A sensitive, young guy in Jochen Hick’s excellent documentary, Cycles of Porn, sums up life in L.A. and its gay porn industry perfectly when he says “it’s all about the size of your dick and making sure everybody knows how big it is. And if it’s not a big dick it’s all about lying about it.”
This feature-length expose of the gay adult biz forms Part 2 of Hick’s Sex/Life in L.A. series (released this week as a double-disc set in the UK by Peccadillo Pictures and available on Amazon). The first movie follows some of the big names in gay erotica at the time, while the follow up documentary catches up with them and their mixed fortunes seven years later while examining how the internet has dramatically changed the sex industry in the intervening years.
While Hick’s ultimate conclusions that the gay porn industry isn’t glamorous and performers don’t make a fortune are hardly big revelations – this is an industry that will mercilessly drop a model and where addiction is never far way. But this turns into more a collection of personal stories and a reminder that even in an industry that completely objectifies people and strips away any individuality there is a whole spectrum of personalities working in front of the camera.
What I found particularly touching in Cycles of Porn was how it always comes back to family: for some of the performers in the movie, they might be washed up, rejected and ejected, but their family will always be there. Tragically, this isn’t the case for many gay porn models and where can these guys turn when it all goes sour?
The domestic scenes in the movie – particularly between 90′s porn star Matt Bradshaw and his sister – prevent this doc from being pure voyeurism and really show the human side of the story.
I hope Hicks revisits the theme again in the future. It’ll be interesting to see how the L.A. industry changes again. I recently mentioned a similar documentary feature that is currently doing the festival circuit. All Boys examines the even more ‘fluff-em-up, spit-em-out’ gay porn industry based in Prague, where ‘beautiful boys’ are constantly bused in from the countryside and you’ll likely get booted out of the ‘family house’ at 21.
There definitely seems to be more cross-over now between the adult biz and the mainstream gay movie industry, with performers like Brent Corrigan (Milk) and Jason Rush (Another Gay Movie) doing both. French model Francois Sagat has gone one better and was recently seen in Hollywood slasher movie Saw VI as ‘Male Addict’.
A gay movie coming to screens this Summer is an experiment in planting one foot firmly in both. L.A. Zombie, directed by Bruce LaBruce and again starring Sagat, will be released in both adult and non-adult versions.
Whatever the future holds for these movies and performers, one thing’s for certain: as Markku Heikkinen puts it in his documentary, All Boys, “humans have made pictures of nudity and sexuality as long as they’ve existed,” and this isn’t going to change any time soon.
