Some of the most beautiful people choose to live the hardest lives

I swear that I once read that there was a home in California for retired gay porn stars from the 1980s and 1990s. The weekly film night looked fun. But I stand to be corrected because I can’t find any evidence of it now.

I once knew a gay porn star. At least, that’s what he called himself. A bit of a fabrication, really. He made one movie and was dropped because of his inability to maintain an erection. The last I heard, he was a shop assistant at Mango Man in Alicante.

A lucky escape, really.

For all of us.

Yes. I’m stuck in a bubble of lube at the moment.

After being star-struck with Joey Stefano (RIP), another challenger surfaces for the ‘I fucked my life up’ award.

Christian Fox.

By the time you read this, it will be thirty years, almost to the day, since the 22-year-old died from a lethal ketamine overdose at his apartment in New Orleans. His body was discovered three days later. A suicide note was recovered from the scene.

There are a few social media posts that say Fox was ‘a lovely guy’.

But dead guys are always lovely guys.

The same thing happens when a young guy steals a car, evades a police chase and then wraps himself around a tree. Suddenly, he was a ‘lovely lad’.

I don’t know whether Christian Fox—love the name—was a lovely lad or not.

Chi Chi LaRue, patron saint of dead gay porn stars, called him one of the most challenging individuals to work with. He had a reputation for being difficult.

Beyond a shadow of a doubt, I would have liked him.

He ticked every box. And not just because of the athletic physique and ‘honey-blond’ aesthetic.

Born Christopher John McLaughlin in Port Hardy, British Columbia, in 1974, he had an unstable childhood and was placed into foster care at thirteen. He ran away after allegedly being sexually abused and travelled across Canada and the United States using fraudulent identification to conceal his age.

He became an underage dancer at late-night gay venues and adopted the name Christian Fox.

Don’t you admire the spunk of the kid?

He reportedly made his first adult film on his eighteenth birthday and became an exclusive model and actor for Falcon Studios. At the same time, he appeared in gay publications including Manshots, Jock, In Touch and Gay Video Guide.

Like Stefano, he bucked the trend and became known as a ‘premier bottom’ performer.

But Fox developed increasingly serious problems with substance abuse, making him progressively unreliable. By early 1996, his career was effectively over.

Fox had insisted that he would not allow his porn career to become something that wore him down or something of which he would eventually be ashamed.

When his talent agency terminated his contract, the writing was on the wall.

To secure legal residency in the United States, he entered into a marriage of convenience with an American friend and relocated to New Orleans.

But by then, the real problem wasn’t pornography.

It was everything else.

Substance abuse. Depression. Isolation. The inability to imagine what came next.

When Chi Chi LaRue warned him that he might suffer the same fate as Joey Stefano, Fox reportedly replied that he ‘wanted to go’.

LaRue also suggested that Fox was confused about his sexuality.

His neighbours only saw a young man who rode a motorcycle and walked around the French Quarter in a black leather jacket.

Success had come too easily and too young.

Behind the façade was a different world.

Fox was suffering from severe depression.

The porn industry didn’t care if somebody was mentally unstable. And when the cameras stopped rolling, Fox had no obvious way back into the real world.

Shortly before he was due to enter rehab, Fox attempted suicide by throwing himself through a plate-glass window. His injuries prevented him from being admitted.

His wife, Shawn, left him shortly afterwards.

And then, a month later, he was dead.

Twenty-two.

That is the bit I keep coming back to.

Not the body. Not the porn. Not the photographs. Not even the ridiculous mythology that grows around young men who die before they have had the opportunity to become anything else.

Twenty-two.

A whole life still sitting there, unused.

Perhaps that is why I like the idea of the retirement home for old porn stars. I want it to exist.

I want to imagine them at seventy, eighty, sitting around a communal television watching films they made when they were twenty, arguing about who had the best arse, complaining about the heating and asking what happened to everyone else.

Because somebody should get old.

Somebody should get the chance to become boring.

Somebody should survive long enough to look back and think:

Christ. What was I doing?