THE FIRST TIME I saw him was on a giant screen at a bathhouse in the summer of 1984. Sitting on a carpeted banquette, with only a white towel wrapped around me, I watched him climb a tree to rescue a skydiver tangled in a parachute. He and the skydiver had sex in the tree, of course. The room filled with men was transfixed by the screen. Their faces, illuminated by the flickering light, looked up in awe, as if they were watching a mothership land.
"Who is that?" I asked the guy sitting near me.
"That's Al Parker," he whispered. "He's a fucking legend."
Everyone's focus was on the tan, ripped, bearded man on the screen. With his dark piercing eyes and chiseled features, he emanated an unapologetic, raw, sexual charisma that I hadn't seen modelled before, not among men, not in movies or television, and certainly not in Utah, where I'd grown up. The spell in the room broke when the credits rolled. The other guys in towels returned to wandering the bathhouse.
"I'd love to paint him," I remember thinking.
It wasn't hard to find Al Parker videos. In many stores, he had his own section. I studied him, his expressions, the way he moved, the way he made sucking cock a religious experience. Maybe I thought that because he reminded me of Jesus. I wanted to be like him. I stopped bleaching my hair and got a shorter cut. I tried growing a beard, but it made me look Amish.
Almost everyone in the public eye—celebrities, politicians—were still in the closet. Gay culture had just entered the nightmare of the AIDS crisis. Living in LA, I worked at the Pleasure Chest, a store that sold biker jackets, leather chaps, boots, hankies (which came with a pocket-sized foldout hanky code), paddles, tit clamps, magazines, and videos. It was a different world back then. Hanky codes and most porn magazines have faded out of existence along with the stores that sold them.
One day, I was holding a 20-inch double dildo over my shoulder when I saw someone's reflection in the glass case. "Can I help you?" I asked.
I raised my head and it was him, Al Parker. "Poppers and one of those cock rings," he said. His close-cropped beard revealed naturally rosy cheeks, and his tight jeans accentuated his crotch.
"Size?" I stammered.
"Large," he said.