Footnote 3 Rapid’s success in 2018 appears to have been buoyed by his highly publicized bareback debut a few years earlier (in 2015, in a series known as Johnny Rapid Goes Bareback), which forms the focus of this article and raises questions that are still relevant at time of revision and publication (in June/July 2021).
Footnote 1 He was also named as the second most searched for gay porn star in Pornhub’s 2017 “Year in Review” annual analytics report (beaten to the top spot by relative new-comer William Seed, also a Men exclusive) Footnote 2 and was the 2017 recipient of Str8UpGayPorn’s Best Gay-4-Pay Performer award. At time of writing, toward the close of the last decade (November 2018), Rapid was just five scenes short of his 200th scene with the studio, and while his age was beginning to count against him, remained a major player-ranked Men’s “most liked” performer with more than 6,800 audience ‘thumbs up’. Johnny Rapid began his porn career at the start of the 2010s as a fresh-faced 18-year-old, shooting scenes with Boys First Time and Bukkake Boys before signing with Men as an exclusive and releasing his first scene in November 2011.
Through this reflection, I arrive at the conclusion that the time was right for an aging twink performer to be freshened-up by a transition to bareback-similar transitions of which have become widespread across the gay porn landscape in the intervening years between the 2015 Johnny Rapid Goes Bareback event and the present day, thanks in no small part to advancements in HIV prevention technologies. I read the case study in line with the concept of time, which has particular resonance with bareback. Yet I also take the opportunity-writing several years after this critical moment in Rapid’s career-to reflect on the success of the campaign. The analysis reveals a decidedly negative reception of Rapid, the promotion of bareback as event, and the quality of the bareback performance itself, all of which I read in accordance with what these narratives have to tell us about bareback at the time. Just two days before, gay porn star Armond Rizzo called out a studio for paying its sexually submissive performers less than their dominant scene partners, essentially creating a wage gap between tops and bottoms.This article explores a critical moment of going bareback in the career of arguably the biggest gay porn performer of the 2010s, Johnny Rapid. It was the second time in the same week that the gay porn industry was criticized by its actors for unfair practices. "Now that I am more experienced, I feel like a model should make no less than 1k." "When I started out I was making $500 per scene," said Nic Sahara. "Back when I worked for Boycrush we were only paid 400-500 per scene," one guy replied while another said that as recently as last year, he only received $300 for his first scene. "If you're a performer making less than 1k this isn’t me coming after you in any way," he said, "I just want everyone to realize what your worth instead of letting your studio decide for you."Ī number of models responded to the tweet, sharing just how much (or little) they were paid when they started out in the industry, citing specific studios who underpaid their performers. He clarified that he wasn't criticizing the models taking less money, but rather pointing out how studios might be exploiting their naivety. As performers can we go ahead and say that no one who is preforming for a studio should be getting paid any less than 1k a scene I hear about some of these new models scene rates and how multiple well known studios are knowingly taken advantage of young performers #1Kornothing- Joey Mills January 27, 2020