Picture: See Ming Lee
Conner Habib writes at the Good Men Project:
Whenever a porn star — especially a gay porn star — commits suicide, theories show up, and people act very, very certain about them. Arpad Miklos, who was as much as a porn “star” as anyone can be in a time when we are hyper-saturated with porn, killed himself on February 3rd, 2013, at the age of 45. As usual, many people felt sure they knew why he committed suicide, without much evidence. It was drugs, it was studios not treating him well, it was the feeling of dehumanization, it was the vague but all encompassing “porn industry” that did it, it was the feeling of being hollow, it was it was his loss of validation after being a star for so long.
I can’t claim any special knowledge about his death, I didn’t know him very well. We met in passing on a set; he’d just finished a scene, and I was about to start mine. He was huge and handsome; I’m not saying anything new. If you met him, you were impressed by his smile and his body and his presence. Looking at him almost made you feel a sense of unbalance in the world, like his handsomeness and flawless physique were proof of some deep inequality between people. But then you’d forget that feeling and be drawn back into the intense attraction.
He gave me a kiss and his phone number and asked me if I’d like to spend time with him later that night. My scene ran over schedule, and I was exhausted, so I told him I couldn’t meet. We communicated a few more times over the years by text and phone, and that was that. I mention all of this to say: I don’t know his motivations or who he “really” was. We kept passing through each other’s lives without ever truly meeting.
But others who knew him even less than me flooded twitter, wrote articles, posted to Facebook about what had happened. The theories appeared as soon as the news did. It was immediate, like flies to a corpse. Theories arrived before grief, before honor and love and the experience of loss. When a gay porn star dies, instead of an outpouring of grief, what we are usually witness to is a buzzing.
All of this is to say that not even death can trump many people’s confused and hostile attitudes towards porn and porn performers.
That is how deeply injured we are as a society when it comes to sex, sexuality, and love.
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It’s natural to turn events like suicide into cultural concerns.
Tragedies are supposed to pose questions to us — the feelings of discomfort that sadness brings can create meaningful action. But these actions are always most effective when we don’t bypass grief and compassion to get to them. Unfortunately, the people that make up the largest group involved in porn — the viewers and consumers — may not understand what it’s like to be a performer or to work for a studio. The porn industry remains obscured by unexamined attitudes towards sex. So compassion isn’t always available.
There’s a general outsiders about performer motivations for making porn, how much money they make, what happens during a shoot, what health and safety precautions are in place, how a scene is organized, what it feels like to be a crew member and more. The result is that a monolithic image of “gay porn star” and the “gay porn industry” is formed. But unlike ideas of other industries — banking or agriculture, say — people’s perceptions are colored by a broader societal confusion: a difficulty in thinking and communicating clearly when it comes to sex and desire.This confusion is generated by many factors, most importantly by social and cultural institutions that have historically leveraged sex as a way to control people (I address some of those forces here, and will write more about them in the future). Because these forces create pressure and guilt around sex, when someone like Miklos, who had sex publicly, kills himself, people tend to think he was sad because of his public sex life. They don’t focus on the fact that he was trained as a chemist nor do they ask what his relationships were like or if he was generally happy. Instead, a knee-jerk reaction links his sadness with porn.
People want to know: How was porn involved in this death?
Read more here.
