Papa Was a Porn Writer

I was checking my stats the other day. This is a new blog, and while I get the occasional comment (yay!), I wonder whether anyone's wasting his precious time reading my prattle. Anyway, I noticed a number of visitors who were coming here from Cooper, so I surfed over to his site (which I do twice a day, anyway, to see whether he's updated and to drool over appreciate his pictures: shaved heads, yum), and I saw that he'd put up a link to me. In his pornography links. My initial thought (where "initial" means following close upon "Mmmmm, Cooper"; "Hey, you can post links to other blogs! I should post links to other blogs. I read blogs. How do I post links? What the hell is a sidebar, anyway? Ooooh, shiny objects. What was I thinking about?"; and "Mmmmmm, Cooper") was "Holy Falcon Studios, Batman! After all these years, I am finally NSFW! Go me!"

[By the way, I'm afraid there's not going to be a lot of writing about actual sex in this entry. I spent most of the weekend (the part that didn't involve me working or having friends over for dinner, that is) in a sleep-deprived haze after I was kept up all Saturday night by an intense but short-lived illness of mysterious origin, the further details of which are the opposite of sexy. Long story short(er): my already tenuous relationship with sticking to the point is undergoing a (hopefully temporary) separation. In case you're wondering, while I was unable to sleep Saturday night, I watched the John Cameron Mitchell DVDs that I ordered last week. They were great and helped distract me, but it does seem a shame to watch Shortbus when you're in too much pain to jerk off. So I watched it again Sunday, and jerked off.]

For a brief, shining moment perhaps eight or ten years ago, I was a real, honest-to-God pornographer. I had a story published in Torso. It was about having sex in the laundry room of an apartment building. It was called "Spin Cycle," and my nom de plume was Dakota North. I still think that "Dakota North" was the best name ever made up to write porn under, and part of me wishes that I'd been more persistent in following up my, um, maiden effort. I did get a letter from Guys (I think I have that right, but I'm not 100% sure) saying they were going to buy a different story, but I never saw it in print, and I certainly never got a check for it, so I think that they changed their mind.

I got such a trifling sum ($100) for "Spin Cycle," that I just didn't see the point in writing more, especially after my third effort got its first rejection. The editor said that it "failed to convince" (though, really, I suspect that maybe he'd just had one too many to drink before attempting to jack off to it). It's likely that if I'd been a bit more savvy about the business, I could have gotten more money for my work. I subsequently hooked up with a part-time pornographer (his other job was writing history textbooks) in the Baltimore suburbs, and he told me that if I'd had an agent, I'd have gotten a lot more. He said that he would write up our encounter (I suspect he would change the details. He shot his load after I'd been chewing on his nipples and yanking his nuts for less than ten minutes, and then he spent the rest of the time apologizing to me and offering me donuts. I declined: God only knows where those donuts had been.) and that he'd probably net about $800 for it. He told me that he wanted to play another time and that he'd give me some more info about agents and such, but then he never returned my calls. I don't know whether he was afraid that I'd want a cut of the money from his next article or he was just offended by my refusing his donuts. (It is important to me that you understand that when I say I refused his donuts, I mean that he had actual, literal donuts [assorted varieties] in his apartment and that I declined to eat them. I am not talking about some weird anal sex scene that I declined. I am all about the euphemisms, but I am not using one just now.)

Anyway. Before my glorious porno career was cut short by the combined cheapness of publishers and fickleness of submissives, I spent a fair amount of time thinking about gay porn, in ways both general and specific. I purchased a number of relevant publications and analyzed the stories for form and content. It was apparent to me from the outset that with porn, you were dealing not with art but with product, and the best way to succeed commercially was to determine and follow the formula. Thus, I spent a lot of time counting words, paragraphs, and sex scenes to figure out how they worked. I developed a list of synonyms for various acts and pieces of male anatomy. It was tedious and mechanical in the same way that a lot of actual porn is tedious and mechanical. And, for that matter, in the same way that sex can be tedious and mechanical if you have the misfortune to be having it with someone who fucks by formula.

I have more to say on this topic, but it will have to wait for a time when I'm less fatigued and when I can say it in a way that doesn't bore myself. It really does please me to be called a pornographer, as long as I can remain anonymous. I don't think my kids would be especially pleased to find out. Though, now that I think about it, my older daughter (almost all of her male friends are gay) did once ask me whether I'd be willing to buy some porn for her underage gay friends who were too shy to get it for themselves. When I started shrieking "OH MY GOD YOU DID NOT JUST ASK ME THAT!!! TELL THEM TO GET IT OFF THE INTERNET LIKE EVERYONE ELSE," she just rolled her eyes and said, "Geez, Dad. You could have just said 'no'."

Fortunately, it's is a secret that's easily buried. Unlike arcane baseball statistics, pornography disappears after a few years. You can't find the particular Dakota North who was I by Googling. Somebody probably still has a copy in a basement somewhere, but the only solid evidence that he and I are the same person is probably buried within the mountain of documents that were filed during my divorce proceedings. From the distance of this many years, the memory of my ex-wife's attorney asking me about my second career during the deposition is mostly funny. He couldn't quite bring himself to use the word "pornography," so I had to say it for him.

Maybe I should buy him a subscription to Torso. And have it sent to his office.