Real Men Don’t Screw Dudes

TNG reader Evan submits this piece.

For those of us (gay men) coming of age in the Internet Age, “gay for pay” is probably a familiar term. Not so for the mostly straight (presumably), female, and bug-eyed audience of the Tyra Banks Show. Luckily, the titular beauty queen is here to enlighten. On Thursday’s episode, Tyra casts a disinfecting ray of sunlight on the gay-for-pay phenomenon (which is, FYI, straight guys doing gay porn). And she wastes no time getting down to brass tacks. “How do I say this on daytime TV?” Tyra ponders to her first guest, a nervous looking Kurt Wild, straight man and professional gay-sex-haver. “O.K. It’s Christmas day. . . Do you like to give presents, or receive them?” The audience erupts with laughter and applause. Best metaphor for anal sex between men ever! He equivocates a bit before Tyra calls him out: in front of the camera, she tells us, Mr. Wild prefers to “receive the presents—on Christmas day or Hanukkah or whatever.” Because the gift of sodomy knows no religion.

Now, I must admit that I have never watched the Tyra show before. Except, that is, for the clips Joel McHale and crew show on The Soup. On that program, Tyra is mocked weekly as a silly, self-obsessed, attention-desperate airhead. Taking this assessment at face value, and being generally familiar with the whole daytime talk-show oeuvre (Go Jerry! Go Jerry!), I wasn’t expecting much more than a tawdry freakshow. But I was disturbed, in my naivety, by the gender politics that came up during the hour. To be specific, the show sets up the two gay-for-pay pornstars as symbols of failed manhood.

The first part of the show is spent with Kurt Wild and one of his gay-for-pay costars, Aaron James. The air in the studio is repulsion mixed with incredulity. How can these two young men consider themselves straight—girlfriends and children notwithstanding—and voluntarily have sex with men? When Tyra asks James how he got into the gay porn business, he cites the big money and his adventuresome spirit: “I mean, how can you say no to something if you’ve never tried it in life?” (Tense silence.) “Wait, wait, back up Aaron,” says Tyra, “I think every woman in this audience has been asked a lot of things and we say ‘Hell no!’” (Laughter and applause.) We all know that men are terrified about pushing the boundaries of their sexuality, but even women won’t do some things!

In the next segment, Tyra trots out three straight men who bartend at gay clubs, saddling them also with the gay-for-pay label—even though all three profess to being frank about their heterosexuality with bar patrons. The first man, Victor, claims the hardest part of his job is pushing past the throngs of lusty gay men after his shift. “There was a guy that came to the club . . . and he actually offered me $40,000 to sleep with him that night.” (Gasps from the studio audience.) Tyra responds, “And were you gay for pay that night?” The bartender proudly shakes his head and smiles, “No I was not.” (The audience laughs with relief, applauds.) On to Corey, a fauxhawked muscleman with studs in each earlobe, well-pruned eyebrows, and a soul patch. He discusses one bar patron with a certain fetish: “I will give you $100,” the man told him, “if I can lick the bottom of your boot.” (Gasps from the studio audience.) “So I just thought he was joking around . . . [I] put my boot right on top of the bar there, [he] threw down a hundred-dollar bill, and just licked it, like, three times.” (The audience giggles, gasps, and makes various sounds of disgust.) Julio, the final bartender, explains that he too was offered money (this time $10,000) to spend the night with a patron, but he just couldn’t do it—he has a beautiful wife. (Audience cheers and applauds.) When did people start believing that straight flesh is the gay man’s Holy Grail? The pitiful gay man who pursues this ultimate prize—when did he become a stock character?

The comparison between straight gay-pornstars and straight gay-club-bartenders is hardly fair, but it screams here. After the bartenders share their stories of triumph—they are positively beside themselves at the depraved antics of those crazy queers—it becomes clear that the pornstars, in contrast, have failed at being real men. They fell to temptation; they took the money. And after doing gay sex, they have no claim to the moral superiority over gay men that is the birthright of the bartenders, and all other straight guys.

In Tyra’s defense, she does seem to recognize a homophobic tone in the conversation and attempts to address it: “A lot of people, like, say that, like, gay men are, like, freakier than, like, straight men—it’s not true—a man is a man, and a man is just nasty!” Thanks, girl. But the final segment shines ever more negative light on the porn actors by opening the discussion to three anti-porn panelists. The first is Matt Sanchez, a pro-military activist and self-described “100 percent flag-waving red-blooded Reagan Republican” who made headlines in 2007 when his gay porn past was exposed. Espousing his own straightness, Sanchez warns James and Wild that their porn pasts will come back to haunt them. Annie, a female ex-pornstar talks about the “empty hole inside my heart” that steered her to the adult film industry. “Every time you have sex with a stranger,” she claims, “a piece of you gets taken . . . and the shame builds,” leading to drugs and despair. Finally, Sean Kennedy, news editor of the Advocate, speaks explicitly on behalf of us gays, explaining that the gay-for-pay phenomenon does not sit well among the “gay community.” Gay for pay, he argues, is essentially a fraud whereby straight guys lie about their orientation to take advantage of gay men financially. Never mind the large number of Straight-Men-Doing-Gay-Sex! porn outlets, which suggest that the gay-for-pay thing is fine by us. Does looking at gay-for-pay porn make us race traitors?

It is not my aim here to tackle lofty (though worthy) questions of whether pornography is harmful to the actor or the viewer, to the individual or society. Nor is it my place to speculate that Wild and James are, in the depths of their respective hearts, actually gay. Or bisexual. That’s none of my business. But the scapegoating and suspicion of these men reveal only our anxiety surrounding those forbidden gaps between “gay” and “straight” (Friday’s edition of Tyra takes on bisexuality: is it real or bogus?), as well as our ongoing discomfort and fear of what two men can do together in bed. Responding to the criticism Aaron James says, “Tyra, I’m not ashamed of anything I do. I think people have a problem with gay for pay because they have a problem with homosexuals.” Right on, Aaron. I hope you find the woman of your dreams. (Or man.)