Faulty Towers?: Probing The Plight of A Porno Pariah

Porno tomes.

I love them, and my bookshelf houses such tell-alls as Christy Canyon‘s Lights, Camera Sex!, A Thousand & One Night Stands: The Life of Jon Vincent, Traci Lords: Underneath It All, John Holmes: A Life Measured In Inches, Wonder Bread & Ecstasy: The Life and Death of Joey Stefano, Blue Blake‘s Out of the Blue: Confessions of an Unlikely Porn Star, and Boy in the Sand: Casey Donovan, All-American Sex Star.

I know on a superficial level that it’s trivial and voyeuristic to have a fascination with porn stars, but on a deeper one I’ll confess that I find them strangely compelling. They are after all sort of willing freaks in society; even the most with-it of us are conflicted about sex — afraid of what we want, afraid of how much we want it, afraid that no one can give it to us — and so they provide us with a by-proxy catharthis. In a world without disease, emotional entanglements, or taboos, I’d probably be doing everything I see onscreen, but what holds me back is absent for them. That shame valve just wasn’t included in their designs.

I wonder what the confluence of events is that leads someone I could know to do porn. Are they all born exhibitionists, or do they have borderline personalities that need to push limits further and further? What’s the precise dollar amount that gets a father and son to jerk off on camera or to double team the same woman? At what point does cash override your own health and dignity as you decide to go condomless?

My latest addition? Victim of Pleasure: From Frank Towers To Mark Slade.

I like the Lifetime Movie-ish title, and Mark Slade is actually a significant figure for me. I remember seeing him in Playing With Fire 2 just as I was discovering porn at the tail end of the ’90s. I liked his sunny, Captain America quality, his linebacker build — ye gods, you could suffocate in that rack — and the whole cartoonishly blocky aesthetic. Gay porn stars tend to seem super-slick and hard-edged, but Slade came off as more gentle giant.

Affable to the point of being almost goofy, aw-shucks square, and seeming corruptible instead of corrupted, he would smile with dopey sincerity while getting serviced and had that air of a corn-fed dish just off the bus who’d been convinced to do dirty movies — a cliché usually associated with young female starlets. A guy who proclaims “Gosh! That’s tight!” while working over an ass has a certain charm, and Slade played as both pleasingly dominant and boyishly awkward in his repertoire, a hard combination to effectively pull off.

It took me some time to catch on that Slade was also Frank Towers, employed on the hetero side of the biz since mid-decade and a member of the new wave of hot straight male stars who all had cross-demographic appeal. His defection into gay features caused quite the industry hubbub; it’s not uncommon for straight male performers to be promoted from gay porn early on in their careers — stalwarts like Peter North and Jamie Gillis were gay for pay early on — but straddling the fence for established performers is curiously stigmatized. Apparently, you don’t look back, much more play both ends against the middle. Jeff Stryker had the clout to do it and I know of a handful of contemporary stars who managed to get drafted for both teams under dueling noms de porn. Still, the existence of a Lex Baldwin shows how puritanically stratified porn really is, and Slade/Towers admits to being blissfully ignorant of that reality.

His story manages to be stereotypical and unique all at once, mainly because I found myself associating many of his travails with how a female star might reconcile herself with wayward womanhood. Born into a devoutly religious — and unusually matriarchal — family, Towers seemed to be ill-equipped for too-staid good-boy wholesomeness, this despite the fact that he physically embodied it.

Aspects of his ingress into porn are virtually textbook: a lifelong ken for bodybuilding and muscle man worship, a chance meeting with a stripper who got him in the door at an adult production company, his struggles with faith, a wide-eyed enthusiasm for a gig that let him bang hot chicks for cash, the false security that no one would find out about his new endeavor, a very minor career on the outskirts of mainstream Hollywood, and the requisite slide from the apex of porn stardom into drugs and hustling/massage. It’s easy to forget that the ladies aren’t the only ones who may feel exploited and used up by the adult entertainment arena.

Towers is guileless and wistful about his strange trip — though there’s always the possibility we’re dealing with an unreliable narrator, particularly given the setting — and I found it hard not to empathize with him. Having one of your brother’s friends inform on you after renting Opie Goes To South Central with you on the box cover (yoink!) has got to be even more nail-biting than coming out. His accounts of the hetero end of the biz can be, frankly, fucking demoralizing. Whether it’s having to penetrate revolting women, spending hours corkscrewing a co-star while her boyfriend is on set, being berated for not staying hard, or having to think about dead puppies to keep from climaxing, I’m surprised he didn’t just stick with gay productions — which he turned to for the better pay, even receiving royalties for his output — that treated him like a star. It’s a grim peer into the world of men who do straight porn; used as virtual props or beasts of burden, they become overbred to the point exhaustion and disillusion about their self-worth.

Studio 2000, All Worlds, Falcon, and Catalina poached Towers for entries like Cuffed!, Cadet, Brawlers and Active Duty, and certain admissions he makes about working with men in both milieux only confirm my suspicion that many is the man who does gay porn to commodify (and implicitly legitimize) his yen to be with other men. He’s open about getting a real rush from double penetration — a position I’ve always viewed as inherently homoerotic — wherein you “feel the other man’s equipment through the walls of the woman.” He confesses that his preferred partners in gay scenes are pretty twinks. He also chronicles his relationships with transsexuals, which strikes me as something of a compromise that allows a man to have the appearance of straightness while having it both ways.

I figure even top-line, perpetually employed porn stars like Ron Jeremy or Herschel Savage must have to hustle off camera to bring in the cash, and since it’s not uncommon for straight porn studs-for-hire to work couples action, I’m guessing hubby isn’t always just putting up green to simply watch from the sidelines.

The divide between sectors in adult entertainment is largely impermeable though, and Towers’s moonlighting was taken as an unpardonable betrayal. Producers froze him out, actresses refused to work him, and he ended up virtually blacklisted, ultimately finding some work in the twilight world of Bi productions for a time as Ted Hunter. He’s justified in pointing out the rank hypocrisy of this prudishness in an industry that’s fooled itself into thinking it can self-regulate without condoms and was the epicenter of a hetero-based HIV outbreak in 2004 that still continues to have fallout years later. Male stars are even known to doctor or outright fake STD tests — Towers admits to attempting this and getting caught red-handed — at the peril of their unwitting scene partners.

I was left pondering what kept him from just turning his back on the whole scene as he continued to return to a well that had run dry. Performers seem to often boomerang back to adult films and sex-for-hire when they fail to succeed at legit careers. Is it the easy money that lures them back, or something else? We’re told to worry about the addictive nature of porn for viewers, but what about its sway over the actual stars? Can they get too accustomed to the thrill of being on camera and the vanity of being admired for their sexual prowess? Towers, still virile and foxy, truly did fall into a crux of obsolescence — the hetero side of the industry too eager to scapegoat in order to veil its own failures in keeping performers safe, while the gay one now regards the days of the aloof straight trade porn stud as old hat.

The lesson learned from The Falling Towers? I don’t think I’d ever want a career where I had to rely completely on my looks, and if I ever did porn, I’d take the white collar approach and just keep it a hobby rather than try to make a profit. Commingling sex with money warps the sex drive, and when you become a product, you’ll inevitably fall out of favor with the market when your brand becomes outmoded. Weirdly, even an outsider stratum like porn that’s regarded as illicit by a broader population needs a Hester Prynne to shun, and it seems there’s no greater trespass than a reliable stud turning the tables and becoming a willing object himself.