Porn, Madonna, drugs, death – and one red shirt

“At least once a week, I get asked, ‘Whatever happened to that Joey Stefano biopic you were going to do?’

“Every time, I sigh and reply, ‘Still trying to find the financing. Got a million bucks?’

“This for nearly eighteen years.”

Director Chad Darnell wrote those words in 2019.

Things haven’t changed.

It seems that nobody is particularly bothered about Joey Stefano anymore.

Spare me the blushes. It’s unlikely that I’ll be rushing out to find VHS tapes of his work anytime soon.

Joey Stefano — real name Nicholas Anthony Iacona Jr. — was a gay porn actor whose career took off in the 1990s under the guidance of Chi Chi LaRue, the American adult-film director and producer.

I love one particular description of Stefano:

“Stefano was the first bottom to hit big.”

It leaves absolutely nothing to the imagination. And, yes, you’ve guessed correctly.

For a time, Joey — or “Nicky” to those who knew him — was on a high, appearing in more than fifty gay porn films.

High.

Quite literally.

He struggled with drug and alcohol abuse, and in 1994 he died from a drug overdose at a Hollywood motel. The combination was cocaine, morphine, heroin and ketamine.

“His ashen body spread across sweat-soaked sheets.”

There was also the intriguing story of the red shirt he was wearing when he died.

The shirt fascinated Chad Darnell, too. Writing in Queerty, he recalled:

“I was also obsessed with finding the infamous red shirt everyone spoke of in their interviews.”

Nearly eighteen years later, Darnell finally got his hands on it.

“Mike (Skee) called me and said he’d found something he had to show me. He had recently come across a box of Karen Dior’s clothing and each of the pieces had little notes pinned inside them. Dresses. Shirts. Jeans.

“He pulled out a red poplin shirt with a note that read: ‘Nicky died in this’.

“I still have no explanation as to why I felt the need to find this shirt for nearly eighteen years, but here it was. I felt like I had finally caught this ghost I had been chasing for nearly two decades.”

We can all be macabre sometimes.

But Joey Stefano had another claim to fame — and this one took him well beyond the world of gay porn.

Madonna chose Stefano to appear as a featured model in her bestselling and highly controversial coffee-table book, Sex, released in October 1992.

She had noticed him through his growing notoriety and his work as an erotic dancer at New York City’s Gaiety Theatre in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Following the book shoot, Stefano also made a cameo appearance in the music video for Madonna’s single Deeper and Deeper.

The collaboration fitted neatly into Madonna’s wider exploration of transgressive sexuality, underground art and marginalised queer subcultures during her Erotica era.

And then Stefano died.

His death didn’t exactly set the newspapers alight, but I stumbled across an old article in Britain’s Sunday Mirror.

It is fascinating — although perhaps more for its inaccuracies than its accuracy.

“A former boyfriend of Madonna took a chilling secret to the grave — he was HIV positive.”

The article described Stefano as Madonna’s former boyfriend and claimed that he was a 26-year-old bisexual who had been paid just £100 to pose naked with other men in what appeared to be an orgy.

It claimed that, on his deathbed, Stefano had told a friend that Madonna had turned her back on him because he was a junkie. It also claimed that he knew he was HIV positive but had never told Madonna.

According to the article, the two had met after Madonna saw Stefano dancing at a New York theatre. She stayed for two shows, tucked twenty-dollar bills into his G-string and told a friend he was “gorgeous”.

There is, however, a problem.

As far as I can establish, Stefano was never Madonna’s boyfriend. Nor was there, as far as I can establish, any official diagnosis of HIV.

That doesn’t necessarily mean the entire story was invented. It is entirely possible that Madonna distanced herself from Stefano as his drug problems became more severe.

Film editor Mickey Skee certainly believed Stefano had been abandoned by the people who once surrounded him.

“He was abandoned by the rich and famous who once swarmed around him,” Skee said. “And he bad-mouthed Madonna. She had promised to come and see him and help get him jobs. She never did.”

And that, perhaps, is the part of the story that interests me most.

Not the porn.

Not the red shirt.

Not even the Madonna connection.

It’s the strange little gap between the man Joey Stefano became and the people who had briefly found him fascinating.

He was famous enough to be photographed for Sex, famous enough to appear in a Madonna video, famous enough to inspire a biopic that someone spent eighteen years trying to finance.

And yet, when he died, the story almost disappeared.

So I would like to have a word with Madonna.

I have a few questions.