Michael Stabile III (1974) is an American journalist and documentary filmmaker best known for his work in and about the sex industry. He is the director of Seed Money , a documentary about pioneering gay porn producer Chuck Holmes, of Falcon Studios. Stabile's written work on sex and sexuality has appeared in Playboy , The Daily Beast , BuzzFeed , and New York Times , among others.
Stabile serves at the Director of Public Affairs for the Free Speech Coalition, [1] the national trade organization for the adult industry, and has been featured in the publications including San Francisco Chronicle , Washington Post , Los Angeles Times , Rolling Stone and the Huffington Post speaking on issues related to the industry. [2] [3]
Stabile is the owner and founder of Polari Media, a media strategies firm based in Los Angeles.
Stabile began his career as the editor of San Francisco Metropolitan, and alt-weekly based in the Bay Area. He subsequently wrote or edited for numerous Bay Area publications, including San Francisco Bay Guardian, The Bold Italic and Gay.com.
In 2003, he became interested in the intersection of adult content and LGBTQ culture. He took over as editor of Gay Porn Blog and the producer of The Tim and Roma Show , [4] a web-based talk show about the gay adult industry.
In 2004, he and Jack Shamama co-created [5] the gay pornographic soap opera Wet Palms for which they won a GayVN Award for Best Screenplay. He has also written several other GayVN-nominated movies including Spokes III, Cross Country, and Master of the House. Two of the films were included in "Top 10 Gay Porn Movies of the Decade" by Gawker Media's Fleshbot [6] with credit given to the writing team of Stabile and Shamama.
In 2008, Stabile launched gay news site TheSword.com. [7] He was named "an arbiter of taste for gay porn" by the Village Voice . [8]
Stabile's documentary short, Smut Capital of America premiered at the 2011 Tribeca Film Festival on April 24, 2011. [9]
In 2015, his documentary Seed Money played over 50 festivals across the world and was acquired for distribution by Breaking Glass Pictures. [10]
Brothers James Lloyd "Jim" Mitchell and Artie Jay Mitchell were American entrepreneurs. They operated in the pornography and striptease club business in San Francisco and other parts of California from 1969 until 1991 when Jim was convicted of killing Artie.
The AVN Awards are film awards sponsored and presented by the American adult video industry trade magazine AVN to recognize achievement in various aspects of the creation and marketing of American pornographic films. They are often called the "Oscars of porn".
Sean Paul Lockhart, known by his stage name Brent Corrigan, is an American film actor and director, known for Milk (2008), Judas Kiss (2011), and Triple Crossed (2013).
Adult Video News is an American trade magazine that covers the adult video industry. The New York Times notes that AVN is to pornographic films what Billboard is to records. AVN sponsors an annual convention, called the Adult Entertainment Expo or AEE, in Las Vegas, Nevada along with the AVN Awards, an award show for the adult industry modeled after the Oscars.
Michael Brandon is an American pornographic actor and director who specializes in gay pornography. He has had his own subdivision at Raging Stallion called "Monster Bang" and has previously participated in some charitable efforts.
Eon McKai is an American director of alt porn-themed pornographic films. The name "Eon McKai" is a pseudonym and a tribute to punk singer Ian MacKaye. Ian MacKaye considers this "surreal", but has said that he does not lose sleep over the matter.
Toby Ross is an American film director who made straight and gay pornographic films in the 1970s and 1980s and later on went to produce nonsexual and cult films with a strong sense of comedic flare. Many film aficionados consider Ross the only missing link between adult films and commercial independent films, as Ross calls it The Antarctica of the film business. He was born in Landsberg am Lech, Germany, to a Jewish mother and a Catholic father. At the age of eight, his mother having remarried an Austrian Jew, he moved with his mother and stepfather to Israel. He served two years in the Israeli army. After studies in Los Angeles, attracted by stories of the freedom in San Francisco, he moved there in the 1970s.
Dana DeArmond is an American pornographic actress and director. She entered the industry in 2004 and is a member of the AVN, XRCO, and Urban X Halls of Fame.
Michael Williams,, known professionally as Sister Roma, is an American drag queen activist, gay pornography director, fundraiser, entertainer and event host/emcee. He has been a member of San Francisco's Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence since 1987.
Michael Lucas is a Russian-American-Israeli businessman, performer, founder, and CEO of Lucas Entertainment, Manhattan's largest gay adult film company.
TheSword.com is a gay news and lifestyle website for coverage of the gay adult industry. Based in San Francisco, a large portion of The Sword's coverage is dedicated to covering the lives of gay porn stars in a tabloid fashion. The Sword is owned by gay adult site NakedSword.com.
Sexually transmitted infections in the pornography industry deals with the occupational safety and health hazard of contracting sexually transmitted infections (STIs) by workers in the sex industry. Since the 1980s many cases of pornographic performers contracting HIV/AIDS have been reported. However, since the mid-2000s strict adherence to rigorous STI testing, and limiting sexual contact with only fellow tested performers has halted the spread of HIV and other STIs in the industry.
Richard Allen Karp, better known by his stage name Cole Tucker, was an American actor in gay pornography, born in New York.
Jack Shamama is an American author, producer, screenwriter, blogger, and social critic who is best known for his work in the LGBT community and in gay pornography. Born in Brooklyn, New York and raised in Miami, Florida, Shamama graduated from Wesleyan University and later moved to San Francisco, where he lives today. Since 2008, he has been the product manager for gay adult video-on-demand membership site Naked Sword, where he is concurrently producing the independent art-porn feature film, I Want Your Love.
Charles M. "Chuck" Holmes was an American adult film producer, businessman and philanthropist. He founded Falcon Studios in 1971.
Tom Chase is an American gay pornographic film actor who was active in the 1990s and 2000s. He is best known as the first lifetime exclusive model for Falcon Studios, and for his later work at Colt Studio Group.
The Other Side of Aspen is a 1978 American gay pornographic film produced by Falcon Studios, directed by Matt Sterling, starring Casey Donovan, Al Parker, and Dick Fisk. The film consists of sex scenes filmed in Lake Tahoe, California, interspersed with dialogue scenes shot in San Francisco. The Other Side of Aspen was Falcon's first feature-length release, notable as one of the first adult films distributed on videocassette.
Max Konnor is an American gay pornographic film actor and webcam model. After starting his pornographic career under the name Isaiah Foxx in 2009, he left the industry in 2012 to pursue a career in stage and television acting. In 2017, he became a webcam model on CAM4 and started pornographic accounts on OnlyFans and Twitter. He soon started performing in studio-made pornographic films and later became the most-followed Black gay pornographic actor on Twitter and CAM4's first male ambassador.
Seed Money: The Chuck Holmes Story (2015) is a documentary film which follows the life of Chuck Holmes, the founder of gay pornography studio Falcon Studios. Its director was Michael Stabile, and the documentary premiered on April 10, 2015, at the Wicked Queer film festival, formerly known as the Boston LGBT Film Festival.