Porn director and drag queen Chi Chi LaRue refuses to refer to his cast members as actors, though he admits “there are some people in my industry who truly can act as well as fuck.” But good help is hard to find. “I once hired a straight boy who took two girls home and fucked them all night in a hotel room,” he says. “He came to the set the next day and told me he couldn’t perform. He was scheduled to do three scenes and a box cover for me, but I had to fire him and send him home and hire someone that I knew would be reliable.”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
LaRue directs between 10 and 20 gay porn movies a year. Despite the occasional casting mistake, arranging scenes of group sex is apparently not a high-stress job. “I just tell the performers to go to it, and we’ll see what happens,” he says in his breezy, meandering memoir, Making It Big: Sex Stars, Porn Films and Me. The most important thing is choreographing the money shots.
Besides devoting a chapter to the pitfalls and benefits of fame (“As Chi Chi, I’ve had sex with guys who wouldn’t give Larry the time of day”), LaRue uses his memoir to take credit for helping found the Gay Video Guide Awards and launching the career of the late porn star Joey Stefano; he also refutes accusations that he knowingly allowed Stefano, who was HIV positive, to perform with uninfected partners. But one of his greatest contributions to the industry, he points out more than once, was casting drag queens in his movies.
