John Calendo’s “Pornville”
This is an excerpt from John Calendo’s essay “Pornville”, a kaleidoscopic carousel centred around his experiences as editor of gay porn magazine In Touch, an essay which ends in tears.
Fresh off the bus from Nowheresville where they had always been told by passing men in slow-moving cars that they were the hottest thing since toast, finding themselves not in a red-carpeted Glamorland but in the harder than hard Hollywood of hustler allery, a lucky few were scooped up by the pioneers of movie-porn, the out-of-work cameramen and lighting guys who knew their way around the heavy equipment (this was before the digital camera) and were living on the cheap in Van Nuys or in a gritty bungalow in Silverlake with a sideline in boy-on-boy mail-order.
Together they created reels and reels of not-quite make-believe where all the tops looked like Tom Selleck in plaid shirt, mustache and bushy- bushy hair; and all the bottoms resembled the twink legend Kip Noll who with his curly mess of blond locks looked like an angel that had fallen off the top of a Christmas tree in Surf City.
