Seven ages of man (and porn)…..

His extensive filmography includes such titles as Bootstrap (“the always irresistible Shane Rollins is paired up with the ultra-masculine Gus Mattox”, says one review site), Through the Woods (“Gus Mattox gives Pierre Fitch a very instructive lesson on affection and penetration”) and Men’s Room 2 - Gale Force.

I collect porn star live appearances nearly as avidly as I do my flop musicals - I once saw 90s legend Jeff Stryker do a one-man show here in P-town, too, and another time I planned a trip to Toronto around the fact that my then-favourite duo of Blake Harper (2001 Gay VN Award winner for Performer of the Year) and his then-partner Jason Branch were doing a play together there whose title was Making Porn. It luckily coincided with the pre-Broadway try-out of Stones in His Pockets, with original London cast Conleth Hill and Sean Campion, so I killed two birds with one stone and interviewed them both for a feature for a US paper I used to write for. I wish I could have interviewed Blake and Jason, too, though both offered “private” meetings for a fee; it’s a fact of porn life that, though there’s not much money in the porn itself, it’s a good shop window, as it were, for escort services, and both used to offer it.

As did Gus. In his one-man show, he freely tells us of his parallel careers as now retired porn star and former male escort (including an encounter with a married man in a suite at the Waldorf Astoria where the client’s wife and parents were next door asleep). But while I’ve regularly tracked down porn stars in theatre settings, the fascinating thing about Tom Judson/Gus Mattox’s career is that prior to doing porn he’d in fact had a “legitimate” theatre career, appearing in the touring versions of Broadway musicals like Cabaret and 42nd Street; before being discovered, at the relatively late (in porn years) age of 43, and making his porn debut.

In a 2008 interview in the New York Times - in the homes and garden section, since it was a feature about his next career as a what they called “successful house flipper” as opposed to the bed flipper he’d been, though he would never flip-flop himself in scenes as I recall but always played the “top” - it said, “he decided to trade in the nonstop travel of his theater career for what he saw as the more settled life of making porn”. It says something when porn is a more reliable and settled life than being an actor, though in fact, as Mattox movingly makes clear in his sometimes rambling and ragged but always fascinating show, porn and escorting aren’t so much about sex but about acting, too, though instead of playing roles, they’re about role-playing.

And last night he played another: that of the personable raconteur on a journey through some of the signposts of his life. His porn life started in 2003 when he was 43, so doing the maths (and looking him up on Wikipedia), he’s now hurtling towards 50. In fact, by a bizarre coincidence, one of my friends who is also in P-town this week is Broadway company manager Brig Berney, and when Brig and Tom met on Commercial Street, it was Tom who recognised him: they’d been at NYU together. (Tom had been a film student, so I guess he ended up, sort of, in film after all; and as a musician, he had composed the score for the film Metropolitan, too). But Tom’s story is also informed by sadness and loss: he also tells here movingly of the loss of Bruce, his partner of six years, from AIDS in 1996.

Tom is clearly a survivor in more ways than one; and even if there’s something a little bit sad about the current spectacle of trading on his former film fame to return to the theatre now, he’s at least knowing about it, realising that it may well be the picture of a naked Gus, not Tom, who has brought us in. But having done so, he makes it worth sticking around for: it’s not every day you get to see a man wearing only a jockstrap and black boots playing the accordion.