Content warning: HIV/AIDS, pornography, sex, unprotected sex
James Allen Rideout Jr. died on October 10, 1988 from kidney failure due to substance abuse and AIDS. He was 22. Before he died, he starred in four very successful gay porn films under the name Kurt Marshall.
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My relationship with Marshall’s filmography begins down a Wikipedia hole. I am scrolling through the “Pornographic Acting” subcategory on Wikipedia’s “List of HIV Positive People” page. I click every name, read their page, and return to the main list. Kurt Marshall is the twelfth name under the “Pornographic Acting” subcategory. Even before I read his page, the list informs me that he was born in November 1965 and died in October 1988. So he was 22 when he died. This makes his death the youngest in this subcategory by a considerable margin. I click his name with that a priori sense of the tragic. His picture appears on the right side of my screen. He’s hot. Like, classic twink hot. Tadzio from Death in Venice hot.
I normally don’t care about this kind of hot, but the presumed tragedy surrounding his death pulls me in. 22 is so young. What did he feel in those months leading up to his death? How did he feel about the industry that he’d dedicated his adult life to? How did he even begin doing porn? Was he aware of the risks? These questions arise all at once from that spring of intrigue surrounding tragedy—tragedy I can imagine as my own, had I been born 30 years earlier. He was a big star: in only four movies, a diva on set, a coke problem. But I need more context. I need to see him—what he did that made him famous. I have to watch a video.
I open a new tab in my browser and search “Kurt Marshall gay porn video.” Always reliable, PornHub is first on the scene, offering its page of search results. I oblige and select the longest video because I am a sucker for plot and I want to see him speak. It’s a scene from what I later learn is Marshall’s second film, Splash Shots, which allegedly originated the trope of gay sex around swimming pools. I skip ahead 30 seconds, past a man who isn’t Marshall basking in the splendor of a Jacuzzi. Then Marshall and a third man enter the scene. I stop and let the video play. They enter wearing speedos, emerging from some forest just beyond this suburban aquatic utopia. Why they are wearing speedos in the woods is never addressed. The man in the Jacuzzi welcomes them and they all quickly get down to business. In what should-have-been-expected Tadzio fashion, he doesn’t speak.
With the sex beginning sooner than I had anticipated, I am not prepared to pause the video and return to research. Now, I am just watching porn and getting aroused. I jump ahead because I don’t really care about blowjobs. I press play when I get to a close-up of Marshall craning his neck back in ecstasy. “This should be as good a place as any,” I think. He is angelic. He is the original holy twink. In this shot, I know all at once why he was so famous.
Then the video cuts to a shot of him from behind, riding one of the other men’s condomless penises.
Of course—it’s 1984; they wouldn’t be wearing condoms.
I close my eyes. I cut to August 8, 2018. I am having unprotected sex with my ex.
Cut to October 21 and he calls two months after our break up.
Hey, I just tested positive for HIV so I am calling to tell you that you should get tested.
Cut to me weeping in UC, the walk through rush-hour traffic to Hassle Free Clinic, the texts to friends from hands that won’t stop shaking, the rapid-test results that come back negative, and the collapse into the arms of a nurse.
It all comes back in this shot of Kurt Marshall getting penetrated without a condom. It seems pretty obvious that they wouldn’t have used condoms. Still, I pause the video. I am not uncomfortable with the memory it summons—I replay it all the time. I am uncomfortable with how I got here. Is it okay to watch this? Is it disrespectful? Kurt Marshall died tragically in arguably the most painful period of queer history, and I am about to masturbate to him performing the culturally persistent, albeit problematic, symbol for HIV transmission. Is this okay? I decide to stop, which I also have reservations about. I call my ex (who I have since gotten back together with, sort of) and we have phone sex.
So, how do I proceed?
Regretfully, or not, I do more research. It turns out Marshall loved doing gay porn, at least when he was doing it. In a 1986 interview with Stallion Magazine, regarding his career choice, Marshall said that “one can only judge something with one’s own eyes—something’s only bad when it has a bad influence on you. If something turns out good, you can’t look back and think that it was wrong…”
This fills me with a sense of hope, but I am skeptical about jumping right into masturbating to his videos. I know that tragedy is a stigma, which is why I didn’t want to hold back in the first place. But we have no records of the last years of Marshall’s life. There is no way to know if his filmography was how he wanted to be memorialized.
Beyond Marshall, I am grappling with negotiating a cultural tragedy that isn’t necessarily my own. I wasn’t alive to remember the AIDS crisis. I talk to those who were, who felt its immense cultural pain, and through them I can partially understand its gravity. Someday these people will be gone, and the tragic history of AIDS will be representable only in cultural artifacts—artifacts and paratexts, like Marshall’s filmography. So amidst the ethical uncertainty of masturbating to Marshall’s movies, I am wondering how a generation is supposed to negotiate the tragic histories of a past it was not there to experience.
In the end, I did it. I filled an epistemological gap with pleasure. I figured after thinking about this for a month I would come to some kind of conclusion. Instead, I have just as many concerns as I started with, if not more. Thankfully, HIV is not the tragedy it once was. My sort-of-partner is undetectable and we have had unprotected sex. Nevertheless, our sex obviously isn’t the sex of 1980s L.A.—I can’t read modern science and sex onto the past. I have dates and artifacts. From these disparate strands I pull together a narrative of Marshall’s life—part tragic, part reparative. As a representation of his life, it might make as much sense as wearing a speedo in the woods. But it’s how I’m holding on to the past, at least for now.
