Most people fantasize about doing them. I’d rather be one of them.

Yes, one of my most recurring (so you know it’s good) playgrounds of sexual wish fulfillment is to have a twin. An evil twin as my devious doppelgänger who could detach protozoa-like from my own body and be the vessel into which I could house all the dark and disturbing facets of my personality that I’m not equipped to deal with, thus unburdening me of haunting division. Our sole demarcation? Hair color — that Hitchcockian cliché that distinguishes good from bad, virgin from whore. I would get to be the blond ingenue of the pair who walks in the light, and he’d be the brunet sex kitten driven by unhinged sociopathy and violent possessiveness of me. Then we take to seducing men by night and committing crimes for kicks, ultimately dying together rather than surrendering to the police in an exquisite fade to black.

I have a very elaborate inner world.

If gay twins have been on your mind recently, it’s understandable. With Bel Ami’s sensations The Peters Twins (opening image, middle), Elijah and Milo, arriving on the heels of The Visconti Triplets (left) and unabashedly going at it as they leave audiences slack-jawed and spur a serious debate about how-far-is-too-far in porn, curiosity — be it innocent or morbid — is making a name for them.

Incest is a not-heretofore-unexplored theme in porn — there have long been lecherous stepdads, seductive MILFs, kissin’ cousins, tarty sisters, and shag-happy brothers — but there’s a line between simulating a transgressive fantasy and actually depicting it. Even siblings working in adult films is notable but not unprecedented, and various fake brother pairings have been dreamed up to sell features. Real or not, sibling-themed porn provides enough of a tease to bring in the bucks but still treads the line carefully in not breaking a taboo (and correspondingly, the law, which delineates between marital and criminal incest but seems to become murky when the issue of consent between adult parties arises).

Twin-themed porn has been decidedly dicier and more inclined to flout (or at least casually push the boundaries of) the anathema nature of incest. The Christy Twins went the full penetrative route back in the late ’70s in a series of extant loops, but since then producers either became leery of duplicating their antics and/or struggled to find gay porn twins as game to go all out. Twins have been fairly common in print, which allows for a more static sexual tension, but feature-headlining ones are rarer.

The decades since have given us Gabriel and Oscar Peron — aka The Odyssey Twins (above, top left), two rod-inducing Kristen Bjorn discoveries in the form of bodybuilding bros Boris and Nicolai Otov (top right) and the gorgeous Carlos and Luis Mendez (bottom left), with latest additions to the scene being the nicely rugged Matthew and David Studding (bottom right). Most had or will have brief, one-shot flashes of fame and add a dash of novelty if little else to the standard porn scenario, their presences largely amounting to a suggestive vibe that the viewer can extrapolate on at will.

The most explicit team-up since The Christy Twins came in the form of Czech identicals Jirka and Karel Bartok (left), whose short filmography culminated in 2000′s Double Czech. Yup, one brother (candidly, I can’t differentiate them) plows into the other in a finale initially excised from original release prints. Of all the twin scenes I previewed in preparation for this piece, this would be the only scene I watched that comes remotely close to approximating the “disturbing” feeling Thomas Rogers experienced in his Salon.com chronicling of The Peters Twins phenom.

There was no troubling creep factor for me with other brother acts — maybe the ad nauseum linking of gay sex with every form of perversion has made me less hung up on normality — and the fact that I don’t find the Bartoks terribly attractive with their dearth of charisma and dead eyes as they robotically go through the motions might’ve killed it for me. It’s likely the staging that undercuts any real eroticism; it’s hard to be aroused as one brother takes it on his back with a too-placed child’s teddy bear (?) next to his head, and the fact that the tableau fades out with a glaring portrait of Mary and Baby Jesus on the wall had me laughing out loud. By contrast, the Mendez Brothers’ scene in Caribbean Beat is molten hot and the best of the lot I’d encountered to this point.

I’ll confess that I find the very existence of identical twins to be rather freakish at times. What should be one person splits into two in utero, and one can even “vanish” when it’s cannibalized by the other, remnants of it carried around in the survivor. The idea of two people being selfsame right down to their DNA, having a secret language, and sharing a preternatural awareness of each other’s thoughts and emotions has become a common trope in horror and suspense films, and no set of blue movie brothers comes as close to embodying a Dead Ringers-style pathological co-dependence than Keyon and Taleon Goffney (right).

Gay half of the duo Keyon was on the cusp of a mainstream modeling career, while straight, down-at-heel brother Taleon found gay porn to be his best option when the pair began starring together in several films for BlackMen.net in 2006. They also just happened to be the perpetrators of a series of rooftop burglaries enacted across three states (with their mother as lookout), and when law finally caught up with them in 2008, brother turned against brother as the heat rolled in. The weird eclipsing of identities evidenced here as one twin beckoned the other into their respective worlds of porn and crime to suit their own ends before they chose betrayal as their greatest self-interest warns of the danger of being too connected by fraternal ties.

With Eastern Europe having become a cost-effective gay porn hub, twins and multiples have become all the rage in the past few years. In addition to the Hungarian Visconti siblings and the Czech Richter and Peters Twins, the dusky Mangiatti Twins, Fabrizio and Fernando (top left), offered up a nice spate of efforts that didn’t have them go beyond kissing but still showcased their nice repertoire. With their cool, ethereal magnetism, lean builds, and concussed Hungarian line readings, these two are the pick of the lot in my mind. Watching one thrust away at a middleman while the other sucks his dick in one of their trademark moves — his face only inches away from his brother’s penetrating cock, has a heady eroticism that wasn’t lost on me.

As for Milo and Elijah, I find myself preferring the sultry Mangiattis (the Peters Boys are a bit too twee for my liking), but not flipping out over their antics. Much of the stigma from incest comes from the dread of its procreation — not an issue here — and it’s hard to see one forcing himself on the other in abusive scenario. I have doubts about how impromptu their much-hyped all-the-way encounter was, mainly because I don’t see a porn shoot being that spontaneous and I’m positive they had to be paid handsomely in advance. As for their claim of a romantic off-screen relationship that cost them their family, again, I’m not sure how much of that is drummed-up PR courtesy of Bel Ami.

The exact same claim was cheekily made by the Brazilian Carvalho Twins in 2008. I know I’m cynical, but I also don’t buy that all porn actresses are really into the ladies, nor am I convinced when a gay porn star claims to have been a mainstream actor overseas or a CEO over here. If they are really a couple — and from what I’ve seen, they do seem into it — my sole caveat would be: what happens when one’s eye begins to wander to someone else, and the intense closeness/psychological interdependence between the two for family, fame, and money becomes threatened? Can the uncanny duplicate state of twindom — twincest is often linked to onanism — that blurs into sex cause one side to lose himself in the other, so much so that one can’t exist without the other?

If The Parent Trap has taught me anything, it’s that Lord help the bitch who gets on the bad side of a pair of united twins.

© 2010, Shawn Baker. All rights reserved. Nightcharm.com