By Dallas Steele | @DallasSteeleXXX
I used to be a news anchor. At forty, I was sitting behind an anchor desk in Fort Myers-Naples, Florida. Five years after that, I would be among the top fifty best-known gay pornstars. It was a drastic career change that many would consider too late in the aging game. But not me.
Doing porn after 40 isn’t for the faint of heart. Your body still has to be top-notch at a time when the body isn’t always top-notch. In this industry, no one gets a pass because they’re older. Directors still expect you to perform just as well as the younger guys. This means I have to work even harder on my body to compensate for the fact that I will have some wrinkles and sun spots while my 25-year-old costars are flawless.
If you’re working with an actor your age, chances are good that both of you have endured some injuries from years of working out. Sometimes a director will suggest fucking in an unusual position, and it will simply be impossible because one or both of you have some lower back pain. Sometimes shoots take a little longer with mature actors because, as we all know, certain parts of the body change the older you get. It often (not always) takes longer to get hard and stay hard at 45 than at 25.
All these problems aside, the industry demand for male stars over 40 seems to be growing. As baby boomers and gen X men grow older, they seem to be embracing the idea that guys their age are sexy — just as sexy (or even more so) than twenty-somethings. I’ve had the pleasure of working with many men over forty — men who’ve shared their powerful experiences in this business with me.
I think this is a healthy trend, especially for gay men. In our image-obsessed culture, it’s important for us to see that getting older doesn’t mean letting ourselves go or deciding we can’t be sexy anymore. Men at any age can be sexy, especially if they’ve taken care of themselves.
A lifelong commitment to exercise, moderate drinking, choosing not to smoke, hormone replacement therapy, plus some facial fillers along with plastic surgery can go a long way. I’m very pro-body modification. Unless it becomes an unhealthy obsession, there is absolutely no shame in doing what you want to make yourself like how you look.
Sure, there are times I feel old compared to my costars. When I talk about the show “Family Ties” and my screen partner has no idea what that is (because he was born in 1992), I feel old. When I talk about the days before cell phones, before the internet, it hits me that I’ve been around longer than many of my peers, and I remember a world they never experienced.
I often get paired with young men who’ve never done a scene before. It’s funny that I’ve been branded a “daddy” by the industry because on these shoots, I become a real-life daddy — a caretaker, talking them through the scene and making sure they feel comfortable. Yes, it’s hot to tell a 23-year-old exactly how hard I’m going to fuck him, and in what positions. But it’s also important to help newcomers. I was nervous when I started (read the full story about how it happened in my other post).
Roles for men over 40 are more plentiful today than they used to be. For the most part, the “daddy-boy” genre seems to be the most common porn trope, but lately, I’m seeing more older men paired together in standard porn scenarios without their age being used as part of the dynamic of the scene — two construction workers, hot and bothered, getting it on. That tells me we’re finally embracing men over 40 as sex icons in their own right — not just as “daddies” for hungry boys.
For every performer in his forties and fifties, the question arises: When is it time to retire? The market will tell you. Pornstars, like politicians and mainstream actors, serve the pleasure of the people. As long as people are buying your movies and liking your tweets, you’re still viable as a performer. Not long ago — just two years into the business — the VP of a studio told me, “Maybe you should just retire and call it good.” He had been a performer early in his career. He retired at 43 and felt I should do the same.
“I’m sorry you gave up on yourself so early in life, but that’s not me,” I told him. “I still have the body, my cock still stays rock hard, and I’m going to keep making movies until I’m at least 50, maybe longer.”
Here’s my advice: Beware of people who think they can make you in this business. Those same people think they can break you. I didn’t give his comment a second thought. I’ll decide when it’s time to retire. I moved on from that company and have had tremendous success shooting for other studios.
Ignore the cultural messages that men of a certain age are supposed to retire, settle down, and “act their age.” Want a career change at 40? The camera’s rolling.