A Star Is Porn: Corpulence, Comedy, and the Homosocial Cult of Adult Film Star Ron Jeremy

In a 1995 episode of MTV's Beavis and Butthead, "Career Day," the eponymous, flatulent, nose-picking adolescent duo take their usual spot on the couch and watch a music video by an alternative rock band called the Meices, providing their usual derisive commentary. The video, set in the interior of a convenience store, features an overweight, forty-something man cruising through the aisles, smearing food on himself. Beavis and Butthead snigger and guffaw at the man's unsightly body, his sagging paunch, his drooping jowls. Then Beavis remarks, "Hey, that's the guy in the naked movies at your uncle's house!" And Butthead turns to him and replies, "You were watching the guy?"

The star of the video is Ron Jeremy, also known as "The Hedgehog," twenty-three-year veteran of the "adult" film industry and arguably its most recognizable male icon: 47 years old, 5'7", 200 pounds, and 9 inches. He has either directed or starred in over sixteen hundred pornographic features, and he has also released a Billboard Top Forty rap album, Freak of the Week, and made a series of tongue-in-cheek cameo appearances in a number of mainstream studio films such as 52 Pick-Up (dir. John Frankenheimer, US, 1986), American Virgin(dir. Jean-Pierre Marois, France and US, 2000), and Killing Zoe (dir. Roger Avary, France and US, 1994). He's been a guest on Conan O'Brien's late-night talk show. A brand of Ron Jeremy cigars sells in adult bookstores and skateboard shops. A documentary—Pornstar: The Legend of Ron Jeremy(dir. Scott Gill, US, 2001)—was recently released in theaters. He also served as a "creative consultant" for the 1997 hit film Boogie Nights(dir. Paul Thomas Anderson, US), loosely based on the life and career of 1970s porn superstar John Holmes, and made another appearance in Beavis and Buttheadas an animated self-caricature by the name of Ebenezer Screw. He travels the country with his cultish Ron Jeremy's "S&M Side Show" (the press release is headlined "Upcoming Events—World Famous Dick!!!"), in which there is not any explicit sex, but a little stand-up comedy, a pie-eating contest, female oil wrestling, and a Q & A session at the end. ¹ Until recently, he was also the subject of a popular Web site, wco.com/~gruebnst/ron/index.html, which had been maintained for several years by a devoted male fan who catalogued Jeremy's film appearances, offered "Ron" merchandise (T-shirts and autographed photographs inscribed with the axiom "GOD IS RON AND RON IS GOD"), and featured "Top Ten" lists of male fans' favorite "moments of Ron." The site meticulously registered every allusion and cultural reference that its custodian found, whether it was at the top of page 145 of O. J. Simpson prosecutor Christopher Darden's best-selling memoir or a brief mention in a Rolling Stoneinterview with British pop band Bush. Now the site is gone, but in its place are a number of Jeremy-devoted discussion boards, bedecked with candid photos of Jeremy taken at porn conventions with his male fans, as well as his own "official" Web site overseen by Jeremy himself. ² During an interview with Susan Faludi for a New Yorkerarticle on male porn actors, Jeremy showed her a video of the Beavis and Buttheadsegment in which the pair ridicule his flabby body and, while consuming a plate of lox and bagels, enthused, "Isn't this great? I don't care what [people] say about me as long as they spell my name right."³

Al Goldstein, publisher of Screwmagazine and infamous entrepreneur of porn, once remarked that Ron Jeremy would never have gotten laid if producers had not paid women to have sex with him. ⁴ A special education teacher with a master...