Mom gets a lot of blame.

Pop psychology dictates that she’s at fault for her kids’ (especially the boys’) sorrows; if she isn’t smothering and controlling, then she’s distant or just absent. Too much love or not enough — either way, it either supposed to make us gay, strand us in childhood, or turn us into hooker-preying serial killers.

But what about the Horror of the Father? How many different ways can dear old Dad screw us up? He’s long been posited to be the factor that drives young women onto stripper poles, and ex-gay therapy would have us believe we’re seeking his love/approval in other men as adults, but stripped of all the armchair psychology and soap operatics, the Horror Hag‘s other half — the Father Ogre — is more that just a Grim(m) Fairytale.

For all the talk about family being the cornerstone of society, it sure can fuck a lot of people up. It’s almost compulsory at this point to assume that some form of abuse or neglect propels players into porn; the psychology of being sexual chattel must require both a yawning void in the self and a blunted fear/inhibition response, and the disease, drug use, and doom that come with it play out with textbook regularity. I want gay porn to be better than it is, but I have to admit it’s currently in an industry nadir in my view. I won’t retroactively falsify, but the end of the Gay ’90s is now seeming like a pivotal Götterdämmerung in which the best elements of gay porn (and porn in general) have fallen in battle before the worst.

I don’t have a big moral objection to porn — I’m convinced that it’s offscreen behavior that does in your average flare-out star — but there are some beyond shady characters populating that world as of late. It’s one thing to choose the easy money and the perils that go with it for yourself, but to draw in another family member — specifically, your own kid — makes even the most wicked stage mother seem like the Blue Fairy.

Chance Caldwell hit the gay porn scene at the end of the late ’80s just around the time that the era of the Jeff Stryker/Jon Vincent/Ken Ryker Super Top was entering its initial retrograde. He made claims early on of being an Olympic wrestler, but porn star resumes are notoriously embellished. Hailing from (the now former) Czechoslovakia, he was something of an anomaly in terms of timing, his Eastern European appeal anticipating the Prague craze that’s de rigueur today, only with a less prettified and more masculine spin.

His look initially seemed tailor made for aloof Top Man-Only status, yet Caldwell proved to be up for anything, appearing in gay and bi features where he was perpetually on alternating ends of a good time, which made him a favorite of mine. The fireplug build, the square jaw, the thick-as-marble accent — they worked in an aggregately Teutonic style and set him apart from all the California boys he was cast opposite, and I never really could get a handle on what his scene was. He became quite the staple — thought not necessarily the star — in some memorable titles like Night Walk, Powertool 2, The Roommate, Face Riders, and Falcon’s high concept Abduction series. The latter has probably his best scene, wherein he plays a surly kitchen staffer who gets bitch-slapped and then forcibly double-teamed by underlings Bo Summers and Ty Russell (“You’re not the boss, bitch!”), putting up quite the resistance before finally relenting to spread on a tabletop. Classic.

By 1994 or so, his career had hit its peak and he began to slide into B and C features lensed on-the-cheap, making the mistake that many performers do: carving a career out of sex and hanging around in the business long after their expiration date. He continued appearing in a variety of wrestling-, Daddy-, and Transsexual-themed entries in which he was a reliable-if-mercenary ride while he hustled all over Hollywood, but around the turn of the decade something curious happened.

Caldwell hosted a typical webcam-themed peer into his home that included not only a boyfriend, but a second, younger, and oddly similar looking man. Talk began circulating that Caldwell had actually fathered a kid in his late teens (mother: unknown), and with his star on the wane in Porn City, was now using him as an added gimmick offscreen. Rumors and doubts swirled as the pair performed together at Nob Hill (was it just a scam?) and were purported to be up for private sessions either separately or together for the right price.

Together together.

It gets even weirder. Caldwell — seeming to be made of Teflon — next somehow managed the impossible. With his name in the gay industry now languishing in the bargain bin, he promptly reinvented himself in straight features, this despite the fact that he had hundreds of gay credits under his belt and faced an industry divide that effectively blackballed male stars for straddling the fence. Emerging newly rechristened as Jay Huntington, he improbably slipped under the radar without notice. Ah, but not alone — the former Mr. Caldwell was soon followed into the biz by his son, branded Jerry Kovach (aka Jerry Kovacs [below, left]) and following in Dad’s footsteps in a real life plot that can only be described as a XXX variation on Paper Moon.

Family acts aren’t exactly unheard of in porn. Straight stars Buck Adams and sister Amber Lynn had hoped to keep the fact that they were siblings secret, but the two were forced to let the cat out of the bag when they were paired together for a shoot, and twins are a not uncommon selling point. Anyway you slice it, Chance and Jerry are in a league all their own and seem eager to salt the earth of their previous incarnations.

A chance meeting with fellow equal opportunity player (and brief former boyfriend of Caldwell’s) Chris Dano on a group shoot resulted in somebody getting penetrated hard and nasty all right — as in Dano getting a knife in the back when Caldwell, who’d taken to badmouthing other male stars with gay porn tenures, informed on Dano to the cast and crew, effectively banishing him from his turf and into the dustbin of porn oblivion.

As for Jerry, Daddy Chance seems to know best, the pair — looking eerily similar and close in age, indicative of how young Chance was when he became a father — having no qualms about co-starring together, even if it means double penetrating the same woman.

And Electra just clutched pearls.

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