A PORNSTAR NAMED DESIRE

by Michael Kearns

“Only connect.” —E. M. Forster

When someone casually tells me that he had died, I freeze. The memory of his thick tongue—its thickness and how it tasted as it delved in and out of my mouth—temporarily paralyzes me as the news lands somewhere in my solar plexus.

Another pornstar with AIDS bites the dust. News at eleven.

Try to remember. When was the last time he gave me tongue? When was the last time I gave him head? When was the last time we f--ked? When was the last time? 2005, I’m fairly certain: the year that I began to confront my sexual compulsivity. He was dead less than two years later.

He was a player in that endless litany of reckless hook-ups that I’d hoped would quell my relentless need to feel connected to the flesh and blood of a man, any man.

We did connect, randomly, several times, over a five year period: his apartment in Hollywood, my apartment in Los Feliz, sometimes in the middle of the afternoon, sometimes in the middle of the night, always fever-pitched.

Like all pornstars, he had more than one name and multiple identities. The man I got to know during these rough-and-tumble trysts was a dichotomous combination of heat and sweetness. In spite of the macho persona he purportedly projected on celluloid (I have never seen one of his movies, although I understand he made a hundred or so), he possessed a genuine playfulness during—and after—sex that distinguished him from many of the other porn poseurs. Beyond fulfilling the fantasy of his scorching image, there was an unexpected little boy who lived in the pulchritudinous body of this hunka, hunka burnin’ love.

Unlike most of those fervid assignations that left me with a feeling of being more isolated, I felt a lingering connection after time spent with What’s His Name. Does that explain my melodramatic reaction to his death?

I am bereft, I cry. If those sex dates were just quick fixes, why am I experiencing this ineffable sadness?

Is it because a part of me died along with him, the part of me that is younger and ostensibly more desirable than I am now, the person who was closer to 50 years old than 60? The person whose belt size was three sizes smaller?

I can never retrieve him, the dead sex-star, but I can also never retrieve who I was during those scattered moments when I was in his sphere. I will unlikely never recreate that degree of unbridled and careless sexual lust.

I try to jack off, conjuring memories of every part of his sinewy, silken body, but—since orgasms elude me these days—I can’t come. Is it my medication? Age? A shift?

Besides, it is the memory of him in a public place that refuses to abate: “How’s your daughter?” he asks, as I’m leaving the Silver Spoon in West Hollywood. He appears to be alone, and so am I. After simply answering his question (“Great”), I move on. This brief meeting is unexpected and utterly out of context, extending beyond the steamy dirty-talk and acrobatic sexual positions while shattering the impersonal entanglements that we’d mutually (albeit mutely) agreed upon.

There’s the lesson. The deeply human is now what triggers me more than detailing a body part and what I want to do with it.

Should I be sad? Relieved? Angry? Grateful? Three words—“How’s your daughter?”—contain more intimacy than the innumerable monotonous sexual vagaries.

This reconfiguration of my sexuality—no, my humanity—is a challenge, like looking in the mirror and seeing someone who is virtually unrecognizable. I am different now.

For nearly thirty years, the appearance of death has always, without pity, forced me to look deeper within. I’d almost forgotten that we still die of AIDS; we still die of homophobia; we still die of heartache; we still die of various addictions. And “old age” becomes a more likely reason as each summer turns into fall.

Always walking the tightrope of the addict, I want to leave this world with some sense of balanced gracefulness, having learned something about true connection.

Maybe I already have.