Where The Streets Have No Name: The Dark Days of The Gay Porn Alias

It really says a lot that the two American underclasses most reliant on aliases are crooks and porn stars.

Yes, while your typical downtown con or friendly neighborhood leg-breaker may be alternately known as Harley Heenahan, aka Rocco Bic, aka Ricky Streetz, aka Gremlin, it's getting so your randomly-selected gay porn model has just as many trashy AKAs under his belt.  I figure that there has to be a meth runner in your area né Colton Capps, so inversely there also must be -- somewhere, out there -- a just-off-the-bus barely legal Skid Row twink starlet dubbed Jujyfruit, this pair capable of very easily switching lives on a dime. 

It's as if America's criminal underworld and Porn City (aka:  San Fernando Valley) are beginning to overlap in this venn diagram of lust, graft, and shady profiteering.  All I can picture is Naked City meets Heavy Traffic crossed with The Living End and sprinkled with a less-than-savory dash of '60s gay pulp.  "Welcome to the Dungaree Jungle, boys!  What is the Law?:  Fuck 'em before they fuck you!"  I get that porn is the figurative shady part of town in American pop culture, but lately, that red light district has started to seem a lot less Boogie Nights and a lot more 8mm.

The truth is, I like my porn the way I like my amusement parks:  safe, well-lit, and heavily-regulated.  Sometimes I miss the cheesy, sunny, optimistic gay porn of the '90s.  Porn seems darker now, more remote.  I guess that I shouldn't be surprised that as the medium seems to be entering a permanent twilight, it's become seedier and scarier than it was during the home video revolution.  There was a time before porn went mainstream that performers were mainly  -- mainly -- arrested for the expected industry pitfalls, while the mobsters shaking down the producers committed the really ugly offenses.  Maybe it's that the drug trap is even more perilous now, but over the past five years, it's the actual talent themselves who have essentially become their own de facto enforcers, so I guess if you're gonna kill your sugar daddy, knife a teenager, ice a rival producer, or sledgehammer a trick to death in some weird hybristophilac mating ritual, you'd better have some fake agnomens at-the-ready for when you flee for the border.

Half the fun of porn is that it used to be this downmarket flipside of mainstream Hollywood -- a world where guys who were too short or not quite talented enough to land gigs in Aaron Spelling nighttime soaps could find tawdry fanfare of their own.  You had men who were the big A-List stars and looked like mainstream actors, then you'd have your reliable B-Team ones to round out a good cast, and then there were your favorite D-Listers who would do movies because they needed money to order pizza that night.  The system worked.  

It's distressing enough to know today that there's a guy out there who willingly christened himself Fierfly, but I just can't with the likes of Dylan McLovin, Baby Star, Jason Crystal, and Dcota (the fuck?).  We're now in the era of hipster porn stars who are oh-so-ironic about getting jizzed on for a living, which means we end up with cats called Kelly Taylor, Dale Cooper, Patrick Bateman, and -- inevitably? -- Joey Tribbiani and Fabio in the mix.  Violent eye roll.  Gay porn has its own Lena Dunhams, James Francos, and Diablo Codys now.  Shameless pandering for crowdfunding, artistic cred, and even Wi-Fi is the new hustle.  Gay porn is now, weirdly, a parody of itself, and that's a corner that's nigh-impossible to escape once you've painted yourself into it.

Names used to really matter because  box covers needed marketable stars, and stars stuck with their monikers because they were assets.  You really wanted it to feel like Henry Wilson was still around and bestowing appellations like Flash Branson, Biff McLintock, and Clutch Cargo upon his stable of male starlets.  Rex Chandler seems almost quaint now, like Tab Hunter or Frankie Avalon.  Tom Katt was Tom Katt from day one, and the fact that he was outed as a fuck film star because the adult video store across the street from where he worked had a big cardboard cut-out of him in its window was frankly pretty cool.  As performers have become more plastic and assembly-line, the star power of a great screen name has vanished.  How many Tylers or Kevins can succumb to this prefab unimoniker trend?  How do you feel anything for Trip aka Reese aka Calvin aka Cord doing his 50,000th solo scene?  Who is he, who was he, who does he hope to become?

Porn has hit the same existential wall that Hollywood did back in the '60s when TV began to lure away its viewers, and whether it can survive that remains to be seen.  The cracks are showing, though.  Technology and consumer apathy combined are a two-headed monster that's tough to slay.  Exclusive contracts for big name stars are dwindling along with paychecks, and the collapse of prominent studios has opened the door for any number of cut-rate producers houses that employ flash-in-the-pan performers with no real star quality, nor any mystique.  Content is having to become more extreme. 

As circumstances have gotten more desperate in the industry, porn now seems to revel in seeing random, anonymous, or just plain debauched men further debased, laid low.  "Jake" may garner the porn equivalent of an "introducing" credit for one studio, but we've already seen him promoted by three others under different names -- just another boy-bot who could snap like a broken toy.  I suspect that the days of long careers on camera are behind us too.  The game plan for new models now involves working for as many studios as possible -- under a different nom de porn for each -- for all of six months to a year before cashing out. When overexposure kicks in, anything novelly hot can cool off quickly.  Level-headed players are being replaced by seriously troubled, dispensable drifters teetering between the gutter and The Big House.  The Name Game is indicative of that fatigue.

Every body do Tony!
Pretty good, let's do Billy!
Very good, let's do Marshall!
A little trick with Nick!