‘Bare-backing spoils everything. He's spoiled goods’: Disposal and disgust, a study of retired power bottom twink Jake Lyons

ABSTRACT

This article uses star study and textual analysis of posts on popular gay porn blog TheSword.com as a means to chart the career of retired power bottom twink Jake Lyons and the manner in which his various career and personal decisions – such as to perform bareback and in fetish porn – are critiqued by participants on this blog. I argue that a discourse of disposal and disgust surrounding Lyons and his actions pervade this forum and that this discourse is worthy of scholarly consideration: not only because it relates to sexual health concerns resulting from high-risk sexual practice facing the industry and gay community, but also because it has something to tell us about the consumption of gay porn and the objectification and disposal of gay male performers, twink bottoms particularly.

KEYWORDS:

• Gay pornography
• porn star study
• bareback
• twink
• power bottom
• Jake Lyons
• TheSword.com

Acknowledgments

I am deeply indebted to John Mercer and Feona Attwood for thoughtful suggestions that have greatly improved this article.

Notes

1. Key texts that have helped shape this subfield include Richard Dyer's (1985) essay ‘Male Gay Porn: Coming to Terms’ and Thomas Waugh's (1996) history of pre-Stonewall gay male erotic film and photography.

2. While the majority of Lyons's credits occur between 2009 and 2012, and Lyons himself announced his retirement from gay pornography (see Sire 2012a), he re-emerged in 2014 with credits from British studio Zipper Video.

3. Accessed December 4, 2013. http://www.datalounge.com/cgi-bin/iowa/ajax.html?t=11075088#page:showThread,11075088

4. For another perspective, see Lucas of Lucas Entertainment, who draws on his experience in the industry to argue for gay porn's potential ‘to liberate as well as educate a historically closeted segment of society’ (Lucas 2006, 299; also see Leap 2011).

5. Accessed December 4, 2013. http://thesword.com/date-night-republican-state-senator-takes-gay-porn-star-out-for-steak-dinner.html

6. Accessed December 4, 2013. http://thesword.com/gay-porn-star-donny-wright-arrested-for-breaking-into-firehouse-and-masturbating-on-firemen-gear.html

7. JakeLyons.com remains viewable using Wayback Machine's archive.org server.

8. Accessed December 4, 2013. http://web.archive.org/web/20111209115901/http://www.jakelyons.com/aboutme.html

9. Known as ‘nonnies’. See Brennan (2014, 369–373) who discusses nonnies and cultures of encouraged ridicule on anonymous internet fan forums.

10. Corbin Fisher and Jet Set Men are among Lyons's most iconic performances of the ‘O-face’.

11. See Filiault and Drummond (2007, 178–181) for a history of the rise of the ‘twink’ since the 1980s and the decline of the ‘clone’: the macho ideal and homosexual prototype. See also Mercer (2003) and Cole (2014).

12. Filiault and Drummond (2007), in their psycho-historical exploration of gay men's body image in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, refer to such values as ‘the hegemonic aesthetic’.

13. Studio Corbin Fisher filed a $1 million lawsuit against Lyons and the escort site men4rentnow.com after Lyons used studio-owned images on his escort profile (see B 2010). Commenting on the ‘straight college guy’ studio’s tough stance against models using images of themselves for escort purposes, one fan astutely notes: ‘Bunch of hypocrites and jackasses’ especially when they put out content that has a model saying “Gay Love is wrong Man love is cool” WTF?’ (Sire 2010b).

14. Webcam videos featuring Lyons have begun appearing on amateur adult websites such as Xtube in recent years. The video simply titled ‘Very Verbal Boy’, for example, was uploaded by a third party in February 2013. Accessed February 6, 2015. http://www.xtube.com/watch.php?v=0t2wP-G374-

15. In reference to one of Lyons's more recent aliases: Ian Endore (see Sire 2012b).

16. In what can be read as a particularly provocative example of typecasting, Lyons was cast in the 2011 erotic film Payton Collins: Serial Rapist as a victim encouraging the rapist's advances.