WHAT KILLED SEAN @ CORBIN FISHER?
Hmmmmmm, let's review a few pertinent facts:
Sean, aka Matthew, is mostly famous as being a hot, 'All American', Corbin FIsher gay porn star, who is announced by CF to have died suddenly, unexpectedly at age 22.
A quick Google reveals a bunch of obituaries, which also reveal:
his full name: Matthew Edison Bremer
He was a 2 time National Champion in ATV Motocross. (Google Matthew Edison Bremer and quickly get to his obits, such as at dignitymemorial.com)
He had two apparently living dads, and therefore was most likely a child of divorce
The last two years of his life appear to have been very much entangled with drug use and the law -- probation supervision according to MugShots.com: "OFFENSE DATE 05/29/2010 OFFENSE: POSS.CONTROL.SUBS/OTHER SENTENCE DATE: 12/14/2010 Scheduled Termination Date: 12/13/2011"
Well, let's think about commonly observed trends about people who act in porn:
Traditionally and by most people It's not considered nice or polite generally, and is actually considered a bit transgressive (naughty, wild, illicit) by many.
Porn seems always to have gone hand in hand with drugs. According to most of the research I've read, documentaries, interviews, and having met a few porn actors, drugs are pretty rife in the scene. Steroids are not uncommonly used by guys to beef up -- and boy, Sean aka Matt was beefy (and seemed to beef up significantly, as so many CF actors do). But, some of the problems with steroids typically include: roid rage, genital shrinkage. Yeah, that's a problem for porn stars. Even more commonly used drugs among male porn actors: Viagra and the like. Then, of course, all the recreational drugs. Porn actors often have lots of emotional problems many leading to them getting into porn, and a number which often result from it: struggles with self image, self worth, relationship and family problems, sexual identity issues, problems with intimacy. Drugs are often used to self medicate to avoid difficult emotions, as well as for recreation, and often just to deal with the added emotional stress of the work.
Porn and prostitution are also pretty much eternally conjoined. Not too surprising: who'd be most willing to have sex on camera for money, but someone willing to have sex for money? And, even if they don't start that way, once they're porn stars, everyone assumes they have sex for money, and they start getting offers. Most of the male sex professionals I’ve met recognize that the way up in their business is porn. Often the people who are the highest paid for sex, are the biggest porn stars. Porn serves most sex-workers as advertising for their sex-business. In a business as tough and unpredictable, where work careers and 'stardom' are short lived, if they didn’t start as hustlers and get discovered that way, prostitution becomes a common fall-back for many gay porn stars. I wonder if it's most?
Ohhh, and then there was the barebacking. This has grown from a trend in the business, to the new de-facto standard. And now we're back in some ways to the 80s, where porn stars are EXPECTED and really forced by the industry to have unsafe sex. The producers claim to be giving them medical check-ups and tests, but, come ON: people who are already risk takers, thrill seekers, pushing boundaries, breaking conventions, frequenly involved with drugs and who often have sex for hire, where there's still more pressure to use drugs and have unsafe sex -- it's no wonder there's a CONDOM AND SAFE SEX WAR going on in the industry again. LA County passed a law in 2011 requiring porn actors to wear condoms on set, which has caused a FUROR in the porn business, which has fallen into bad old ways and grown addicted to barebacking in the past 10 years ago. Google: "porn condom laws" and you'll find them fast.
During the first decade or so of the AIDS crisis in the 80s and early 90s, there was essentially a huge generational die-off in the gay world, and especially in porn. Yup, hugely high percentages of porn actors died of AIDS during that decade, that correlated highly with unprotected receptive anal intercourse (and even higher with drug use, which clouds one's judgement and makes them more likely to engage in unsafe sex). So, it took about a decade for people to figure out what was up, and then for safer-sex guidelines to get established, and then for the gay world to require that the porn industry stop both glorifying by showing unprotected sex, but to stop killing their talent off by doing so. Those norms and industry rules got put in place by the late 80s/early 90s. It took 10s of thousands of deaths and years of struggle, but those rules went into place.
And, in the last 20 years, people have become complacent, and slowly and surely unprotected sex has become increasingly tolerated, accepted, fetishized, celebrated, commodified. You wanna be in gay porn, chances are high, especially at some producers, that you're going to have to be willing to do some barebacking. And, no matter whether people get tested as often and thoroughly as producers say they do (and they DO NOT), these are young guys who are already in a wild life style, having sex for money with various people. Many HIV tests take time for the HIV to become detectible, sometimes months after exposure, and only repeated tests over months reveal that. Does that mean porn actors are not having any sex for months at a time? Are being completely safe and having sex with only ONE other completely chaste person during that time? OF COURSE NOT. So, I suspect quietly, what's been going on is increasing rates of STDS, increasing rates of HIV infection and AIDS, increasing danger for porn actors, higher need for producers to hide these truths from the young eager beavers at the front end of the tallent hopper. And, I'll betcha, higher drug use among many of the actors in order to deal with all this risk and stress (when people are lying to you about the risks to your life of the work, that's stressful).
I can't help but notice in the CF Obit for Sean the idea that his family was somehow proud of his work for CF -- ?!*^# I rather doubt that. If you look at any of the documentaries which have come out about gay porn actors real lives in the last decade or so, people are typically desperate to hide this aspect of their lives from their families, or struggle to get them to somehow understand, which often doesn't happen. As a parent, even a gay parent of a gay kid, I certainly wouldn't want my kid to work in porn, because at a rate higher than most other careers, the people I've met who worked in it had big, big problems in life which seemed work related. Not everyone, but in my limited experience the majority.
So, what’re WE gonna do about it?