Year-End Interview: Following Up with Porn Legend Tom Chase, My Most Popular Interview So Far

He was also my personal favorite interview so far, so I asked him to do another one to close out 2023. And he didn't disappoint. (It gets graphic.)

I asked Tom if he could get me a photo of himself in a Santa hat and a jockstrap—and he graciously met me halfway.

Happy holiday season, Caftan readers. To start, I want to thank all of you for the support in 2023, paid or unpaid. Caftan has had some big growth this year, with some great interviews under its belt (can you belt a caftan?), and I’m particularly grateful for blogs like Kenneth Walsh’s Kenneth in the 212 and Matthew Rettenmund’s Boyculture that have picked up my interviews and brought more readers my way.

So now I will share some internal data with you: Of the nearly 30 interviews I’ve run since starting Caftan in August 2021, none of them—none of them—have done as well as the one I did with ’90s-’00s porn legend Tom Chase. Most of the interviews get something like 2,000 reads—Tom’s, from Summer 2022, got nearly 25,000, with my chat with Too Close for Comfort’s Jim J Bullock coming in second at 18,000. I even learned recently that the interview with Tom spawned a whole thread of its own on the gay gossip site Datalounge. To be honest, though, I’m not surprised, because, in addition to Tom being an icon of gay men like myself who watched Falcon videos in the 1990s, the interview was everything I wanted a Caftan interview to be—really thoughtful and intensely self-analytical but also uncompromisingly open about self-esteem, childhood trauma, mental illness and recovery, aging, body image and sex, sex, sex. Tom is that rare kind of person who makes a great interview subject—someone who can talk about themselves at great length and ease but, rather than being an insufferable narcissist, is actually a really nice guy.

So, I figured, why not ask him to chat again? And he agreed. We reconnected right after he’d had a major facelift, which he posted about on Facebook in great detail, so we had that to talk about among many other things. (You might want to read the original interview with Tom first, as we pick up on a lot of things we first discussed there in the new one. It also has more photos.) I also had a great conversation with him about masturbation, which I’ve been wanting to have a Caftan conversation about for some time. (My interviewing philosophy: if it doesn’t make you cringe a bit, it’s not interesting enough! lol). It was so fun to talk to him about what desire, fantasy and sexual connection mean to us at this stage in our lives. (Trigger warning right here that our conversation gets really graphic at points.) I’m really grateful to Tom. He talks here, as he did the first time, about intending to do porn again, and, partly because he’s fairly quiet on social media, I hope these interviews pull him back into the spotlight a bit in preparation for that. I am totally here for gay porn featuring men 60 and over, fucking either one another or younger guys.

Before we get to Tom, I just want to reiterate my gratitude for the Caftan support. I’ve been a working journalist for about 30 years, and this is the first time I’ve been able to do interviews with exactly who I wanted (assuming I could get them…you have no idea how many gents I’ve reached out to and not heard back from…paging you, Stephen Burrows!), talking about exactly what I wanted to talk about. I will tell you a bit about how my mind works as I seek these interviews: The past many years, I’ve been obsessed with basically unknown male Broadway chorus dancers from the 1970s and 1980s, seemingly all of whom have died of AIDS. I can’t even tell you how many times I’ve watched these two clips in particular:

I believe the two dancers with Liza on “I Gotcha!” are Spencer Henderson and Jimmy Roddy, both of whom died of AIDS. If any of you know any Broadway dancers from this period who somehow survived, please drop me a line at timmurphynycwriter@gmail.com and let me know. I am dying to interview them about that era. I don’t know why, but there is something about the deepest gay ephemera from past decades that I just get absolutely obsessed with until I can find a living thread, someone who was there, to talk about it.

And your support has allowed me to do that. There is so much darkness in the world right now as we go into what is supposed to be a season of lights. I wish I could say I’m able to shut it all out, but I’m not. That’s why I try to reserve Caftan as a little oasis of gay joy—for myself and for all of you.

I’ll see you in January! Meanwhile, as we approach Christmas, Hanukah, Kwanzaa and the Solstice, I wish you some light, some love, some warmth, some fellowship, some grace and, most of all, some GAIETY as we go forward on our troubled planet. xTim

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Tom early in his porn career.

Tim: Tom, it is so good to talk to you again. I want to start by asking you about your current mental health, because one of the comments I saw most frequently after our last interview was that people could not believe you suffered through such a major depression without help for so many years—that, in fact, you thought it was necessary to do it that way to come out the other end of it.

Tom: Well, because of the work I've done, the effort has paid off. Now, every day, I'm happier than I was the day before. I'm two years out of that dark work and I'm thankful that I did it, although in the throes of it, I'd never have told someone else to do it because it's just too much. Maybe I had the rare constitution for it.

Tim: A big part of it was self-imposed isolation, right?

Tom: Right. There was no guidance and I'm glad that there wasn't. I know you feel differently about this. [Tim: because I had expressed concern that he'd not sought outside help for his long depression.] But the inner message I was getting was: "No, in order to do this work, you have to walk this alone, confronting suicidal thoughts, fears, guilt, my own self-loathing—that kind of stuff—without the jargon of therapy. Because I had to know what I was made of in order to overcome those things and emerge on the other side.

Tim: Again, were you in total isolation?

Tom: No, I had a roommate, Gordon, who is now my husband.

Tom and Gordon

Tim: Yes, I remember Gordon from the last interview.

Tom: We got married last year. But this work I'm describing started in 2002 and went on for 20 years, from Palm Springs to Dallas to Portland. I mostly stopped making films in that time because you can't go to a job if you're crying ten hours a day. And part of the inner work I was doing was cutting ties with people and starting over. That's when the worst of the stuff happened. But when I cut ties with family and friends and Gordon and I moved to Portland knowing nobody, that was the best because nobody could interfere or placate me or try to give me comfort during that release of emotion—of rage and anger and resentment.

Tim: So, currently—?

Tom: I've done all the work. Part of it was extracting myself from religion. It was about confronting religion as it happens in our society and as it affected me as a child with the antigay thing. So over 20 years ago, I gave myself to God as a gay adult man who'd never gone to church, even as a child. It was very organic. I think that's why my system didn't want a parent, friend, therapist or pastor guiding me [through the dark period].

Tim: So how do you feel now on a daily basis?

Tom: In order to get through the last ten years, to keep my head clear and not go nuts, I had to learn to pay attention to my breathing like someone meditating. So that is now a habit all day long. I don't set time aside to focus on my breath [the way many people meditate for x minutes a day] because I'm doing that all day. Even as I speak right now, I'm paying attention to my inhalations and exhalations. I choose now to stay peaceful moment by moment. Prior to now, I wasn't giving my breath the importance it deserved. I was giving my sexual conquering more priority. So after all this dark work of letting go of my ego, destroying it—now I have peace, and as long as I pay attention to that, I'll make good decisions. When I don't, I'm off in thought, like, if somebody sideswipes me in a car, would I turn right or left? Those are the kind of thoughts I have when I don't pay attention to my breath. 

Tim: Okay. So what has marriage to Gordon been like?

Tom: I've always been opposed to marriage, even though I've been married twice, including when I married Joe Cade in 1998.

But that was because Joe wanted to be married and I wanted to make him happy. But I wasn't happy, and that's why we're not friends anymore, though we're civil. 

As for Gordon, I met him in 2008 and he fell in love with me, as a lot of guys do, because I represent something to people that they look for.

Tim: What is that? Classical masculinity?

Tom: Yes, that's what I mean—a classic, muscular, good-looking but not too good-looking guy with a good job and an education. A package. I met him in 2008 at probably the lowest point in my life, training clients in the gym of a gay bathhouse in Dallas. People knew who I was there because Dallas is my hometown. I was poor and in my midforties when most of my friends were peaking in their corporate jobs. I had nothing. My parents, though wealthy, wouldn't indulge me. They said I could live with them but I was getting my food at a food bank. People who knew me could see me eating at the free meal place, the Medicaid cafeteria, where nobody would sit at my table. They were gossiping about me in Oaklawn, the gay neighborhood. Everyone knew that Tom Chase was back in town and had hit the skids, training clients at the bathhouse. That doesn't fly in Dallas. That's D-list—which is okay with me.