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 How a stint in gay porn helped inform the literary work of sci-fi author Steve Pierce. By Barry Lowe.
These days, it seems, just about every retired gay porn star is penning a book – usually an autobiography. So it comes as a pleasant surprise that sex god Steve Pierce has taken a different tack. He has penned World Without Winter, about the global warming Armageddon.
“That’s precisely the point,” Steve tells Queensland Pride. “I wanted to do something that hadn’t been done before.”
Steve got into gay porn (that’s him in the pic circa 1996 courtesy of Falcon Studios) when he was trying to make ends meet. “I was going to have sex anyway, so why not get paid for it? We all trade our time and talent for cash in one way or another, don't we?”
He answered an ad in San Francisco’s Bay Area Reporter to supplement his income from his job as a tailor at an upscale department store. “It was nice undressing, rather than dressing up, for a change!”
However, Steve was in a relationship. “We’d already been together for years before I ever started doing porn, and I think the fact that our relationship was so well established helped us maintain it. We’re still together after 20 years!”
But his partner’s feelings about Steve’s new career path were ambivalent.
“On the one hand, he feels lucky to have a guy like me,” he says, “but on the other hand he worries that others will only see my sexual side and overlook my intelligence, character, and talent.”
And Steve’s talent, apart from the obvious, is ball-grabbing sci-fi thrillers.
Set in an all-too-plausible earth future with Jetsons-style transportation, the ice caps have melted, coastal cities drowned, oceans have become toxic, World Without Winter harkens back to the golden days of end-of-the-world, enviro-science fiction such as John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids. What Pierce has added is a spicy erotic gay love interest between the book’s hero, Miguel, a scientist, and Angelo, a space car salesman.
Epic terrain but wedded to reality. “Realism was my aim,” he says.
“I find the more plausible science fiction is, the more engaging it is. I studied Nuclear Engineering at the University of Michigan which has provided me with the science part of it; the fiction was derived from my real life experiences. I think that’s why it comes across as so authentic. The best lies have a little bit of truth in them.”
And this is where Steve’s porn past has been helpful. “For instance, Angelo is loosely based on Falcon exclusive, Tom Chase, whom I had the pleasure of working with several times. He’s a remarkably genuine person who really knows how to live in the moment. Being more of the goal-oriented driven type I was fascinated by that quality, and built Angelo’s character around it.
And his fondest memory of his porn career? “Doing a live sex show in London at the legendary Club Fist. It was a sellout crowd, with 1,000 people in attendance. I was naked on a stage in the middle performing with three other guys. It was like being part of an ancient Greek Dionysian orgy. I came three times as the audience cheered. What a high that was!
Maybe he’ll include a scene like that in his next novel.
World Without Winter is out now through Boomerang Books.
Visit www.worldwithoutwinter.com
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