Sword and Sandal

by Roland Graeme

  Mr. Nameless was bisexual. He was married to an attractive younger woman, a real trophy wife. Mr. Nameless enjoyed sucking bodybuilder’s cocks, but what really turned him was watching muscle men fucking his wife. The couple hosted gangbangs in their home, and these get-togethers were notorious in bodybuilding circles.

  When I was invited to one of them, I felt obligated to show up. But I didn’t enjoy myself. The guests were expected to service Mr. and Mrs. Nameless, not each other. It was all too calculated and impersonal for my taste. I know that must sound strange, coming from a guy who’s just admitted to having performed in porn movies. But that’s the way I felt. That night, as a stud, I was a dud—an unusual and humiliating experience, for me.

  After that, I got the distinct impression that I was being treated rather coolly by Mr. Nameless and his flunkies.

  In all honesty, I felt that I was being “dropped,” which was the term we gym rats used. The bodybuilding subculture was replete with legends of “dropped” physique stars, as the business’ barons picked up, exploited, and then discarded their protégés as fast as any Hollywood studio went through starlets. I’d heard all too many stories about disillusioned guys who’d turned to alcohol or drugs, or worse. The poster boy example of such a downfall was one blond-haired, blue-eyed, deeply-tanned muscle man who was on the top of the bodybuilder heap for a year or two. And then he was dropped. He no longer got any publicity in the magazines. He stopped winning competitions. His product endorsement contracts dried up. Things deteriorated to the point at which, if he showed up to do an exhibition, people would lie in wait for him and laugh—and not always behind his back.

  That was the start of my own disillusionment with the physique industry. Oh, don’t get me wrong. I still loved the sport. I loved working out. I still do. But I lost some of my dewy-eyed innocence.

  I found myself asking, okay, here I am … I’ve got a decent body, if I do say so myself … I’ve got the muscles. I ought to; God knows I’ve worked liked a dog to get them. But now what? What do I do with them? Where do I go from here?

  My experiences with John and Dirk had taught me that my physique was a commodity, which could be exploited for gain.

  Although popular mythology would have it that hustling bodybuilders merely feign homosexuality in order to make bundles of cash by turning tricks with gay men, I knew from personal experience that homosexuality was by no means uncommon among the muscle elite. All of those stories about hustling were basically true—especially in the large cities. The guys who openly admitted to being gay may have been comparatively few, but just about all them turned tricks—and when they did, they’d do just about anything that a john demanded from them.

  As was the case in most sports, however, bodybuilding was not particularly fond of gay people. I knew two lifters who were banned from some of the muscle magazines after they’d posed nude for a gay mail-order photo firm. I tried to be extremely discreet about my own excursions into that area, and my sex life in general, just to make sure I wasn’t “dropped” because of my homosexuality. The publicity that the physique industry could give you could help you, but it could also take over your personal life and dictate your choices. The money to be made wasn’t enough to compensate for that, in my opinion.

  For me, being a star bodybuilder brought more fame than fortune.

  The fact that on this side of the Atlantic I was seen as more of an object of lust than an object of art could leave me frustrated when it came to romantic endeavors. Admittedly, everybody likes to be admired. But I would meet some guys, and all they wanted to talk about was my biceps. It really didn’t give you a feeling that there was any depth to you. It was hard to find anybody who was truly interested in me. I longed to meet another man who would like me for my personality, or my conversation, or who’d even share some interest with me outside of the gym.

  But such unenlightened responses, and the other drawbacks of bodybuilding—which included the inability to buy decent dressy clothes off the rack—didn’t detract from my fanatical enthusiasm for the sport. As so many other weightlifters have acknowledged, it’s a big rush. When I was in the gym, all I did was concentrate on pumping that particular muscle I happened to be working, watching it move. It was a natural high, because some extraordinary force seemed to be at work inside my body. It was a physical and an emotional release, and a temporary escape from reality.

  To make a long story short … during that time I lived in Manhattan, I whored around a lot. I did some discreet hustling. I was a call boy, available by the hour, for a fee.

  But the truth was, I wasn’t cut out to be a male prostitute. I was polite, and I think the johns liked me. But I found it difficult to fake arousal with men with whom I felt no real sexual chemistry.

  During this period, I did have my moments, though. A United State Senator became infatuated with me. For more than a year, he came to New York at least twice a month. He’d check into one of the most luxurious hotels in the city, and I’d meet him there for sex.

  Eventually, though, his wife found out that he was screwing around—not only with me, but with other guys. She lowered the boom, and forced him back on the straight and narrow.

  And, all this while, I continued to work for Dirk.

  But, as I’ve said, my porn career, like my stint as a call boy, was a short one. Today, all six of these movies are considered gay cult classics. But I can’t take any credit for that. Dirk was responsible for the unique qualities these films possess—which might be summarized as an unabashed, gleeful exploration of the full spectrum of gay sexuality, from tender lovemaking to pure raunch.

  Today, thanks to the twenty-first century’s digital media explosion, every single frame from these six films is accessible at the click of a computer’s mouse. This creates the illusion that I spent all of my waking hours having sex in front of a camera. The truth was that making these movies was an incidental part of my life.

  Viewing the films, you can tell that Dirk had a “thing” for me at the time. He gave me a lot of exposure, in every sense of the word. There are moments in my scenes when Mark’s camera, at Dirk’s instigation, lingers on me in way that could be called favoritism—or obsessive. All I can say in my defense is that this wasn’t the first time a director was having sex with his leading lady—or, in this case, with his leading man. I’m told it happened in Hollywood all the time. Why should low-budget porn be held to a higher (off-camera) moral standard?

  Dirk’s ambition was to make me a true porn star. He had contacts in California. At the time we wrapped up my sixth (and last) film for him, he wanted to send me out to the west coast to work for one of the larger studios there. I was willing. But fate intervened, in that unpredictable way it has, and it decreed otherwise.

  Chapter Eight: Muscles in the Movies

  At the time, my idol and role model was a gentleman named Steve Reeves. I had plenty of company. My buddy Eric Streiff worshipped Reeves, too, and so did many other bodybuilders.

  Steve Reeves single-handedly redefined bodybuilding’s sensibilities. Suddenly, size wasn’t enough. Sheer bulk and brawn could only get you so far, and they could even be considered liabilities. Reeves wasn’t the biggest man who ever strode out onto a stage in posing trunks—not by a wide margin. But he didn’t need to be, because the man was perfectly proportioned. Even in repose, his physique was graceful. And, when he posed and flexed, he gave new life to that hoary cliché, “poetry in motion.” The guy looked like a god, come down from Mount Olympus to give us mere mortals something worth worshipping. The fact that he was handsome, intelligent, and personable didn’t hurt him, either. Almost overnight, he set the standard to which the rest of us iron pumpers desperately aspired.

  As though his accomplishments in bodybuilding weren’t enough, Reeves also left a lasting mark on the film industry, at least in Italy. He in fact did bit parts in a couple of Hollywood productions before an Italian studio invited him to portray Hercules. The rest, as they say, is history—or rath
er pseudo-history, since the so called “sword and sandal” film genre in which Reeves excelled usually played fast and loose with historical fact, and also never hesitated to rewrite the stories of classical mythology to serve its ends.

  The Italian studios ground out film after film of this type. Some of these were co-productions with French or Spanish studios. Since they couldn’t always get Reeves, they needed to find other muscle men to play the leads. As a result, an entire galaxy of flexing stars was created. Some of these guys were native Italians, or at least European, although for some reason the studios often decided that they should be given stage names that sounded Anglo-Saxon. Thus Sergio Ciani, Constantine Daniel Vafiadis, and Adriano Bellini became Alan Steel, Dan Vadis, and Kirk Morris, respectively. These men were not enough to meet the demand, so bodybuilders were also imported from the United States. A guy named Lou Degni was rechristened Mark Forest, and one Gordon Merrill Werschkul became Gordon Scott. An enterprising blond lad who’d posed nude for several Californian photographers and filmmakers was transformed into Ed Fury. Richard Harrison, a handsome man who actually had some formal training as an actor, was lucky—he was allowed to keep his real name.

  One of the major Italian studios, located in Rome, soon decided to take advantage of the sword and sandal trend by making a movie which would feature not just one bodybuilder, but several—as many as they could cram into it, in fact. Since they didn’t have too much money to spend, they looked for a suitable property which would allow for a lot of filming outdoors, on location, instead of in the studio, on sets. Luckily for them, they had a smart young writer on their payroll. He’d been given a thorough education, including immersion in the classics of Greek and Latin literature. He came up with the idea for a film which would be titled Tito Manlio, or Titus Manlius as we would say it in English.

  The studio heads also decided that, since they’d need more than one bodybuilder, they couldn’t afford to hire one of the big names who’d already emerged in the industry, such as Reeves or Forest. Instead, they’d take a chance by contracting some unknowns. If this strategy paid off, they could claim the credit for having discovered a new star or two. If it didn’t, they’d write off their loss and move on to the next project.

  The studio’s representatives contacted my fuck buddy Eric Streiff, and they made him an offer. This was a shrewd move on the Italians’ part, since Eric was a hot number on the bodybuilding circuit at the time. And he was certainly good-looking enough to be plausible as the male lead in a movie.

  Eric told me about the offer—and he also admitted that he wasn’t sure he was all that keen on pursuing it. He was afraid the filmmaking would interfere with his rigorous training schedule! And the weird thing was, I understood perfectly where he was coming from. I never let anything get in the way of my own workouts—not my job, not a cold, not a family get-together, not even the wedding or the funeral of a close relative.

  “If I accept this gig, I’m going to have to be overseas in Italy for, like, a whole month,” Eric complained. “I’ll probably end up being bored out of my skull. Hey, how’d you like to come along with me?”

  “I’d love to, but I could never afford it.”

  “Maybe you could get paid for it, too. I told them I have this buddy who doesn’t look too shabby, and I showed them your photos. They might be willing to put you in this flick, too.”

  “You’re kidding me, Eric.”

  “No, I’m not. These guys are here on the States scouting for new talent. I don’t know if either of us has any talent, but we’ve got the kind of look they’re going for. And they got all hot and bothered when I told them you speak Italian, because that might save them the cost of hiring an interpreter for me. They want to meet with me again, in a day or two. You might as well tag along, and see what they have to say. What’ve you got to lose?”

  Well, in point of fact, I supposed I had nothing to lose, apart from an hour or so of my time. So I agreed to accompany Eric to his appointment. At first, I treated the whole thing as a joke. I told my gym buddies that I was auditioning to be a movie actor. I was going to go off to Italy and give Steve Reeves and Mark Forest some competition. Yeah, right. In my dreams!

  Interestingly enough, neither Eric nor I was ever required to make a screen test, at the time. That came later—after the contracts were signed.

  In a hotel suite in downtown Manhattan, we met with the Italian studio’s representatives. Eric and I may have been young and naïve, but we weren’t complete innocents. We’d both been promised big things by some of the bodybuilding organizations, which had subsequently reneged on these promises, so we were wary. Eric had a brother in law, Daniel, who was a hotshot lawyer, so we invited him to accompany us to the meeting as our “agent.”

  When Eric first introduced me to Daniel, I drew him aside, for a one-on-one conversation, outside of Eric’s earshot.

  “I have to ask you, Daniel,” I told him. “What about those photos of Eric?”

  “What photos? And what about them?”

  “The nude photos of Eric, which he’s been selling. To bodybuilding enthusiasts. Oh, hell. To gay men, mostly.”

  “So guys are willing to pay to see Eric in his birthday suit. So what?”

  “So, what are these Italian movie people going to think, about Eric exposing himself like that?”

  “What they don’t know can’t hurt them,” Daniel said, blandly.

  “And me?”

  “What about you?”

  “I’ve posed for the same kind of pictures. And, worse—” I told Daniel, briefly, about my excursions into gay porn.

  He shocked me by his diffidence. “No big deal,” he declared.

  “But couldn’t it be a big deal, if these guys from Italy find out about it?” I said.

  “I don’t see why. If they try to sneak a morals clause into your contract, I’ll act all insulted, and I’ll insist that they take it out. I’ll tell ‘em that a fine, upstanding young man like you would never dream of doing anything even vaguely immoral. I’ll lay a guilt trip on them. They’ll cave in. As for you—in the unlikely event that the subject comes up, which I doubt, your position is that you’re a goddamn virgin, a fucking Boy Scout. You’ve never unzipped your fly and whipped out your dick in your life. That’s your story, and you’re sticking to it.”

  I had to hand it to Daniel—he was shrewd.

  But the Italians were no fools, either. After some polite chitchat, they soon got down to business.

  For one thing, even though they’d been supplied with photos of Eric and me—a few head shots, along with many pictures of us stripped down to our posing trunks—they wanted to get a look at us in the flesh. I suppose the possibility had occurred to them that the photos of our near-naked bodies might have been retouched—if not to enhance our muscles, which wouldn’t have fooled anyone for very long, then perhaps to conceal scars or other skin flaws.

  “Would you mind undressing down to your shorts?” one of the men asked us, politely.

  I agreed at once. “Of course not.”

  In my own mind, I was still treating this whole adventure as a lark. Eric was the one these guys wanted to sign up. I couldn’t believe that my much less stellar bodybuilding credentials, which included such titles as Mr. Garden State, could mean much to these Italian gentlemen. As a result, I wasn’t least bit nervous or self-conscious.

  I had already begun to undress, when I noticed that Eric seemed reluctant to follow suit. This was entirely out of character for him. I was down to my boxer shorts (freshly laundered, starched, and ironed, I’m proud to say) when Eric called Daniel over for a whispered “conference.”

  “What’s the matter with you?” Daniel hissed in Eric’s ear. “So strip, already! Since when are you so modest?”

  “I’m not wearing any underwear,” Eric confessed, looking sheepish.

  I could tell that Daniel wanted to let Eric have it, for showing up at this important meeting without underwear. But instead, he smiled sweetly at
the Italians, who were waiting patiently, and he excused himself for a moment. While I tried not to laugh, Daniel darted into the suite’s bathroom, returning with one of the hotel’s towels.

  “Drop your pants and wrap this around you,” he whispered to Eric.

  So, while I walked up and down the room in my shorts, allowing the Italians to inspect me, they got to see Eric—briefly—totally nude, before he wrapped the towel around his waist and joined me on parade. It was kind of farcical, and I did have trouble keeping a straight face. But the Italians seemed to like what they saw, which was the important thing. At their request, we did some flexing. (No bodybuilder worth his baby oil ever turns down an invitation to show off what he’s got.)

  We got dressed. Then we sat down and negotiated.

  Eric was being offered a lot more money than I was, which was only to be expected, since he’d be playing the so-called “juvenile lead,” whereas I was going to be cast in a supporting role—if I was lucky. Eric was also going to be billed under his real name. The fact that he had an established reputation as a pro bodybuilder, and he was well known as such even in Italy, no doubt had a lot to do with this. Apologetically, the Italians told me that I would have to use a stage name, and preferably one that sounded as American as possible. Apparently, my real name was too Italian-sounding to be included along with those of a bunch of Italian actors in the cast list of an Italian film!