Wonder Bread and Ecstasy: The Life and Death of Joey Stefano by Charles Isherwood

Title: Wonder Bread and Ecstasy: The Life and Death of Joey Stefano
Author: Charles Isherwood
Publisher: Alyson Books
Buy this Book: Publisher

Blurb:

At the top of the gay porn industry, Joey Stefano’s death in 1994 from a drug overdose, at the age of 26, revealed the truth behind the burnished image. Stefano had struggled with substance abuse since his teens, and the fame and financial rewards of his career couldn’t keep at bay the demons that caused his ultimate self-destruction.

Review:

Although nominally this is a biography of noted late ’80s-era gay porn star Joey Stefano, here is the number one thing I took away from this book: Charles Isherwood has watched a truly staggering amount of gay porn.

I don’t know if he’s watched more than the average guy, but it’s clear from this book that he’s really dedicated himself to the task. It’s not just the personally annotated Joey Stefano videography in the appendix, or the adulation of adult film legend Jeff Stryker, or the references to meta-gay porn books such as Sorry I Asked: Intimate Interviews with Gay Porn’s Rank and File and One-Handed Histories: The Eroto-Politics of Gay Male Video Pornography. No, I think it’s more that any mention of an adult film in this book (and hello, there are many) comes with the author’s own wry observations of the film in question.

Isherwood’s dedication to research aside, this was a pretty grim book.

Joey Stefano was a troubled young man even before he hit the gay porn circuit. His rocky childhood culminated at age fifteen with his father’s death and his own already overwhelming drug problem. Then he left Philadelphia, found L.A. and was swallowed alive by the adult filmmaking industry. This book chronicles Stefano’s brief film career along with his much longer dancing and hustling careers, and details how Stefano’s drug use escalated along the way, culminating in his death from a drug overdose at the age of twenty-six.

Despite the salacious cover photo and Isherwood’s encyclopedic knowledge of gay porn, the tale is a bleak one. The author’s many sny asides (“Their hair alone is breathtaking–and [Ryan] Idol’s is generally more erect than his penis”) do little to lighten this story of the relentlessly downward trajectory of this young man’s life.

And the thing that’s most depressing is that Joey Stefano himself doesn’t come off as likeable or sympathetic in any way. He’s depicted as narcissistic, paranoid, childish and unhinged, and while yes, good biographies are of the “warts and all” variety, I wound up feeling sorry for Stefano while simultaneously unimpressed with the choices he made.

What ultimately saves the book is Isherwood’s depictions of the adult filmmaking world and associated party scene, which are rendered with a deft and witty hand:

“Chi Chi LaRue’s birthday party took place on a night in November, but porn star Karen Dior (nee Geoff Gann) decided to wear a white string bikini anyway. He reasoned that drag queens aren’t really dressed appropriately in any event, so they can damn well wear what they please. And the average drag queen isn’t likely to find herself in a crowd that objects to white after Labor Day.”

Many of Stefano’s fans, especially those prone to romanticizing his short life and tragic death, will find little here to titillate them. However, for scholars of the history of gay porn, this book provides a brief but detailed glimpse behind the cameras, and is enjoyable on that score alone.