Girl’s Shoes in Gay Pornography
Only in gay porn might acne make you more attractive. It’s part and parcel of a look. A flat and hairless stomach, short and spiky haircut, toothy smile, maybe a pubey mustache, but never armpit hair. Skin super pale or spray-tanned orange. Hair brunette or dyed yellowish blonde. There usually aren’t any clothes — this is, after all, porn. If there are clothes, though, it’s usually a shirt just small enough that, when the arms are lifted, a small but exciting amount of midriff is revealed and some relaxed-fit jeans with holes around the knee and down by the cuff. In the beginning, there is underwear. Skimpy briefs, the type you could rip open if you wanted to, and this look — this tiny and taut body, this skinny, cheap twink — invites you to do as much.
Can you see this body yet? It’s the body of the gay porn actors who bottom. They’re penetrated, they receive, they take it. These porn actors are type-cast: You look like a bottom;therefore, you are a bottom. Porn is nothing if not essentializing. In most scenes, these actors are merely the sexually submissive partner. In other scenes, though, scenes which script out and eroticize sexual violence, these actors are cast as victim.
Johnny Rapid is one of these porn actors. With all the evident primping and pampering of Rapid’s face and body you might wonder: Why all the pimples? Surely, there’s something he can do about those suckers. But the pimples, more than anything else, are what make Johnny Rapid, now 27, resemble the 18-year-old virgin he was presented as when he started acting in pornography. Why, then, would he get rid of the pimples? What, after all, does society sexualize more than the innocent?
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At 27, Rapid has filmed over 240 sex scenes. In 2017, he was one of the most widely searched actors on Pornhub, and in 2014 he won the Cybersocket Web Award for Best International Porn Star.
This continued success has been due, in no small part, to the fact that Rapid — at 5’6” and 134 pounds — still looks like a twink. In porn, the diminutive bodies of twinks are figured as vulnerable. In scene after scene, Rapid bottoms and plays a younger man forced or coerced into sex by an older man. His body is vulnerable-looking, and in porn, this perceived physical vulnerability is taken advantage of, manhandled. Rapid, by being the manhandled and not the manhandler, represents innocence. Innocence isn’t about acting, it’s about being acted upon.
In “Prison Shower,” Johnny Rapid, then 19, plays an inmate raped by a larger and older one, played by Rafael Alencar, 31 at the time. In a recent interview, Rapid looked back at this scene — one of his most graphic, transforming the reality of molestations in prison into an erotic fantasy — as the major turning-point in his career.
“My scene with Rafael Alencar, ‘Prison Shower,’ was iconic. It will never be forgotten,” he says. “It was hard to get into that mindset, but I did it. I went somewhere. I really did. I put myself in a girl’s shoes if she was in that situation. And it worked.”
For Rapid, putting on your girl’s shoes is about becoming passive, becoming the object of violent acts. Putting on your girl’s shoes is about inhabiting innocence, innocence here both begetting violence and being violence’s opposite.
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On Oct. 9, 2014, Rapid assaulted his wife after she refused to have a threesome with him and a 14-year-old girl. He was arrested two months later. In an interview from the year before, Rapid said, “I’m really dominant over females... I do my porn, and then I go home to my girlfriend. I have sex with her until she bleeds.” At work, Rapid puts on a pair of girl’s shoes. At the end of the day, he goes home to his wife and puts on his big boy shoes.
When gay media outlets picked up the story of the arrest, Rapid responded on Twitter in January of 2015 with a selfie of him and his wife, captioned, “The media can write and twist the story all they want. Just know we still stand strong.”
Later that day, in response to several stories claiming that Rapid was straight, he tweeted, “I guess being BISEXUAL is still considered being straight.” This announcement came after five years of telling the public he was straight and merely a “gay-for-pay” porn actor.
The timing of Rapid’s invocation of BGLTQ identity eerily parallels Kevin Spacey’s infamous 2017 tweet in which he responded to allegations that he had sexually assaulted a 14-year-old boy by coming out as gay. “I choose now to live as a gay man,” Spacey tweeted just hours after Buzzfeed published the first allegations against him. “I want to deal with this honestly and openly,” he wrote, “and that starts with examining my own behavior.”
People were enraged at Spacey’s tweet for reinscribing the conflation of homosexuality with pedophilia. They were also upset that Spacey was trying to muffle a story of sexual assault with a coming out story.
What’s happening in Spacey’s and Rapid’s tweets, though, isn’t muffling, but a manipulation of gay/bi identity. Each man implies not necessarily that he is innocent of the crime alleged against him, but that he is innocent in a larger and more elusive sense of the word, one beyond a bureaucratic notion of justice. Unconsciously represented in their statements is the image of gay/bi men as the manhandled, but never the manhandler. Rapid and Spacey disrupt their figuration as predators with the potential that, via their sexuality, they could be victims.
Gay/bi identity is vulnerable, placed in the margins of society, and also implies that a man could be vulnerable in sexual and domestic contexts. Such an identity, as invoked by Spacey and Rapid, doesn’t absolve either one of guilt but claims that one, made oh-so-vulnerable by their identity, couldn’t possibly have accrued enough power to be dangerous in the first place. How could the abused possibly abuse?
In the case of Rapid’s tweet, the image unconsciously registered is a preexisting one: the images of sexual violence that have already been enacted upon his body in porn. Rapid, by coming out at the moment he did, implied a link between his pornographic work and his domestic life. Coming out as bisexual perhaps would add authenticity to the images we had seen of him pretending to be abused while also invalidating allegations that he had been an abuser. “Look,” he seemed to imply, “that was the real me in those videos. That innocent-looking twink couldn’t possibly hurt anyone.”
A few months after the first allegations about Spacey came out, Heather Unruh, a former TV anchor, came forward with more allegations. She stated that Spacey sexually assaulted her son, who was just 18 years old at the time. “My son was a starstruck, straight, 18-year-old young man who had no idea that the famous actor was an alleged sexual predator,” Unruh said.
Unruh says “straight” with particular emphasis. If Spacey and Rapid’s invocation of gay/bi sexuality implies that this sexuality begets victimization, Unruh’s statement seems to go even further: Gay/bi sexuality invites victimization. If her son had been gay the assault may have been deserved, may have even been besired. The violation would have been less violating, the tragedy less tragic.
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Shoes can be taken on and off. The body, however, remains.
It isn’t, of course, Rapid’s bisexuality that facilitates his transition from abusive husband in real life to abused gay boy in front of the pornographer’s camera. It is his body that facilitates this transition. It is his body that performs in pornography, being dominated and penetrated, and it is his body that inflicted acts of violence on his wife. Despite what Rapid and Spacey seem to want us to believe, it’s entirely possible to be both abused and abuser.
Porn is, obviously, not reality. But it also isn’t total fantasy.
Porn is more like a revolving door. It allows bodies to move from one space to another, while serving as an airlock, ensuring that either side of the revolving door remains its own environment governed by its own rules. Bodies on either side can be cast into roles. If you look like Rapid — thin, short, hairless, pimpled — you can guess what role you might be assigned. Meanings can be poured into these bodies, and values can be attached. Rapid can enter this revolving door as an abuser, and come out the other side as the abused. Shoes are swappable.
— Magazine writer Paul G. Sullivan can be reached at paul.sullivan@thecrimson.com. Follow him on twitter @neuroticgayboy. This is the second installment of his column, You Don’t Always Have to Be on Top, which explores gay male culture on and off campus.