Instead, a knee-jerk reaction links his sadness with porn.
They don’t focus on the fact that he was trained as a chemist nor do they ask what his relationships were like or if he was generally happy. Because these forces create pressure and guilt around sex, when someone like Miklos, who had sex publicly, kills himself, people tend to think he was sad because of his public sex life. This confusion is generated by many factors, most importantly by social and cultural institutions that have historically leveraged sex as a way to control people (I address some of those forces here, and will write more about them in the future). But unlike ideas of other industries – banking or agriculture, say – people’s perceptions are colored by a broader societal confusion: a difficulty in thinking and communicating clearly when it comes to sex and desire. The result is that a monolithic image of “gay porn star” and the “gay porn industry” is formed. There’s a general confusion for outsiders about performer motivations for making porn, how much money they make, what happens during a shoot, what health and safety precautions are in place, how a scene is organized, what it feels like to be a crew member and more. The porn industry remains obscured by unexamined attitudes towards sex. Unfortunately, the people that make up the largest group involved in porn – the viewers and consumers – may not understand what it’s like to be a performer or to work for a studio. But these actions are always most effective when we don’t bypass grief and compassion to get to them. Tragedies are supposed to pose questions to us – the feelings of discomfort that sadness brings can create meaningful action. It’s natural to turn events like suicide into cultural concerns. That is how deeply injured we are as a society when it comes to sex, sexuality, and love. When a gay porn star dies, instead of an outpouring of grief, what we are usually witness to is a buzzing.Īll of this is to say that not even death can trump many people’s confused and hostile attitudes towards porn and porn performers. Theories arrived before grief, before honor and love and the experience of loss. It was immediate, like flies to a corpse.
The theories appeared as soon as the news did. We kept passing through each other’s lives without ever truly meeting.īut others who knew him even less than me flooded twitter, wrote articles, posted to facebook about what had happened. I mention all of this to say: I don’t know his motivations or who he “really” was. We communicated a few more times over the years by text and phone, and that was that. My scene ran over schedule, and I was exhausted, so I told him I couldn’t meet. He gave me a kiss and his phone number and asked me if I’d like to spend time with him later that night. But then you’d forget that feeling and be drawn back into the intense attraction. Looking at him almost made you feel a sense of unbalance in the world, like his handsomeness and flawless physique were proof of some deep inequality between people.
If you met him, you were impressed by his smile and his body and his presence. He was huge and handsome I’m not saying anything new. We met in passing on a set he’d just finished a scene, and I was about to start mine. I can’t claim any special knowledge about his death, I didn’t know him very well. It was drugs, it was studios not treating him well, it was the feeling of dehumanization, it was the vague but all encompassing “porn industry” that did it, it was the feeling of being hollow, it was it was his loss of validation after being a star for so long. As usual, many people felt sure they knew why he committed suicide, without much evidence. Arpad Miklos, who was as much as a porn “star” as anyone can be in a time when we are hyper-saturated with porn, killed himself on February 3rd, 2013, at the age of 45. Whenever a porn star – especially a gay porn star – commits suicide, theories show up, and people act very, very certain about them. Why do porn actors kill themselves? Who is responsible?