A Shot of Yaeger: Our Exclusive Interview with Rob Yaeger

One of my favorite things about my job is that I'm able to come into work every single day and be surprised by something, almost exclusively in a positive way. I was aware of Rob Yaeger and his work, and while prepping to interview him, the Manhattan offices of Rentboy were raided. In the wake of this, Jake Jaxson released a piece on the Huffington Post that featured an interview with Rob in which he talked about his experiences as an escort and, even more miraculously, opened up his home and gave us all a glimpse inside his personal life. I was floored, moved to tears, and more than anything else, blessed with a new appreciation and—dare I say it—a new attraction to his already dynamic presence as a performer. There is not a doubt in mind that you'll walk away from this interview feeling exactly the same.

Before you read this interview, however, I would highly recommend first watching the video since it's a huge topic of conversation in our chat...

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Vincent Thrice: Is this still a good time for you to talk?

Rob Yaeger: It’s fine, this is actually the first time I’ve talked shop in about a week. I’ve been going through this whole thing with that interview that I did for Cocky Boys.

VT: Yes!

RY: Did you see it?

VT: I did. A friend of mine who is not in the industry whatsoever posted it to her Facebook page, and what a piece, honestly. It was phenomenal. 

RY: Yeah, between his essay and the video that we shot, it was pretty awesome. 

VT: Yes, and I think—or at least I hope—that it really drove home a point. 

RY: Well, I’ve sort of been looking at myself more as somebody talking about social justice these days rather than doing porn, but (both laugh). It’s all sort of wrapped up in the same ball of wax. 

VT: Absolutely. You know, I actually have a question about that anyway, so if you don’t mind let’s just jump right into this. As far as the profile on The Huffington Post goes, did you have any reservations about opening yourself up like that in such a public & mainstream forum? 

RY: I actually didn’t, I always like to share things about myself when the moment is right because, I think, in porn especially there is a reason why we have different identities. We have our performer names and we have our real names, and generally speaking there isn’t much crossover between the two. But this was a moment where disclosing some stuff about my personal life really made an important point. So I was actually quite happy to do it and we shot this footage back in April for a completely different reason and it wasn’t until the Rentboy raid happened in New York that we had a reason to tell the story because it isn’t very sexy. It’s not sexual at all and we were shooting a Cocky Boys movie and they were doing a profile about me and my Rentboy & escorting life, and I had to tell the full story because if you really want to know why I’m involved in this, then you have to know a lot about my personal injury, and that involves my partner, so that’s why we did it. 

And then Andy (Pandy), who was the guy who shot the footage and did all the editing and cinematography, he called me up two days after the raid and he was like, “I really need to talk to you,” and I thought he was basically going to cancel the shoot completely and not use the footage. But quite the contrary, he was like, “Do you mind if we publish this on a mainstream, very public level?” and I just said, “Go ahead.”

VT: That’s great.

RY: Yeah! I had no reservations at all because I think that the more people know about me for these reasons, the better. 

VT: Definitely, and it is… I don’t know if refreshing is the right word, but it’s certainly refreshing to see, lately anyway, the crossover between escorting and porn is high.

RY: Very much so, especially for gay performers.

VT: Right, and I think that it’s treated very much like a dirty little secret, so my hope is that your piece and hopefully others that come out in the wake of this raid will maybe shine a light on the fact that this isn’t some “behind closed doors” thing that’s happening, it’s pretty much out in the open, most people just aren’t looking. 

RY: Right and of course the other thing that I think is a crossover for porn performers, at least in terms of doing bisexual or straight movies, is that escorting is really frowned upon because a lot of people think that it endangers STD test results. So that’s also a thing, but since the release of the video I’ve gotten e-mails and tweets and direct messages from some of my straight colleagues, some of them girls, and they’re like, “This brought tears to my eyes, I can’t believe that there’s people as good as you out there.” So, I mean it’s clearly penetrated a lot of the stereotypes about escorting and made people realize that it shouldn’t be a dirty little secret, especially something that can be very beneficial to everyone involved. 

VT: And the fact that you mention that for a lot of these men, you’re almost a therapist for them, it shines a different light on the profession and lets people know that your escorting life is not some sort of non-stop, Eyes Wide Shut-esque sex fest or something. 

RY: It’s not exploitative in the least. I’m doing this by choice. Obviously there is some economic compulsion, but I don’t face the same sort of bad economic pressure that some escorts do. At times I question whether I’m the best spokesman to advocate for reform and social attitudes toward sex workers, but I’m happy to do it for this particular moment in time. 

VT: Well, sometimes it just takes one person to stand up and do this in a very public way to help enact real change, so…

RY: The one thing I was very concerned about was my partner because he’s so frail. It was very hard for him to do the interview. I remember the day we shot the interview, about 75% of the way into the day he was just like, “I can’t do this anymore, it’s overwhelming me too much,” between the memories of the incident and just the exertion of talking about his own life, which is something he hasn’t done for years, it was very taxing for him. And I’m also generally very discreet about my partner, I don’t like to drag him into my professional life, but this was a time when that was important to do so.

VT: Absolutely. It seems like this is a really synergistic time in your life at the moment, between the exposure thanks to the Huffington Post piece, just passing 3000 Twitter followers, and of course, the launch of The Fuck Chronicles. Do things feel like they’re coming together for you at the moment or are you remaining guarded?

RY: I really do feel like they’re coming together, and it’s funny too because back in January an astrologer told me, “Watch out for August, there’s going to be a big flowering for you,” (both laugh). So I kind of feel like it was all ordained somehow, but just speaking purely pragmatically, I think that I’ve been in the business long enough that the critical mass of my past work and getting to know people on both coasts and also getting to a point where enough people know me, where I think that I’m ready to take a step forward in my career, and I think that’s what is happening. 

VT: It’s really funny how all of those things just sort of happened right around the same moment, and I wonder if you’ve seen moments like that before or is this the first time you’ve really seen a number of things come together all at once?

RY: In terms of good things, this is about the first time it’s happened in porn. You know, I’ve had bad things happen in great multiplicity at various times in my life, but this is the first time where it’s been extraordinarily positive, and I’m just absolutely humbled. It’s not going to change anything about who I really am, you know, it’s not going to turn me into a douchebag all of a sudden (both laugh). 

VT: Right, well, if you’ve weathered the bad, I think it makes you appreciate the good when it finally does come along.

RY: Oh, for sure. I feel that this really created my character and I’m certainly grateful for any good times that come upon me in my life. 

VT: Moving on, your sexual orientation is essentially that you don’t have one, in as much as you don’t like to label it…

RY: I don’t like to label it because I think that labels are phony, in light of my own experiences in life. At one time I did identify as gay. At other times like when I was a teenager, I didn’t even know what gay was I just thought of myself as being a boy and I was attracted to girls at that time. I was attracted to boys too, but I just didn’t know what to make of those feelings. But now that I have sex with both men and women, I use the term Omnisexual because it captures the fluidity and the dynamism of human sexuality, at least in my case. 

VT: Absolutely. I was going to ask if you feel that as society in general is beginning to shun labels more and more, do you see the adult world following suit?

RY: I really think that, at least in my experience with straight porn, that all of the guys that I’ve worked with have been—at least in some sense—bisexual. Look, if you’re shooting straight porn, there’s some big hairy bald guy sitting basically back to back with you as you’re doing a scene, it can happen (both laugh). So you need to be comfortable with that, if you’re doing a DP or something, you’re going to have to be in contact with another guy’s dick and not complain about it, so someone who’s completely and utterly, as I call them, pigheadedly straight is not going to stand for that, so you have to have a certain level of leeway sexually in order to do any sort of porn. 

VT: Yeah, I would tend to agree with that, and it is funny how certainly the consumers and people that watch porn that will watch straight porn and call themselves 100% straight, but there is an attraction to the male sex organ, seeing it in action, doing things that perhaps theirs can’t…

RY: Oh completely. There’s a little story that I tell about people who watch straight porn. When they watch it, I’ll ask them sometimes, “When you’re watching straight porn, do you prefer to watch a big, fat dick fuck a pussy or a small dick?” and they always say a big, fat dick which means that you’re looking at the big, fat dick and liking it and, you know, that’s not straight (both laugh). I think that dicks are something that intrigue all men and I think that sort of goes back to Sigmund Freud’s statement that all human beings are bisexual, it’s just a question of what predominates at a particular time. And that’s the way I live my life, because at particular times, different sources of desire and desire for different genders or different body parts have predominated for me. 

VT: So let me ask you this, and I didn’t write down this question but I’d like to get your opinion on it. There is this proclivity, in the gay porn world, where the studios think that the audience only wants to see actual gay men having sex with one another. They don’t want females in the film at all, especially not as performers, they don’t want anyone that might potentially be working in the straight porn world, or anyone who is gay for pay. There’s this very insular streak that seems to run through the industry and I wonder what your experiences have been like with that?

RY: Well, it is more insular and the only hate that I’ve really gotten on Twitter and places like that has been from gay fans that have found out about my Omnisexuality. They will send me tweets and messages that say, “Oh, you only talk about girls,” or “Why do you want to work with this girl?” blah, blah, blah, and they proceed to call me a fraud for doing gay porn because they feel that in order to do gay porn you basically have to be a gold star gay. So not only do you have to get turned on by men, you have to be fantasizing about men in your personal life, and I explain, along with some of my more progressive colleagues, that that is ridiculous to think because any one person’s sexuality is much too complicated to require that anybody who does gay porn not only has to have the attraction to men, but the psychological makeup of somebody who only thinks about their own gender. So yeah, I have encountered that a little bit. It’s a fringe position, but I do encounter it.

VT: Yeah, I know it’s not the prevailing thought any more and you see it particularly in the comment section, certainly on our website, but on a lot of others too. It just makes me wonder why some people are holding onto this view?

RY: We really saw it in response to the new Treasure Island video that I was in, Fuck Holes 3 and of course Treasure Island is a gay icon, basically, real down-home gay porn, with an enormous following and tremendous financial success because they’ve been defiantly “gay” in that sense. And so, when we did the video with my fucking Trans-girl Sami Price and a gang bang scene where my friend Siouxsie Q was getting fucked by guys, the gay fans really got vocal and said, “We can’t believe this, this is a betrayal, it’s no longer gay porn,” as if gay porn were somehow distinguishable from porn in general.

So that led to a lot of comments against Max Sohl and how the people at Treasure Island were selling out the gay community, etc. But it turns out that Fuck Holes 3 sold really well. 

VT: Really?

RY: Yeah, it broke all these sales records, so these vocal comments by all of these gay men who were disappointed and saw it as a sell-out were really just a vocal minority. I mean, they take it very seriously, and if you look at the comments, you might think there’s something to this, but then you look at the sales figures and realize it’s just a bunch of loud mouths on the internet. 

VT: It seems to me that running your own site give you a ton of freedom and autonomy, but it can also be incredibly time consuming. Do you prefer running your own site or would you rather work strictly as a performer for a studio? 

RY: I like doing everything, and I have a very diversified approach to what I do with my time. I love working with other companies because it gives me exposure, so every time I work with another studio, I look at that as free advertising. And of course I have my escorting which is another source of income and doing my own thing is another source of income, and also exposure and advertising. But it’s very, very time consuming. It took me about six months just to get the site going, between organizing the shoots, getting all of the footage together, doing all of the editing myself, doing all of the promotion, it takes a very long time. 

In terms of the freedom, I really wanted to do the site because I don’t like to sit around and wait for companies to call me. I like to be working all the time. In a perfect world, I’d be doing a porn scene five days a week. I’d love to, I’m a big technician, or a dick-nician (both laugh), so I feel that it’s a technical skill that I’m good at, and why shouldn’t I be doing it everyday? So I run my own site in order to fulfill my desire to be working a lot and I use the old style that I learned when I fist started doing videos with X-Tube, and I’ve taken it to a new level, which is all mine. 

VT: Yeah, and honestly the production quality is so much better than people may expect because when you hear the term “self-produced,” the mind just wanders to people setting up a shitty webcam in the corner of a room and god only knows what happens next. But you have a legitimate talent as a performer, as an editor, and a director, and it’s much more than your average self-produced content for sure.

RY: Well, I appreciate that very much. I learned my craft by reading people’s comments on X-Tube. So I spent 2010, 2011, 2012 basically just doing my thing and seeing what worked and what didn’t on X-Tube. So now that I’m having sex with other people and other pornstars for my site, I’m able to stick with what I know works. People really like the amateur style. I think there’s been a big movement in porn away from the high gloss, story-driven, beautiful lighting, people just want to feel like they’re looking through a window or peeking through a keyhole in somebody’s apartment and they see some hot sex going on. That’s what my site is trying to capture. 

VT: Which is great because that’s a market that is going to explode, if it hasn’t already.

RY: Yeah, my sales have already been quite good considering the fact that I haven’t really done any advertising yet. I’ve been very happy with the progress that I’ve had so far. The other thing is that it’s very liberating since my shoots are very straightforward; I have a wide angle shot and then some POV and a closer angle on the penetration, and then I go back to my editor and intersperse those perspectives. That’s my basic model, but ultimately when I get some capital, I want to get a cameraman in there and maybe rent out some hotels or something to do the shoots, but for the most part, the floor of my office is fine (both laugh). I’m also looking to shoot some stuff this coming October with Brock Avery, who’s already got his own site, and we’re gonna be doing our own thing, trading content, we’re gonna bring in girls, guys, trans people, and we’re just gonna shoot some stuff and put it on our sites. 

VT: That’s really exciting. As of right now, what do you think are the two or three best scenes available on The Fuck Chronicles right now?

RY: I really like Ethan, who I describe as my worshiper, we’ve done two scenes so far. He was just this guy I met who was willing to be filmed, and we just had this crackling chemistry. I think that those two videos are really, really good. There’s actually really good solo on there that I’m really proud of called “A Classic Rob Yaeger Solo Fleshlight Show,” and there’s one with a Shy Twink that’s selling really well too. 

What’s interesting too is that people aren’t deterred by the fact that, in some of the videos, I don’t show the bottom’s face because one of the principles of my site is that it’s Rob Yaeger’s Fuck Chronicles. You’re looking at the life of this stud who fucks people left and right, right in his house, and it doesn’t really matter who the other guy is. So you can either identify with me or you can identify with this bottom object whose identity is really irrelevant, so the fact that I conceal the identity of some of these more amateur bottoms adds to the excitement and the purposes of the site. 

VT: For sure, I think that anonymity allows the viewers to more readily place themselves in there

RY: Yeah and step into the shoes of this bottom and be my object because that’s one of the fantasies that I get all the time in fan mail: “I want to be that anonymous bottom. I want to be that bottom who gets fucked by a stud.”

VT: Is there anyone you haven’t worked with yet, in the gay porn world, that you’re dying to work with?

RY: Yes, Tyler Rush. I’m great Twitter buddies with Tyler Rush and we have a little Twitter flirtation going on. He’ll comment on a boner picture of mine and send me a picture of his ass and then I’ll send him a video of me jerking off, and it’s really awesome (both laugh). That guy’s ass is off the charts and I think that we could make a stupendous video together. 

VT: My last question is just if there’s anything else you’d like your fans to know or perhaps anyone that’s discovering you for the first time?

RY: Well, I just hope that people enjoy the content I produce. It’s a real amateur alternative to high gloss porn that captures real, masculine, hot sex in an informal setting, which is true to life. It’s reality porn. I think that’s something that people really thirst for, based on all of my experiences doing porn. People want to see real sex, real encounters, and the excitement of that spark that happens between two people when they first have sex, and that’s something that my videos capture.