The Porn Cult of Jon Vincent: A Legend Never Dies

“I have a shit load of fans out there who know better. After all, who invented verbal porn?!” – Jon Vincent

By his own admission, you could call Jon Vincent a lot of things: sex fiend, manipulative hustler, revolving-door junkie, anabolic casualty, errant hubby, absentee father, porn trash, heedless good time guy, and trash-talker supreme. But a has-been? Even at his lowest point, he knew better.

With the curtain seeming to come down on the era of the Porn Kings and the Land of Smutdom, you’d be harried to name any current star who inspires the same cultish adoration and hushed reverence in the manner that Jeffrey James Vickers‘s alter ego Jonny V. does. Though the teeth-gnashing, hole-obliterating motherfucker appeared in only a relative handful of otherwise lackluster flicks — there’s really no name-defining epic like a Powertool or Big Guns in the mix — he stands on a pillar of immortality that Falcon’s or Titan’s five-years-ago big names never reach. Ultimately, the same fateful cocktail of character flaws and grim life experiences that made him an inveterate drug addict synchronously (and troubingly) made him a mythic sex star.

His posthumous biography A Thousand & One Night Stands chronicles a life marred by frightful Laura Palmer-esque childhood sexual abuse, a subsequent adolescent lack of fear response combined with money-minded hypersexuality, a parade of wives and keepers who could neither redeem nor abide by him, a narcissism manifested in pumping his physique up with anabolics, an almost monstrous sex drive, and a lifetime of comebacks in athletics — his other natural-born gift he betrayed — used up by the time he was twenty-two.

It was Nightcharm’s 2005 entry on Vincent that confirmed his enduring presence in the gayosphere and exposed a cult of priapic acolytes (incidentally, nailing me a writing gig based on a comment I made), triggering not just the most voluminously enthusiastic four-years-spanning response the site may have ever received, but the most mind-bending range of assertions, everything from fond reminiscences about his movies and personal anecdotes from his johns, to moral hand-wringing from people claiming to be his loved ones and a theory that his 2000 death was actually an elaborate hoax.

You can scroll through the litany, but we’ll save you the time and give you our front-runners:

“I grew up down the street from Jeff Vickers/Jon Vincent in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. He was 2 years older than me and used to bully me when I visited his next door neighbor who was my friend. He was always very aggressive, which totally turned me on. I can remember fantasizing about him while I jacked off in junior high and high school.”

It’s the plasticity and hollowness of nine out of ten porn stars that limits their humanity and condemns them to 2-D oblivion. It’s practically impossible to picture, say, Matthew Rush or Zeb Atlas reading or even eating, but it was Vincent’s playful, tactile mortality that translated best in his scenes and set him apart.

Watching Deep Inside Jon Vincent — one of those usually cliché peers into the supposed life of a name top — you truly can believe that you’re getting some vérité glimpse into the world of Jonny V. as he lolls around bored and stripped to the waist, naps, dines on potato chips, takes calls from potential fuck buddies, and fantasizes about who he’ll mount next.

The final scene in which he’s serviced by Matt Gunther features my fave of his myriad of dumpster-mouthed lines, any of which would sound ridiculous coming from anyone else. As he half-growls, half-moans “I didn’t think I was gonna get any. Oh, but I am! I’m reeeeeaaaalllly scoring now!” while grinning like the cat that ate the canary, you get instant insight into what a natural wordsmith and performer the man was, so far removed from the dispensable potted plant kind of star who has to obviously be prodded off camera with a yardstick or guided with a laser pointer in order to speak or even emote. Vincent’s appeal stemmed from the reality that he truly was that older prick-teasing jock who we all wanted to put out for us, and his skill at simply being can’t be scripted or coached from the sidelines.

“Jon was, stated simply, the best. I hired him three times to ‘take me to heaven’ while he was living in Los Angeles. He fucked me like a hungry animal and reminded me how good it is to be alive. I’m grateful to him for all he contributed to the industry and to ‘daddy-hungry’ bottom boys like me.”

This is why porn stars are so much more exciting and alive for us than a Hollywood crush: most can be attained at the right price, and their celebrity has a certain inviting and willing freakishness to it. Nicole Kidman‘s marble bat-brow or Ryan Reynolds’s Hydroxycut waist could never give me the quivers in the same way that standing next to Colton Ford on the subway or crossing paths with Caesar would.

For all they get (over) paid, can any legit star ever really give their all in the way Jon did when he uses his good ol’ boy chicanery to convince half the cast of his 1988 debut Heavenly to suck him off and spread for him, or when he emitted that grizzly roar after he (apparently, spontaneously and accidentally) blasted in Joey Stefano‘s mouth, causing the only bottom to truly match him pound-for-pound to lob his load back at him in a gesture of nasty-boy petulance?

Fuck no.

“I think Jon Vincent reeks of instant hard-on. I was young and virginal when I saw him on video in a baseball uniform. I wanted to go to my knees, kiss his feet and beg for him to humbly take my cherry. Ruin me. I would have sold my pretty boy looks on the street & humbly gave him all my money, to be his submissive for abuse.”

True porn stars — the cognomen “star” is so overapplied it’s in danger of losing all meaning — are magical. Not only are their auras dazzling, but objects they possess or even touch become fetishes. Clothing, photos, and even body hair can be purchased via their web sites.

A few years ago, I happened to be in one of those ultra-tacky novelty stores staffed by EMOs to pick up a lava lamp bulb. I had a moment of supreme weirdness when I spotted Vincent’s mug on the packaging for chintzy thong underwear five or six years after his demise, treated like one of those generic hard bodies they use in gag greeting cards. It was poignant and exploitive all at once, and it’s the most concrete evidence I’ve ever witnessed of how little control porn stars have over their own images.

I had an acquaintance who was mad about everything vampire-related, and he intimated to me that his ultimate get was to own the dimestore fangs Vincent sported in the awful gay sucker flick The Bite, wherein Vincent works over and bastes frequent co-star Rob Cryston in a pine box. When it comes to our sex gods and gay saints, everything about them is periapt.

“I am the wife of Jeff’s son and the mother of his grandson. What you fags are doing is disgusting and immoral. You should be ashamed of yourself. We know who all of you are and all of you are going to pay for this one day. Jeff has a beautiful grandson and it upsets me to think that you butt pluggers are talking like this about his grandfather.”

This elegant, tea-baggish statement from a crazy bitch troll says it all. The Lindsay Lohan-type of celebrity is not unlike a debilitating disease, and the real test of fame is not the healthy worshippers you can attract, but the lunacy you can inspire in wack jobs who think they have a personal connection with you as you decay in a fruit fly’s rapid-time degeneration.

James Dean had his Night Watch crew, among them the Black Madonna Vampira, who claimed she could commune with him via a telephone connection to the spirit world after his fade-out. Michael Jackson had his Bird Woman as the most memorable of his coterie of cooks, and upon his death, the majority of my night class was absent for a “day of bereavement” for a man they never even met and would certainly have shrank from in an instance of any real intimacy.

Vincent had a cast of characters in his life that ran the gamut from wealthy benefactors and hit-it-and-forget-it nightclub tarts to junkies and fellow porn bad boys, and the man burned bright and briefly. Just four years after hitting the blue movie scene, the wear was evident on his face in 1992′s Idol Thoughts — which found him playing third banana to Ryan Idol and Tom Katt — and by the year of his death, his last movie Porn Fiction found him looking haggard-eyed, hollow-cheeked, and on his last leg at just thirty-seven.

The only C I ever got in college was on an art history paper in which I likened Andy Warhol‘s Marilyn to the celluloid devolution from glamour girl icon to death’s head specter, and the cunty professor can suck it now, because nothing could be more apt in describing the neon-lit, track-marked doom of Jon Vincent than that.

“I dare you to entertain the fact that he is not dead. Jon Vincent, his alter ego, is no longer with us, but Jeff Vickers the MAN, still very much is! I saw him at a Family Dollar in the city where I live in October 2007.”

Elvis. Big Foot. The Loch Ness Monster. Compassionate Conservatism. They’re all modern-day myths and urban legends that people are convinced might or still exist. In a better world, all porn stars would be well-taken care of in the world’s most action-packed retirement community, and the fantasy of Jon Vincent alive and happy in blissful anonymity is the guazy form of anodyne even a cynic such as I finds himself wanting to entertain. Maybe he faked his death, quit the biz, and made a real show at sobriety. Today, he could be the mechanic, construction worker, or high school football coach of your dreams. Did he pull an Eddie & The Cruisers-inspired vanishing act? Is there Zapruder-style camera phone footage of him loping about some quiet ‘burg? Can we clone him using a lock of his hair? If the stars are right, maybe — maybe — the hot-ass UPS guy will have a familiar drawl and grin all pervy-like when he tells me he has a package for me that’s too big for him to handle alone as he addresses me as “son.”

Maybe.