How was Rapid’s immense popularity leveraged to help launch a new “rough sex” porn studio? Did this move help to revitalize Rapid’s fortunes, who aged 23 at the time of his bareback debut, was a twink performer nearing the end of his expected porn lifespan? And what insights into the mainstream integration of bareback and ageist restrictions normally placed on twink performers are to be gained from textual analysis of audience reactions to Rapid’s bareback debut? Audience reactions that, as I note briefly, also reveal certain class-based assessments of Rapid and his infamy at the time.
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3 Rapid’s success in 2018 appears to have been buoyed by his highly publicized bareback debut a few years earlier (in 2015, in a series known as Johnny Rapid Goes Bareback), which forms the focus of this article and raises questions that are still relevant at time of revision and publication (in June/July 2021). 1 He was also named as the second most searched for gay porn star in Pornhub’s 2017 “Year in Review” annual analytics report (beaten to the top spot by relative new-comer William Seed, also a Men exclusive) 2 and was the 2017 recipient of Str8UpGayPorn’s Best Gay-4-Pay Performer award. At time of writing, toward the close of the last decade (November 2018), Rapid was just five scenes short of his 200th scene with the studio, and while his age was beginning to count against him, remained a major player-ranked Men’s “most liked” performer with more than 6,800 audience ‘thumbs up’. Johnny Rapid began his porn career at the start of the 2010s as a fresh-faced 18-year-old, shooting scenes with Boys First Time and Bukkake Boys before signing with Men as an exclusive and releasing his first scene in November 2011. Through this reflection, I arrive at the conclusion that the time was right for an aging twink performer to be freshened-up by a transition to bareback-similar transitions of which have become widespread across the gay porn landscape in the intervening years between the 2015 Johnny Rapid Goes Bareback event and the present day, thanks in no small part to advancements in HIV prevention technologies.
I read the case study in line with the concept of time, which has particular resonance with bareback.
Yet I also take the opportunity-writing several years after this critical moment in Rapid’s career-to reflect on the success of the campaign. The analysis reveals a decidedly negative reception of Rapid, the promotion of bareback as event, and the quality of the bareback performance itself, all of which I read in accordance with what these narratives have to tell us about bareback at the time. With a swish and a smile, he sashayed away.This article explores a critical moment of going bareback in the career of arguably the biggest gay porn performer of the 2010s, Johnny Rapid. "You know, it just makes my dick limp," he lamented. "Why do you still shave? Chest hair is so sexy!" His friend's cheery smile turned into something of a frown. My boyfriend - a lover of hair and bears - couldn't help but express his frustration. Jason was probably 30 or so, white, with bleached blonde hair that was receding, a collared shirt that was strewn open to reveal his shaved, orange chest, and lines on his face that betrayed his love of tanning beds. What happens to twinks when they grow up? I found myself wondering this out loud to my boyfriend this past weekend after we ran into an old friend of his, Jason, at the bar. Pile on a two-and-a-half year abusive relationship, and somehow I found myself an almost-30-something who avoided mirrors to not have to look at what I had become. After graduating college and growing up a smidge, those 29-inch jeans stopped fitting. four nights a week, it turns out, is the cardio equivalent of running a marathon every week. My friends and I would roll up to the local dance hall three or four nights a week, polyester and glitter trailing behind us, dropping it like it was hot and cage-dancing the night away. I was basically a gay anime character a-la- Dragonball-Z, and I fucking loved it. Blonde highlighted spiky hair to the heavens. Having begun my training so young, by the time I was actually legally able to drink I had cultivated quite the twink aesthetic. I was rebellious, angsty, but also damned crafty: I forged a fake membership card to the local disco by scanning my provisional driver's license, editing the birth date, and laminating the edited print-out opposite a downloaded JPEG of the club's logo from the their website. Tired of being the punchline of my hetero peers' jokes, I desperately searched for a community to call my own.
I started going to gay bars when I was 15.