Leave a beautiful corpse.
James Dean wanted to and did, and long after he sanctified the union of cruel, swift doom with untimely struck-down youth, Tinseltown’s downmarket flip side – gay porn – seemed tailor-made for a never-ending series of sad, lurid fades-to black.
The advent of AIDS — Death come to town for an extended stay — claimed countless beloved players of yesteryear, and with contemporary ones foolishly buying into the false security that they can bring it to heel, more are bound for passage on Charon’s ferry.
Suicides and O.D.s have long been the Second and Third Horsemen of the Apocalypse galloping on the horizon, haunting footsteps like a black cats prowling the night. Then there are the starlets who were unfairly extinguished for no fault of their own, leaving behind Black Dahlia cold cases for the armchair sleuths among us.
For all the talk about Hollywood being run by the gay mafia, it’s really gay porn that’s the repository of all our dreams and fears. I’d argue that our connection to noteworthy moments in the medium and the array of stars who have populated its pantheon is stronger than our regard for too-straight and too-pat La La Land; it’s here that our true love for physical perfection and mythical sexual prowess is mirrored back at us, and with those reveries come the demons of age, disease, and death that daunt us.
Join us now as we open up our case files and chronicle a luckless lineup of ruin-bound porn muses who plummeted hard from the heights of Olympus, withered the moment they set foot outside of Shangri-La, or fell prey to the Jabberwock’s claws that catch.
Some dreamboats just get lost on their way down the Yellow Brick Road… (read the full article)