When he got out, he was homeless.Ī friend eventually offered Cohen a room out in Phoenix, Arizona, which was "the beginning of the end," according to Shari.
He died of an overdose in January.Ĭohen worked for a furniture company before his death, but I ask Shari if his modeling career with the gay porn company Randy Blue had contributed to his troubles. She tells me that he kept his career in adult entertainment away from her, so it's difficult for her to ascertain how he felt about it. "I'm never going to really know the truth about how he felt towards his modeling," she says.Ĭonner Habib, a porn star and activist, believes people rush headlong into the assumption that porn makes people suicidal because it confirms their existing prejudices. "Theories arrive before grief," Habib wrote in a blog post. "The porn industry remains obscured by unexamined attitudes towards sex. When I spoke to Habib, he stressed to me how empowering porn can be.
"You learn how to have sex with people you're not attracted to and you learn to perform all sorts of acts that would normally be exhausting. It's a really intense skill set, and the people who succeed are the people who do it well, who can perform." #NEW GAY PORN STARS 2020 HOW TO# Alex,* a former high-profile porn star who asked to stay anonymous, grew up poor in a modest religious family that had rejected him. At first, he was drawn to the cash and admiration of the porn world.
"I was paid a very high daily rate to party and do drugs and hang out with gay people and my clients," he says. "So just having money and control over my life made me feel like it was worth it. I won awards I always had somewhere to be and people that wanted me, my time, and my attention."Īlex booked as many shoots as he could to stay sane and distract himself from everything he'd bottled up when he first started modeling. "And that festering is what leaves people high and dry."Īlex told me he knew a couple of guys who had committed suicide, as well as one who had a heart attack from steroids. Another was killed fleeing from the police in a drug bust.