Autopornography

A Memoir of Life in the Lust Lane

Scott O' Hara

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135024291
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

In this provocative book, retired porn star Scott O'Hara (known as "Spunk" by many of his fans from an early punk photospread) gives a backstage look at the world of pornography, revealing why he loved it, what he got out of it, and why he left it. In an autobiographical style, he considers and poses answers to some fascinating questions: What is sex? What makes a porn star? And why does pornography really upset people? You'll really get to know this noted gay porn star as you get a firsthand look at his life experiences and sexual journeys from his boyhood days of locker room fantasies and sexual experimentation to his years as a porn star and then to his experiences as an individual facing the realities of being HIV-positive. As O'Hara puts it in his Introduction: "This book was written as a last-ditch effort: a way to open up all my closets, let you in on all the dark corners of my life, and give you a better picture of what goes into the making of a porn star. Because if there's one profession that arouses people's curiosity, it's that one." As you read through the pages of Autopornography, you'll see how O'Hara's personality reflects his sexuality, that is, how they have melded into one. His vivid descriptions of personal relationships (with family, friends, lovers, and casual acquaintances) and his many sexual encounters as he traveled the world reveal his love of sex and his desire to live without inhibitions, secrets, or sexual constraints. Reading Autopornography may cause you to reexamine your own sexual boundaries, realize new sexual potential, and discover sexual desires not previously aroused.Listed #14 on Books Bought Mainly by Men 1997 Top 100 Bestsellers as rated by A Different Light Bookstore!

The Videos: Easy to Work With

Every video has its own story. Here they are:

CALIFORNIA BLUE, SEPTEMBER 1983

When the manager of Savages asked me if I’d like to be in a porn flick, I said, “Sure, I’d love to.” I mean, it wasn’t something I’d spent a lot of time thinking about, but who hasn’t fantasized about being in a porn video? I’d bought myself a video camera when they were still a novelty, back in 1981, and I’d taken a lot of home videos of myself jerking off, shaving my pubes, shaving my head-even a couple of surreptitious videos of men having sex with me. I’d always been a ham, so I liked the idea of being put on film by professionals.

Except, these weren’t really professionals. None of the guys had done porno before; the cameraman was the most experienced of all of us, and he proved completely unreliable (I don’t know, maybe he wasn’t getting paid). I can’t speak for the other performers, but I wasn’t doing it for the money; I was doing it because I liked sex, and I liked the idea of being on film. That, and two of my costars, John and Tony, turned me on in a big way. Tony played the mean farmer who abuses trespassers; John played the cop he calls to help him out. Personally, I couldn’t care less what the fantasy scenario was; I liked the reality: Tony’s dark, curly hair and bushy eyebrows, John’s big, pouty lips and the way his butt seemed to float about an inch behind and above where it should’ve been … So I put up with the long hours and rude treatment that comes with being a sex star, and frankly, I had a blast. The most memorable part of the movie isn’t the scene with John and Tony in the brussels sprout field, however, where they “rape” me with a cucumber and then double-fuck me; it’s the later scene, up at the barn, where John and Tony get it on with each other. I had to stand by and watch that scene … and greater frustration hath no man ever experienced. I knelt on the sidelines, mouth open, eager for a chance to “fluff” either one of them. One time when John went outside to take a piss, I drank that, too, and then sucked him up hard again. He had a fabulous, leisurely manner of fucking a face that really got me worked up; pity it isn’t documented better in the movie.

The “finished” product ended up sitting on the shelf for almost two years; the producer/director ran out of money. Finally, in desperation (hey, I really wanted to see this film on video store shelves!), I approached him and asked how much money he needed for postproduction. “$10,000,” he said. Fine. I loaned it to him, and just for good measure, we decided to shoot another scene: a scene, in which I describe the action in the other scenes, and end the video with a truly impressive cumshot, and a pan into a still photo that strongly implies that the cop eventually became my lover and “reformed” me. Hey, it’s a cliche, but it works … especially since I’m obviously a couple years older in the narrative scenes. I wrote the monologue, too. (Should I be proud of this, I wonder?) So we did the postproduction, and got a distributor, and … well, other difficulties arose. I don’t think Walt ever sold more than 500 copies of the video–definitely not enough to make a profit, much less pay back my loan. For the last ten years, it’s been sitting on warehouse shelves gathering dust, although Walt claims his distributor is still selling copies without sending him his cut. For all of you amateur producers out there who are sure you can make a bundle with a pornflick: this is, I’m sorry to say, the grim reality of making porn.

“WATER SPORTS,” A LOOP OF WINNER TAKES ALL, OCTOBER 1983

Before we’d even finished shooting California Blue, I had an offer from Falcon’s talent scout, Dennis Forbes, to do a video for them. He met me at Savages, over Labor Day weekend. He’d been commissioned by Playboy, of all magazines, to photograph the “Biggest Dick in San Francisco” contest. Well, yes, yours truly was the winner, and so naturally, he gave me his card, saying, “Let’s do a video, little boy.” I was as enthusiastic as always. (The folks at Playboy, incidentally, when they saw the photos, were horrified. “You know we can’t print shots of penises!” they told him.) So Dennis test-shot me (making me look about fourteen years old, everyone claims–Falcon was too nervous about those photos to ever use them in publicity), and sometime in October or November, I was flown down to L.A. for the one-day shoot. We spent the night in some cheesy Sunset Boulevard motel, and bright and early Saturday morning, we were ferried up to the location: a house up in the hills with a view of a smog-filled basin (with a pool, of course). That’s where I met Randy (now this is one occasion where I genuinely have no memory of his real name, and don’t care) Page. My initial impression: spoiled little empty-headed blond preppie gold digger. Godnose what his impression of me was. If I’d had a few more movies under my belt, I might have bowed out at that point, telling the director, “Hey, I just can’t work with someone like that.” Fortunately for my career, that didn’t occur to me as an option (and, realistically, it wasn’t). So we spent the day lying around, sunbathing, waiting to have sex. The first item on the agenda was the setup shots. I think we got around to them at about 2 p.m. I was then told to give Randy an enema with a garden hose–the single most disgusting thing I’ve ever done on camera, I have to say. Enemas are not meant to be given with garden hoses. I mean, those brass fittings on the end are not smooth, okay? And this is COLD water we’re talking about. If I’d been on his end of the hose, I’d have walked out right then and there. After that experience, I’m not surprised he disliked me. He put up a brave front, though, and I fucked him for much of the rest of the afternoon, while cameramen changed positions, rearranged the reflectors, and so forth. Shortly before sunset, when the director realized he was losing the light, he told us, “Okay, time for your cumshots!” And about time, too. I eagerly shot all over Randy; Randy required a dick in his mouth to work himself up to climax, so I obliged. Afterward, when the cameras had stopped rolling, he spat my dick out as if it tasted bad. Maybe it did. I don’t think we spoke another word to each other. Minutes later, cash in hand, I was being ferried back to the airport. I don’t want this to sound like it was a horrible experience. It wasn’t. I had fun. It just wasn’t very sexy.

“HARD-PRESSED,” A LOOP OF RAMCHARGER, FEBRUARY 1984

This was a strange little loop, designed to go with two other film pieces that had been hanging around for a year or more–and since Falcon had just switched to video, they needed another film loop to finish up this movie. (There’s some technical reason why they didn’t want to mix analog and digital on the same tape.) For some reason, they decided that these loops weren’t up to their usual standards, and they should be marketed under a new brand name, “Jocks,” so as not to sully the fine Falcon reputation–the beginning of my B-movie career.

The premise of the loop was especially loopy: two leathermen are slouching along a country lane somewhere (actually someone’s backyard, of course) when we find a naked boy (Brian Hawks) handcuffed to a cyclone fence. Well, of course we let him go, right? Um … you obviously don’t have the Falcon formula engraved in your brain yet. That’s right, we molest him unmercifully, and at the end we leave him handcuffed to the fence again. It’s not my fantasy, but hey, I’m not the owner of a million-dollar video studio, either.

I need to go back, before telling this story, to Monday, when I’d met Peter James O’Brien, my co-leatherman. He was part Greek, part Turkish, part Irish–what a combination! He had black hair, dark eyes, full, sensuous lips, and the juiciest-looking foreskin I think I’d ever seen. He also mentioned that he’d recently been in jail, but he didn’t say why. We were at the Saharan Motel, changing for dinner. Dennis Forbes was staying with us, as chaperone–a good thing, too, or I’d have been all over Peter at the first opportunity. This man was the stuff of which my fantasies had always been made. We went out to dinner (Italian; I had a cannoli, imagining it was you know who), and then to a garage, where Dennis was all set to shoot stills of Peter. I said, “Excuse me, do you need a fluffer?”–and he agreed, so I got to at least taste that heavenly cock. But it wasn’t working, and after awhile Dennis asked me to leave, so I didn’t see the rest of the shoot. It didn’t go well. Peter maintained, that night, that he was straight, and just couldn’t get excited with all these guys around. Not a good omen for the shoot.

On Tuesday, Dennis spent all day trying to get a decent set of stills of Peter. I went shopping. At day’s end, Dennis admitted failure. Not good. I spent another night tossing and turning, wondering if I stood any chance with Peter once the shoot was over.

On location, Wednesday, the same problems popped up (or didn’t pop up). Admittedly, it was unusually cold for L.A., and outdoor shooting in fifty-degree weather is not very good for erections. No matter what stimulus we used, Peter’s fabulous dick stayed limp. It didn’t really bother me; just a lick or two on it, and my dick was harder than it had ever been. Sort of like fluffing, only in reverse. (Which, come to think of it, is how “fluffing” has always worked for me. Having someone else suck on my dick makes me self-conscious; sucking on someone else’s dick releases all my animal instincts, and usually makes me stiff.) So I did all of the plowing of Mr. Hawks, and Peter got his dick sucked a lot. Eventually, the director called a halt to the shoot, saying that maybe the weather would be better the next day, and we all went home–another sleepless night.

The weather didn’t improve. We didn’t get any better footage. Then, as the afternoon was wearing on, with no sign of a cumshot, emergency measures were called for: a local boy named Gregg who had been in several earlier Falcon videos was surreptitiously called up. He came over, ostensibly to deliver something, and did an emergency stunt performance. He was very professional; I just sucked him a little bit, and he produced a masterful erection and impressive moneyshot. Since his dick, though beautiful, was circumcised, that meant that all shots of Peter’s dick had to be cut from the film. I was depressed when I saw the final product; I think they wasted a lot of footage that foreskin lovers would’ve paid good money to see, hard-on or no. Fortunately, as I said, I had one of the better “performance days” of my career: Peter’s dick inspired me as few others before or since. There might actually be some connection to the fact that he was soft the whole time. I mean, a soft dick, especially given my foreskin fetish, is relatively nonthreatening, but retains most of the erotic potential of a hard dick. If he’d just managed to piss down my throat, I’d probably have had a spontaneous orgasm.

That night at the motel, I was frantic. I wanted to get into Peter’s bed so bad I could taste it. Instead, he went out on the town, looking for pussy. I don’t know if he found it. In the morning, he gave me his address, and said I should let him know if I was back down in L.A.; but when I wrote, my letter was returned. I did hear from him once more: he wrote me a letter from prison, a month or two later–he told me it was due to a parole violation. There was no response when I wrote back. I pined for months.

SLAVES FOR SALE, JUNE 1984

The genesis of this rather horrible little video was when I innocently shaved one side of my head, in March or April of 1984. I was intending on leaving it that way–very punk, you know–but then I wandered through the leather store on Folsom Street that just happened to be the storefront for Drummer magazine, and John Embry (the publisher) saw me, and said, “Hey kid, ya wanna get the rest of that shaved on film?” Having heard the magic word–film–I batted my eyelashes at him and agreed. He grabbed Patrick Toner, who was tending the front counter, and we went upstairs and took some photos of Patrick shaving my head. The photos looked quite impressive–it isn’t obvious that I was half-shaved to begin with, and one of the shots was used on the cover of the next issue of Drummer–and two months later, John Embry called me up again. “Hey kid”–always his term for me, and maybe for all his stable of boys–“how’s your hair?” He wanted to reenact the scene, on video.

I am nothing, if not willing. I’ve been told that’s what doomed my video career: I didn’t know how to say no to those inevitable “B” grade producers. (And, ten years later, have I learned how to say No? Well, let me think. Surely I’ve said No to someone in the past year … ?) So John paired me up with Ken Bergstrom, a Top From Hell who had recently moved to San Francisco from Florida. I can’t say I liked the man, but that was kind of irrelevant under the circumstances; in an S/M video, you’re not supposed to “like” your partner, you’re just supposed to play your role adequately. Since my “role” was to hang from the ceiling like a piece of meat, in shackles and restraints, while he shaved my head and body (and applied various other indignities), that was easy. He also clearly wanted to fuck me, but I hadn’t agreed to that; he pretended to do so, anyway. No climaxes. Hey, it wasn’t much fun to shoot, and I’ve only watched the thing once. If your thing is v-e-r-y s-l-o-w videos, this one’s for you.

THE OTHER SIDE OF ASPEN, PART II, APRIL 1985

It takes a certain amount of chutzpah to take an acknowledged classic of the genre, like The Other Side of Aspen, and try to make a Part II–ten years later. Several of the original performers were still alive and still available, but Falcon chose an entirely new cast. (Or was Jeff Turk in the original? I can’t remember.) I found the thought titillating–being connected to one of the original gay pornflicks, by whatever tenuous connection there was–so I was more than eager. When I arrived in Tahoe (no, it wasn’t filmed at Aspen–and neither was the original), I was even more glad that I’d agreed to do it: that’s when I met Tony Bravo.

Oh, okay, his name was Michael. That’s the name we used on set, too. “Noms de porn” are generally ridiculed by the very people who insist on using them. I’ve never cared for the institution. Oh, I’ve used pseudonyms for various purposes throughout my life (mainly for mailing lists), but never to separate my sex life from my “real life.” I would consider that an unhealthy psychological attitude toward sex. I was proud to be in these movies. Most other men are not, for whatever reason. Some will say, “But what if my boss found out?”; some mention their parents; some have lovers; some have wives. Some really do anticipate meteoric political careers. (And yes, the discovery of a past life in pornflicks would truly make a politician’s career “meteoric,” in the sense that a meteor is only notable when it’s crashing and burning.) Curiously, most of the porn performers I’ve stayed in touch with over the years have eventually come out to their parents–and their parents have generally been quite intrigued by the idea of having a pornstar son.

What was Michael’s reason? I have no idea. I never asked. He was one of the sexiest men I’d ever met, and it’s difficult to ask serious questions (beyond: “Wanna fuck?”) of someone who sets your blood boiling. There was also a fellow on set named Maurizio (known to the world as Giorgio Canalli, and familiar to me from several William Higgins and Nova films), who similarly made my knees weak. He and Michael had met, coincidentally, a couple of weeks earlier, at a Big Dick Contest in L.A. Maurizio had won; Michael had come in second and won a special prize for having the “sexiest” dick (and it was!). The three of us, together with about six other young porn-bunnies, were shut up in a good-sized chalet for the weekend. Oh, what torture!

Actually, all joking aside, it really was. As mentioned heretofore, Falcon keeps a close watch on its stars to make sure they’re not having fun offscreen, wasting precious juices. There was always a chaperone present. On Saturday morning, when we were supposed to begin shooting, we were all sitting around waiting for the van to take us up to the location (another chalet up on the mountainside, not materially different from the one on the lake). After two hours of waiting, I got a headache and retired to a bedroom to lie down. Not too long afterwards, Maurizio wandered back that way, too. Or maybe I followed him back; who remembers? Before we knew what was going on, our hormones were at work: we were locked in a vigorous sixty-nine. He had a very tasty piece of Italian sausage, oversized but not so huge that it wouldn’t fit down my throat (which, when I’m really turned on, doesn’t acknowledge much in the way of limitations), and he had an amazingly deep throat, too. He came pretty damn close to bringing me off. He then spewed down my throat, a load that seemed at the time to be the most perfect cumload I’d ever swallowed; and moments later we heard the van drive up outside, and someone got out and called, “All aboard!”–and we quickly got dressed and ran outside. It all happened so quickly, I don’t think anyone even suspected … but I felt guilty all that afternoon, as Maurizio’s angle of erection consistently failed to measure up to what we all knew it was capable of doing. I knew that I had his best load of the day percolating in my stomach. Guilty–but smug and turned on.

Up on the mountainside, it was another case of hurry-up-and-wait. It was another four hours before any shooting got done; some of that time was spent outside, shooting stills in the snow (I’d brought along my own new Nikon, and shot a few stills of Michael and Maurizio which I treasure), but most of it was just sitting on the couches, watching TV, talking, snacking. (Not too many of those donuts, boys …)

When we finally got around to shooting, it was nearly sunset.

The “plot” of this scene–a group of skiers repairing to their cabin at the end of the day for group sex–had me, the brazen hussy of the group, doing a striptease up on a table, in an effort to get the orgy going. Okay, I did my part. I was looking forward to the orgy myself. I hadn’t had nearly enough of Maurizio’s meat, and I hadn’t even tasted Michael’s. But then, Falcon choreography stepped in. “Scott, you work with Chris and these other three blonds. Michael and Maurizio, you work together, over in that corner, with Jeff.” God, talk about frustration! I mean, blonds are really not my cup of tea. For the next three hours, I kept trying to sneak over to the Italian corner. No success. I found out later that the plot of the film called for those two to be sort of in love–and I was just a casual acquaintance. At any rate, during one of the breaks, while the cameramen were having coffee, Michael and I were relaxing by ourselves on the set–and I noticed his toenails needed trimming. Ever ready with my clippers and file (once a fister, always prepared!), I set to work … and then started massaging his feet … and then sucking his toes … and when the cameraman happened to glance into the room, a few minutes later, I had half his foot crammed into my mouth, and we were both intensely turned on. They quietly started filming, and the scene gradually built up around us. I got several of his toes up my ass, which Michael seemed to enjoy and I certainly did. Before long, though, we were directed to separate, again–yanked apart by cruel, unfeeling video-Nazis–and I had to go back to fucking the blonds. Maurizio did get it up enough to get i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Something in the Water
• Soap Gets in My Eyes
• June
• The Family: Hard to Live With
• Chrysanthemum Tea
• Re-creation
• The Good Parts
• “Is That All Real?”
• That Sandwiched Feeling
• Venice Beach: Memorial Day
• Porn
• The Videos: Easy to Work With
• AIDS
• Foreskin
• The Noose
• Open Wide
• … and Perhaps Some Wine, to Clear the Throat
• Passion by Mistake
• Colm
• Philip Core
• Scott in Love
• Dear Ex-Lover
• Pornstars in Private
• Chess
• Peaks
• Spunk-boy
• Chronology