Hungary Like The Wolf: An Eastern European Skin Trade — Exposed

The San Fernando Valley and West Hollywood aren’t the only gay porn casting couches on the globe.

Thirty-odd years ago when it was regarded as just one of the clustered Eastern Bloc nations, Hungary was mainly famed in the West for goulash, being a cost-efficient locale where vampire B-movies could be lensed with castle and fortress backdrops, and for serving as the stalking grounds for the likely first and most prolific female serial killer in history, Elizabeth Bathory.

Present day, it’s the awe-inspiring and apparently renewable pipeline of genetically-gifted hard-bodies exported for Capitalist gay porn toil that’s put Hungary and the U.S. on mutually beneficial terms, even if only on the sly.

There’s no hyperbole in using the adjective Olympian to describe these guys; not only do they all look like they just stepped off a marble pedestal, but many have some connection to pro bodybuilding, competitive wrestling, hockey, or fitness modeling. Their ranks don’t appear to be born so much as they descend to earth fully-fleshed and destiny-bound for the first plane out to Pornoville, USA.

There’s everybody’s favorite, the jaw-dropping and multi-aliased Ted Colunga (top, from Men At Play), whose body becomes more impossibly perfect as he seems to draw vigor form the very ground in Antaeus-like fashion. Back-that-muscle-ass-up Fernando Nielsen (left) is just as rightfully beloved as a veritable demi-god among muscle bottom lovers. Smooth-as-butter Marc Dievo is always ready to spread. Julian Vincenzo‘s so sultry that a bat of his eyes could melt tungsten.

Muscleheads slutting it up for bucks in porn features has become so ubiquitous stateside that only bodybuilding industry insiders and muscle fanboys flip out about it anymore. Add to that web cams and the sea of solo muscle worship porn, and the line between the bodybuilding circuit and the porn arena gets hazier by the year.

With die-hard bodybuilding purists, a gay and/or on-the-take Chris Duffy or Bruce Patterson ends up either being reviled as some sort of lost boy who fell from grace or written off as some sort of aberration (“You probably do get the occasional homo or pervert, but I think it pretty rare.”) Uh-huh. Because hypertrophic somehow equals heterocentric.

Eastern European-themed titles began as a subgenre — almost invariably featuring either a wrestling, athletic, military, or historical theme; lots of overdubbed grunting and straining; and clumsily subtitled sexspeak (“We have tired of all this labor! Now is the time for us to suck upon dick!”) — but as their popularity has flourished, they’ve effectively become a lucrative full-fledged genre in their own right with an ever-expanding roster of starlets. The fall of the Soviet Union opened the porn floodgates, and within five years Hungary would dominate the domestic adult entertainment market in Eastern Europe.

The trend of bodybuilders and athletes moonlighting in Western productions certainly has its financial motivations, but there’s a qualmish cultural unease marked by clandestine collusion behind the intercontinental sex trade — specifically relating to the male variety — that carries with it a decidedly East vs. West connotation.

Communism for decades vilified porn as a distinctly Western (read: American) nadir of licentiousness, and the Hungarian Right has progressed little in that stance since the doctrine’s collapse. Pair that with a predominantly Catholic population makeup, and All-Male porn is branded with a two-pronged taboo. Conversely, within the U.S., gay male audiences are panting for more, with studios like Atomic, Jet Set, High Octane, Pacific Sun, Bel Ami, and Studio 2000 always on the make for more cash-strapped Magyars looking to supplement their incomes by offering up their rods and holes on camera with the hope that an ocean between them and their homeland and the aid of a generically Anglican- or Italian-sounding porn moniker will provide them with local anonymity.

Things can get ugly when you mix Gay For Pay and a hyper-fundamental view of masculinity. The Pasolini-style slaying of gay porn director Steve Cadro — aka Istvan Korda, former head of the Hungarian broadcasting system cum gay porn auteur — at the hands of one his stars in Budapest occurred just a year after his 1999 outing by the Hungarian press. Sure enough, the timeworn “The Homo Tried To Touch Me!” defense was raised, but many in-the-know still suspect the killing was a bungled extortion attempt gone awry. Fast money, double lives, mercenary hustlers, and hair-trigger reactions to the publicly homoerotic make for quite the powder keg.

“Supplement” is the watchword here. Bodybuilding and the Olympics are a windfall only for an established few at the top of their games. Aspiring hopefuls need time to train and the funding to hire coaches, and American print and movie producers have stepped in to fill the void. The majority hail from working class backgrounds in the suburbs are rural areas outside Budapest, Debrecen, and Miskolc.

The trip-up comes when the veil between worlds is lifted; just as gay porn stars have begun to invade the competitive stages and models in fitness magazines are baring all in XXX features, worlds are colliding too close to home for Hungarian models in their native land.

As more pro athletes, champion lifters, gymnasts, and college up-and-comers with designs on being the next Schwarzenegger find their adult film work outed to the public, Hungary’s athletic insiders have increasingly become more vehement in their assertion that any involvement in adult entertainment should automatically result in ineligibility for participants. The question remains, though: just how many Samsons are pro sports willing to kick the curb for the sake of moral outrage, and what role to they themselves play in encouraging the Gay For Pay swing?

The most high-profile implementation of this outcry came in 2004 with the cruel disqualification of lauded and presumedly medal-bound freestyle wrestler Gergo Szabo from Hungary’s Olympic wrestling team (top left) when his alter ego Sergio Foster (bottom left) — fun-sized, ass-pulverizing studlet featured in about a dozen titles for Pacific Sun and Diamond Pictures like Man-Driller, Frat House Bash, and (foreshadowing…) Secrets of A Wrestler 1 and 2 — was revealed.

Hungary may’ve made the importing of American-produced features and magazines illegal — regarded by many as a cynical tactic to block its athletes’ porn resumes from hitting its shores, jarring rather hypocritically with its willingness to export their locally-shot exploits to a remunerative American market– but the Internet is too often the equivalent of international waters.

Szabo’s public defaming left industry insiders ruminating of just how pervasive the gay porn crossover into athletics has become, while outsiders looking in called foul on a sport that expects miracles from its competitors but offers them little in way of financial support to realize them. Even his likely hip-to-the-scene teammates were nonplussed about the whole matter. The young contender, like many others, did what he had to to stay in the game, employing his physical prowess as his best asset. Just how his talent of taking down a opponent was compromised by his willingness to chow down on a stiff prick still strikes a false chord now that he’s been relegated to unjust “Whatever Became of?…” oblivion on both of his career fronts.

Soon, other competitors with multiple titles and/or high-profile endorsements like Csaba Zsiros (right), Attila Szabo, Imre Bordacs, Csaba Toth, and Viktor Hogyes were ultimately outed as both hustlers and porn players, spurring many to panic at the apparent queer-ifying of Eastern European bodybuilders by well-funded and predatory American interests.

The crux of all the teeth-gnashing is whether athletics of any nationality were ever all that minty fresh to begin with. Gergo Szabo was made an example of, but never mind that many would deem performance-enhancing drugs as Professional Athletics’ true dirty little secret.

A ridiculous twenty-four athletes — five of them Hungarian — were disqualified in the very same 2004 Games he was jettisoned from for their use of banned substances. Officials have had to step up procedures when it comes to detecting the rampant use of HGH. How exactly do the “scandalous affair” of porn and cheating manage to rate on the same scale?

In 1996, half of Hungary’s champion swimming team was revealed to have qualified based not only on fraudulent times, but from meets that never actually took place.

1988 found forty players and officials from the Hungarian Soccer League indicted as accomplices in a massive bribery and match-rigging conspiracy, a national debacle that still casts a long shadow over the sport decades later.

Worse yet, just how in the dark the Hungarian Wrestling Federation actually was regarding Szabo’s and other athletes’ porn tenures is up for debate. Rather tellingly, Knock Out, the first gay hardcore feature produced domestically in Hungary, was shot in Budapest’s famed Koko Gym, founded by Istvan Kovacs, who previously found a protege in one Attila Szabo. Another jock-themed entry, Amabassadors of The Ice, just happened to be filmed within the Szekesfehervar Alba Volan Ice Hockey Bowl, coincidentally the home turf of Hungary’s National Hockey League. Were league officials and federation members that blind to films being produced in their own houses, or did they just look the other way until it became publicly inconvenient?

Signs point to yes. Around the time of Gergo Szabo’s outing, the long-running Hungarian magazine Nyugat began running a series of exposes sporting hilariously interrogative titles like Bodybuilders Against The Spread of Gay Porn Industry? and How Strong Boys Become Girls? that were intended to lay bare an international flesh-peddling ring, but instead play all-over-the place, switching gears from probing to paranoid, xenophobic to gay-panicked, naive and knuckle-dragging from sentence to sentence.

All the uproar is apparently for naught. The XXX Hungarian vogue shows no signs of abating anytime soon, and for every one naughty athlete who gets his hand slapped, there are countless others being drafted by producers. Julio Carillo (left), Kristoff Caine, Matthew Cameron, and the Visconti Triplets are just a handful of the discoveries making their debuts in the past two years.

Natch, it’s American sexual decadence and Gay For Pay side-dealing that are cast as the bane of pristine Hungarian sportsmanship, with Nyugat taking a cue from Testosterone Muscle‘s uproarious 2003 piece The Sex Cult of Venice Beach — a sort of muscle slut spin on The Story of O narrated by an unnamed “secret source” who conceals identities in order to keep “a sport with a revered pantheon of role models to emulate” from being “forever associated with depravity and perversion,” not to mention “the darkest sins of the flesh.” Um…thanks?

“You so nasty, musclemen!” every remotely sentient gay guy will be thinking from word one, most of us clued in that bodybuilding and hustling have always traded favors back to the days of the ancient Greek Olympians becoming the playthings of the noble class, and none of us are terribly shocked and appalled that a sport whose goal is physical perfection might feature participants who could err toward the vain and hypersexual.

Nyugat goes even more over-the-top, alleging everything from Suspiria-type training camps where officials attempt to initiate attendees into the cult of muscle-for-hire sluttony, discotheque outings-turned-slap-downs (how very The Last Dragon), betrayed girlfriends, private dances in VIP male strip joints, the Hungarian Embassy doctoring passports for U.S.-bound bodybuilder porn muscle boys, the collusion of the Hungarian Government and agents to turn competitions into veritable slave markets, and contestants being forced at dickpoint to take part in porn shoots masquerading as fitness spreads. Even Michael Jackson‘s professional ties to producer/actor Marc Schaffel (better known as Marc Fredrics) were flimsily alluded to if only to put a lurid hebephilic spin on otherwise adult business transactions.

Sure it all sounds like a melange of trashy porn plotting and homo-baiting hysterics, and if it isn’t true, you’ll still wish it was. As international incidents go, we’ve had a hell of lot uglier ones than Hungarian Hook-Up, Danube Dreams, and Vampires of Budapest.