When asked in a recent interview about communication with her fans, Ames said that she most frequently received requests. We expect adult actors to engage in the things that we ourselves want to see and we don’t care if their performances are sometimes nothing more than louche pantomimes we need only believe what we are watching for as long as it takes to get off. In sorting through the particulars of the story, it seemed clear to me that Ames, even if her rationale was rooted in an outdated understanding of the respective STI-testing protocols in gay and straight porn, was primarily trying to demonstrate her agency as a worker in an industry that often goes to great lengths to conceal gestures of personal choice. In a final tweet on December 4th she wrote, quite simply, “Fuck y’all.” Accusations of homophobia were immediate and Ames worked to defend herself by decrying the suggestion as baseless for two days she denied that her statement was rooted in anything other than a duty to herself to make decisions that served her health.
The implication, of course, is that male actors who participate in gay pornography are at higher risk for HIV infection, a sentiment that many read as the perpetuation of a myth that frames the gay body as a metonym of disease. Do agents really not care about who they’re representing? #ladirect I do my homework for my body.” “Whichever (lady) performer is replacing me tomorrow for you’re shooting with a guy who has shot gay porn, just to let cha know. Ames’ death had not yet become widely known, and her Twitter account continued to bare a steady stream of comments that alternately excoriated and defended her, the majority of which appeared under a tweet that read:
Gay porn stars death by suicide movie#
Under a headline that read “Adult movie star August Ames, 23, is found dead after being accused of homophobia for refusing to do a scene with an actor who had appeared in gay porn,” I learned that Ames had been involved in a chain of negative Twitter interactions that many claimed had catalyzed her decision to take her life. I first read about Ames’ death in a breathless Daily Mail article posted on the morning of December 7th. While this is certainly a story about a depressive 23-year-old woman whose projected jouissance did not have a prayer of matching up to the reality of her life, it is also a story about all of us. It’s inappropriate to postulate if the instances of drug use and childhood abandonment that often come to light in the wake of these deaths are incidental-it is prurient to suggest that adults who choose to engage in sex work are impelled to do so because of the host of issues that can follow at the heels of abuse-but I will say that pornography proves again and again to be a treacherous path for emotionally fragile people.Īugust Ames’ suicide on December 5th was recounted by mainstream media outlets with unusual voracity. While a porn star’s death typically generates a few days of articles on low-rent news sites replete with predictably cruel reader comments about the fluctuating value of human life, Ames’ opened up a more complicated set of concerns-not only about pornography, but about the ferocity with which we consume strangers from a distance. It’s not that the details of these deaths are any more lurid (the abandoned body of a hanged adult actress is no different from that of an overdosed teen idol), but the depressingly familiar narrative running through many sad endings in pornography speaks to me acutely. Porn suicides stir the heart’s obsessive embers.