Porn’s latest hunk brings life’s hard lessons to the set
Tom Judson, aka Falcon porno star Gus Mattox, is unabashedly 43 years old and has had a life in stories, music, experimental theater, Broadway footlights, and adventure to prove he has lived a full life.
In his life as Tom Judson, he wrote many musicals, played in bands and shows with the likes of Charles Busch, Lisa Kron, the Five Brothers, and Ann Magnuson. This past year Judson was touring with the road company of “42nd Street” when in a complicated series of chance encounters he met and befriended Chi Chi Larue, well-known porn director, and the rest is porn star history.
We wondered if Tom Judson wasn’t using his real name, should we too conceal his true identity.
“No, I believe I have an entertainment career, music writing, and porn,” Judson/Mattox responded. “I have it in my contract that I get to write all the movies I star in. In fact, I wrote a scene into a movie where I am playing ‘Lady Of Spain’ on my accordion. I am using a porn name because, well, everyone does. I choose the name thinking, ‘Now that Strom Thurmond’s illegitimate daughter has made herself known, I thought it was time for the illegitimate gay son of Lester Mattox to come out of the closet.’”
Okay, we love that Gus, er, Tom is so funny and edgy, but how did he really choose that name, was it the name of his first pet or a childhood street thing?
“No, I picked a short and retro name––Gus––and porn names with an X in it are good because there is a theory that if there is an X in print, your eye is drawn to it because you think the word will be sex,” he explained.
(I feel a bit over my head in this interview with a porn star known for the size of his endowment who has an even bigger vocabulary. But I will soldier on.)
Since Mattox dropped on the scene, people have been trying to guess how they know this new star who is obviously a little older than most of the other tasty morsels. So, forget trawling the online search engines for investigative insights. You have it here: Gus is Tom and he doesn’t care who knows it.
“I don’t have anything to hide,” he said. “That’s pretty great. And that is a question of age, self-knowledge and self-awareness, and security. And isn’t that the sexiest thing? When I turned 40, I just stopped caring what anybody thought or said about me.”
We wondered if Gus/Tom had been a porno fan before he started making movies.
“I have always loved it, always have,” he confessed. “I’m a voyeur, I love watching guys have sex in real life, so watching the whole thing enhanced with especially good looking guys, well that makes it a little more titillating. I had a partner, a husband, who died in the late 90s and I often think how he would have loved this because he always fantasized about doing porn, so it is fun to think that he would have gotten a kick out of this. He probably still is.”
Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. Isn’t that what the Wizard said in Oz––the movie, that is, not the prison drama? We wondered if shooting porn is like that.
“Well, watching porn now has changed for me,” Judson explained. “It is like working in a restaurant and then eating out. It has changed significantly now that I know what is happening off camera. I see the guys making slight adjustments, I notice things that a civilian wouldn’t. It doesn’t ruin it, but it does lessen the effect.”
So do porn stars have better sex lives than we mortals?
“Since I have been a porn star I have gotten laid so infrequently that I don’t really have a frame of reference,” Judson said, going on to admit, “I am having a fantasy affair with Anderson Cooper but he hasn’t called me yet. Maybe after this article he will realize who I am.”
Well, at least does making porn give you ideas?
“No, because having sex in front of a camera is not really the same as having sex. You are doing it in positions that are not natural. Sometimes they’re quite uncomfortable, but they look good on the screen,” Judson explained. “Making sex for watching is an entire different art than having sex. And it is a business.”
Mattox’s films will flood the market this spring and provide others the opportunity to attest to the fact, that as he says quite directly, “I’ve never suffered from stage fright at all. The first time I walked onto the set I was ready to go. And of course if you aren’t ready for the six-hour shoots, there is plenty of Viagara on the set. I’ve been around long enough, it was a different kind of job but it was just another job. The thing that I have in my favor is the sheer fact of my age. That makes me different from everyone else on the set, so I am not competing with the other guys.”
We wondered if that makes Gus become the daddy on the set. And he responded in true porno fashion: “I am always a top in the movies, is that what you mean?”
Well good enough for us, go on.
“ Some of the guys who are used to being bottoms get cast as tops and they have no idea what to do,” he elaborated. “It is interesting to see that sometimes we do fall into roles and even when acting we can’t get out. I do want to stress that it is all safe on the set, totally 100 percent, it is just a hard and fast rule that it has to be safe sex, no exceptions.”
Some Tom Judson fans may remember him when he wasn’t such a hard body.
“Yes, in fact, a few years back a friend of mine remarked to my face, ‘She’s getting large,’” he confided. “Now my body is my instrument too, I have to think about it in a different way. I don’t have the five or ten pound leeway that I used to have.”
And any advice for how workers in the adult film industry can break the news to their parents?
“I’m not ashamed of it,” Judson insisted. “I came out of the closet at 17. I was not about to go back in at 43. I said I was working in the adult film industry on the set. My parents asked, ‘Do we want to know more about it or just that you are working?’ I said they should just rejoice that I was working.”
Are you still also working in your other life?
“I finished the first draft of a gay, New York, romantic comedy screen play,” he said. “When I get a second draft I am actually going to begin sending it out. Also, I’m getting Gus Mattox.com, I am learning to do the website myself so there will be a weekly column. It will be about everything, not just porn. By the way there will be information about my dream date Anderson Cooper. I do love him. He’s cute and dorkie and obviously smart. For instance, do you know he speaks fluent Vietnamese? There are a bunch of websites about him but mine will have personal tidbits, when I imagine them.”
A Tom Judson letter to the editor also ran in The New York Times last spring decrying a William Safire article.
Judson, as Mattox, is leaving to do a Falcon film in London because director Chi Chi Larue wants to do a scene on the Millennium Wheel.
Until his website comes out, we can all catch up with Gus at gusmattox@mac.com.
