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Hamilton also relishes the attention of a small but worldwide audience. Every night he comes home to 20 to 30 e-mails. They write from some of the most remote spots in the United States, where the sight of a manly, out-of-the-closet homosexual having great sex is a rare thing. "I got one last night from a guy who said he could never come out, so he thanked me for creating a fantasy. You don't know what that did to me."

What do his employers think of all this? "What you do on your time is your business," he says. Many of the health club's gay members certainly know of his porn sideline. They might even know that he had won the title of "best newcomer" at the Probe "men in video" gay porn awards held last year in July. (This year he's up for "best bottom.")

Craig West of Beaverton, Ore., is similarly unconcerned about what impact his work as a working stiff has on his career as a technical writer and software programmer. He works freelance on long-term contracts and picks and chooses his assignments. "My skills are very much in demand. If someone has a problem with [my doing porn], I wouldn't want to work with them anyway." West (who works under the porn name Carl Barnes) had a rigorous religious background, too. He once trod the back roads of Portugal trying to convert people to Mormonism. Then, in 1996, he didn't just come out of the closet -- he catapulted. In May, he acknowledged his homosexuality; by August he was stripping in Portland bars. "It's a thing among good Mormon boys," he says. "To come out is more like an explosive decompression." From stripping he appeared in magazines and recently did "Bear Moving Company," his first sex video for Brush Creek Media, a California porn producer.

Why does he do it? "It's not the money," he says. Porn pays anywhere from $500 to $1,000 per shoot. "The money is nothing compared to what I do in my day job," West says. Rather, he does it to show off his fine figure, which includes an outsized sex organ and a hairy chest but no navel ("surgery when I was an infant"). Both West and Hamilton deny that they have become porn stars as an expression of frustration or anger about their fundamentalist pasts.

Still, it's one thing to tell your buddies at the water cooler you do porn and it's another to have them actually see you literally kissing ass. Some women co-workers found out West is a stripper. "They thought it was wonderful and wanted to come down and see me. But I was concerned there would be a change in how they perceive me in a shirt and tie after they've seen me in a G-string." Hamilton has similarly resisted requests from co-workers to bring copies of his videos to work. "A woman I work with," West says, "doesn't want to see my porn because it would change our relationship."

West believes heightened sexuality is common among professionals, the polar opposite of the common belief that career pros channel most of their energies into work. "I'm in the leather community. It has a high incidence of doctors and lawyers. You have to have money to buy all this crap. Successful people tend to have healthy sex drives. It's the great lesson from Clinton. We have this image of people being totally either into their bodies or into their minds. Many are actually highly accomplished in both. When I did the porn shoot everyone had day jobs, and more than half had professional day jobs. One was a medical student from Chicago, one was a bank vice president, one was a registered nurse."

Some white-collar performers are even getting famous, though sometimes with unintended results. A Boston real estate broker who performs under the name of Cole Tucker has made more than 20 videos. He gained even more attention after being identified as the lover of British member of European Parliament Tom Spencer earlier this year.

Twisty and Homerun, both 34, make their own kind of fun. Preferring to be identified only by the nicknames they use for Internet chat, they set up a porn site last year. Later this year or next they plan to take the site commercial, using their professional skills and abilities to network. Twisty is head of training for an international cosmetics firm in Toronto and his lover Homerun works in commercial lending for one of Canada's huge chartered banks.

In page after page, they record their sexual encounters, and they are often joined by other exhibitionists. Thus far, none of their guest stars has been white collar, but, as Twisty says, "give us a few months." Both are lean, muscled and handsome, favoring black tank tops and jeans. They share Hamilton's fascination with porn, but unlike West they see it as a springboard to money. "When I was in college in the early '80s," Twisty says, "I was in data processing. I didn't want to sit around writing payroll programs. It was too depressing. And I was fascinated by porn videos." Homerun is equally ambitious. "My goal with porn is to make money," Homerun says. "I've been working with entrepreneurs on the lending side for two years and I realized I'm an entrepreneur too. I don't want to go down to the head office and climb the corporate ladder."

Although Homerun's bank has a pro-gay culture, it has yet to show much appetite for pornography, and he worries that any day one of his commercial clients may find out and freak. Twisty is shocked at how quickly his colleagues learned about it. An American employee of the company was at the head office one day and blurted out a request for the site's URL. "It could have gotten to the head of personnel or PR," he says.

Given the often dubious business sense among traditional porn companies, Twisty and Homerun believe they can score big with a commercial site built around themselves. As Craig West says of the producing side of porn: "Most of the people running porn are flaky, use drugs and they can be difficult to deal with. The sex industry doesn't attract rocket scientists and brain surgeons -- at least not full time."

Ironically, the arrival of white-collar workers is driving down the rates performers get paid. "It's almost a cool thing to do now," Hamilton says, and producers are naming their prices. In July he'll be moving behind the camera in Palm Springs, Calif., to direct his first porn video. He's feeling pressure from fellow white-collar types to include them in his next project. "All you have to do is holler out the back door," he says, "and they come running."
salon.com | July 19, 1999

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