KILLED - Episode 4: The Relationship

Episode Date: April 27, 2023

ELLE rejects Justine's profile on "porn moms," women who love gay porn stars. Featuring Evan Ross Katz and Robbie Myers.To submit your KILLED story, visit www.KILLEDStories.com.

Okay, well, if you made it this far, you're probably wondering, how did she end up here? In this trash room, surrounded by piles of printouts, making a podcast about dead stories. Well, you're about to find out. From Justin Harmon and audio Chuck, this is Killed, the podcast that brings dead stories back to life. Season 2, Episode 4, The Relationship.

The first time I ever heard about killed stories or killed fees was in 2012. When I finally got the job I had been angling for since I graduated college years earlier. At 27, I was an assistant editor at L and for the first time in my life, I felt like I was exactly where I was supposed to be. A decade ago, the L Futures Department was absolutely stacked with talent. Editors whose experience dwarfed my own. A roster of contract writers whose books and articles changed the cultural conversation. And then there was me, making sure that those writers got paid. I'm not sure I've ever wanted something as consistently as I've wanted to be a writer.

To have an idea, to sell people on it, and to deliver thousands of words that not only explain something precisely, but also make the reader understand some greater, more honest truth about the world we live in. There is nothing I wouldn't do for a story back then. No where I wouldn't go, literally and figuratively. After nearly two years on the features team at L, I accepted a full-time role at the website. For L.com, which published somewhere between 6 and 10 original pieces a day,

I regularly wrote about my friends, my mom, my shame, my boobs, Rihanna's boobs. I couldn't watch something, meet someone, or read something without asking myself. Is this a story? Well, I believe we were at pure food and wine. That is Evan Ross Katz, the jarringly astute culture critic. You definitely already follow on Instagram. Nearly a decade ago, Evan was like me. A 20-something writer always trying to get to the next rung. Evan and I were connected by his colleague and my good friend Lindsay, with whom we were dining at the not yet infamous health food spot at the center of Netflix's Bad Vegan. It makes her look like the vegan Bernie Madoff.

What happened to you? Have you seen the documentary? Of course I have, but I don't remember ever seeing her or the paint tails or anything. No, I don't think that we did, but I mean, I feel like that's a crucial piece of the puzzle. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! At an intimate outdoor table, the three of us covered everything. It was the kind of deep diving, free-range conversation that only happens when three people feel completely

at ease with one another and have nothing but time. Yeah, I remember telling you to sort of, because at this time I was hanging out with two of my friends who are still my friends today and they're the co-owners of Cocky boys, which is a gay porn studio based out of New York. And I just remember sort of like very shocked expressions, jaws wide, just sort of like, wait, what? That's sort of my memory is like you has just being like very interested in something that was becoming increasingly normal for me. Of course, I can look back at it now and be like, wow, it's so funny. I had like a period of my life where I hung out pretty exclusively with porn stars.

Not just any porn stars. The cocky boys. But now, I see the veins of his plan, helping turn a boy into a man. Within the world of gay pornography, it's just often very focused on the hedonism, on the sex acts, and the guys' bodies, and, you know, the forenication. Whereas with cocky boys, there was more consideration around the story, the eroticism, the lighting, the setting, the costumes. I don't know what's happening, but I do know that this house is haunted.

And I think it's because of me. I think that there's a gravitas and a care and a precision that makes the approach way more, like an independent film where there happens to be sexual acts as opposed to a sex film, where the focus is on the sex and often nothing else. And then Evan casually says the phrase that has been etched in the back of my mind ever since. Porn mom. So for those who don't know, what is was a porn mom?

Basically, there's this, you know, huge fandom within gay pornography that's not just servicing gay men, but servicing, you know, an audience of older women, and, you know, just to denote older, I would say, maybe being 50 plus. Their interest is very pure in that they love these guys and sometimes they'll get them gifts and whatnot, but often they'll come out in sort of two events that they go to and sort of help support them in more of like assistant-like roles and they'll sort of help manage a lot of their merch. They're basically like super fans that have sort of engrossed themselves within the lives of these boys. And often, if you think about, you know,

who's the primary fan of the gay porn star? It's gonna be gay men. I think there's a comfort that a lot of these boys feel and sort of having a fan base that's not entirely sexualizing them. A March 2014 Urban Dictionary entry defined the porn mom or POM and porn son POM like this. Quote, the relationship between a gay porn star and a female fan, where the female becomes a secondary mother, giving guidance, promotion, support, and a safety net. I remember I was at a pull party up there once,

and it's like, you know, you look to your right, and it's like a sea full of beautiful boys with in tank tops and speedos and, you know, galvancing, and then you look to your left and it's like a table full of older women with you know in wheelchair some of them and and the visuals were in Congress to one another seemingly so You know if you were to flip the gender roles and say these were a bunch of old men hanging out with young women

and say these were a bunch of old men hanging out with young women. There's obviously going to be a predatory nature implicit to it. But when it came to the porn mom, there was a protectiveness and a care that these women seem to genuinely have for the boys that in retrospect, it's like, I think any judgment that I had, which by the way, I don't think I really, I think my judgment slipped away very quickly, but I think that there's, like, so many things in life, there's some nuance, and these women have stories and things that led them to to gay porn. I couldn't get the idea out of my head. Women, street women, my age and older, sometimes with families, who moonlight as porn moms, to 20-something gay porn stars. Great Women, My Age and Older, Sometimes with Families, Who Moonlight as Porn Moms,

To 20 Something, Gay Porn Stores. From my humble L.com barracks, I immediately pitched the story to Elle's editor-in-chief, Robbie Myers, as what I later described in an email as a snapshot of a new social media obsessed culture and a micro-examination of how some people are grappling with the human condition in new and inventive ways.

Very nice. But I didn't stop there. I wrote, I think these characters are just looking for something to which we can all relate. Connection. On Halloween 2014, two weeks after my 30th birthday, I got the green light. I know this because I still have the celebratory email to my husband in my outbox.

Subject line. All caps. Porn moms is a go. Body of email. 3,000 words. And just like that, I was off to the races. Psst, this is killed. The podcast that brings dead stories back to life.

After that memorable dinner at Pure Food and Wine, my new pal Evan put me in touch with his friend Levi Carter, who at the time was probably the brightest star in the Cockey Boy universe. I see myself as, you know, as actual free spirit. Levi then introduced me to his porn mom, Jen, a 37-year-old stay-at-home mother who lived with her husband and seven-year-old son outside of Detroit. Jen at first began interacting with 21-year-old Levi a year and a half earlier after seeing his photos online.

The two began exchanging messages on Twitter and eventually struck up a phone relationship. The first time we talked, it was for two hours gentle me. I was never looking to have this in-depth relationship with him. It just happened. Weeks after the story was assigned, I found myself at the cocky boys HQ in Long Island City, sitting in on a marketing meeting. T-shirt clad porn stars sat around with fo-hawked CEO Jake Jackson. I took fervent notes in my notebook, hoping that I might later be able to extrapolate a rough

annual income for a cocky boy. Yeah, it was a loft space, so it kind of felt Andy Warhol-ish, downtown Brooklyn, warehouse-y, but it had kind of a back room that had all of the like DVD storage and toy storage and all that stuff, but you know, they have this really good style. One of the former cocky boys who appeared in the story I wrote with just one of their porn moms.

Susan, that's right. At the time, Tate had what they called a harem of three porn moms. Tate, who now goes by their birth name, Aaron, uses they-them pronouns. It's such a strange thing to have two names based on a period of your life. Every once in a while I'll run into people who I knew from that portion of my life and they're like,

what is your name? I was introduced to you when I was working for cocky boys. I think it was my, I was working for cocky boys. I think it was my, that was probably my second year with them, because I was with them 10 years ago, which the deck is crazy. And you were doing a wonderful story on porn moms, which at the time was in the porn scene, was all the rage. But from when stood the porn mom Come

Sorry A lot of those women came from fandoms of things like um what's that movie with the fucking vamp twilight See it out loud. See it vampire Say it. The Empire. You know, we as young porn individuals on a Twitter space where we didn't necessarily have huge followings, obviously compared to someone like Robert Pattinson, we didn't have any Twitter following, we would respond. And so I think it was the perfect culmination of time period.

These women were very excited about Whatever the fantasy of Edward Cohen and there was like five different movies at the time with like hot younger shirt-off things in Hollywood And I think back about this like was this an actual Thing or was this something that I created in my mind because I was in the arena, but it really was, and I think that's why. They went from those fandoms to a fandom that was more tangible and also still passionate and romantic and led further down the sexual space. So yes, it was a thing. During the course of reporting this story, I did all kinds of stuff with these guys.

I attended a holiday party at the Museum of Sex, where the porn moms reveled side by side under framed dildos. I observed as Jen and Levi squabbled over her having the passcode to his cell phone. I watched Tate teach cardio dance lessons in Hell's Kitchen and met Susan at her corporate day job at an extremely popular fashion startup half of you are wearing right now. And each relationship was different. Each porn mom was serving different needs, meeting in a different, customized middle. That's like variety of porn mom was a lot based on the variety of performer because we all had personalities that were very distinct. I was the oldest, even though I was quite young,

I was the oldest of all of those boys and I was, I'm going to say the most responsible because I had a career outside of porn and I had two college degrees, not that that makes you more responsible, but I had done more like life things. So the type of porn mom that I attracted within that was always someone who liked the like boy next door put together kind of goody two shoes getting A's in school. I attracted that kind of woman into my sphere. And Lisa was very much that. And Susan was very much that both of them were these women who were older than me. yes, but not by the amount of older that one would assume in the space.

And they both had careers and they both had success and they had their own lives. And when we interacted, it was not a sexual manner, even though obviously they're watching the content. even though obviously they're watching the content, but it always felt very motherly and kind and wonderful. But then you have the other types of porn moms that maybe are attracted to the more kind of wounded young pup porn star. I mean, that was definitely covered with Levi Carter as he was struggling with being kicked out of this house

originally, but his porn mom was a little more caretaking in the, oh, do you have your phone? Did you leave it out? Let me text you early in the morning because I want to make sure that you got home safely because I know you're like, wild and rumbuncious. And then there were porn moms who were like directly sexual. And that was the relationship. It was more of like a mommy kind of thing to see that was fulfilled maybe on both ends.

A photoshoot took place in the same warholian Long Island City offices. In front of a white seamless background, three porn mom and son pairings sat for stark black and white portraits. Some were holding hands. Others just stared straight at the camera. There was hair and makeup for everyone. We did the whole thing. There was like expenses paid.

It actually happened. Every step of the way, I was certain one of the subjects would change their mind. Tell me I had crossed some invisible line and they didn't want to do this anymore. But they never did. I'll never forget stuffing six signed photo releases into my purse at the end of the night. I had done it.

I'd gotten the story and permission to run the photos with it. The hard part was over. Or so I thought. I know I had a conversation about it with Susan at some point over lunch. We were very excited because L is like a big thing and we had done big things with Thor, you know, I was interviewed for Paper Magazine and we had been on, you know, fashion covers and all this other stuff, whatever.

But I never thought porn could be in a magazine such as L or on an online platform that seemed a little more vanilla. How real is this? Like, are we sure they want this to be the thing? Like, is this as much as we want society to be okay with sex? Is this a thing that a big magazine is actually going to put out there? And we had reservations. This is Killed, the podcast that brings dead stories back to life.

The porn mom. Next door. Girls who like boys. Who like boys. The special relationship. The rise of the porn mom. On a recent Thursday night, inside the cavernous dining room of New York's EN Brossery, a trendy Japanese restaurant that celebrated its 10th anniversary with a party hosted by Martha Stewart and Questlove, 25-year-old Tate Hanson is regaling Susan Lee with the story. As the Golden Blonde Santa Fe native lays out the past down details of an event that

allegedly happened 12 years ago during an annual gay sex cabaret in Las Vegas. He occasionally grabs his friend's forearm to hammer home a point. The story he's telling is equal parts lude, ludicrous, and legend. But suffice it to say, there's nudity and out of his element boa constrictor, and some very entertained, if not scandalized guests. Each time the plot thickens, what you just heard was the first paragraph in a draft of my story dated July 20th, 2015. I recall being very proud of it. I had spent the last nine months embedding myself in the Porn Mom universe.

The story focused on three couples, Bestie's Tate and Susan, Janine Levi, and 21-year-old newcomer Liam and his Porn Mom, Maya, who was 24. The piece also explored the science of female sexuality, citing research that women tend to underreport their physical attraction to homosexual sex. The fact that many of these women like to read fantasy romance novels seemed to me like a key piece of the connection.

In their 2003 book, Warrior Lovers, Erotic Fiction, Evolution, and Female Sexuality, authors Catherine Sammon, an associate psychology professor at California's Redlands University, and Don Simmons, a meritis professor of anthropology at UCSB, hypothesized that women's attraction to gay narratives is related to gender equality. In slash fiction, both lovers are warriors, they write. The typical slash fan may be a woman who is psychosexually unexceptional, but who, for whatever reason,

prefers the fantasy of being a co-warrier to the fantasy of being just Mrs. Warrior. One such co-warrier is 24-year-old Maya, who found her way to the cocky boys and its newest recruit Liam, after a friend pointed out that some of the performers resembled Boyish Belgium reporter Tintin and his surly best friend, Captain Hattick. And though Martine, who identifies as bisexual and works in a Chicago My name is Robbie Myers, it's M-Y-E-R-S-R-O-B-B-I-E Robbie Myers is an absolute legend in the business. She has this unflinching almost academic interest in women's interior lives.

When she finally left Elle in 2017, after 17 years at its helm, the New York Times covered her going away party. She's working on a podcast now. Who isn't? And I am working on a podcast about assisted reproductive fertility, and that came from the four years I spent on the board of a fertility tech company. And I just... I was pretty nervous to email Robbie about this podcast. It's an awkward thing to be like, uh, hey, it's me from eight years ago. Why did you kill my story? And yes, spoiler. My story got killed. What were you expecting? I remember you're pitching it. I wanted to say it was in a pitch meeting with the rest of the editors,

but it might not have been. But what I do remember is one, to say it was in a pitch meeting with the rest of the editors, but it might not have been. But what I do remember is one, I thought it was such a good idea. And two, you were really excited to start it. And that's sort of the two things you need, right? And I understand why you just suggest about it because it was new. It was, and I'm sure somewhere,

somebody had written about it before, but certainly not in, you know, a big magazine like Elle. I sent Robbie the most recent copy of the draft I could find in my outbox. V3 underscore, use this one. When I was reading it, my first reaction was, wow, she's a really good writer.

And I'm not surprised at that, but I'm saying reading a story, reading reaction was, wow, she's a really good writer. And I'm not surprised at that, but I'm saying reading a story, reading something you put together, however many years ago, you know, you sort of forget the details. And so then I kept reading and I got to the end. And I remember having the exact same feeling that I did when I read it, which is, oh, I want so much more. This shouldn't be the end of the story, because there's a lot more to probe here. How did you grow up? What were your sexual experiences when you were younger?

Who were you attached to? What was it like in your home? Did they have children where they married? I'm not trying to report your story for you. I'm trying to say, like, what I wanted more of was to understand like what was underneath their need to do this. Did they like porn and like, and why and when did they find that out? You know, like, so these are all just questions that are in my head and I do remember them

being in my head at the time. And I was trying to remember, you know, were you given a word count or, you know, like, why did it stop when it did? Because I feel like it was just opening up. I had a lot of details like that, but I do see what she means. Some of the stuff about the women's backgrounds feels pat or rushed, but there were so many rabbit holes to go down. 3,000 words, yo.

Didn't we shoot it, though? We did. And here was my thought about that, which was because we sort of didn't get into the lives in a way that I would have liked in terms of what is the path. I mean, it's obviously sort of a niche product, right? You know, the poor and mom, poor and son relationship. Like, what is the emotional path there for these women? Well, what I also remember, and this was,

in some ways more crucial to me, was that I felt like those pictures, we were sort of gawking at them, right? Instead of having empathy for both the women and porn son. And I was kind of uncomfortable with the pictures because I don't know that they really showed them as human beings. They were kind of like, oh, can you believe that this hot, young, delicious man is hanging out with this woman. And look, you know, maybe that's the truth, but I still felt like I didn't want Elle to be a place

where we were, I don't say making fun of them, but sort of saying like, isn't this weird? Aren't they weird? What have gotten a lot of attention? And, you know, I? And I totally understand why you're interested in us because that's what journalists do. They want to enter an interesting sort of sub world that they've never been in and say, what is this about? And this is so interesting.

And what does it tell us about relationships and human beings and sex and money. What I remember is putting the story on pause. You know, Christine has a full-time job and other things she needs to do. Peace is killed. You killed. You killed. You know, your instincts were absolutely right as a story. And I'm not trying to say that you didn't have it in you to finish writing it. I wish that, you know, if I were working on it now and you worked for me, I would said keep going. Ooh, so there you have it folks.

The one that got away. My very own shrink next door. Holy shit! This was all nearly a decade ago. I tried several times to discreetly gin up interest at other magazines but I didn't want to ruffle any feathers at all. And anyway, Aaron says that in the next few years, the porn mom's era came to its natural conclusion.

Currently in the porn world, these young, new porn stars, they do not have the same experience that I had or that Levi Carter had or Liam Riley. We all had very different experiences than what's currently happening. The couples have mostly disbanded. Levi Carter's documentary, Leave It To Levi, came out in 2019. In it, he discusses the road that led to his career in porn, a secret he'd been keeping from his own mom. Had the story run in L in 2015, who knows where that relationship would be? Maybe it would have been men did sooner? Or not at all?

Levi Carter left the industry in the spring of 2021, and he and Jen only speak on occasion. Liam Riley is still a porn performer and an award-winning drag queen. Our guest on this week's QT is a decent of a queen, Liam Riley from Comty Boys. His porn mom Maya got married and according according to her LinkedIn, is still working at the sex toy shop. Aaron lives in Ontario now. Still dabbles in porn, but also photography and dance. You can follow them on Instagram at Accidentally Aaron with two A's.

Susan is now the author of several popular romance novels. She did not respond to Killed's request for an interview. Our core friendship probably lasted for three years. So it was a substantial friendship, because even in New York, they're always quite fleeting. And I look back at it with a lot of fondness. There is some sadness to be like, oh, maybe if we had met in a different space, we could have been a different form of friends because as I started phasing out of the porn world, I did feel myself separate from those individuals

and those individuals separate themselves from me. Just naturally, it's not even vindictive. It just happens. But as much as the relationship lived in a vacuum, occasionally the lines blurred. But I look back on my friendship with Susan the time we spent together as a time that was really blessed and wonderful. She got to meet my husband, well, my now husband, he was just my boyfriend at the time.

We had gone to a cocky boy's release of a new movie that was out that I was not in and I had not talked to any of them for so long. They just reached out and we're like, hey, we're doing this thing. And so she got to sit next to us and we had kind of a blast from the past moment and it was really nice.

These friendships and whatever seemed at times to be just like, oh, this was some work thing that happened and whatever. But I've told all of the people in my life about these people. My mom knows these names of people. So when I say Susan, she knows about the time that this person was in my life

as if it was just another friend, which she was just another friend, even though it came out of this like porn mom situation when you're in that world. It's all just a normal thing. Aaron doesn't think that the piece running in L, what have done much for the porn community? Or even unconventional relationships? I don't know if it would have done anything within the space of being released through L.

And I will tell you why. I think maybe this is me being judgmental, but I think the typical reader at somewhere like L may have read that story and seen those pictures and immediately labeled the situation as kink in some way, even though the photos were beautiful and connected and friendly in all of the things, I think the average reader for somewhere like that would immediately have associated it with a type of kink and immediately thought, oh, this story is not for me.

I've read the piece multiple times. I think it's okay. I can see some immaturity there, a few lines make me cringe, but I'm also reminded of details I had totally forgotten that I'd gone to Susan's apartment, Met Tate's boyfriend. That I'd spent so much time with these people that I really felt kinship with them. That on a

cold November night, after a delicious and fun dinner at a trendy West Village sushi spot, I watched a porn son and his not so much older porn mom, hug and then leave in separate directions. He's off to a date in Chelsea, I wrote. While she'll walk the six blocks north and two blocks east, pass the Perry Street brownstone that once served as the facade to Kerry Bradshaw's Bachelorette pad, and up two flights of stairs into her charming pre-war studio. It's only 350 square feet, cost over $3,000 a month, and now and

again the bathroom floods. But it has exposed brick, pre-war moldings, a working fireplace, and a window overlooking one of the most idyllic blocks in Manhattan. It's a compromise that only someone who has lived and worked in that very specific environment would understand. But when you think about it, as Susan often does, in that stretchy moment between real life and sleep, waking and dreaming, it makes a certain kind of sense. Next time, Unkilled. Anna's team of editors told her not to run the story.

They knew that it was going to be received basically the way that it was, which was with enormous and warranted backlash. Killed is an audio chuck production, created and written by Justin Harmon and edited by Alistair Sherman. You can find links to all the published stories featured on the first and second seasons of Killed at KilledStories.com. So, what do you think, Chuck? Do you approve?