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Everything Is Going Down, But The Word Of God……This interview with ex-porn star turn pastor Bobby Blake, is an eye opener if nothing else, and very interesting. I cannot believe he thinks that his journey in the world of porn was all part of God’s plan for him. WHY?
He now lives in Atlanta where I have seen him out often and his behavior is not one of someone that is no longer in his adult industry, but seems to be just as active as he was in the pass. It is rumored that the preacher turned porn star now preacher again is a active escort if rumors are true. However, it would not be the least bit surprising and the black church and homosexual combination is an explosive one and far more common then anyone wants to admit.
For an entire generation the name Bobby Blake became synonymous within the world of pornography. Having starred in over 100 gay, bisexual and multi-racial porno flicks Blake quickly became an international sensation fulfilling the erotic needs and dreams of both gay and straight audiences alike.
Now retired the bisexual porn star reveals that underneath his rock hard muscles, insatiable sexualized persona and celebrated sexual, physical endowment exist an extremely conservative preacher from Tennessee who ironically is vehemently against gay marriage and is considering a new career in criminal justice. So just how does Bobby Blake reconcile his Christ-centered theology, sexual orientation, and pornographic exploits? Checkout Elder Edgar Gaines Facebook page where he shares more about his new life in ministry or his returning to life in ministry or the combination of the two now!
Find out the answers in a interview with Bobby about his book coming out below:
“My Life in Porn: the Bobby Blake Story charts the adult film superstar’s meteoric rise to fame and offers a fascinating, funny, and sometimes disturbing insider’s portrait of the adult film entertainment industry. It is also the story of one man’s spiritual struggle, the quest for a meaningful life, for love, and the need for community.
“As the most celebrated black gay porn star in the business, Bobby Blake has seen and been through it all. From his roots as a bisexual black male in the Deep South dealing with a troubled mother, criminal brother, an absentee father, and his own life-threatening health problems, to his early experiences in the porno industry where drugs, racism, and other obstacles presented constant challenges, Blake has come through the other side as exactly the man he wants to be.
“In his tale of a man who went from preacher to porn star and back into the ministry, of sex workers balancing ‘normal’ romantic relationships, the self-destructive behavior of many of his peers, and more, Blake offers a fresh and unique account of his life and a highly-revealing behind-the-scenes picture of the adult film industry. It is a rough ride at times, but an unquestionably exciting one!”
As I was sitting on a beach in Los Angeles with my best friend Rikki Beadle-Blair, being (in my case unsuitable) background artistes for the Black Gay Pride sequence in the finale to season 2 of Noah’s Arc, we were approached by Patrik-Ian Polk, the show’s director and creator, who held his cell-phone out to me and said, ‘Speak to Bobby Blake.’ I took the phone and stumbled through an awkward conversation with the legendary – not to say notorious – porn-star, who was looking for a writer to work with him on his autobiography. Patrik – who knew Bobby slightly – had suggested before that I reach out to Mr Blake, though being English, I had never done so.
After our talk I had a proper think about it. I’d seen dozens of Bobby’s films (he only made films for three years, but worked relentlessly throughout that time), and here was a chance to turn this mis-spent time to account. I knew from interviews I’d read that he had a kind of marriage to a fellow black gay porn-star, Flex-Deon Blake, that they were both lay ministers, and that he’d been a pastor before doing porn, which is not the usual way round. My journalistic impulses are nil, but I knew there had to be a story there. So I wrote a sensible email to Bobby pitching for the job, mentioning my award-winning novel, my interest in gay African-American life, my having seen many of his films and so on, and we agreed informally to give it a go. He mentioned he’d tried working with someone else (a straight woman) but it hadn’t worked out. I made sure to avoid reading anything she’d written (if she had written anything), and arranged that I would interview him by phone, taping the interviews, (we talked for around 16 hours), and would then turn them into a book, which he, of course, would work over to his satisfaction. As I was writing it in its entirety, I insisted I be named as co-writer.
We avoided contracts initially. I worried his life-story wouldn’t warrant a whole book, and didn’t want to be stuck with trying to make dull material work. Bobby’s quite an opaque person, and I didn’t know how self-revealing he would be prepared to be – and in that context how problematic his marked religiosity would be, as when he revisited key moments in his life he would rework them in increasingly Biblical terms until they became impersonal parables more than personal revelations. It was when he admitted breaking an alcoholic lover’s arms (after the lover had violently attacked him) that I knew I had a book: that Bobby was prepared to expose a mass of raw nerves.
It was fun to inhabit and channel Bobby’s voice, and I became oddly protective of him as I wrote the book. I tried to use his exact wording as much as possible. Second-favourite was synthesising different versions of events together in the most engaging and revealing way; and then some larger boiling-down was required, and here and there the creation of transitional elements. The internet was a godsend for filling in contextualising detail – for instance about the history of Orange Mound, the African-American neighbourhood in Memphis where he grew up: the sort of information that twenty years ago would have been a nightmare to dig up, and pointless to ask one’s interlocutor to research for you because it’s just not their job.
Bobby sent early chapters to his pal E Lynn Harris to check that the prose was up to snuff, and evidently it was, because we moved forward quickly. The publishers were easy to work with, if understandably uneasy about litigation, particularly around accusations of drug-abuse (not by Bobby, who is extremely Puritannical), though we had an awkward series of exchanges around religion. Our editor was a liberal gay Christian, and Bobby’s Old Testament and at times illiberal Hellfire views at times didn’t sit too well with him. Bobby (wisely) never asked me about my religious views, and perhaps my atheism made it simpler for me to present his views, uninflected, as he expressed them. Occasionally friends would ask if I challenged him about anything, but I didn’t: it’s his autobiography: his views. As a writer, my challenge was to convey Bobby’s voice and put forward as coherent a picture of his views as possible without over-interpreting them or putting them in service of a philosophy other than his. I only challenged him about his age, because had it been what he first said, he would have come of age in the middle of the AIDS crisis, and that wasn’t reflected in how he and those around him acted or thought.
Bobby would sometimes show me emails he got from fans (with names tactfully deleted), and I was fascinated by the way they lurched from praising him as a fine figure of a man, a role model, an escort they’d like to hire if he came to town, a man of faith, and someone who would understand how being abused by their childhood pastor had screwed them up sexually. Those aspects of him that people consider fragmented (and who want him to say and believe things in the way they say and believe them – which has been one criticism of the book) are in fact a truthful mirror of the mentalities of those mostly African-American gay and bisexual men who write to him.
I met Bobby a year after the book was done, when a sponsor flew him over to London for a long weekend, and it was strange to see in the flesh someone one has seen do fairly extreme things sexually on film, or online. He was interviewed by the photographer and activist Ajamu, and on another day by blogger and former pornstar Ras Conrad, and was charming and amiable while embodying Quentin Crisp’s interview principle to a T: ‘You say what you’ve come to say, nothing else.’
The smaller image below is what Bobby originally wanted for the cover, in place of the publisher’s original choice (which is the one actually used). Somehow the file got lost, though a black-and-white version of it was used as a frontispiece. I found this tiny colour version online, and added it here.
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