The Gay-for-Pay Scenario

Whenever I've heard that a certain male porn star is, given his druthers, straight as an arrow but is happy to do gay porn for the money, something strange happens in my brain. It shuts down. Immediately. It absolutely refuses to think about it because it knows this is a thing it will not ever understand, like quantum physics, and because it is too ridiculous a concept to which to allow brain space.

What is more, it appears that there's a politically pissed off reaction to the gay-for-pay boys these days. The gay community, it seems, has had enough of this charade and is no longer willing to close its eyes and take care of business while blissfully suspending disbelief. These actors are performing gay sex, it is felt, and owe it to all of us to come out with a vengeance. Why, if he weren't so hot, we'd boycott Mark Dalton. Girlfriends be damned - we are as determined to have them on our team, in name as well as in action, as any nation demanding real allegiance from a scruffy troop of mercenary soldiers. And my poor brain shuts down again, slamming the door like a shotgun blast.

First of all, guys, let's step back just a bit and remember a home truth or two. All porn is inherently bogus. The industry is and always has been a partnership wherein the consumer stirs his personal fantasies into the pot containing the more generic soup, and even in the most fetish-specific ragouts. Pornography is not documentary. It is not real. Demanding that it be so is not a whole lot more sane than expecting a male escort to remember your birthday. One can understand a degree of outrage over, say, Asian characters in a film being portrayed by Anglo-Saxon actors born in Iowa and trained in the West Village. But, in this particular milieu, all cats really are gray in the dark and looking for nuance in color defeats the purpose. As it were.

Then - and I say this with as much delicacy as possible - I beg you to recall what you know so very intimately about men, all men, and their equipment. The porn business aside, how many escapades have you yourself had with avowedly straight guys who unzip or get knee-bound under the genial pretense of 'exploration'? How thick are the woods with boys who cling to the word 'bisexual' like a life raft, when in fact they seem to get a major boot out of gay sex and are merely and apathetically capable of having relations with women? Let's get blunt. If a man can enjoy and maintain rigidity and its pursuant Fourth-of-July finale while grappling with what's charmingly referred to as a 'buddy', he may not be crazy about old Bette Davis movies. He may even like Nascar. But dude is, press releases from Falcon Studios and kiddies waiting for daddy at home notwithstanding, very, very gay.

There's more than enough on our gay plates as it is, too. We have marriage issues springing up all over the damn place, for good and for ill. We have to keep a watchful eye on media representations of us and consider carefully whether it's respect or additional tokenism coming our way. The gay-for-pay porn stud masking his real sexuality? Not an issue. He says all that needs to be said when the pool boy saunters over and the Speedos fly, and I'm content to give his protestations of straightness all the credence they deserve. None. Sometimes I even whisper - once everything is over, of course - methinks thou doth bullshit too much.