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August 3rd, 2011
Maybe I started to realize it during the spectacular rise and ridiculous fall of Jason Crystal, the gay-for-pay performer who adopted no less than a dozen aliases, at least three hair colors, and appeared on over twenty gay porn websites in less than one year, but if I ever had any doubt, this image (left) of Robert Axel and “Coach Daddy” is proof of something that a lot of us have been lamenting (or in my case–denying) since at least the start of this decade: Gay porn stars are dead.
To be sure, I’ve used the term “gay porn star” here in a lot of cases when I shouldn’t have, and I’ll no doubt continue to use it out of habit/laziness. But in some cases, it will be appropriate. There are exceptions. Those performers who have branded themselves and made a name for themselves not because they appeared on eight thousand websites but because of their consistent performances and their devoted fans and their undeniable physical appeal can call themselves stars (e.g., Brent Everett, Francois Sagat, Erik Rhodes); those performers who have anal sex with another man “for the first time” on an old couch on some set in the Valley can not.
But it’s not the aspiring “star” who killed the Gay Porn Star. After all, everyone deserves a chance to work and to try to become famous, and there has never been anything wrong with being a newcomer. What did kill the gay porn star? A lot of things.
It’s been the internet (illegal downloads, XTube) and the economy (producers paying literally anyone $300 to get fucked in a moving bus) that have helped the death of the gay porn star along. But at the same time, haven’t we helped, too? We get what we pay for. We keep the kind of porn that relies less on stars and more on niche content in business, don’t we? And at what point did we decide that certain types of men would be acceptable to masturbate to? Did our aesthetic change on its own, or did a collection of amateur porn producers gradually change it for us? Or, were we all just shallow before, masturbating to unrealistic and idealized versions of gay men, and over time we’ve become more accepting of and in turn stimulated by different body types–body types more like our own (which, in turn, makes us narcissists)?
It’s been over saturation. It’s been quantity over quality. By the time a larger, non-amateur studio signs a popular model to an “exclusive” contract, it’s as unremarkable as it is meaningless. For one, we’ve already seem him working for seven, eight, or thirteen other studios. He can now only work for one company, for six months? Big deal. And that’s assuming the contract is even honored or legitimate in the first place, which they often aren’t. Take Axel, for example, who one week was signed as an exclusive to
Falcon Studios and the next week was signed as an exclusive to Cocksure Men. While everyone was writing press releases, Axel was simultaneously filming bareback scenes with senior citizens on amateur sites. Oops.
Like Crystal and Axel, a lot of models have realized that they can make a lot of money (a lot of money for someone without formal job training or an education) in a short amount of time by filming for as many companies as they can, as fast as they can, before anyone catches on. In six months, a performer can film 50 scenes for 20 websites and maybe make $25,000, which is fine! There’s nothing wrong with that. But while these lightning round, assembly line style productions are great for well-hung grifters, they’re not going to cultivate any gay porn stars.
It’s been a lack of promotion. The rise of the gay porn star came when entire movies were centered around one individual performer. He was on the box cover (remember box covers?), he maybe made one public appearance at a bar once a year, he never bottomed because he was a top (or, he never topped because he was a bottom), and he never asked you to like him on Facebook. Now, instead of releasing movies, studios release scenes from a movie, once or twice a week. The lack of a cohesive whole and the glut of content doesn’t mean we still aren’t masturbating to, say, an individual Jesse Santana scene, but the fact that studios don’t market a movie using just one performer means that no one performer is given special, god-like status over another. Instead, studios spend more time marketing their websites, their membership options, the fact that their content is in HD, and that you can “download to own” all their scenes. Really? I can own something I paid for? Thanks. But why should a studio bother marketing an entire movie using one star when we’re not even buying movies anymore? The death of the gay porn star really is all our fault, isn’t it? It’s been us, the consumers.
Despite the death of the gay porn star, I have no reason to believe that people have stopped masturbating to gay porn. In fact, I think people are masturbating even more than they ever have before. But instead of spending two or three years masturbating to the same big-dicked muscle jock and eagerly waiting months in between each of his movies, we spend two to three weeks masturbating to some interchangeable person who just told us what he had for lunch on Twitter.
