Aiden Shaw

British-born model, writer and former porn star Aiden Shaw (b. 1966) had a traditional upbringing in England. He came from respectability and has returned to it again, but there’s no ignoring that wild detour in the early 1990s when he established himself as a popular star of gay porn. What set him apart from his adult film peers was that he was a man of intellect.

Shaw made over 50 pornographic films, earning several industry awards along the way. He stood out from the pack of blonds and their smooth all-over-tanned bodies. Shaw didn’t shave his chest and obviously didn’t sunbathe in the nude – in fact, his sharply defined tan line became a trademark. He was further distinguished by his British accent, although his porn roles required limited use of his speaking voice. Shaw’s screen persona was that of a traditionally handsome natural man possessed of a spectacularly generous endowment (and a rose tattoo on his arm). In fact, his penis was as much discussed in the 1990s as international playboy Porfirio Rubirosa’s(*) was in the 1930s (we're all of us too young to remember – just Goggle him). Many of Shaw’s fans noticed a startling facial resemblance to Richard Gere (see photo below).

*OK, I've received numerous E-mails about this, so here's a hint. To this day in Paris, if a restaurant patron wants one of those tall wooden peppermills, he says, "Waiter, may I please have a Rubirosa?" I kid you not.

He became one of the most popular global adult male stars before retiring from the porn industry in 1999 (he was diagnosed HIV positive in 1997). Although a car accident brought a hiatus to his porn career – for a time he was paralyzed and in a wheelchair – he made a return with four more adult videos in 2003/2004.

Nevertheless, it is difficult to reconcile his current appearance as a classically handsome, mature man with salt and pepper hair and a beard with his actual age – 52. He looks years older, in a good way. Talk about aging gracefully.

He comes across as a confident, worldly man, the perfect type for promoting luxury goods. He has modeled for GQ Magazine in Berlin, Le Figaro and El Pais, as well as in other print venues. That his present appearance renders him nearly unrecognizable from his days as a porn star is surely to his advantage, although the rose tattoo is an identity giveaway.

Shaw has worked in diverse fields, as an editor of an interior design magazine, a poet, an HIV activist, vocalist, producer, escort, composer and writer. Print modeling is merely his latest career turn. He undertook formal studies in film, television, photography and video, subsequently taking post- college jobs directing and art directing music videos. Shaw wrote and produced two albums of music, performing lead vocals with his band "Whatever". Individual tracks are available on iTunes.

The first chapter of his autobiography, My Undoing: Life in the Thick of Sex, Drugs, Pornography and Prostitution (2006), begins: “All I could see were pretty shapes and colours, my dick going in and out of his white cheeks.” From his days as an escort, his comment on how to have sex with men who repulse him: “Well, the thing is, very few men physically repulse me. Like a good whore, I can always find something about a man that I like.”

From an interview with Daniel Lee in NYC in 2003:

DL: What makes you laugh hardest?
AS: Getting treated special because I have a big dick.

DL: Would you prefer not to be treated special because you have big dick?
AS: No way!

Well, there you have it.

Shaw’s writing is described by Michael Musto of The Village Voice as prose that “can tug at your heartstrings and your crotch at the same time.” His first novel, Brutal, appeared in 1996, the same year he published a collection of poems titled If Language at the Same Time Shapes and Distorts Our Ideas and Emotions, How Do We Communicate Love? (it sold out), followed by two more novels, Boundaries (1997) and Wasted (2001).

Shaw completed a master’s degree in Creative Writing in 2007 at Goldsmiths University of London, followed by publication of a second autobiography, Sordid Truths (2009). In 2011, Shaw completed training to become a qualified English teacher.

Shaw was recently profiled in the Spring/Summer 2012 issue of Hercules Universal – One Last Colony, the Havana Affair – in which he models luxury men’s clothing (click on link).

http://models.com/mdx/?p=14427

At present Mr. Shaw divides his time between residences in London and Barcelona. In 2016 he reverted to his birth name: Aiden Brady. Here is a sampling of his recent modeling work. You're welcome.

Michael Lucas

Born in 1972 in Moscow, activist, columnist, documentary film-maker, lecturer, porn star and explicit gay film producer Michael Lucas (birth name Andrei Treivas) was raised in a secular Jewish family during the oppressive communist era. He was the target of anti-Semitism as a youth, and some of his ancestors had been killed in the Holocaust. His great-grandfather was a rabbi who was murdered in his own synagogue by the Nazis. Michael was given his mother's maiden name at birth specifically because Treivas sounded less Jewish than his father's surname, Bregman.

Lucas has an interesting back story. He earned a law degree from Moscow State Law Academy in 1994, after which he owned and operated a travel agency. Three years later he was living in New York city, with stops in Germany and France along the way. Treivas began his porn career in Munich by working in straight films, but while in France he began an association with Jean-Daniel Cadinot in gay porn. By the age of 25 Andrei Treivas became an exclusive porn actor for Falcon Studios, who, without his counsel or permission, had given him an Americanized name – Michael Lucas. Nevertheless, he had greater ambition than being a porn star, and he got lucky. He was awarded  a green card through a lottery system.

In 2004 he became a citizen of the United States, and in 2009 took dual citizenship with Israel. The following year he renounced his Russian citizenship as a protest against Russian homophobia and anti-Semitism.

With money earned from working as a male escort, Lucas started his own gay porn production company in New York in 1998. Lucas Entertainment is now a leader in the adult entertainment industry, having produced more than 300 films. His production company employs fifteen people who work in a midtown Manhattan office rented for nearly $20,000 a month, and Michael’s home apartment boasts original Robert Mapplethorpe art on the walls. To say that this immigrant has achieved success is understatement.

In 2000 Lucas moved his Jewish grandparents to New York, and one of the first things he did was take them to see the giant menorah in Central Park, so that they could witness that it had not been vandalized. He wanted to share with them the unbelievable freedoms Americans have.

In 2008 he married his partner of eight years, Richard Winger, a businessman and president emeritus of New York’s LGBT Center. In 2014 Lucas announced that they had divorced.

As a columnist for Out, The Advocate, Huffington Post and Pink News, Michael’s reputation is controversial, and his writing is highly opinionated and outspoken. Speaking regularly at universities such as Stanford, Yale, and Oxford, he discusses social, political, and sexual issues. Lucas has been on the cover of hundreds of magazines worldwide and has been profiled in many mainstream publications ranging from New York magazine to The New Republic.

In 2012 he wrote, produced and directed a documentary titled Undressing Israel: Gay Men in the Promised Land, which extols the tolerance of the Israeli State. A second documentary was made in 2014, Campaign of Hate – Russia and Gay Propaganda. Both received critical acclaim and have been presented at numerous film festivals.

As the gay news magazine The Advocate wrote, “Michael Lucas has used the stardom porn gave him as a platform to speak out against drugs, unsafe sex, child exploitation, anti-Semitism, religious oppression of gays, and a host of other social problems. Bold, honest, and passionately opinionated, Lucas continues to challenge conventional thinking in all of his pursuits.”

(Sources: MichaelLucas.com, vice.com, The Advocate, Wikipedia)

John Stillman a.k.a. Jack Wrangler

When the big-band era singer Margaret Whiting died at the age of 86 last January, I remember reading a few salacious details in her obituary. Whiting certainly raised eyebrows in 1994 when she married John Stillman, better known as gay porn star Jack Wrangler. At the time of their nuptials he was 47 years old and Whiting 69, yet they forged an unconventional 15-year marriage that lasted until Stillman’s death from emphysema in 2009.

Stillman (1946-2009) was a complex character, an out homosexual who starred in both straight and gay porn, inspiring a feature length documentary film, Wrangler: Anatomy of an Icon (2008). His career was about more than porn, however. He was also a TV, stage and movie actor, writer, and theatrical producer and director.

Stillman’s father was a Hollywood TV and film producer, and his mother was a dancer in Busby Berkeley musicals. Growing up in Beverly Hills, his acting career began at age nine on a syndicated television religious family show, The Faith of Our Children. Stillman later wrote that he knew he was gay by the age of ten.

After earning a degree in theater from Northwestern University, he found work in LA and NYC as a stage actor, model and dancer. He easily accommodated the on-stage nudity required by some of his early stage roles and eventually settled in NYC, where he also worked as a go-go dancer and bartender. When Stillman made an appearance in a 1970 male strip show, he used the name "Jack Wrangler," a pseudonym inspired by the label on his Wrangler-brand work shirt. He was approached by a gay pornographic film studio and starred in Eyes of a Stranger (1970), one of the first hard-core gay porn films released commercially in the U.S. Stillman never looked back. He appeared in 47 porn films over a sixteen year period, before retiring from the industry at age 40.

Amazingly he maintained a legitimate acting career while making porn films, appearing in stage roles from 1979 through the mid 1980s. He published his autobiography, The Jack Wrangler Story, or What's a Nice Boy Like You Doing?, in 1984. The next year Stillman wrote the book for the musical, I Love You, Jimmy Valentine, starring Margaret Whiting, whom he had met in a nightclub in 1976. Wrangler later recalled: “I was with my manager when I looked over at Margaret, who was surrounded by five guys in a booth. There she was with the hair, the furs and the big gestures. I thought, 'Boy, now that's New York! That's glamour!' I had to meet her.” Within in weeks of first meeting, they began a romance and became the very definition of The Odd Couple.

Urged by Whiting to give up his porn career and live erotic shows, Stillman eventually turned his attention to her cabaret career, plunging headlong into a dizzying number of projects. He became a board member of the Johnny Mercer Foundation and worked to promote Mercer's music, writing and producing a 1985 cabaret show for Whiting which featured Mercer's music. In 1996 Stillman co-wrote and produced Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil: The Jazz Concert, inspired by the Mercer music used in the film. He helped conceive the 1997 Broadway revue Dream, which starred Whiting singing Mercer songs. He developed a ballet based on Mercer's 1946 musical, St. Louis Woman, which was performed by the Dance Theater of Harlem in 2003. Stillman also wrote and produced cabaret shows for singer Carol Woods from 1984 to 2001. He wrote, directed, or produced a number of other plays, musicals and revues, including The Valentine Touch, The First Lady and Other Stories of Our Times, and Irina Abroad! In his spare time he penned a column on health and fitness, "Wrangler's Weights and Measures", for the gay-lifestyle magazine Au Contraire.

Many years ago I remember being bored by a cabaret performance by Whiting at the Fairfax Hotel in Washington DC, in which she seemed to be just going through the motions to earn a paycheck. Now I know that all the spark in her life was at home, not on the cabaret stage.