. He looks back, smiles knowingly. He takes control by surrendering.
The scene ends with an image of Rocky, dressed again in his tank and shorts, the fly slightly undone. He’s lying half on, half off the couch, his head towards the floor. The bag of coke in his hand, white dust coating the entrance to one nostril. The camera closes in on his face, eyes open. Rocky’s beautiful face is immobile. Mouth spilling open into cave. Blake breaks in: “Panicking, they disposed of the body. Nobody knows where.”
The cicadas you hear are the males flexing the tymbals in their hollow abdomens. Maybe not the best, but the most urgent music is made by emptiness. This is their mating call, made by the males who chorus then mate in clusters. One big bug gangbang.
Do I have to say it? After they fertilize the eggs, the men die.
I wonder if they would sing so fervently if they knew what it provoked.
I think I know they would.
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I couldn’t have done it without you, Mr. Mid-Atlantic Leather 1998 Tony Mills writes, autographing a black=and-white promotional poster. It isn’t a photograph of him, but instead of some hunky-handlebar-mustachioed Tom of Finland fucktrucker. A graphic. A cartoon. All my love.
It’s easy to miss the poster, unless you’re waiting to buy poppers in the—what to call it? gift shop?—inside the Ramrod Fort Lauderdale, and you’re leaning on the wall trying not to look bored, waiting for the attendant to come back from break.
Tony Mills starred in Colt Studios porn videos for a year or two, en route to Chicago in 1998, where he went on to win International Mr. Leather. In his press conference the next day, he disclosed his HIV-positive status.
It was almost the year 2000—four years after the world was introduced to protease inhibitors, and three after AIDS was no longer the leading cause of death among young American adults—and some porn-star leatherdaddy disclosing he was HIV-positive was still news.
Mills in 1999 says: “Sometimes, I’m almost glad when things look really bleak. Because I’ve been through these times before and I know it means that God is about to draw me back to him again.”
That doesn’t sound like God to me. That sounds like a virus and its host.
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Dirty Bluesky replaced dirty Twitter replaced dirty Tumblr; Tumblr dethroned Xtube; Xtube replaced video stores; video stores replaced porn magazines. Scrolling replaced flipping replaced drawings during science class.
In my teenage bed, I hold the newspaper in one hand. I liked the underwear models, reeking of ink. I liked I could smell an otherworldliness in them, I liked filling my nostrils with what rendered them visible to me. I liked especially those Sundays the paper came serrated. Jerking off with one hand while the other felt the newspaper’s flimsy deckled edge.
In college, I left fingerprints on the glossy International Male catalogues—you could tell just from my thumbprints which of the underwear models most invited my desire.
Then the videotapes I purchased: so used,to being paused, stopped, forced to rewind, then to struggle onward in time. The tape as well worn as grass in a park’s desire path. The sound of panting slowed, drawn out. Fuchsia lines tracking up from the bottom of the screen, blurring the actors until the tape catches itself again.
Every wanting leaves evidence. So maybe it’s moral if desire’s practice has at its center some small sorrow that accompanies its success.
If porn survives the cage of its making, it is because desire has an endless wardrobe, will take all forms. Maybe this time it can be beautiful, guiltless. Won’t leave traces of itself, some salt or stain, some sweat or strain. Doesn’t a medium try to prove: In capturing is our salvation?
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The advertisements compel you.
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After Milan has had his way with you, clean him up with mild soap and water. Make sure he’s completely dry before storing, so he’ll be ready to go for your next anal adventure.
Order now: The dicks of the dead. Hold them in your throat. Clench and unclench them with the muscles of your ass. Never let them go.
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Porn exists in lyric time; it takes place in constant, rewindable, perusable present tense. The way memory and art do. The memories I have of Brandon, my first boyfriend, are a movie I return to. Hit play, and hope that somewhere in the mess I will be able to warn the actors; somewhere, I will be able to parse the scene; some part of this will make better, or at least less sad, sense.
Sometimes now I search the internet for Brandon, but there is never any information. It leaves me unsatisfied. His presence is an absence. He is a fantasy made with a real body.
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Max Grand is the first porn star I ever fell in—what should I call it?–love? obsession?—with. In 2003, when I meet Brandon at Lobo’s Bookstore in Houston, I’d created a Google alert set for Max Grand’s name. Brandon’s and my first fight was about porn—how it felt like unfaithfulness to him. Brandon didn’t look anything like Max Grand.
At the time, I gleaned all the information on Max Grand that the internet posts. Collected, collaged it back into perpetual present tense, the only time that the internet knows: Here is a link to his ad on Craig’s List (Los Angeles) posted twenty minutes ago. Max Grand is twenty-two in 1992 and twenty-two in 2002 and twenty-two in 2022. Another man types: This is in Century City, maybe 5-6 years ago, but the post is undated, which is the difference between nostalgia and history.
But the real-life sightings do something different: Put the soul back into the body back into the world. There are sightings in Orlando, New York City, so many California cities: I meet Max Grand coming out of a Kenneth Cole with, I assume, the boyfriend. Max Grand kisses like a dream! You can hire Max Grand at MuscleService.com but he isn’t looking as trim. When I meet him for a session in DC he gives great head. Max Grand told me his real name was Rene in a West Hollywood sauna in 2011. Rene was born in El Salvador on July 5, which makes Max Grand a Cancerian. His real last name is Grandos. Max Grand is a clerk at Walgreens in San Francisco. I hope Max Grand will look my way, but to this day he never has.
Max Grand even appears in a book—he is the writer Wayne Koestenbaum’s favorite porn star, and Wayne publishes Grand’s pager number in an essay that says he has a “lovely speaking voice.”
One day, after five years and love and loans and fucking and fights that are petty and peculiar, all the meaningfulness of what tethered Brandon and me suddenly evacuates. The floor falls out. The we we are breaks into constituent parts. It’s like a movie in which I am just the hotel rooms, the U-Haul that a man rented to get from Houston to Pennsylvania, and from Pennsylvania back to Texas. When Brandon leaves, he abandons books and clothes and porn magazines in our apartment. I find a photo of a young Brandon—three or four years old, blowing out the candles on his birthday cake. I mail it to a mutual friend because I cannot bear to put him in the trash. That is the difference between history and nostalgia.
The way to Pennsylvania is not the way back from Pennsylvania.
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My first teaching job out of grad school was at a small, religiously-affiliated liberal arts college in West Virginia. One semester, my English Comp class was comprised entirely of young men. The first class day, I asked each of them to tell me where he was from, his birthday, his favorite book or movie. The last young man scoffed when it was his turn. “Why don’t you ask me my favorite porn star?”
“Ok,” I said. “Who’s your favorite porn star?”
“Jenna Jameson,” he said, laughing. “Do you even know who that is?”
As I fixed my tie, he asked, “So who’s yours?”
“Your mother.”
The next day, I don’t want to tell you, I apologized.
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In the straight-bait videos, the “known homosexual” plays up his gay voice, made by some combination of puckering lips, sibilant s’s, higher intonation.
“I could tell you wanted it,” Supposedly Straight Star says. A sexy sequence ensues:
Summer’s softball Sundays. Swing, strike. Swagger. Straight studs slap spiritedly. Sweat. Shower. Stubble scrapes skin. Sizable specimen. Squeeze. Spread. Suck. Salt, slightly sour. Somehow spiritual. Swallow.
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Sometimes I can still hear the voice of Jon Vincent, smooth-chested Italian top daddy supreme, telling Danny Sommers, Open your mouth, directing Danny’s mouth to parts of his body, commanding, Lick. Just lick. His voice breathy, taunting the supplicant. Gruff tenderness and a knowing patience made for a heady mix of what I can only say is self-assured dominance. It makes Danny hungrier, denied, his eyes darting and seemingly glued to Vincent’s crotch, even while his focus is on Vincent’s cave of shaved armpit Danny’s tonguing.
Desire says rush, please. Offer yourself, enter abandon. But Jon Vincent’s voice says: There’s work to be done. Now beg. Now worship what you’d like to destroy you.*
Once, riding home from a bar where I’d met a guy and his boyfriend, the boyfriend in the back seat with me put his hand on the nape of my neck. He squeezed gently, then rubbed with the palm of his hand. Who knows why I can still feel his hand, the heat of it, the weight, gentle but irrefutable as an answer to a question I couldn’t ask. I didn’t bend away. I tried to act normal, as if the moment had not changed me utterly. The car sped into a night in which this innocuous massage was the most intimate thing that happened.
What else do we call this archive of how our queer bodies meant to each other?
Everything unfurls. We get to keep so little. A hand, the heat of it on the back of a neck. Jon Vincent’s voice. Clarity ringing its bells on a morning clouded with regrets.
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* Is it destruction?
* A body enters a temple and it becomes a question.
* I mean the temple. But yes, the body too.
* A question is destroyed by its answer.
* Only if it’s a bad question.
* Desire is a question that persists.
* Desire is not just immortal,
* it is immortality. Danny Sommers
* grins, so satisfied, bent over
* a coffee table, getting fucked. The hand
* of god moves over the waters.
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James Allen Hall is the author of a book of lyric essays I Liked You Better Before I Knew You So Well, which won the Cleveland State Poetry Center Essay Collection Award and was published in 2017. They are also the author of two book of poems: Now You’re the Enemy (University of Arkansas, 2008) and Romantic Comedy (Four Way Books, 2023). They are the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment of the Arts, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Maryland State Arts Council. Recent essays have appeared in Copper Nickel and Bennington Review. Along with poet Aaron Smith, James cohosts Breaking Form: A Poetry and Culture Podcast.
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Originally from New York City, Robert Bharda has resided in the Pacific Northwest where for 40 years he has specialized in vintage photographica as a profession, everything from daguerreotypes to polaroids. His digital ‘Quantisms’ originate from templates composed of all organic materials (mushrooms, leaves, flowers, seashells, et al) and seek to release dynamic motion from fractal potential. His illustrations/artwork/photography have appeared in scores of publications, including: Naugatuck River Review, Catamaran, Cirque, Northwest Review, Blue Five, Superstition and Adirondack Review. He is also a writer of poetry, fiction, critical reviews published in one hundred plus journals and anthologies.
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