As the limited field of porn star memoirs goes, a new book ranks high. It's "Body to Job" (Rare Bird Books, paper, $17.95; Kindle, $9) by Christopher Zeischegg, the former and mostly heterosexual porn star whose nom de porn is/was Danny Wylde. He made well over 500 scenes, mostly straight, but including gay scenes for at least seven studios, including Raging Stallion, Next Door, Fratmen, and a whopping 53 scenes for kink.com. He was only casually bisexual, more of a cock-for-hire. Early in his career, he said, "I was up for anything."
Danny's involvement in porn is a riches-to-rags story, documenting the initial fantasies that he ultimately saw as delusions, and his struggles with the double stigmas of being both a sex worker and bisexual, which compromised his relationships and caused a loss of self-esteem. I have no doubt you'll find it all fascinating. Originally written as a series of articles for a variety of industry publications, through which he became known as a spokesman for sex workers and their problems, it is surprising how well they knit together into this seemingly coherent whole. And though it seems truthful I was finally left to doubt much of "Body to Job." It's more about the hetero industry than the gay side, but you can extrapolate. And unlike those gay stars whose only mildly literate tweets you've read, Wylde's an actual writer. He's intelligent, with ideas to express, and a sense of social and sexual politics.
"I was a real-time witness to the inner working of pornography," he says, and his "I was there" description of porn work is revealing. A stretch of indulgent magical realism, however, nearly defeated me. It expresses a nightmare that's rather diffuse, and at moments incoherent. But it's not too long.
Wylde began his porn career while a college student in the Bay Area, as a means of financing his education. Answering a Craigslist ad, looking for guys to get penetrated on camera by women wearing dildos, led to his becoming a prolific performer for kink.com. In San Francisco, he did both str8 and gay porn. Upon moving to Los Angeles, he learned he had to pick one or the other. Producers said it was fear of HIV that made the hetero industry shun "crossover" performers. But Wylde has said, "It seemed to have more to do with homophobia than anything else. But whatever."
Whatever, indeed. With seeming nonchalance, he was soon raking in quite a lot of money. At one time, making hetero porn, he was paid $48,000 to work only six days a month. But he wanted to pursue gay porn work because it paid even better. This running after cash got him blacklisted for a time in het porn, and caused a rift between himself and his girlfriend. The easy income and indulgent porn lifestyle became what he called "Golden Handcuffs." He testifies, "Once you were in it, it was nearly impossible to leave."
Unable to take responsibility and turn his life around, he feels he's disposed of his life, realizes porn has becoming boring to him, and is a "visual mediocrity... void of all significance." And then, a coup de grace, his career is ended when abuse of the drugs that prolonged his erections leaves him unable to get hard at all. Sex had become his sense of self, and without it he was bereft. A final section of the book shows us how he comes to grips with having pursued a life that turned out to be a fantasy. Or does it? What are these concluding fantasies of snuff films? It's hard to tell if this book is as thoughtful and realistic as it seems. If you go fishing for the small print, you'll find buried on the copyright page the author's statement: "The following stories... closely resemble my memoirs. They are also works of fiction." While I found the book interesting reading, this made me feel sort of jerked around.