“It’s a marketing opportunity for producers,” he says. Gay men have always fetishized masculinity and seen straight guys as real guys, says Jeffrey Escoffier, the author of the book "Bigger Than Life: The History of Gay Porn Cinema from Beefcake to Hardcore" and a visiting scholar at the New York University Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality.
Visibly timid, inexperienced and “hetero,” he caters perfectly to the sexual fantasies of those discerning consumers - primarily American gay men - looking to satisfy their appetites for homosexual pornography featuring straight men. He is, he insists, only doing it for the money. Like the vast majority of the thousands of “perfectly straight” Czech men performing in gay porn, he gets offended when asked whether he ever considered he might be gay. Justel, after all, describes himself as 100 percent straight. He will use it to pay rent and take his girlfriend out for dinner. At the end of the shoot, he will get cash in hand. Nevertheless, Justel is here, naked but for a pair of white athletic socks with tiny Czech flags on them, sitting on the same couch where some two thousand men sat before him, some only once, others repeatedly. Some men get cold feet, others get real jobs or - once they have a little experience in the business - find a better-paying studio and stop returning phone calls. But his partner-to-be didn’t show up, for reasons the studio doesn’t investigate. Today, he was supposed to do a twosome - for the first time in his life experiencing, let alone being filmed in, a sexual encounter with another man.
The first time, he did a solo scene and found it to be an easy way to make money doing something he does for free at home anyway. This is, after all, his second time shooting gay erotic video. “You can take off your clothes,” says Rado Pauer, Higgins’ cameraman, stage artist and translator, as he walks over to Justel to hand him half of a blue pill, which he swallows without question. He whispers “hello” as he tiptoes into the Prague film studio of William Higgins, 67, an American producer and “dean of gay porn” who moved to Prague right after communism ended to corner the gay sex market, arriving around the same time two other bearded vanguards of capitalism - Santa Claus and Colonel Sanders - showed up to monopolize Christmas and fried chicken.Īll three have found fertile ground here. In the terminology of the American gay sexual marketplace, he is a classic “twink,” a thin, young, pretty boy. He looks hardly 18 but his eyes, blinking slowly, convey the gloom and servitude of somebody much older. He has a baby face, short auburn hair, long eyelashes and a vacant expression.
He is scrawny and too tall for his body mass.
PRAGUE, Czech Republic - Martin Justel is 20, as old as the Czech democracy and, arguably, just as mature. It is intended solely for mature audiences. In this multimedia report, we examine the complex and interlocking pieces of Prague’s booming gay porn business, from its roots in an American entrepreneur, to the cultural, moral and political foundations that make Prague a gay porn capital, as well as the economic necessities that drive many into the industry, and finally, the human toll it takes on workers.
It is an industry where global economic crisis mixes with the latest web technologies, set amid the upheavals of Eastern Europe’s uneven transition from communism to a raw form of capitalism. Editor’s note: In this GlobalPost investigative report, Prague correspondent Iva Skoch gained rare access to one of Eastern Europe’s most secretive industries, uncovering a world where shifting human sexuality meets rampant commercial demand.