A Waste of Time

So, I feel like it’s time to talk in a little more about this big upcoming project to which I keep alluding.

I’m doing porn.

Gasp, you say, Rick Worley, interested in porn?!

Allow me to explain.  Or not, whatever.

So, I’ve been talking about how this project started out as a small thing and kept getting longer.  As Tolkien famously said, “The tale grew in the telling,” although I don’t think he was talking about hardcore twink penetration with a light S & M kink.  To each his own, but is what I happen to like stranger than Elves?  Anyway.

What this started out as was a little joke story, I thought maybe five or 10 pages, that I wanted to do a few years ago.  It was going to be a story about my rabbit obsessing over porn, and the main reason for me to want to do it was so that I could draw the sex.  I thought it would be fun in a trashy kind of way, and drawing sex and naked boys and talking about porn are hardly things that I’ve avoided doing in my comics.  What I’ve done about porn, specifically though, is just kind of make some jokes about the rabbit watching too much of it, and I haven’t really gone any deeper into it than that.  That’s because, once I tried to write about it in any detail, it got much deeper really quickly.  Deeper, get it?  We’re talking about porn, so anything like that is a pun, keep your eyes peeled for the hilarity bound to ensue.

I wanted to write a comic about the rabbit watching my favorite porn film at the time a few years ago, which happened to be a classic gem called Take It Like a Bitch, Boy.  Doing a bit of research into that to find photo reference and other things, I started to read about the models involved.  Up until then, I hadn’t given any particular thought to porn actors or the lives they led, I mostly just knew that this was a video with cute boys getting dick stuck in them by other cute boys, and as far as I was concerned that could only be a good thing.

A certain young star named Brent Corrigan was obviously the cutest boy in Take It Like a Bitch, Boy, and a bit of curiosity about him led me to discover his other films, which included, at the time, Cream Bboys, also a classic, although I still don’t know why there’s that additional “B” in the title.  It also led me, though, to read about Brent Corrigan, and the studio that had produced those two films, Cobra Video, and that’s when things started to get strange.

Brent Corrigan, whose real name is Sean Paul Lockhart (Which is fun because it seems to me to be at least as good of a porn name as, “Brent Corrigan”) was in the midst of a controversy at the time as what some people were calling the gay Traci Lords because he had revealed that in his first films for Cobra he had been 17.  He eventually started to say that he had been manipulated into sex with the films’ producer, Bryan Kocis, among other allegations, and then as the controversy was getting pretty dramatic, Bryan Kocis turned up murdered.  Sean didn’t do it, but all sorts of accusations and insinuations flew around.

I started, tangentially, reading about other porn actors, and they mostly seemed to have life stories that were also unbelievably fucked up in one way or another, though few of them quite as dramatic as Sean’s, and it all became kind of fascinating to me.

It became fascinating to me that, as soon as you scratch the surface, you find a rabbit hole of drugs and accusations and craziness that just goes deeper the longer you wanted to look at it.  What I don’t get about that is that, porn is just sex, why should it lead to all this other bullshit?  I think it’s because our culture is so repressed and hypocritical about these things, it pushes them to a place in the shadows where, obviously, shadiness can flourish.  If it wasn’t all secretive and underground and shameful, it wouldn’t be such a mess.  There’s absolutely no reason sex, two hot boys fucking each other for your entertainment, should be something that creates so much drama, but it does, and it does because of the very people that consider themselves moral crusaders.  They’re the ones that make it dark and scary, when it doesn’t need to be.

So what I want to write is something that asks the question of why it turns out this way.  I want to write something that portrays sex extremely, extremely explicitly, because I think the more you shine light on it, the more you see that it’s something that there’s no reason not to shine a light on.  It’s people fucking, and that’s a *good* thing, unless we go extremely far out of our way to make it so it isn’t.  I think comics is the perfect way to do this, because I’ll actually be drawing the sex I’m talking about, so there will be the visuals there that in some cases will hopefully be pretty sexy, and then you’ll go on to read about what was involved in the particular things I’m drawing, and it should make an interesting juxtaposition.

The story I’m writing starts out with the rabbit at the start of his interest in porn, when it’s just guys fucking, and there’s nothing wrong with that, and then follows my real journey of becoming interested in particular porn actors, and tells a bit of their life stories.  Sean’s will obviously be one of the most interesting, but not the whole book.  It’s that story, though, that starts out simply with me writing about sex and continues to the point of me writing about a murder trial, and I want to look at why things go that way.

It also seemed to me like a good metaphor for relationships in general.  When you first meet somebody, you have certain ideas and preconceptions about them, and then that gradually changes as you learn more about them.  Sex could be a way to get more intimate with somebody, but in the way a lot of these scenarios play out when sex is made to be more shameful, it only serves to drive people apart.

So anyway, that’s a bit about what I’m writing.  More to come.

New big post tomorrow about Rickets the robot, and then next week I’m going to post a lot about other upcoming projects and things that have been going on in my life.  Yes I know, it’s true, you’re very lucky to have discovered this website.