So I’ve starred in the series Stepfather’s Secret at Men.com. Costarring the very sexy men Johnny Rapid, Trevor Spade, and Scott Harbor, it’s been a huge hit. I’m getting a TON of positive feedback, including a lot of people who speak of this exact scenario being one of their greatest fantasies.
And I also get the occasional person who finds this content absolutely abhorrent. I’ll start out by saying that there are indeed guys out there who were molested in their formative years; of course I completely understand why this might push a big red button for them. But I’m also getting a little trickle of folk who object because they feel that somehow this material makes the gay world look bad.
Answering those objections directly, I am going to point out that in the film Men.com was very careful in scripting and producing these scenes to make these salient points very clear:
- 1. All the stepsons are older than 18. This makes them older than the legal age of consent. It goes without saying, legally, that of course all actors are well above the age of 18 as well. There is no representation, actual or implied, of statutory rape in this movie.
- 2. The sons are all adopted children of my character’s wife; this is made quite clear in her opening conversation in the first scene. As she explains, they are in fact not the stepfather’s adopted children. They are also unrelated to each other. Hence there is no incest depicted, implied or actual.
- 3. All the sons are active and willing participants in the sex. It would be unrealistic to expect the sons to be the instigators, but the scenes start only with the stepfather as the willing facilitator, not the active provocateur. There is no rape or any form of coerced participation shown or implied in these scenes.
Some still object to the age difference. Let’s presume the stepfather is around 40 (as am I) and the sons are between 21 and 25; we’d be looking at a 15 to 20 year age difference. Why is this age difference so objectionable between these age groups when a 30 year old and a 50 year old might fuck with impunity? If you’d tell me a 21 year old is still too immature to know what he’s doing sexually, then why do we place the age of consent at 18? And if a 21 year old is old enough to drive a car, to vote, to drink, and to fight for our country, how the hell is he too young to make his own decisions about his sexuality?
I appreciate the need some people feel to conform to what the straight world might expect of us behaviorally. I also however feel that, as unreasonable as it is for a few straight folk to think that all gay men are sexual predators and rapists out to “convert” the wholesome straight boy (stepson, altar boy, what have you) to a sad life of unfulfilling debauchery, it’s just as unreasonable to think that straight folk set some sort of moral bar. The straight world has been telling us for decades, nay centuries, that we’re perverted and broken and sinful. Some of us are buying into this accusation, and seem to think that we need to toe someone else’s lines of behavior to “prove” ourselves to a populace which might never come around anyway. To suggest that we are now able to convince a minority of stuck-in-the-mud heterosexuals that we’re “just as good as they are” is to suggest that in fact we were foul, uncouth, and unclean in previous generations. And looking at how ingrained into history homosexuals have been, in positions of power, culture, and thought, I’m just not buying that.
The other disturbing thing I note in these responses is a kneejerk need to pass judgement. In this way, we are in fact following exactly the example of those judgemental straight folk who are so fast to tell us what inhuman slime we are. Just as they act based on information that has no source in truth or on no knowledge of any of us personally, similarly we’re fast to come to a negative opinion of a mere porn movie based on a presumption of what it might mean, and that of the darkest interpretation possible. And this doesn’t just happen around this video; it’s a very human tendency. I’m just amazed that we as gay men, having been the brunt of exactly that judgementalism for so long, are so ready to jump the moral gun ourselves. Really, shouldn’t we of all people be better than that?
In realizing on video a fantasy, does anyone really think that the studio would go out of their way to deliberately or negligently portray the corruption of a minor? Even studios which depict S/M and sex in bondage go well out of their way to provide some means of showing that the exchange was in fact consensual. Sex between differently-aged partners is commonplace in gay porn these days, “daddy” being a perhaps increasingly potent fantasy these days. If you want to get upset about something, let’s look at the treatment of our brothers and sisters in Russia, in Africa, in our own christian communities. If you need to level your energies at something we gay men do, rail at unsafe sex practices that keep STI’s a constant threat among us. Take aim at the drug abuse that probably underlies so much of that unsafe sex. Get upset about something which with some reading and understanding you can actually speak intelligently about, instead of something about which we’ve only made an uneducated guess. If we want respect from the heterosexual community, from anyone, or hell, even just from ourselves, that seems a much stronger means of accomplishing it.