Following the police murder of George Floyd on Memorial Day and the resulting nationwide protests over the last week, gay porn conglomerate NakedSword/Falcon (which also operates Hot House and Raging Stallion) issued a statement yesterday saying that they “stood in solidarity with the Black Community,” and you can read it in full below:
The message was met with some thanks but also some criticism, including this reply from Pheonix Fellington (his new Twitter handle, “PlayFella,” is the name of his upcoming studio), who called out the studio for not having a diverse roster of models:
And this morning, Race Cooper (a former performer and production employee at the studio) tweeted the below image with the word “LIES” written over NakedSword/Falcon’s message:
Cooper posted the below thread about his time working at the studio, and he accuses people at the studio of “gaslighting you” by posting about Black Lives Matter.
Following Cooper’s tweets, Chris Porter—another former performer and production employee at NakedSword/Raging Stallion—tweeted in agreement, writing that “Chris Ward, then president of [Raging Stallion], treated black models as props and filler for movies, and so did other employees like [Steve] Cruz and [Tony] DiMarco”:
Disclosure: I worked at the NakedSword office writing their news blog, The Sword, from 2010 to 2013 (this was around the time NakedSword, Raging Stallion, and Falcon were merging into one). While I never witnessed racist behavior or racist statements from anyone there, I’m a white male, so I obviously have the privilege of never having to experience racism the way POC do, and my perception will never be as valid as Race Cooper’s and other POC. Also, I didn’t work on Chris Ward’s productions like Porter and Cooper did, which is where it sounds like they experienced most of the racism.
Chris Porter went on to share a quote he says Ward (who retired in 2015) once made—”we need to get some black guys so we don’t get called racist”—and says he was constantly sexually harassed by an unnamed studio supervisor while working as a production assistant:
Finally, Porter acknowledged that while it’s “nice to see racists in the porn industry finally called out,” he hopes fetishized segregation of models comes to end, and that there are “no more ‘Noir’ sites” (likely referring to NoirMale, the gay porn studio owned by a straight white man in Canada and operated by white director Chi Chi LaRue):
Str8Up has reached out to NakedSword/Falcon for a response to Cooper and Porter’s comments and will update this story if they reply.