Tail Blazers!: Ten Straight Shooters Who Changed The Face of Porn

You’ve come a long way, baby.

It’s hard to believe in today’s hyper-produced, corporatized porn industry that there was a time when porn really wasn’t that pretty to watch. Gay porn stars may have kicked the ‘roids, tattooing, and manscaping into high gear, but their medium always required a certain level of physical presentability. Straight porn? Not so much. Men — despite the vital purpose they serve — occupy a decidedly secondary position in that product.

Many of the male stars employed as hardcore porn was introduced to the U.S. were not much to crow about, and if anything, their spindly, shag-headed, porn ‘stached aesthetic was deliberately utilized so as to avoid threatening the male viewer’s ego. Today, there are more manly lookers in straight porn than you can shake a dick at — with traditional gay types like spike-haired twinks, tanned frat boys, shaved-down bodybuilders, assertive daddies, and inked-up sex pigs becoming practically common — who are proving that foxy fuckers in skin flicks can actually attract straight male fanfare while garnering appreciative gay audiences.

It’s easy to take a Charles Dera, Evan Stone, or Nacho Vidal for granted, but what about the studs who paved the way for them? Prior to the Web making porn so accessible, many of us relied on our brother’s porn cache or pass-around videos from guys at school, meaning straight stars provided us with our maiden voyages into Smut City.

So here are the men we love and cherish, presented in no particular order (we can’t pick a favorite) — ripped, stripped, and ready for their cumshots:

Paul Barresi

When he hit screens in the late ’70s, Barresi was then what we know now as a typical porn star cliché: a babe-like but frustrated model/actor/whatever whose big break in Hollywood was overdue when porn came a-callin’. His career spanned numerous ’80s classics, but his real cred stemmed from his nimble ability to sort of straddle the fence between the straight and gay sectors of the biz. Colt wisely snatched him up early on, and he became not only its signature face, but also the embodiment of the hirsute, macho ’80s New Gay Man, all the while moving on the outskirts of Tinseltown as something of a bit player and celebrity hanger-on.

By the dawn of the ’90s, Barresi turned to directing mostly military-themed gay porn while operating as a muckraking Hollywood private eye (in a porn plot brought to life) and gadfly in high-profile sex scandals. Though he amassed far more straight credits than gay ones, he’s best remembered today as one of the all-time great gay prick teases — your fantasy rough trade trick, grab-ass boss, and abusive stepfather who flaunts it but won’t give it up. For his years of blue-balling, I hereby dub him Paul Barresi — Ever-Withholding Bitch God Supreme.

Peter North

The first man I ever saw do it on film. I vividly remember being in a backyard clubhouse — seriously — full of straight jocks when I was in seventh grade, all of them gathered around a TV and hollering raucously as North and several other men had at with a chick on a card table. As I entered, my awkward “ha ha ha…” laughter quickly turned to “ha ha ha — huuuuuuuhhh?!” as Herr North proceeded to spray all over the place like a runaway fire hose. Looking back, this was my “Well, I’m a homo” moment.

If Jeff Stryker is the fabled gay porn superstar who flirted with straight productions because he could, then Super Soaker North is his elemental inverse: the gay star who regretted going ass-up and funneled all of his energy into becoming a total bitch-magnet. He’s notorious in the industry for not wanting his hair to get mussed during scenes, and his shame-faced disavowal of his gay tenure as Matt Ramsey during the early ’80s — in which he really took it like a man — continues to appall his straight male audience while thrilling his gay one. To this day he claims any penetration he engaged in was faked. We guess it could’ve been body-doubled, or was it actually…Claymation?

Steven St. Croix

I’ve always been rather partial to the appealing Steven St. Croix — his name is very Dynasty — because I like his sloe-eyed, cherubic, thickset look. He was at the forefront of a new roll call of crushable men who began to permeate the industry back in the early ’90s, and he has a comparatively gentler way of banging his female co-stars that’s admirable. As he’s matured, he’s managed to just get beefier, suaver, and hotter with each reliable ride he churns out.

His main point of interest, though: his dick, but not for the expected reason. Early in his career his cock had a straight and true shape to it, but later on its shape mysteriously altered into a noticeable uptilt curve. Fans wondered if something surgical was the cause, but ultimately the truth will out: he suffered what’s known as a dick fracture — purportedly a common industry hazard — from literally fucking too hard. He considers it a war wound/badge of courage today, and I commend his stoicism in pressing on in the face of adversity. You just can’t keep a good dick down.

Lexington Steele

Women of color may have worked their way into the porn scene in the ’70s, but their male counterparts were much slower in, um, coming. Though there were gimmicky antecedents (we salute you, Long Dong Silver), porn didn’t really produce a big-name black male superstar until 1997 when Lexington Steele debuted. Tall, debonair, bald-pated, and boasting a dick like a billy club, Steele became a fixture in interracial entries — another boundary straight porn was slow in hurdling — and promptly pounded that poon with gusto.

You can’t really downplay this hot piece’s significance to the medium. Best Anal AVN Awards, production companies, and name brand sex toys were once the purviews of the Ron Jeremy- and Joey Silvera-style old guard, but Steele proved to be a level-headed businessman who built his own porn empire from the ground up. Reportedly, he’s also quite religious and finds his porn gig at odds with his Baptist faith. Worry not, Lex. If God didn’t want you to fuck like a champ, would he have blessed you with that redwood between your legs?

T.T. Boy

The first male Latino superstar? Yes. The most hole-punishing lay in porn history? Yes! T.T. Boy (his porno moniker is deceptively fey) strutted into Porn Valley at the end of the big ’80s and developed into one of the most profligate pussy pounders of our lifetime. When he lays in with everything he’s got, you could swear a vein in his forehead is about to rupture, causing him to expire mid-rut in a spectacular, jaw-clenching petite mort aneurysm/orgasm of lust and rage.

Sleazy, swarthy, swaggering, and bad to the bone, the Boy’s dick has been described as “a steel rod that never goes down,” and Jenna Jameson articulated her first encounter with him candidly: “The guy was a machine. There was no lull. His focus never dimmed. His intensity never wavered. He’d throw me into position after position, and would come in each one. I was in shock. I’d never been fucked like this in my life.” Rumors of childhood abuse are widely thought to have fueled his unflinching, almost monstrous libido, and he’s become rather a pariah in the business after a film he lensed in Brazil was revealed to have employed the vector for the 2004 HIV outbreak that struck the hetero industry, but love him or hate him, the man is always nasty as he wants to be.

Rocco Siffredi

Pretty, blond Italian Rocco Siffredi looked like a New Wave pop singer when he whipped it out in the mid-’80s, straight porn beating Kristen Bjorn to the punch and offering us a piledriving sex god for the ages. Siffredi’s ascension to stardom marked a pivotal shift in the type of man producers would cast; years down the line men are promoted out of stripper revues and bodybuilder competitions, each able to grace the cover of Colt or Playgirl at will.

Few men can claim they have the astonishing sexual range that Siffredi naturally does. Depending on the theme of the production, he can essay a charming paramour or the most merciless, teeth-rattling, heat-seeking fuck missile to ever grace this earth, giving even T.T. Boy a run for his money. He’s widely credited — or disparaged, depending on the view point — for bringing the vérité gonzo-theme and rough handling of female co-stars into the mainstream. When Rocco goes off on you, he goes off on you, turning you into his personal cock socket in a frenzy of bitch slaps, water sports, hair-grasping, and skull-fucking. I prefer sensitive Rocco to sadismo Rocco, unless of course he wanted to work over a willing muscle boy toy. Perhaps his greatest contribution, though? His tongue-lashing love of rimming ass, a trope that’s rapidly becoming a go-to move in straight porn. Thanks, Rocco. You make us sore and ashamed, but hey, we do ask for it.

Mr. Marcus

You don’t fuck with Mr. Marcus; you just strap him on and grasp for leverage. If you’re like me and prefer a thicker, more robust build to the too-shredded look, then this jackhammer — his body a curvaceous, mountainous wonder with a swirl of Polynesian tattoos — is your man.

A sensational discovery by any standard, he quickly ascended the porn echelons and joined Lexington Steele as a favorite interracial star, pleasuring all manner of cuckolding wives, slutty cheerleaders, and suburban swingers along the way. Loved by us “Me next!” gays for obvious reasons, he’s clearly a giver, often working best in guy-heavy threeways that allow for the beloved gay spectator sport of watching two guys DP a chick with their balls this close to slapping together. Ah…

Randy Spears

If you haven’t fantasized about Randy Spears transforming your body into a quivering, moaning vessel with every thrust of his muscular pelvis, then you need to get your head checked. This man is sex on two legs, and every gay guy over thirty has him on permanent rotation in the fuck flicks of their mind. The Randster’s been puttin’ out steadily since 1988, and I still can’t get enough of him. There is no such thing as overexposure for Randy Spears.

Spears — who actually had a brief mainstream acting career before going blue — joins the likes of Paul Barresi as a defier of the notion that all porn stars are depthless hacks with lobotomized line deliveries. The man can act (his comic timing can actually be termed deft, damn it), and since we know all legit stars are really just sluts with lame sex tapes and coteries of agents and publicists paid to make them look classy, can we please just do away with the moratorium on letting porn stars have mainstream careers already? Hell, it would actually make Grey’s Anatomy and C.S.I.: Miami watchable.

Brian Pumper

When you hear the hackneyed phrase “All American” when referencing male pulchritude, you realize you’ve been socially conditioned to envision a blonde, blue-eyed, corn-fed dish. Still, when I first beheld the statuesque vision with the playfully juvenile byname Brian Pumper, I was stunned by how mythically American he looked. The square-cut visage, the sensitive eyes, the thighs you could never span with just two hands, the body frame of quilted muscle — why, if Abercrombie & Fitch knew a form of beauty other than blank-faced, stark-white zombies existed, it might make Mr. Pumper its new jocktacular poster stud in a welcome case of mall culture porn creep.

Proving that, unlike Hollywood, porn has room for three phenomenal black cocksures, Pumper — along with frequent co-star Mr. Marcus — is everybody’s type, the pair a much-loved mash-up (Pumper’s possible penchant for swinging both ways is the subject of copious contention for muscle fans. Any with-it gay guy will tell you that just because they both love to throw their legs in the air so the ladies can go down south doesn’t mean they’re gay. It just means there’s one more reason for us to love them.

Tommy Gunn

With a marginalized T.T. Boy focusing on his own production house after being shunned by sectors of the industry due to some reckless behavior, a void was left demanding a new Latino bombshell. Enter sex wand Tommy Gunn. And what an entrance! That hair, that face, that body, that dick – our team should forcibly claim him for our own like Spartans waging war to retrieve Helen, but we can’t begrudge him for being an in-demand ladies’ man. He danced in male stripper acts in his late teens, and is currently in the roster of the XXX-Men — a porn-themed male dancing act — with a few other men in this list.

If his co-stars don’t forgo a paycheck and simply consider getting plowed by him a privilege, then they can go to hell, because I’ll do it for free and let him choose where he wants to land his pophsot. I’m also quite enamored that Gunn is one of those guys whose balls sit high and practically disappear when he gets hard. Super-slick and ultra-smooth, he’s as far removed from a dickcentric John Holmes as you can imagine — a total package where every facet comes together fucking magnificently and looks smoking riding a motorcycle, decked out in a wife-beater and leather pants, or poised with smooth muscle ass pointed skyward as he pounds home. He’s cocked, loaded, and has a hair trigger, so Gunn safety be damned, I say!