WONDER BREAD AND ECSTASY, an unintentionally anti-capitalist screed against the vacuity of consumerism

WONDER BREAD AND ECSTASY: The Life and Death of Joey Stefano
CHARLES ISHERWOOD
Out of print (non-affiliate Amazon link)
Various prices from different vendors

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Drugs, sex, and unbridled ambition: These were the main ingredient in the lethal cocktail that killed gay porn's brightest star, Joey Stefano. As pornography's most marketable gay face and body, he was filmed having sex in more than 35 hard-core videos, danced an unforgettable striptease in clubs across America and Europe, and hustled his way through thousands of dollars paid to him by clients around the globe. But none of this filled the void inside Nicholas Iacona, a.k.a. Joey Stefano. From his childhood in the country's heartland to his tragic rise and fall in Los Angeles's dark and dangerous world of gay porn, Wonder Bread and Ecstasy paints a grim portrait of American life gone berserk.

My Review: Reading that blurb twenty-five years on, the first thought that comes to mind is, "Oh, Sasha...stop being such a drama queen." Sasha Alyson's eponymous publishing house brought this book out two years after Joey Stefano's death from an (almost untreated, in a scandalous twist I hadn't known when I first heard of the event) overdose of party drugs. It also marks Charles Isherwood's only book publication to date. (You've probably been scratching your head about Charles Isherwood, thinking permaybehaps of Christopher, but Charles if the theater critic who got canned a few years back. One sees in the Vulture piece linked that the now-reviled Scott Rudin's name appears prominently in the mishegas; much could be explained if that involvement was, well, one of Rudin's usuals.)

Anyway. Back to Joey Stefano...he was a standard-issue kid from a typical, unexceptional background; no one would've thought it was unusual at the time, nor would anyone have seen in a young boy's truculence and troublesome personality a clear danger sign of childhood sexual abuse. Isherwood, as he had no access to the deceased, doesn't say directly that there was something of incest actually happening; it doesn't take any intense reading between the lines, though, to see it's among the likely explanations for the gay only-male-child's unfillable void of love. What the surviving family denies is, in my observation of families with abusive parents of any stripe, typical circling the wagons behavior. What I think happened is that there was abusive behavior in his past...too many things point to it. What we can't know is the form that abuse took.

What a ride of a life the beautiful creature led, though, messed up from a middling sort of childhood which led to a complete absence of ordinary career paths after his father died and he, grieving, left high school. With his sisters and mother clearly unable to provide what he needed in terms of support and guidance, he did what those pretty enough to do so have always done: He sold his body for his daily bread.

Nothing unusual there...but the time this was happening, 1983, was the absolute nadir of the AIDS epidemic. A teen hustler on the make after older men in a time before the concept of "safe sex" had even been articulated still less codified? Guaranteed he's going to do risky things. And thse risky things were exactly what he wanted to do anyway, the guy was a size queen and a truly complete bottom. Look at any one of the many scenes he filmed: This was a man who loved his job. He loved the sex. He loved the cameras. He loved the attention. And, as most porn figures of the era used to their advantage, the VCR revolution that came along exactly as the AIDS epidemic hit meant that the films they made were a form of advertising their wares the same way the old club scene was slowly moving away from.

Here came the most beautiful young man, the least debauched looking angelface, to do the most titillatingly extreme things! On film! You could watch it six, eight, ten times in a row and not once would it fail to deliver! Wealthy men saw; they wanted; they paid and he came. And there was the beautiful body they craved. On screen or off, there was a glory of nature and it was yours for the right (steep) price.

So Joey Stefano got used to being used and used to using people, places, and things. He was, with his eager cooperation, a packaged product...and he had a shelf life.

The glory years were glorious indeed if you're destined by background to mediocrity and by your actions to poverty. The gift of beauty needs to be harvested quickly, and he (showing what I think is a strong shrewd streak) took every chance that hove into view and made it an opportunity. I loved that about him as I read the book. I could, with the distance of time from his death, see which way the parade was headed, and still think "that's exactly what a businessperson with a perishable asset *should* do."

Time, however, has no respect for the asset. Overexposure...changing industry tastes...Joey was the first porn star bottom, the first not to be called a "stunt butt." Inevitably for a business built on pandering to the craving for novelty, he lost some luster, and lost his sense of purpose.

He didn't lose his need to fill his devouring emotional vacancy with drugs. Nothing else could work. No one else could be enough to keep the need to numb the pain of losing something you never even felt you deserved. Numbing the loss of his father, the unlikely chance that he could've built some kind of trust and love between them. That was taken away in 1983; that was just the ignition point, not even the start of the trouble, the gay only son of a bog-standard father...this wasn't going to end well no matter what. And it didn't.

Dead at 26. Self-inflicted harm. And all because he bought the line of bullshit about Stuff, getting and having, being a solution instead of a problem...drugs, money, sex, it's all part of the "more more more is better better better" mentality that costs so many people so very dearly. Just not usually, unlike unlucky Joey Stefano, their continued life.