Popular performers could book five scenes a month, but then they'd still only be making around $30,000 a year-well below the median household income of $53,657. While almost no one in the porn industry will go on the record about their earnings, Queerty estimates that the vast majority of gay porn stars make about $500 to $1,000 per scene. Maybe one day you'll see it… - Jasper Robinson November 20, 2015 "Performers have little recourse for reinvention within the industry once they cease to conform to the category to which they were assigned," Brennan told me. Your career is over and we've moved on to Johnny Rapid." Lyons, only 22 at the time, had already been replaced because he had performed bareback, ruining his image as an innocent bottom. When porn star Jake Lyons was succeeded in popularity by Johnny Rapid, one former fan wrote in a direct reply to a commentby Lyons on the website TheSword: "Please evaporate. Michael Brennan studies how gay porn stars are consumed and discarded by those who watch their work. He considers himself lucky to have gotten out when he did. Another was killed fleeing from the police in a drug bust. "And that festering is what leaves people high and dry."Īlex told me he knew a couple of guys who had committed suicide, as well as one who had a heart attack from steroids. I won awards I always had somewhere to be and people that wanted me, my time, and my attention."Īlex booked as many shoots as he could to stay sane and distract himself from everything he'd bottled up when he first started modeling. "So just having money and control over my life made me feel like it was worth it. "I was paid a very high daily rate to party and do drugs and hang out with gay people and my clients," he says. At first, he was drawn to the cash and admiration of the porn world. Alex,* a former high-profile porn star who asked to stay anonymous, grew up poor in a modest religious family that had rejected him. It's a really intense skill set, and the people who succeed are the people who do it well, who can perform."
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"You learn how to have sex with people you're not attracted to and you learn to perform all sorts of acts that would normally be exhausting. When I spoke to Habib, he stressed to me how empowering porn can be. "The porn industry remains obscured by unexamined attitudes towards sex. "Theories arrive before grief," Habib wrote in a blog post. "I'm never going to really know the truth about how he felt towards his modeling," she says.Ĭonner Habib, a porn star and activist, believes people rush headlong into the assumption that porn makes people suicidal because it confirms their existing prejudices. She tells me that he kept his career in adult entertainment away from her, so it's difficult for her to ascertain how he felt about it. He died of an overdose in January.Ĭohen worked for a furniture company before his death, but I ask Shari if his modeling career with the gay porn company Randy Blue had contributed to his troubles. When he got out, he was homeless.Ī friend eventually offered Cohen a room out in Phoenix, Arizona, which was "the beginning of the end," according to Shari. He totaled two cars and ended up in jail, where he broke his hand and jaw. By the time he got into porn, under the name Xander Scott, he was mixing the two and getting behind the wheel. Beer bummed him out Vicodin didn't do the trick either.
As a teenager, he began experimenting with drugs just to feel numb and good again. Diagnosed with ADHD when he was six years old, Cohen had trouble making friends and felt isolated and misunderstood in grade school. But while Shari considered Cohen's ingenuity "a gift," his hyper energy rankled some.