Out of the Blue

by Blue Blake

  Two days before Christmas Harold flew in. I had been feeling lousy. Being naked eight shows a week in a freezing cold theatre was taking its toll on me. I caught double pneumonia. My doctor ordered me to stay in bed for a week. Caryn went crazy. The show was completely sold out. There was no understudy for me and she insisted I do the show. She told me I could lie down on the filthy backstage couch to rest between scenes. I refused; telling her the only place I was going to lie down was in my own bed. At her wit’s end, Caryn summoned another actor, David Thompson, and begged him to perform my role. David had been learning the lines anyway because he was heading to D.C. to play my part in the touring company Ronnie and Caryn were forming. Even so, David was weeks away from being ready to play the role. But that didn’t stop Caryn. She had once had the stage manager play Ryan’s role, script in hand throughout the night, when Ryan was sick. Anything rather than cancel a performance. The poor guy had walked through the curtains at the beginning of the show and begged the audience to suspend all disbelief as he was a positive TWIG and he had to strut around naked. It was all about the cash for Ronnie and Caryn. It was total lunacy.

  David faired as well as could be expected under these circumstances and then fled back to Los Angeles a week later when I was ready to resume my role of Ray Tanner.

  On New Year’s Eve, Harold and I, along with Ryan and his beautiful Persian girlfriend Ellie gathered in my apartment. Ryan always had stunning girlfriends. I liked Ellie a lot, as did the entire cast. We did a couple of lines of coke; more to keep us awake than anything, and set off to the club. It was freezing but the glow of fame was keeping me warm. The club was packed with New Year’s Eve revelers who were more than a little “partied up.” The ecstasy was flying and the general atmosphere was one of unrestrained euphoria.

  Ryan and I didn’t take the stage until 3 a.m., but when we did, the crowd screamed so loudly our hair was blown back as if in a wind tunnel. We introduced ourselves, invited everybody to see the play and then we told the audience we had a surprise for them. We introduced . . . Madonna!!!

  Actually it was a skinny drag queen in a bleached wig and coned bra corset, more like McDonna really. But the blissed-out crowd of partiers was oblivious to the fake-out. Some started crying as if having an epiphany. We fled the stage and wended our weary way home. Life was good; life was great in fact. Years later I came to realize why there was always such madness around Ryan. He was gorgeous, and great beauty attracts great chaos. Having worked with some of the most spectacular looking men in the world, sadly very few have had spectacular lives to match. But Ryan hung in there and was cast in a Broadway revival of the hilarious sex romp The Ritz starring Rosie Perez. I was delighted. Ryan had beaten me to Broadway by a mile and I was actually elated for him. For some reason I felt like a proud father . . . now there’s madness for you.

  The documentary Ronnie and Cary produced, Shooting Porn, was finally released and was an enormous hit. It overflowed with colorful characters from the industry but the three personalities around which the documentary was structured were Chi Chi LaRue, Gino Colbert and myself. Even better, the poster for Shooting Porn pictured me sitting naked in a director’s chair holding a megaphone to my mouth!

  Shooting Porn was incredibly explicit. There is a scene where Blade Thompson is fucking me on a bed and the shooting had to stop because his dick was so big it made my stomach ache. You see me crawling off the bed rubbing my stomach while Gino begs for just a few more strokes of insertion. Ronnie and Caryn had spent months trailing around porn sets and had created a superb expose of the industry. There were models holding pet lizards, chatting about dildo scenes and douching, confessing they’d be selling shoes if it weren’t for porn. All in all it was an extremely entertaining piece of porn pop culture.

  Shooting Porn was screened at gay film festivals all over the world, so when Caryn asked me if I would like to travel to The London Gay Film Festival and discuss the film in front of a live audience I said yes in a second. The film was showing on the South Bank, a very chic art district. When we arrived at the theatre, we were told that the film was sold out. In fact, it had been the quickest selling ticket ever in the history of the festival. We were incredibly flattered. After the screening we fielded answers from the audience. Caryn was actually very good on the stage. She was incredibly insightful regarding the industry, which was strange as she wasn’t actually involved in the porn industry, but she had been so deeply immersed in the lives of porn stars for the past couple of years that she obviously had a good sense of the business. All the London muscle boys were out in force, and they asked me questions regarding their favorite porn stars. It was truly an exhilarating experience and it made me so pleased that I had agreed to appear in the documentary.

  The movie opened in limited release around NYC and soon I was being approached on the street regularly to be complimented on the film. Everywhere I went, people had either seen the documentary or the play or both. I was finally feeling fulfilled as a performer. I was starring in a hit play and had a film in movie theatres. I was literally giddy . . . all of a sudden I had a greater appreciation for Ronnie and Caryn. In hindsight I don’t think I would have become as well known without them.

  Around this time I had begun work on the final film of Gino’s trilogy Men in Blue. I flew back to Los Angeles to shoot the final two scenes to complete the film. The plot I had written ran like this: I played a rogue homophobic cop being investigated by Internal Affairs after my new partner commits suicide on the first day of the job. Also my character had shot and killed five Latino crack dealers in suspicious circumstances after having been sodomized by them in a crack den. Internal Affairs was out to prove I was a bad cop and the film took place in a police station over a series of flashbacks. The guy playing my police partner who commits suicide was Brent Cross.

  Brent was a straight jock with thick dark hair and a bubble butt. In the film he comes round to my apartment on his first day of work and I answer the door in my underwear. I tell him I’m running late and make him a cup of coffee, which I then fill up with some unnamed substance that renders him semi-conscious. Then I put him in girls’ panties and rape him. After the rape, my character takes Polaroids of him and says if he breathes a word of what has happened, I would show his young wife the pictures. This leads to him killing himself and my character being investigated by Internal Affairs. What a potboiler.

  Ron Jeremy, who is probably the most recognized male face in the entire adult industry, played the Internal Affairs investigating officer. He has parlayed his fame into several reality shows and is a genuine superstar in porn. Years later I was at a Playboy party with Ron and guys would literally freak out around him:

  “HEY RON . . . YOU’RE THE MAN!”

  “FUCK, RON . . . I WANNA BE YOU WHEN I GROW UP!”

  It was insane. I knew exactly what this reaction to Ron was all about. He represented Joe Schmo . . . an everyman who got to spend his days fucking nubile chicks for cash. As the adult industry grew exponentially, so did Ron’s fame and belly. He was recognized everywhere. At the time he did Men in Blue, however, his star hadn’t yet risen, so appearing in a gay porn film was just a job to him.

  Men in Blue opens with my character in uniform getting drunk on raw bourbon in a squad car. I pull over two cousins, played by Gino and Paul and force them to suck each other off. Then Paul comes in Gino’s mouth. The scene mixed abuse of liquor and authority with just a smatter of incest thrown in for good measure. Gino had rented an authentic squad car, and clad in my police uniform, I threw myself into the role with all the realism I could muster.

  In another scene I break down the door of a crack den to find four Latinos smoking crack. Ryan Block, Andreas Bergane, Rod Garetto and Juan Antonio played the Latinos. Juan didn’t speak English and mistook all the fake drugs on the set for real crack. He told his agent he would never make another porn film again. After my character is raped by the Latinos, he pulls out his gun and shoots them all to death. In the fina
l scene when Ron Jeremy is exhausted from trying to force a confession from me, he leaves the room and eats the pussy of policewoman Sharon Kane. As he’s doing this, Sharon watches me get fucked by Cutter West on a table through a two-way mirror in the police interrogation room.

  The film caused an uproar. Some magazines refused to review it, saying it promoted homophobia and illicit drug use; that it glorified rape and was just generally completely amoral. And some magazines loved it, calling the movie the best piece of erotic film making in years. Men in Blue earned a four and a half star rating out of five from Gayvn Magazine. I was extremely proud.

  Every year in Chicago during the International Mr. Leather Contest there is an award show called the Grabby Awards. The show is presented by Gay Chicago Magazine and honors the best in porn. Over the years it has grown immensely and is now one of the major events on the porn calendar. Ten years ago the show wasn’t as enormous as it has since become. Back then, it was held in a bathhouse. I was nominated for Best Dramatic Actor for my role in Men in Blue. By this time I was so used to being nominated for awards and not winning, that I had lost all sense of anticipation. I flew to Chicago because I was curious to attend the International Mr. Leather event, having once been a leather title-holder myself. Also I wanted to see Chicago, which I had never visited. The city was packed with leather guys. At the host hotel there was a huge leather fair where people sold everything from inflatable butt plugs to pissing videos.

  The night of the Grabby Awards rolled around and I trotted off to the bathhouse to attend. I had also been asked to present an award so I was done up in tight leather pants and jacket. Chi Chi LaRue was hosting the event. As I listened to the nominees for Best Dramatic Actor being read I noticed a stunning bodybuilder at the back of the room. He was a knockout. I wandered over to him and introduced myself.

  “I’m Blue Blake.”

  “I know,” he grinned. “They call me Caesar . . . and they’ve just announced your name on stage . . . you’ve won Best Actor, congratulations.”

  I couldn’t fucking believe it. I spun around and ran to the stage. I was handed a perspex statuette with somebody’s arse engraved on it along with the words:GAY CHICAGO MAGAZINE

  “BEHIND CLOSED DOORS”

  1998

  GRABBY AWARDS

  BEST ACTOR

  DRAMATIC

  BLUE BLAKE

  MEN IN BLUE—NEW AGE PICTURES.

  I’d finally won! I went on to win many more awards but this was my first. Although it’s a Perspex plaque with somebody’s arse on it, I still treasure it. The most tasteless looking award of all time was a Probie Award, which was a giant gold paper mache cock. I never won one of those.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  LAST YEAR I WAS IN SAN FRANCISCO to receive an award for a film I had produced and directed called Musclemen Moving Company, Inc. It was named one of the top ten best selling on-demand films of the year on the Internet. The award was presented to me by the video on demand site Maleflixxx. These days porn has moved from VHS to DVD to, finally, video on demand. We are living in the technological future and, as in years before, pornography is once again spearheading the technological advances.

  Chicago Gay Magazine asked if I would attend their upcoming Grabby ceremony in Chicago. The ceremony coincided with the International Mr. Leather event so Chicago would be full of fags, and I thought to myself, why not? I decided I could go and slake up some worship at the very least. I told them I definitely would be there. By this time I was enjoying my film infamy and there were a lot of the people in the industry that I genuinely liked and hoped to run into. It was always interesting meeting the latest models who worked for the other studios and I figured at the very least it would be fun to see how big the Grabby’s had become.

  I hopped a flight to Chicago and the night I landed went straight to the International Mister Leather opening night party. It was just like being back at the Mr. Drummer contest, albeit seventeen years had passed, and I was a little more jaded. Make that a lot more jaded. Nothing could shock me now.

  “You’re Blue Blake, aren’t you?”

  I turned to face a guy about sixty years old. Balding and kind of starved-looking, he stood in front of me absolutely naked apart from a yellow jock strap and little leather ankle boots. He had the palest skin I had ever seen with clumps of hair growing from different parts of his body, mostly his ears and nose.

  “I love the films that you make . . . I want to star in them.”

  “Well,” I began rather smugly, “It’s a tough road into porn and I’m not quite sure if that’s a road you should be thinking of traveling. It’s long hours and before you can really become a star. . . .”

  “Oh, I am a porn star,” he interrupted, “I just starred in Piss Pigs 4 for Treasure Island Media.”

  “Isn’t that a bareback company?” I asked with considerable disdain.

  “Yes . . . I think you should have a little more piss and barebacking in your films, and I’m certainly the man to provide those things.”

  And the night just spiraled downwards from that moment onward, one more bizarre conversation after the other. I learned something that night. There were still plenty of things that could shock me.

  The Grabby Awards took place the next night. The show was now held in an enormous auditorium and the evening began with Chi Chi LaRue and two drag queens performing the entire score of Dream Girls. First on film, then continuing live on stage. I hadn’t been asked to present an award so I just sat back and enjoyed the show. Halfway through the evening they presented their Wall of Fame Awards—the Grabbys’ version of the Hall of Fame Award. Chi Chi appeared on the stage.

  “Our next recipient was born in England.”

  Oooooh, an English winner . . . I began craning my neck around the theater looking for possible honorees.

  “He started his career as a COLT model.”

  Oooooh . . . just like me. I must have been lost in thought, because all of a sudden everybody was staring at me. I realized suddenly that Chi Chi was announcing my name as one of the Wall of Fame recipients for that year! I climbed on the stage in a daze and I don’t even remember the speech I gave. As I walked offstage I realized I was clutching the award that Chi Chi had presented me with. And guess what? It was STILL a perspex arse . . . and I’m glad it was!!!

  I didn’t win Best Actor the year Ryan and I were competing against each other, but neither did Ryan. He eventually left Making Porn and was replaced by Sonny Markham, a young straight bodybuilder who really was a terrible actor. The show began to suffer and fall apart. Although Ronnie and Caryn had both made great money from the show, Ronnie wanted to move on and work on other projects. He would write a handful of other shows but none of them would be as successful as Making Porn. One day when I felt I could no longer stand to do the show, which by now had become a hollow shell of its original incarnation, I told Caryn that I was returning to Los Angeles. She begged me not to leave but she knew my mind was made up. I wanted to get on with my life with Harold. I was deeply in love. Harold had flown in every other weekend for months and had been nothing but supportive and a tower of strength amidst all the craziness that had surrounded me. I had gotten into the industry to make money, and as this no longer was an issue, at Harold’s suggestion I agreed to retire from the porn industry. I was famous, and I could have carried on performing for years, but my heart was no longer in it. So I figured it was good to go out on top.

  Caryn asked me as one last favor, to fly to Washington and join the D.C. road company. I didn’t want to, but I acquiesced for two reasons: I had never been to Washington so the idea of living there for three weeks appealed to me immensely, and I also wanted to leave the show on good terms in case I ever wanted to come back.

  What Caryn had neglected to tell me was that the reason David Thompson had left the play was that Ronnie had flown into D.C., seen the appalling state of the show and had promptly fired the entire cast. Then, realizing that there were no understudies to
fill the roles, he demanded that the cast perform for the rest of the run. David told Ronnie to stuff it and caught the next plane to Los Angeles. This left a hole in the show—my part incidentally—and so I stepped into my old role and joined the disgruntled cast.

  Playing the ingénue role of Ricky was Kurt Young. Kurt was David’s boyfriend and had won more porn awards than any performer in history. He would later break up with David and go on to date the mayor of West Hollywood. But for now he was a shy, slim kid clutching a Chihuahua—his and David’s love child I presumed. The show was indeed an absolute wreck, full of barely adequate actors of the extremely mediocre variety. Bad word of mouth was destroying the sold-out D.C. show, but I had no intention of performing in a lousy production. I called together the actors for extra rehearsals and began to piece together the play until it resembled the Off Broadway version. We pumped up the humor and threw out all the lugubrious parts. After a week we were zooming along and everybody was much happier.

  We performed the show in an old church that had been converted into a theatre in the middle of the gay district, Dupont Circle, affectionately known as “The Fruit Loop” or “Bouffant Circle.” We sold out every night, and once the cast had relaxed into the now hilarious show we tore the town up. Every night we went dancing and drinking and hung out with sexually ambiguous politicians.

  At the end of three weeks I was sad to leave D.C. but happy to be returning to my life in Los Angeles with Harold. I had been gone for six months and despite the trials and tribulations of living apart, Harold and I had weathered it all and in fact became closer because of it. Once home, I moved in with Harold. I figured there was no point in running from my destiny.

  That year the Gayvn Awards nominated me for my lead role in Men in Blue as well as for Best Screenplay. Although I didn’t win—the award went to Vince Rockland for his role in Three Brothers in which he had costarred with his two real life brothers Shane and Hal Rockland—I didn’t mind. Considering the thousands of performances given each year, it was an honor, as they say, just to be nominated. The show was much more upscale now, with even a bad three course dinner served to the audience. All the studios now bought tables and everybody schmoozed and hugged and kissed and secretly longed for their names to be called so they could climb on the stage and collect an award for having the biggest hole, or slurping more cum or . . . hold on . . . “Bitter, table for one.”