Porn Legend Tom Chase Is Nearly 60 And Wants To Make More Films
The 90s Falcon and 2000s Colt star had a years-long breakdown due to paternal rejection but has had a spiritual rebirth in Portland, Oregon.
Happy midsummer, Caftan readers! I hope you are having a good one despite the bad things that continue to swirl around us in the U.S. and elsewhere. It is so important that Democrats win as many races as possible this November, and here is a recent New York magazine piece on the crucial races to not only watch—but, if you can, to donate to and/or even canvass for if you have the means and the time. In late October/earlyNovember, I will probably head with some friends again to Pennsylvania, as we did in 2020, to canvass for Democratic Senate candidate John Fetterman. But as I write this, I leave in less than 24 hours for three weeks in GREECE, where I’ve never been. I’m excited! I’m also going to try to be off my laptop for the longest time since I can’t even remember, and to try to READ READ READ, including Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, which, believe it or not, I’ve yet to tackle.
But enough about that! I’m actually so excited to have interviewed for this Caftan Chronicles my first porn star—nineties Falcon and 2000s Colt legend Tom Chase. I reached out to him because, yes, I am a big porn fan and I’ve long been a big Tom Chase fan, because he always seemed to me, in addition to being a very competent hung dom top (at least in the Falcon years), kind of a nice regular guy, almost like your friendly, affable high school gym teacher you had a huge secret closeted crush on. But more so, I think porn is more important in the lives of gay men than we give it credit for. It’s where many of us actually see what gay sex looks like for the first time, what the different types and tropes of gay desire are, and in a sense it’s where many of us actually kind of learn how to have gay sex—at least in the technical, if not necessarily the emotional, sense. And I am also interested in sex work as a career and how different sex workers go about their careers—either haphazardly and messily, or with intention and thoughtfulness. Tom (whose real name, Tom Moore, he is open about) is definitely in the latter category, as you’ll see. He had a vision for the arc of his porn career that he executed, and he intends to have another chapter. But what I did not expect necessarily was that he would be so forthcoming about a years-long breakdown he had in the 2000s and the 2010s, and how he literally cried his way through it, largely without professional help—that, too, was a conscious choice, although not one I’d recommend—to come out the other side. I think what I took away from his story is that not even someone who was a kind of gay physical ideal was spared the pain of parental and social rejection that so many of us gay men—perhaps more so on the older side?—experience as children and teenagers.
I do want to note that this is a very sexually graphic interview, so please proceed with that in mind. And I’ve made the choice to, well, censor the part of Tom he is perhaps most known for, because if there is some kind of Substack algorithm out there, I don’t want it shunting The Caftan Chronicles into a porn cul-de-sac. And with that, I give you Tom Chase, to whom I am very thankful for the three separate hours-long sessions he spent with me on the phone, always being thoughtful and open about whatever I asked him. He took his porn career seriously and was able to talk about it with detail and depth, which I really appreciated. So here we go! Oh! But before we do, I want to say, as always, thanks to those of you who support Caftan with your $5/month subscription, and if you have the unpaid version, please consider, if you can, doing the $5 version—it really helps me continue carving out the time for this labor of love!
Tim: Tom, thank you so much for doing a Caftan talk with me! So...to start...you moved to Portland, Oregon, in 2012, correct?
Tom: Yes. Prior to that, I was in Dallas [where he grew up]. There was a turning point in my life where I was learning how to destroy my ego in order to be free. Basically everything in life I'd attached to emotionally I had to let go of, or I was going to die on the inside. I saw my parents do that, by living out of duty and not for their own happiness. So in 2012 this feeling became so profound that I had to leave Dallas so I could dissolve, and when I say that, I'm talking about a nervous breakdown. I did what a wounded animal would do, which is go lie down under a bush until I was healed. I realized that my unhappiness was connected to my immediate family, which had become toxic. My parents were quite wealthy but my childhood was unhappy because it was so rule-oriented, and of course my being gay didn't fit into that. I also discovered that my father was a narcissist.
Tim: How did you discover that?
Tom: I didn't have a therapist. My conscience was my guide through five years of deep crying every single day, 2010 to 2015, not stopping until I went to bed. I'd sleep well, wake up and do it all over again. After five years, I'd cried out all of my pain and sorrow and had let go of my guilt, shame, anger and resentments. I let go of bad habits, actions and thoughts that got in the way of my joy. All my friends and family had to go.
Tim: All of them?
Tom: Yes. Any friend who truly loved me would meet me on the other side of [my transformation] and none did except for one, Gordon, my current roommate, who stayed by my side, so he is the first friend of this new chapter of my life.
All the people in the past were doing the same things and thinking the same way I was—drinking and doing drugs, believing things that aren't true or learning not to believe at all.
Tim: Some of what you're talking about sounds very Buddhist, letting go of the self. Did you get into Buddhism or meditation?
Tom: No. It all happened organically. When I'd had enough of being unhappy and living paycheck to paycheck, I surrendered myself to my higher power, which is love, to heal my life.
Tim: Okay—let's get back to this in a bit, but now I want to go all the way back. So you are 57 now?
Tom: Yes. I was born in Columbus, Ohio. Both my parents were from Oklahoma, high school sweethearts, the basketball captain and the homecoming queen who fell in love and married. My father went on to become a renowned pediatrician. When I was five, we moved to Highland Park, a very wealthy part of Dallas. I knew I was gay at five. Homosexuality is the most predominant theme in my life. When my father would take us to the Y to swim, it was required then that you swim nude—so I'm seeing all kinds of men naked and am being turned on right and left. But I'm not aware that the turn-on is disgusting to most people. When I was seven, I had a friend spend the night. He got a boner and humped me and got in my crack. I liked it a lot and I didn't feel badly about it.
But then in Highland Park, I transfer into my new school at eight and immediately get called a faggot on my first day—not because I acted like one but because I wouldn't fight.
I had a major break with my dad early on. When I was five, I gave my dad a stuffed watermelon pillow for his birthday. He took me into the other room and said, "Don't you ever buy me something like this again." So right then, I knew this was not a man to trust or learn from. I knew what he did was wrong. So I decided I would not let him raise me. The wall went up on him and he could never reach me again. I survived because I behaved myself until I could move out after age 18. I hung out with my mom, but over time I realized she loved him more than her own children, so I put the wall up on her, too. I was on my own. I never went to them for advice.
In elementary school, I got called a faggot every day. But I knew they were correct, so even though I didn't say "Yes, I am," I also didn't deny it. By high school, I wasn't popular but I was respected. I was a gymnast.
Then in ninth grade, a kid named Chris moves to town and becomes my friend. He was clearly gay, very effeminate, getting teased left and right. I do not like effeminate men and I never have. I've examined this within myself for years as to why. I thought maybe there was an effeminate side to me. But I just don't like it.
Tim: You mean you're not sexually attracted to effeminate men or you don't like them generally? And why do you think it bothers you so much? Do you think you simply internalized the deep anti-effeminacy [in men] strain that runs through society, even more so then than now?
Tom: I don't care if you're effeminate if you're my friend. And I vote for the rights of everybody. But a lot of effeminate men come on to me because I'm what they want. But I don't want them. So Chris was everything that put me off. It's embarrassing to hang out with someone who swishes around. But we became friends anyway, although not sexually. And I adapted to his effeminacy. And I learned that he was not such a bad guy. We became best friends out of survival. We were tagged as gay in school. We avoided each other in the hallway and hung out after school. But then he got a car and we decided to go to this gay bar called The Village Station. We're underage with braces and acne, but the owner let us in anyway.
Tim: Oh wow, so you started going to gay venues early. Do you remember watching your first porn?
Tom: Yes, at Chris' house. His stepfather's [straight] porn movies. We saw The Story of O, Behind the Green Door, Deep Throat. Of course I was turned on by the guys. The first gay porn I saw was [1988's] Cruisin' with Joe Cade. [Tim: Tom and Joe later married in 1998 and were together until 2000.]
Tim: So when is your first gay sex?
Tom: When I was 16, I met a hot waiter who was 28. I show up at his doorstep with two steaks and tell him he's hot. And we date for two years, so that was my high school boyfriend.
Tim: Wow, so he was 28 and you were in high school. In retrospect, do you think that was wrong of him?
Tom: No. I was a boy who wanted to sleep with men. I would have slept with my gymnastics coach if I could have. When I discovered NAMBLA [the controversial North American Man-Boy Love Association, which apparently barely exists anymore], it made sense to me. An older man with a younger boy doesn't disturb me, because I know that if the boy is into it, it's a very good maturing situation for him. It's definitely what I wanted. I wasn't letting my dad raise me, so as I entered into homosexuality, I needed the advice and guidance of older men. I never liked people my own age. So around this time I meet a man who suggests that I do porn when he sees how big my dick is. Up to that point, I thought everyone's dick was the same size.
Tim: Yes, I did want to ask you about your relationship with your own dick, because it has been such a defining feature of your porn career. How do you feel about it? Grateful for it?