Originally Posted by Mutt

The outside world paints a picture of the porn industry where women, especially the young, are disposable sex machines that are exploited and then when used up, forgotten, junked. Mike South made a post on his blog about the recent death of veteran stunt dick Billy Glide from a drug overdose that may have been intentional. Even if not, the word was Glide was on a downward spiral. Mike went on to comment on the plight of the aging male talent, people for whom nobody in or out of porn care about. I've been thinking about it since reading that porn legend Tom Byron was living on somebody's couch. I've often noticed in my years watching and working in porn familiar male talent disappearing and wondering 'whatever happened to 'that dude'?'

In the mainstream movie industry the script is flipped. Female stars have short careers, by the time they reach 40 with rare exception they are either out of the business or taking supporting roles as older women. Older male stars remain viable as leading men, Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, George Clooney, Denzel Washington, Bruce Willis, all 50 plus.

In porn where 'MILF' is an extremely popular genre, attractive older female porn stars like Lisa Ann, Julia Ann and Nina Hartley remain popular. Lisa Ann may be the most popular performer in the world of porn. Male talent with the exception of the guys who own their own studios and DVD lines just fade away when they get older, I assume the phone just stops ringing. You see some of them hanging on working for cheap for bottom of the barrell
producers.

It's got to be very depressing to face the reality that having spent 10 or 20 years making a good living fucking an endless parade of hot women that it's all over and you have nothing to fall back on.

I remember when Jon Dough killed himself, a guy who was a contemporary of Tom Byron and Peter North, back when I was a kid watching bootleg 10th generation VHS porn tapes that would get passed around. Recently one of Evil Angel's older hired gun performer/directors did himself in. How many other older male talents have committed suicide? I bet there are some that nobody knows about.