To the First-Time Porn Star
You’d chosen a fitting alias—unique enough to stand out from Sean Cody’s stable of all-American jocks named Mark and Ken, but not laughable like Knox or Shamu. “Charley” with a y dangling off the end like a monkey’s tail was the name of a boy next door or an adored, mischievous younger brother. And you certainly looked the part, wholesome and goofy, crossing your eyes and sticking out your tongue beside a pool ringed by palm trees, declaring you felt “jubilant” that, for the first time, “dudes” would be watching you masturbate.
Jubilant Charley. In the blue light of my laptop, your face looked open, eager, and richly expressive, whipping out that 25-cent word with jocular self-satisfaction. “Shoot!” was your exclamation of choice, and when you laughed, you smacked your hands together. Hunched at my childhood desk in a robe and soggy boxers, half-listening for the rumble of the garage door downstairs, I watched you yank the striped V-neck shirt over your head, your stomach lean and shoulders broad, already tenting your jeans.
You had a fearsome appetite, and so did I, a fact few realized. “I don’t know how someone so quiet and shy can be such an aggressive driver,” the first guy I dated told me as I darted through Los Angeles traffic, rocketing down the 101 to catch a pre-opera lecture. A die-hard Bruin who could recite random facts about strawberries, he never ventured beyond quiet and shy. He couldn’t see how desire lit up my brain like a bare bulb, for him and countless others. But my intense friendships with sexually equivocal men never took off, while the gays who did impress me—a high school math teacher, a visual artist who loved candy, a tall linguist turned on by my reading voice—soon lost interest, ghosted me, or paired off with each other.
As years passed and a dead-end Hollywood-adjacent job compounded my feelings of stagnation, I wondered whether my appetites exceeded my abilities. At 26, I moved back in with my parents to finish my first novel and apply to writing programs around the country, not sure where I’d end up. Every day, I dragged myself out of bed at 5 a.m. to revise the manuscript, but still it sat unfinished and unoptioned on my desktop, a file I minimized whenever I visited Sean Cody. Would I ever make good on the promise of my college years? While my classmates directed their first movies and rose in their careers, I found myself drifting further and further from the person I wanted to be.
Waking to the wildlife wallpaper in my old bedroom, watching DVDs from the family Netflix queue, and rolling out the trash bins as I had in high school, I felt I’d regressed to my teenage self. I spent my creative energy avoiding my parents’ scrutiny. I drove back and forth between Orange County and LA, listening to Benjamin Britten operas, The Hunger Games trilogy, and the macabre stories of Paul Bowles. To be home by dinner, I scheduled lunch dates at Thai and ramen restaurants in neighboring towns and made out with white guys in strip mall parking lots, but in the end, they either weren’t into Asians or posted photos in Japanese yukata, were either too interested in sex or not interested enough. Sooner or later, a chasm yawned between me and them, between our rehashed conversations and the passionate, playful love I wanted.
“As if you were performing for me alone, as if it was within my power to grant you release.”
For me, amateur porn stars were sexier and infinitely less complicated. Sites like Sean Cody recruited curious, cash-strapped young men, flew them to San Diego for the weekend, and cleaned them up with California haircuts. You and your predecessors weren’t actors, and that was your appeal. In another state, you were someone’s son or teammate, someone’s food court crush. You weren’t all gay, but you were willing, and in 2013, that was a revelation: Straightness was not a hard no, but merely the beginning of a negotiation.
Charley, you were the type of guy I couldn’t help falling for, a heady mix of Donatello’s nerdy genius, Dawson Leery’s idealism, and Zack Morris’s calculated charm. “A cute college math/physics tutor,” one viewer called you, dependable with a dash of chaos. After you revealed you were a gymnast, I pictured the hours you spent training, wrists wrapped and hands chalked, lifting yourself into a controlled press handstand, hooking your leg behind your head, or mounting a pommel horse. Honing your small body until it rippled with muscle, did you come to see it as an instrument for getting what you wanted, a means of escaping your small-town life?
You shot one solo and two penetration scenes, vanishing just as I thought you were becoming a regular. Maybe you saw porn less as a career than as a dare to yourself. Despite Sean’s claim that your solo shoot was a weekend of liberating first experiences, you were probably not a virgin bottom. Even as I watched you finger yourself at the climax of your first scene, I suspended my disbelief, accepting that you were inexperienced like I was. Call me naïve, but bottoming has always terrified me, and I liked to think we were learning together.
Your veneer of innocence belied a deeper wildness. In a van on a San Diego freeway, you begged Sean—begged me, it seemed—for permission to come. You arched your back, tilted your face to the headliner, and closed your eyes as if in prayer. “Can I please come? Please?” Semis whizzed by too close for comfort while you worked yourself with both hands; California chaparral and green exit signs I couldn’t read rushed by in the urgent breaths expelled through your lips. “Let me go. Can I go? Let me go!”
“Come,” I whispered to the screen, “come, come.” As if you were performing for me alone, as if it was within my power to grant you release. I sensed you were discovering yourself in that scene, that as you convulsed in the back of Sean’s van, covered in a mess I could almost smell, you were becoming more at home in your desires, less tethered to a prescribed moral universe. Your ecstatic approach to sex turned me on, and I envied it, wanted it for myself.
After that year with my parents, I spent three winters shivering in western Massachusetts before escaping to Greece, a country whose sun-drunken ease better suited my California temperament. Athens was a sprawling, graffitied city much like LA, a city whose uniform apartment buildings and glittering rooftop water heaters spread from the mountains to the sea. In the wounded, defiant days after the Greek government accepted crushing new austerity measures to secure its third bailout package, a brittle atmosphere pervaded the capital. I’d been awarded a grant to write stories about the crisis and found them everywhere: in the dramas reenacted at neighborhood coffee shops, beneath my feet in layers of antiquity, and among the cocksure Greek men I flirted with on Grindr and Planet Romeo.
By then, I’d perfected a pornographic persona of my own on these apps, a character both based on and distinct from me. The app me sent midnight messages to hundreds of dark-haired, olive-skinned men, fleshing out the sparse, sometimes contradictory details of their lives and adopting the Greek slang necessary to crank our chats to their inevitable, solitary climax. Images and videos were the currency of that nocturnal world, determining which guys were worth approaching and whether a conversation would ratchet up or fizzle out. As I amassed explicit selfies in the same encrypted folder where I stored your videos, Charley, a distinction between us I’d long presumed began to disappear.
But my assertiveness online didn’t translate to success in physical interactions. In majority-Orthodox Greece, most gay men carried their own unresolved baggage. Closeted, emotionally unavailable, or terrified of disease, they preferred to show off their sea-toned bodies rather than meet up, at least with me. With few exceptions, my singular focus on getting off flattened my relationships with these men to the same static longing I felt for you. Night after night, my phone filled with the sculpted torsos of Greeks I couldn’t touch, and my violent cravings scared off more than one decent guy.
Then, five years ago, a neurology resident named Andreas messaged me on Grindr. He was home in Athens visiting his parents for the holidays, and he asked if I wanted to meet up the next evening for coffee. In one of the photos he sent me from his recent travels, he was running shirtless through the snow, invigorated by impish joy, as if outpacing a lover. An odd choice, I thought, gazing at the line of dark hair that bisected his pale, lean chest.
Andreas had left Greece to continue his studies in Berlin during the crisis; in addition to his mother tongue, he spoke English, German, and French. I learned this as we sipped green tea at a café near my apartment, leaning toward each other across the table. We chatted in Greek, and he repeated questions and translated words to make it easier for me to understand. An innate curiosity lit up his wide, expressive eyes, and he had a cosmopolitan sensibility. But he demurred when I invited him back to my place. He wasn’t that forward sexually, he told me. In Berlin, everyone rushed to sex, and guys were always looking for something better. Standing on the street, I felt chastened but hopeful. He’s like me, I thought. Not the app me, but the real me.
We walked to a secluded park behind the US Embassy, empty except for a woman with a little dog. I sidled up to him on the dark bench, draping my arm across the backrest and rubbing his shoulders. I worried I was being too forward for his taste, but he purred like a small, contented animal, then leaned in and kissed me. His lips were soft, his kisses gentle. My nose was running, but I didn’t want to stop. After a few minutes, he pulled back and smiled, a genuine, shy smile flashing in the dark.
“Perhaps the wildness that drove me to you then was a kind of life force, redirected from one exploded life toward the creation of the next.”
Andreas and I got married on Crete last year, an intimate ceremony with guests flying in from six different countries. Holding hands before our loved ones, he promised to guard the key to my inner library, and I promised to step out of my comfort zone to be the partner he deserved. These days, I don’t visit Sean Cody much anymore. The new models bore me: too bland and beefy, too white, and then suddenly, disconcertingly, too young. Instead, I like friends’ shirtless selfies on Instagram and follow Greek alt accounts unabashedly advertising their OnlyFans on X, where poutses flop about on balconies and beach towels, pose for scale beside Monster cans and vinegar bottles, stick up from army bunks, and poke out the flies of soldiers’ fatigues.
Since we’re all amateur porn stars now, tell me, Charley: Where did you channel your wildness after you stopped performing? Would you disappoint me if we ever met? After all, few adolescent crushes can bear adult scrutiny. You’re probably nearing 40, like me, and I imagine you’ve settled down in your Midwestern town or not far from it. Has your hairline given out as a few vicious queens predicted? If you’re not gay, maybe you married a woman like one of my exes did and have a daughter you now jubilantly pester with dad jokes.
My life, too, has become mundane, though marriage is more fulfilling than I could have hoped for. Andreas and I live in Switzerland, a country famous for its predictable rhythms. He spends hours in the kitchen transforming budget veggies into restaurant fare and inventing healthier versions of my favorite desserts. He darns endless pairs of my socks while we watch Star Wars spinoff series and threatens to trim my toenails so short they’d bleed. On the train, he taps my leg—“Look, look, look!”—every time we pass an exciting new landscape, and he can’t sleep until I give him head rubs while he scrolls through nature videos on Instagram, yelping sympathetically as orcas, herons, and Komodo dragons hunt and devour their prey.
One of your videos recently resurfaced on X, a deepfake with Tom Holland’s face superimposed on your body. I wonder if you saw it, wherever you are. I suspect you’d be amused, even flattered, to find yourself stunt double to a celebrity. I wasn’t fooled, of course. Those acrobatic positions, that gasping, staccato laughter punctuating each surge of pleasure—who else could perform like that?
Last night, I dug your low-res solo out of its encrypted drive and played it for Andreas, returning with him to Sean’s CB2-decorated condo, though that room feels a bit claustrophobic to me now, too much like a closet with its blinds drawn against the California sun. I felt weirdly protective of you as I started the video I’d watched so many times, worried he might find you plain or clownish, toppling the fantasy I’d built. Sean Cody men were too American for him, their faces, bodies, and cocks completely interchangeable. Fifteen minutes of porn couldn’t hold his attention, so he tapped through the video, pausing to see your erection smack your abs.
“Okay, he’s hot.” Andreas lay on his stomach, and I lay on top of him, running my fingers through his hair. You had something, he agreed. You were charming, sincere.
Charley, I’ve also wondered what you might think about my cuddle-loving husband. Would you identify with—or fancy—the excitable, empathetic nerd whose quiet chaos spices up my life? In our marriage, I’ve yet to find a thought too embarrassing, too anomalara to share. What freedom. His approval of you validated the version of myself who craved men’s approval, who searched for decades for someone with whom to share his secret selves and for the ownership and belonging inherent in the Greek endearments we call each other.
That’s the intimacy I wish for you, Charley, as thanks for accompanying me through that year in Orange County when I was changing course, straining into a new shape. Perhaps the wildness that drove me to you then was a kind of life force, redirected from one exploded life toward the creation of the next. You were the dream of a self I could imagine becoming when I was trying and failing to write, when I felt locked out of most men’s fantasies, when what I whispered to you was also meant to draw out the wildness in myself: Come, come. Come.
About the Author
Steven Tagle is the recipient of fellowships from the Institute of Current World Affairs, Asian American Writers' Workshop, Lambda Literary, and Fulbright Greece, as well as a Soros Fellowship for New Americans. He has been published in The Common, BOMB, them, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Nea Estia. Originally from California, he now lives in Zurich.
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Edited by Aube Rey Lescure
Header photo by Tim Mossholder.
