“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. (read the full article)

The late Joey Stefano, circa 1990 — an interview that not only led to OutWeek outing paramour David Geffen, but that seemed to poetically chronicle where Stefano had come from while presciently predicting where he would go.

All the requisite attributes for a not-long-bound-for-this-world icon are there: childhood sexual abuse, adolescent hypersexuality, the absent father, boundary-testing thrill-seeking, magnetic glamor with undercurrents of fateful despair, the effortless ability to tap into people’s most powerful desires with a projected emptiness waiting to be filled, the search for stardom down the long road to Hollywood, the burning-twice-as-bright period of glory, and the coming darkness you can almost see reflected in those faraway looks.

This is his Icarus moment.

Watch the whole thing.

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)

Porn, as we scholars of the form know, takes place in an alternate universe too lopsided, too abundantly endowed, too strangely convenient to ever be described as parallel.

Pizza boys arrive with hardons. Doctors are as fit as musclemen and when they ask you to drop your pants, they drop theirs.

Here the locker rooms are oddly silent and empty … empty, empty empty — except for HIM! HIM has, of all things, the locker right above yours and a painfully erect whopper that keeps bumping into your face.

Welcome to Pornville. That Land That Never Was and yet can never die thanks to those old eight-millimeter reels that laid down the rules and regulations for all time. Rules like …

Well, finding a stranger asleep in your barn (your barn?) He is naked, of course, totally — except for one odd little hayseedy type thing: he’s wearing a studded cockring. That and giganzo chrome rings through his nipples, cockhead and perineum.

This, you think, must cause a sensation when Hayseed goes through the machines at the airport. But, of course, there aren’t any airports in Pornville. Only barns, locker rooms and embarrassingly queer-looking bedrooms decorated to within an inch of their silly High-Auntie lives. (And boy, do we have the evidence. See our brother site Lurid Digs.) (read the full article)

Kurt Marshall, who died in 1988 at twenty-two after a mere sticky handful of performances in four videos, was the triumph of the golden-haired aesthetic in gay smut.

Blonds have come and gone within the pantheon of porndom but Kurt Marshall set forever the standard. He was the perfect Hitler-Jugend gone insatiably raunchy and saucy.

And yes, Kurt is an obscure figure, but so what? Let others consider the departed titans now off in Porno-Valhalla (Scott O’Hara, Jon King, Joey Stefano, et al) or those minor figures reposing in unmarked pine boxes in the Potter’s Field of Pornotopia.

In a more perfect world, poets would have written sonnets to Kurt’s thrilling languor. He would have been cast for a life-sized nude gilt (as though he wasn’t golden enough) statue holding up the proscenium arch at some very private, all nude production of Parsifal. (read the full article)

If you believe in fate, it is easy to say the porn star career of Nicholas Iacona (aka Joey Stefano) was inevitable because of his backside.

His looks were never called into question, and his body, while not “gym-centric,” was a pleasure to look at; however, his looks and his body do not account for his derriere. Stefano’s backside was large, curvaceous, and ready for those who could handle it. (read the full article)

Butch-rugged handsome and nerve-rattling raunchy, foul-mouthed fuck machine Jon Vincent was the Barbra Streisand of queer porn: Always the center, larger than life and fueled by a self-loving vulgarity that made his performances Legend. Like Streisand, Vincent never allowed himself to just “play a role,” he was too intent on topping — and stopping — the show.

His mix of gay for pay ingredients was crazy-making and classic: “Straight,” married and a father — Vincent was a professional baseball player turned competitive bodybuilder who decided to hustle and make porn as something fun to do on the side — and to support his nascent drug habit. His on-set verbal pyrotechnics, merciless ass-poundings and danger-level testosterone made him neon and golden within the grindingly boring world of faked butchness queer porn. It didn’t hurt that he developed a reputation for off camera aggressiveness too, striking terror into mild-mannered co-stars and easy-going directors. Vincent was an unruly handful — and we loved him for it. (read the full article)