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Recently in Salon Health & Body

My antidepressant made me do it!
The Hartman estate says Zoloft was to blame for a murder-suicide.
By Rob Waters
[07/19/99]

Urge
Episode 3: The rules
When it comes to keeping a romance going, there's nothing like a big white lie.
By Tracy Quan
[07/19/99]

Urge
Stranger in a super-friendly land
On the planet of polyamory, eager-beavers and boneheads mingle with truly enlightened souls.
By Lady Chimmerly
[07/17/99]

Urge
Three's company; so is four or five
For polyamorists, responsibility and commitment replace jealousy and distrust. As long as everyone remembers who's who.
By Jim Gerard
[07/17/99]

Patients Rights DOA
A bill favored by insurance companies and managed care providers wins in the Senate.
By Arthur Allen
[07/16/99]

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By Jared Mitchell

July 19, 1999 | Marc Hamilton is just back from a holiday at Disney World, which held an all-gay weekend. Years ago, he says, he worked there, on the now-defunct "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" ride. "Horrible ride," he says, "it's no longer there." To spice up his very first day on the job, his training supervisor blew him. "We were in the back, where the ride went through the water on tracks."

This time around, he had no such waterside adventures. But he did get lots of smiles and shy waves from other gay men he'd never met. They recognized him, but not for his current day job -- he is an assistant manager of a health club in Minneapolis. What they knew him from was his porn career. In the past two years he has done 20 hardcore videos, including "Deep in the Brig," "Fallen Angel," "Slave Brothel" and "Glory Hole Pigs." Every few months he takes a leave from work and flies to California to have sex before the cameras.

The soft-spoken Hamilton is one of a growing army of white-collar gay men who perform on weekends and holidays in porn videos, nude magazines and saucy Web sites. Hamilton is his porn name; he prefers not to mention his real one. He has gotten down and nasty with all manner of professionals, including a professor of American history. Recently he did an orgy scene with, among others, a dentist. Airline employees, accountants and loads of computer industry geeks are turning into part-time show ponies in what has become a trendy way to achieve minor fame. It has become popular enough that white-collar workers boast that they're pushing out the traditional ranks of hustlers and strippers. Perhaps a dubious claim but it's evident that a lot of guys are taking a break from anonymous, stolid careers to participate in the gay world's fascination with porn.

The white-collar invasion is a far cry from the hardscrabble lives of the porn stars of yesteryear. Amply paid by their regular jobs, the new men of porn want for little. They will never suffer the indignities of the legendary gay performer Al Parker, who was always so low on funds he used to shuttle his old Cadillac between friends' garages to elude the repo man. Other porn stars were notorious for arriving on set strung out on drugs. Far too common were the psychologically troubled stallions, such as Steve Fox, who committed suicide in 1997, and Ryan Idol, who battled drugs and alcohol before whistling out a fourth-floor window in New York last year in an attempt to take his own life. (He survived.) Now, confident white-collar workers are arriving on set on-time, drug free and with professional attitudes, which porn producers are only too pleased to greet. Some, like Hamilton, are looking for an ego boost, others for a kind of niche fame they'll never experience in their day jobs, others just because they simply love to put out in public. "Nobody does porn for a living anymore," Hamilton says.

Next page | From Falwell to porno fever dreams