How Reality TV Took the Shame Out of Pornography
Look everyone! This guy who is going to be a contestant on upcoming reality show Conveyor Belt of Love was in gay porn! Ugh, this has become so commonplace it's boring. Now these genres go hand in hand.
Maybe it's the mainstreaming of porn culture or the fact that plenty of our reality show stars have had sex tapes (think Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian), but now people are free to go from one genre to the other without impunity.
The latest is porn star Kekoa Nalu who gay porn mag Unzipped [It's not entirely SFW, but there's nothing below the belt] reveals he was a cover model and did a few scenes on RandyBlue.com, a gay pornographic website with which I am completely unfamiliar. Unzipped also has a link to action shots, if you're into that sort of thing.
Kekoa is going to be one of the men sliding by on the Conveyor Belt of Love (trailer is at the bottom of the post), who have only 60 seconds to impress a panel of ladies. The worst thing about this isn't that he did porn, but that these women have been reduced to this sad, sad show.
This comes right on the heels of everyone finding out that Emmanuel DelCour, one of the contestants currently on Bravo's Chef Academy, is also straight porn star Jean Valjean. Well, naming yourself after a character in a musical isn't the straightest choice, but there is footage of him fucking ladies.
At one time, this might have been a fireable offense. In 2003, Frenchie Davis (pictured) was kicked off the second season of American Idol when topless pictures of her were unearthed. In 2007 and 2008, when similar pictures of contestants Antonella Barba and David Hernandez floated to the surface, they were allowed to keep competing. It looks like in four years time, these things ceased to matter.
That's the thing about porn, it is forever and if a person who does it receives any smidgen of notoriety—from a reality show to being in the news—everyone's going to find out about it. But it won't cost you your shot at fully clothed humiliation. In 2008, Big Brother found out that one of the contestants on the show had an extensive career in gay porn, and he not only got to stay in the house but also continued hooking up with one of the female contestants. We wonder what she had to say when she got home and googled him.
We're all still into the prurient details, but does anyone really care about a porn past anymore? Earlier this year, another dating show contestant, "Danger" on For the Love of Ray J did some nude modeling [NSFW, unless you work at a naked modeling agency], but it didn't hurt her on the show. We got that news from our friends at Fleshbot, who also tell us that two So You Think You Can Dance contestants have some nude snaps without penalty [NSFW, unless you work at a clothing optional gay guest house].
And it goes both ways. Just look at the entire oevure of E!'s The Girls Next Door, a reality show about Playboy models (pictured), or HBO's classic Cathouse, a hard-core reality show about a brothel. And former reality stars can then become porn actors, just like Marco Rivera, a loser on VH1's I Love New York, who is now having sex with women on gay websites (don't try to figure it out. There are too many layers, and your head will explode).
So, yes, it's mildly entertaining to find out someone on television has been getting naked for money before a camera, but it's not really news anymore. What we have instead is porn and reality TV sealed in a marriage of convenience as the two things that America loves more than anything, but doesn't want anyone to know they watch.