Out of the Blue: Confessions of an Unlikely Porn Star by Blue Blake

Title: Out of the Blue: Confessions of an Unlikely Porn Star
Author: Blue Blake
Publisher: Running Press
Length: Novel / 299 pages
Buy the book: Publisher

Blurb:

Legendary adult film producer, actor, and director Blue Bake reveals all in this hilarious and extremely candid expose of the gay adult film industry. From the slums of Nottingham, England, where Blake began his career as a 16-year-old stripper to the giddy heights of porn super-stardom in Hollywood, California, this hysterical rollercoaster ride will leave the reader both shocked and titillated. There has never been a star like Blue Blake, and there has never been a book like this.

Review:

We finally ended up with Tom lying on the six-foot high wheel of the bulldoer with my crew holding his legs apart out of camera shot. To achieve this effect I gave several Mexican day laborers $20 each to hold Tom’s legs up and apart, since I had run out of crew. The Mexicans had been wandering around on the ranch and didn’t speak a word of English, so God knows what they were excitedly saying to each other. When you shoot porn you develop an attitude where you have no shame. You just want to get the shot. If my granny had been on the set I would have paid her to hold Tom’s legs open. God rest her soul.

That sound you hear is noted diarist Samuel Pepys whirling like a dervish and powering greater Manchester.

Now, you’re all going to have to bear with me when I say that up until I read this book, I had no idea there was such a thing as gay bodybuilder porn.

I know, I know. Take a moment to collect yourselves. A mature woman well-familiar with the internet and various adult-oriented usenet groups and yet I had NO IDEA.

Now I know more than I could ever have dreamed of on the subject.

Blue Blake, star and producer of an astonishing number of gay adult bodybuilding films (googling that phrase is not for the faint of heart) has written a lighthearted if somewhat dubiously glamorous book detailing his journey from penniless London theater student to Hollywood porn doyenne. It is glittery, mildly titillating and almost compulsively readable.

Born Glenn Marsh to a working-class family in Nottingham, England, Blake details his journey through dancing, hustling, more hustling, massaging, hustling, body-building, hustling and finally porn with astonishingly nuanced detail. He names names. He admits taking steroids. He writes candidly about his life as not just a thickly muscled rent boy but also pimp of thickly muscled rent boys before describing how he broke into and then through the world of adult filmmaking.

This is not “Long Walk to Freedom” by any stretch of the imagination. It’s quite a bit closer to “I, Claudius”, in fact, but then again, Blake makes no bones about what his story is and is not. “This book should be read while drinking mojitos and wearing something skimpy,” he writes. And while I did neither of those things (whoo! following directions!) I did lose one entire Saturday spent reading the whole book in one sitting.

It’s a guilty pleasure read. You show up to read about Blake’s adventures at the illicit massage club, and his sin-soaked trip to San Francisco to compete in the Mr. Leather world championships. You’re not looking for deep lessons on life or comportment, but why Blake refuses to bottom on film unless basically held at gunpoint. Shelve it in your collection between Divas Las Vegas and the Jackie Collins hardcovers.

In fact, Blake’s story is almost preternaturally upbeat, and either his editor exorcised all the portions of the book containing personal demons, divas and temper tantrums or Blake’s got a truly incredible therapist. At no point in his story does Blake’s facade of the universally adored party boy crack or splinter, and his steroid use is tossed off as a fait accompli, a fact of life that’s never really examined or resolved.

At the same time, he does take pains to point out that he is and always has been a compulsive liar. Three points for the unreliable narrators and their memoirs.

And it truly does add a piquant dash of whimsy to evaluating all the tales in Blake’s book when this passage:

I had seen the show in Los Angeles and although Jeff [Stryker] had struggled with the concept a little, it hadn’t really mattered because at the end of the show he got naked, came down into the audience and let them all feel his cock…and that’s what three quarters of the audience were there for in the first place.

Is immediately followed by this one:

A few years after Vince Rockland beat me for the Best Actor award at the Gayvn Awards he went to live in a commune in India. While out buying a spicy chicken vindaloo from a street-side vendor, he was run over by a cart carrying piles of brightly colored saris. It broke both his legs. I heard the cart was being pulled by a wild herd of Peruvian mountain goats. I felt so terrible I made a huge donation that year to the “Homeless Goat Foundation of America”.

Did gay porn legend Jeff Stryker really let a theater full of strangers touch his biggest moneymaking asset while on tour? A cart of brightly colored saris pulled by wild goats? Really, Blake?

There is really no way to gauge the truth value of either anecdote, but therein lies the rub: that statement fits the very notion of autobiographies to a tee. And as long as you bear that firmly in mind and are in the mood for fluffy, sometimes filthy tales of sexual congress and excess, this book is for you.