Still, defying or creating social constructs aside, I’m not convinced it is possible to think about nudity without thinking about sex. Like it or not, some wack combination of hormones and neurotransmitters that my humanities-inclined mind refuses to comprehend automatically goes off whenever we see someone we are even remotely attracted to in the nude. Boobs. Penis. Sex. Simple, really.
So what is it about nudity that makes us feel so, well, naked?
“Nudity,” actress Bridget Fonda once declared, “is who people are at the most interesting part of the evening, when they take off their protective layer, when no one is watching.” If this is the case, then I have been missing out. The physical specificities of my lovers tend to take a backseat to more important matters, e.g., sexual positions and continuous orgasms. I have zero desire to think about his patchy chest hair or nonexistent abs, much less how my stomach and thighs must look without clothes to hide under. Grunting, sweating bodies are best ignored in favor of assured, maximized sexual pleasure.
So much of our discomfort with nudity has to do with environment and social convention. At the beach, people feel comfortable in bikinis and Speedos, but not bras and boxers, largely because walking around in your bathing suit, even it means you are effectively nude, is socially acceptable. Walking around in your underwear is not. Same goes for locker rooms—walking around naked after a workout has little significance. Undressing someone in bed for the first time, even if you’ve already seen him or her naked in the locker room, takes on an entirely different meaning.
Maybe it gets difficult when someone we care about is watching us. Our vulnerability levels skyrocket. Going to a naked party with a bunch of random people is much easier—who cares what people you don’t know think? Going to a naked party with your lover is an entirely different, excuse the pun, ball game. So is going with a close friend, for that matter. We’re much more sensitive about our self-images when we care about the person (or people) observing us.
Genuine examine-every-crevice-in-my-body-and-fuck-me-with-the-lights-on nudity can be equally, if not more, erotic than sexual intercourse in and of itself. Which means it takes guts. If sex marks the shift in a relationship from friendship to something more, then nudity, in its rawest form, marks a relationship’s shift from something more to something that can’t be taken any further. To the normal human eye, the most you can observe about a person is visible when he or she is naked. Even for the most serious of couples, there is nothing more to see, nothing more to explore. Everything, including those physical attributes you like least about yourself and your lover, is suddenly on the table.
But it is not just more erotic, it is more intimate. About as intimate as it gets. Because once you are mutually raw and naked with someone, you’ll never look at that person the same way again.
The Hung List
Scott Poulson-Bryant
In an industry that prizes the very thing that, symbolically, keeps a Denzel Washington off the hung list—the looming possibility that he hangs better and is just waiting to unleash that hangature on the world—Lexington Steele is a bona fide leading man. In an industry in which women are the main attraction, in which female faces (and other body parts) are the selling points that move product, Steele is a star. With his massive fan following and record-setting three Best Male Performer awards from the Adult Video News (a sort of porn version of Variety-meets-the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences), compared to other men in the porn biz who are mainly, mostly, studs for hire, Steele reigns supreme. He is a tall, pitch-perfect evocation of what singer India.Arie affectionately calls “Brown Skin.” He is also a perfect evocation of that love-cum-envy that Toni Morrison’s Sula detailed so incisively—because, to put it bluntly, Steele is not only model handsome and athletically built, he is also hung, very well hung. Lexington Steele is eleven inches long. Eleven-by-seven-inches hung.
On the list of brothers in porn’s unofficial Beyond Ten Club, Lexington is said to come second, after Jack Napier, and before Sean Michaels, Jake Steed, Byron Long, and Justin Slayer. He may come second on that list, but if you ask around, many porn aficionados will rank Steele higher, partly because of his superior bedside manner and partly because, when compared to the other guys in the porn business, he is the whole package. Steele can pull it off, no pun intended. “It” being the ability to perform, which in the world of porn is more than whipping out the dick and stuffing it wherever the director instructs it to be stuffed. “It” is that highly regarded ability to be hard on cue (reportedly less stressful lately with the advent of Viagra), to be ready to shoot—in both senses of the word—when the director is ready to film, to be able to act the scene and make it real for the audience.
As provocative as a big dick might seem to us laypeople, size isn’t always what gets a guy into the porn game. “Size almost pales next to performance,” Steele told me one August night. “Next to the ability to shoot on cue or last longer to make a scene work? A big dick might get you in the door, but that ability to really perform is what keeps you in the game.”
That ability to perform well has made Lexington Steele more than one of the most popular porn actors to successfully make the transition to director/producer/owner. With Mercenary Pictures, the production company he founded in 2002, Steele has some control over his image and how his films get produced and distributed. Though he’s had success performing as the Impaler in a series of films, appearing in the Up Your Ass series and guest starring in Jake Steed’s mega-successful Little White Chicks and Big Black Monster Dicks franchise, Steele has given the world under the Mercenary banner Lex Steele XXX, Black Reign, Top Guns, Super Whores, and Lex on Blondes. His triple-threat status as performer/producer/director doesn’t just make him a brand name to be reckoned with; it also provides him with a clever and clear-eyed way of looking at the business of porn. When he told me, “This is a business and as a performer you look to penetrate a market,” it is clear that he appreciates the intended pun and appreciates that I appreciate it. “You also look to maximize your potential as a brand. You know that you’re filling a void and that you’re giving the audience a fantasy, but that doesn’t mean that I’m not aware of what it means that I do what I do.”
That awareness might come from the unusual way he made his way to porn. Before Lexington Steele was Lexington Steele, a king of West Coast porn production, he was a suburban East Coast kid, from Morristown, New Jersey, a middle-class, churchgoing kid who didn’t have girlfriends but excelled at sports (and lettered in three) before graduating from high school and first matriculating at Morehouse College only to eventually transfer to Syracuse. No girlfriends? “This was the late eighties, early nineties,” he told me. “It was all about the light-skinned, curly-haired brothers. The world wasn’t safe for the shaved-head dark brother yet.”
After college, where he pledged the black fraternity Omega Psi Phi, the stereotypically rowdier-than-thou Q-Dogs, Steele took his degree and landed on Wall Street, trading stocks and bonds for Oppenheimer. He did some modeling, the “legit” kind with his clothes on, but that didn’t last. He was, simply, too big for the sample-sized clothes models were expected to sell to buyers and shoppers on the runways and in the photo shoots. Not too big down there, but in his broad shoulders and long legs. Someone suggested that he try modeling for some adult publications and those jobs led to the suggestion that he try his hand at the porn biz. Which certainly was a place he’d never hear that he was “too big” for anything. So, in 1998, with enough money saved to last him, he figured, three or four months, he headed west, and there he remains.
His first few jobs, as it is for black dudes arriving on the scene, were primarily in all-black productions, doing sex scenes with black women. But he wanted to move into the interracial market, mainly because it paid more money and could only broaden his audience. And, like he’d told me, he was aware of what he was doing and, most important, aware of what was needed of him. “White consumers have certain expectations,” he told me.
“The idea of the big black buck deflowering the little virginal white girl is very popular.” Steele could do the “deflowering” but he also learned that as much as the audience may enjoy that scene, there was an irony at work that didn’t completely surprise him. To “deflower the little virginal white girls,” producers hired a specific sort of black man. This was the other part of the package: along with the big dick and the ability to “perform,” Steele, like other black guys who wanted to work the lucrative interracial market, had to be what he calls “palatable.” “Nonthreatening,” he told me.
Interesting concept: black men hired to be the big black buck had to be nonthreatening and palatable enough to appeal to the white men who wanted to jerk off to images of little virginal white girls being deflowered. In other words, they wanted their big black bucks not to be too black.
Just black enough, one supposes, to fuck a white girl.
According to Pat Riley, a pornography expert who posts rants and raves about the industry on his porn info site RAME (rame. net), “for the longest time,”
The porn industry… [traded] in the most pejorative views of blacks it [could] find. Pornographers perpetuate the stereotypical view of a shiftless, maladjusted group. [Racism in porn] is not some white actress who doesn’t want to screw a black guy (for whatever reason) but a concerted attempt by the producers to appeal to the basest elements of the viewing population.
But then there was the porn-era post-Sean Michaels, an articulate, bespectacled, briefcase-carrying black stud who played scenes as if he was a black Gregory Peck with a ten-inch dick running down the leg of his boxers underneath his gray flannel suit. Sean had single-handedly changed the rules for brothers in the porn game. Not only was he “palatable” but he was smarter than the average stud, more sophisticated than the average viewer, a tall ebony-skinned Adonis who never soiled his white collar.
“Sean paved the way for me,” Steele told me. “All roads lead back to Sean Michaels and what he did for the image of the black guy in porn.” Essentially Michaels had retrieved the tropes of standard white-boy professionalism and flipped it into a sort of sexy pose of black-boy cool. So you had to be just black enough (and hung big) to fuck a white girl, but not so threatening that you scare her in the parking lot after the shoot.
According to Steele, his video releases sell like, well, hotcakes. Whereas most porn videos will move approximately three thousand or so pieces upon initial release, then trail off at about five thousand copies over the next six months, Steele’s titles such as Heavy Metal, Volumes 1 and 2, will move five thousand copies upon release. Others have moved up to seven thousand pieces upon release and move about ten thousand copies in the next three months. These are major numbers in the porn market. And at twelve dollars a pop, that’s quite a few coins for an entrepreneurial porn actor to jangle in his pocket.
Lexington Steele, college-educated former Wall Street broker, works in a business where strangers fuck strangers for money, where the big black beast is an accepted role to be played in a public space, for a huge fan base of black men who worship him as the sexual superhero that he portrays on-screen and white men who want to see Steele whipping out his big black monster dick and ferociously putting it to a tiny white girl. Steele feels the sexual sting of stereotyping every day he goes to work: as the hung black stud he’s the personification of a stereotype that controls the very image of black men everywhere, yet he has to rely on the stereotype as a fantasy creation to ensure that he stays on top of his game. Steele laughs as he recounts this, mostly, it seems, because he realizes the utter paradox of it—culturally and economically speaking.
“By nature,” Steele says, “this business isn’t about any color except green—money. I mean, the only thing that separates it from being prostitution is that there’s a camera in the room when people are doing their thing.” As a producer, as someone who hires and fires talent every day, Steele has a fairly sanguine approach to it all, particularly coming up against the casting of white women and the usual conflicts that arise around that issue. “I don’t have a problem with hiring white girls who want to work. I’m seeing product. My own films don’t have a color line. All races are represented in the scenes. However if you allow my brown skin to overshadow my green money, then fuck you, that’s your loss.”
Not that this behavior is limited to the stars of the business. “I’ve met girls fresh off the bus from West Virginia or Utah, coming into this business and immediately stating that they don’t do black guys. This from a girl who’s probably fucked her way across the country to get here, who wants to make a living fucking strangers on camera. She’ll fuck for money, she won’t do it with a black dude.” He laughs off such a contradiction because he also knows there’s a secret buried in that paradox—as there usually is when race and sex meet for a little session. “The thing is,” he told me, “that many, many of these girls who ‘won’t screw a black guy’ really mean that they won’t screw a black guy on-screen. I know of a few of these women who do private shows with black guys. Let some rapper call, or some basketball player ring up and say he wants to get down. Then let’s see these females talk about ‘not screwing black guys.’ ”
“I take the good with the bad,” he added. “Of course there’re elements to doing this that doesn’t necessarily add up. It can be both emasculating as well as empowering.” Emasculating because “you know you’re the animal phallus, the beast. I know that I’m dealt with for what’s between my legs, but at the same time, there’s something to being cherished, to being the desired one even as you know you’re filling a stereotype.”
Said by the man who looked to the hip-hop music industry and World Wrestling Federation to find a way of crafting a branded image for himself. “You know how rappers and wrestlers are like characters?” he told me. “That’s my model. Method Man can be Johnny Blaze or whoever else. I can be the Impaler, the Dark Prince, the Black Viking.”
He’s the guy who is the soft-spoken cat, opening the first installment of Heavy Metal by inviting a journalist into his home to interview him, then modestly pulling out his eleven-inch dick when she asks to see it, telling her that it’s not even the biggest one in the porn biz. He’s the guy who ends his time with me quoting Dr. Frances Cress Welsing, a noted theorist on race. Welsing has a theory about color, about how it is color itself—before you even get to the invented tropes of stereotypes and myths—that intimidates people, that the sheer appearance of black or brown skin is the perceived salvo in the waged war of race hatred that has plagued human relations.
War, indeed. The first Little White Chicks and Big Monster Dicks (1999) opens with a disclaimer that the filmmaker (Jake Steed) doesn’t mean to attack any racial group. But it certainly can’t be an accident that the director/producer of the video—billed as a Jake Steed Production—is credited as A. Trublackman. Jake Steed: a True Black Man, Who’s Hung Like a Horse.
The black male body is, I’ve decided, something like American history’s Trojan horse, hiding in plain sight, invisible as its real self yet highly visible as its mythical self, a hopefully benign gift unwrapped to expose a seething mass of warring contradictions, the enemy in the midst. Perhaps porn is the place that expresses this better than anything.
Maybe the phrase should be hung like a Trojan horse.
The Glass Closet
Michael Musto
“Bravo, Jodie Foster!” That cry has long sounded among easily charmed gay celebrity watchers from Hollywood to Gotham. After all, Jodie is one of the original out-but-not-really-out queens of “at least.” You know: She’s never come out publicly, but at least she’s never tried to claim she’s straight either. She’s talked incessantly about her kids, but at least she hasn’t named the father and tried to make it sound like he was any kind of love interest. She won her greatest acclaim for a movie protested by gay activists—The Silence of the Lambs—and reportedly refused to do a short film based on the lesbian classic Rubyfruit Jungle, but at least she isn’t afraid to pla
y tough women, single moms, and parts originally written for men (even if that might be what she mostly gets offered).
And though her ’92 Oscar speech for Lambs seemed to confirm her tenacious belief in the semicloset (“I’d like to thank all the people in this industry who have respected my choices and who have not been afraid of the power and the dignity that entitles me to”), at least she’s never threatened lawsuits when press people drag her out of it!
By all reports, Jodie lives an out life—within serious limits—while cagily avoiding any on-the-record revelations, a delicate dance that’s difficult to pull off—but not nearly so much so as double-bolting the door and living a total lie. Jodie, it turns out, is one of the foremost residents of a glass closet—that complex but popular contraption that allows public figures to avoid the career repercussions of any personal disclosure while living their lives with a certain degree of integrity. Such a device enables the public to see right in while not allowing them to actually open the latch unless the celebrity eventually decides to do so herself.
The glass closet is nothing new in Hollywood. Back in the 1920s and ’30s, leading man William Haines was gay in everything except magazine interviews. (He was, in fact, as gay as any star was allowed to be in that era, and when he crossed the line—getting arrested in a gay incident and then refusing to hook up in a fake marriage—his acting career was kaput.) In the ’70s performers like Paul Lynde and post-Liza Peter Allen similarly went as far as seemed possible, hinting around at their sexuality and even making appearances at various gay spots. But they could be certain the squeamish media wouldn’t push things any further by addressing that, so they remained flamboyantly, ambiguously glassed off. And today, the press still gives a free pass to people like “Good Morning America” weather anchor Sam Champion and CNN presence Anderson Cooper, helping to keep their glass doors shut so they can lead gay social lives while carefully skirting the issue. The media has a field day with all kinds of oddballs, but the earnest TV-NEWS presences—whom everyone has a crush on—get “protected,” even though Cooper has been seen in gay bars in New York and Champion sightings have long been reported from Fire Island to the Roxy.
Best Sex Writing 2008 Page 15