Jonathon Rosen

The Icarus Voice: I think I can do this!

The Daedalus Voice: I told you that you couldn’t do this.

My Mother’s Voice: Why must you do this?

My Father’s Voice: Do this and you’ll be sorry.

My Sister’s Voice: This is going to kill Mom.

The Ghost of Genocide Past: Your grandparents didn’t die in ovens so you can do this.

The Ghost of Genocide Future: One day when they’re forcing you and your children into ovens, you’ll regret having done this.

The Derogatory Scholar/Marshall McLuhan from Annie Hall: You don’t know enough to do this. You don’t know enough about anything. To do this, you should have gone to college. You should have gone to graduate school. You should have gone to the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. You know who knows more than you? Everyone. One of those people, those people who know everything, they can do this. But you? Please. Stick to (insert loathsome writing job here: i.e., copywriting, sitcoms, etc.).

The Garrison Keillor Writer’s Almanac Voice: This thing you’re doing is not nearly serious enough. You should do something more serious. Do you know how I pronounce “literature”? I pronounce it “litch-ri-chur.” Litch. That’s because I’m serious, and books are serious, and you are not serious. Make this more serious. If you do enough serious things, for a seriously long time, I might someday mention your birthday. But this? This is not of birthday-mentioning caliber. Keep this up and I won’t even mention the day you die.

The Bombastic Post-Publication TV Interviewer Voice: What do you say to people who might say that other people said that you wrote this just for shock value?

The Ron Jeremy Voice: Wouldn’t you rather be watching porno than doing this?

The Joel Gott Cabernet Voice: Wouldn’t you rather be drinking wine than doing this?

The Marijuana Voice: Doing this would be so much easier if you were stoned.

The New York Times Book Review Voice: I don’t know what this is, but I know what it isn’t; it isn’t the voice of the author’s generation, it isn’t an important new work, it isn’t a bold new voice, it isn’t the future of American fiction, and it doesn’t limn anything; I’ve read it twice now, and it doesn’t limn a fucking thing.

The Huffington Poster Voice: I didn’t like this very much, not as much as I like Wittgenstein, and I didn’t like the last thing he did either, or the thing before that. I went to college. I think he should write more about Palestinians. Why doesn’t he write more about Palestinians? You know who I’ve read? Wittgenstein. That was in college, where I went. I have a book I wrote, and it’s better than this, much better, but of course the publishing industry is too afraid of it and so they won’t publish it because they’re scared of it, I scare them, but soon the dead-tree industries will be gone and we won’t be subjected to books like this and we’ll get better books, that aren’t this. Books like mine. (Insert irritating, desperately hip quotation signature line here.)

The Writer’s Digest How-To-Write-Books Voice: To do this, you should start with an ending. You should end with a beginning. You should start at the middle and write backwards. You should start backwards and write sideways. You need a hook. You need a good story. You need a stronger theme. Nope, nope—now the theme is too strong. You need to start over. You need a more dimensional villain. You need a more dimensional protagonist. You need to know more about your character. Is he tall? Is he short? Where did he go to school? Is he well-hung? What’s his favorite ice cream? What makes him break out in hives? What gives him explosive diarrhea? What’s that rash on his neck? Is he for or against a two-state solution? What kind of car does he drive and what’s the bumper sticker and which scent air freshener does he hang in the car, or is it not a hanging one at all but rather one of those little plastic bottles that sits on the dash? Until you know all of that, this is just never going to work.

The Voice of American Express: This better sell well, you’re carrying a tremendous amount of debt.

My Publisher’s Voice: This was done once, and it didn’t sell very well.

Phillip Roth’s Voice: I probably did this once already.

My Psychiatrist’s Voice: This should be more about your mother.

James Joyce’s Voice: This should be more incomprehensible.

David Foster Wallace’s Voice: This should be longer and have more footnotes.

Dave Eggers’ Voice: This should be more socially relevant and have a funny index.

The Prize Committee Voice: This should be more about a dying old man, lying in bed and looking back on his life.

Adolf Hitler’s Voice: This is finishing what I started.

The Ron Jeremy Voice: I really can’t believe you’re doing this instead of watching pornography.

The Fuck This Fucking Shit Voice: Fuck this fucking shit.

And the next morning, once again, there is the damned desk, and the damned chair, and Icarus, that pain in the ass, and the riotous ridiculous racket begins all over again.

Lucas—a porn actor and director, and founder of the New York-based gay porn production company Lucas Entertainment—sees his new film Men of Israel as a tool, if you will, to promote tourism, at least among gay men. Before you laugh this off, know that it’s happened before, when the Bel Ami studio’s movies helped turn Prague into a major gay destination soon after the Iron Curtain fell, or when porn director Kristen Bjorn’s Australian trilogy put Sydney on the gay map nearly 20 years ago. The Russian-born Lucas has been ratcheting up the heat for weeks in anticipation of the film’s release tomorrow. His website—MenOfIsraelXXX.com—features still photos of the actors and excerpted video clips, as well as text explaining the performers’ biographies and Lucas’s Zionist motivations for making the film.

Journalists from The Atlantic to Out Magazine to Yediot Aharonot have taken notice, deeming the project a landmark because it is the first gay adult film to feature an “all-Israeli” cast. Fair enough. But they’ve missed the larger story: Men of Israel is a landmark because it is the first gay porn film to feature an all-Jewish cast.

Jewish involvement in the adult industry has been widely documented over the years. And even though that involvement usually happens behind the scenes, where viewers never notice, or gets erased when Jewish performers adopt deracinated porn names, there have been some openly Jewish stars in straight porn. Nina Hartley, Joanna Angel, Heather Pink, and other women have succeeded without hiding their backgrounds in interviews. A smaller number of Jewish men have done the same in straight porn, although they often play their parts with tongue in cheek. (Think of uber-nebbish Ron Jeremy, or Harry Reems—born Herbert Streicher—whose on-screen persona was as close to Groucho Marx as it was to fellow ’70s super-stud John Holmes.)

But in gay porn, where there’s less room for nebbishes and clowns, openly Jewish men have been virtually absent or invisible. In fact, the only one in recent memory is, well, Michael Lucas.

That’s not to say that there haven’t been Jewish guys in gay films. Just two years ago, for instance, Dror Barak made it big as a hirsute hunk making movies for Raging Stallion Studios; but Barak—who worked in the Israeli Consulate in New York until news of his other career broke—performed under the name Roman Ragazzi. (It seemed like not much has changed since I came out 20 years earlier and got this bit of advice from an older Jewish friend: If you want to date a guy, tell him you’re Jewish, but if you want to get laid, tell him you’re Italian.)

In Men of Israel, the guys are all Israeli, all Jewish, and they’re not hiding it. Sure, their names are probably fakes—no parents would name their son Morr Foxx unless they knew he’d grow up to be a gay porn star. But at least their names sound plausibly Israeli, plausibly Jewish: Matan Shalev, Avi Dar, Naor Tal.

So will Lucas’s self-proclaimed landmark film change things? For Israel, perhaps. The director’s goal is to help viewers realize that Israel is a place of unique beauty and history, he says, but also a place that’s not so different from Prague or Sydney or Palm Springs— all places where hot men have sex with each other on film, and all nice places to take a perfectly innocent gay-cation. To that extent, the project seems likely to succeed.

As for Jewish men, the question remains open. Will Jewish men become a religion-based fetish category for consumers of gay porn, who can already choose narrow types of men to watch based on their race or ethnicity (Latinos, African-Americans) or age (daddies, college boys) or body type (big bears, skinny twinks)? Will their Jewishness become a signifier for a certain type of sexual prowess or desirability? Will Italian guys start wearing mezuzahs and telling people they’re Jewish—and will that make them seem more virile, better endowed, hotter?

I’ll believe it when I see it. It’s possible that Men of Israel will herald a golden age for Jewish guys in gay porn, but it’s just as possible that the few “openly Jewish” performers who have made it in gay porn have gotten away with it because they are still somehow “exotic” foreigners—Israelis with unfamiliar names or, like Lucas, Russian born —rather than the Jewish boy next door. I’ll know that Jewish guys have truly arrived when I see a magazine called Jewish Inches, or a DVD titled Dirty Jews, or a blond, blue-eyed Midwestern performer who adopts a name like Lance Bornstein or Rod Horowitz.