Jeff Stryker, the biggest gay porn star of the video era and the man who became a product line

In 1993 a Los Angeles judge looked at a catalogue of rubber replicas of Jeff Stryker's body and said they looked like cordless telephones. By then the star built by John Travis was selling tapes, toys and playing cards to gay and straight buyers alike, and was on his way to the stage.

Los Angeles, summer 1993. In a courtroom of the Superior Court, lawyers argue a breach-of-contract case in front of Judge Eric A. Younger. The plaintiff, a 31-year-old man with his evidence packed in a cardboard box, is the gay porn star Jeff Stryker, and the case is about rubber replicas cast from his body. When his lawyer shows him the replicas pictured in a catalogue, the judge glances down from the bench and remarks that they look like cordless telephones¹.

By then Jeff Stryker was the most famous name in gay video, a star who sold tapes, toys, playing cards and stage shows, and who crossed into straight films without losing his first audience. This is the story of how a young man from Illinois was turned into a brand, what he sold under that name, and why he is still remembered as the biggest gay porn star of the video era.

A photograph in bicycle shorts

The star was invented in the mid-1980s by John Travis, a director who had already spent years in the business. A photographer friend sent him pictures of a young man from southern Illinois posing in spandex cycling shorts. He had been trying to work as a fashion model and had been told he was too short².

Travis talked to him on the phone for a couple of weeks and finally persuaded him to fly to Los Angeles. He liked to tell how their first meeting went: at the airport the newcomer's suitcase, tied with a rope, burst open on the baggage carousel and scattered his clothes².

Over the next six months Travis rebuilt him. He changed his haircut, put him on a workout programme, had his teeth capped and gave him a name. "He moved in with me," Travis told the San Francisco Chronicle in 1999, adding that he had managed the star's career ever since².

Travis knew how stars were made because he had helped make many of them. He had started as a photographer, shot for Brentwood and Falcon, and directed 104 credited titles between 1982 and 2009, later running his own studio, Studio 2000. When he died in January 2017, aged 75, Stryker said of him that "he created everybody that was anybody"³.

Bigger than life

Stryker made his debut in 1986 in Bigger Than Life, and the title became his signature. The same year came Powertool, directed by Travis, in which he plays a man sent to prison for thirty days, and in 1987 Stryker Force².

The films sold a single, consistent character: a well-endowed stud with a low, smooth voice, always in control, always on top. By 1999 the Chronicle could describe him as the highest-paid and most shrewdly packaged personality in the history of gay porn, with about 25 videos to his name².

The secret was scarcity. Most performers of the video boom made dozens of films in a year or two and vanished. Stryker made very few, roughly one a year by his own account, and treated each one as an event. He said he chose his co-stars himself and planned every shoot "like Ben-Hur"⁴.

The strategy paid off in a market built on videotape. A customer ordering by post or renting from a back room could not see the film first, but he knew what a Jeff Stryker tape would give him, and the same titles went on selling for years.

Jamie loves Jeff

Stryker never let one market define him. In 1988 he starred opposite the actress Jamie Summers in Jamie Loves Jeff, a straight film made for Vivid and directed by Paul Thomas, followed by Jamie Loves Jeff II in 1991 and The Heiress. When Vivid reissued the first two on DVD in 2003, the trade magazine AVN called them two of the best-selling tapes in the company's history⁵.

He also made bisexual films and solo tapes, and he described the logic plainly: gay, bisexual, straight and solo were all markets, and it would be foolish to miss any of them. Asked about his own sexuality, he refused the usual labels and called himself "universal", a word the British writer Mark Simpson picked up in 1994 in his study of masculinity as a performance⁶.

The crossover mattered for the history of the business. A star of gay video had become one of the biggest sellers in straight video, and his name on the box sold to both audiences at once.

The body as a product

The name went on everything. A namesake writing in Salon in 1999 listed Jeff Stryker playing cards, T-shirts, greeting cards, a music CD and a branded lubricant⁷.

The best-known product was a dildo cast from the star's own body, sold as the Jeff Stryker Cock and Balls for $59.95⁷. The Chronicle called him the model for the biggest-selling sex toy of all time, a claim nobody has audited but few have disputed².

The toy was the subject of the 1993 case. Stryker had posed for a sculptor so that a plaster cast could be made, and he signed a contract allowing his likeness to be reproduced. His lawsuit against Health Devices Inc. and California Publishers Liquidating Corp. claimed that replicas had been sold without authorisation or payment, and his lawyer said that unpaid royalties might come to more than a million dollars¹.

The companies answered that the products had been a financial flop and that Stryker had already been paid 200,000 dollars. Judge Younger, who called the case "beneath the dignity of the court" and asked the lawyers whether this was really what they had gone to law school for, finally dismissed it on condition that the companies paid Stryker 25,000 dollars. He called his own ruling "horseback jurisprudence" and asked the lawyers to take their exhibits with them when they left¹.

On the inside

At the end of the 1990s Stryker went on stage. Jeff Stryker Does Hard Time, a comedy send-up of the prison films that had made him famous, was conceived by Stryker, the playwright and director Sean Michael and John Travis. It sold out 65 performances at the St. Genesius Theater in Los Angeles before moving to San Francisco, where it opened in February 1999 at the Victoria Theatre on 16th Street, with tickets at 40 and 30 dollars².

The city was covered overnight with posters showing the star behind bars, under the tagline "On the Inside, It's Not Your Back You Have to Watch, It's Your Butt"⁷. There was no hardcore sex on stage. Stryker played the audience, joked about his own image and ended the show naked⁴.

The show toured until 2001, and later in the decade it was followed by A Sophisticated Evening with Jeff Stryker, a comic monologue about his life in adult films. Outside porn he also acted in an Italian horror film, After Death (1989), shot in Manila, and in a 1999 short by the German director Rosa von Praunheim.

He talked openly about the risks of the job. Hard drugs, he said in 1999, were a one-way trip for the performers who took them, and he kept away from them; the way to last was to work little and choose carefully⁴.

An art piece

The art world had noticed him early. In 1991 the French photographers Pierre et Gilles made a portrait of Stryker in their glossy, hand-painted style. He told an interviewer in 1999 that there had been no money involved, that it had been an honour, and that he now hung "in a museum in Europe on a wall. I am an art piece"⁴.

The industry honoured him too. He was inducted into the halls of fame of the AVN Awards and of the GayVN Awards, and in 2000 onto the Wall of Fame of the Grabby Awards in Chicago.

In 2011, at 48, he was still planning new projects, from a reality television show to a magazine spread. The columnist Michael Musto summed up the range of the career in one line: Stryker had tried singing, legitimate acting, a dildo, a lawsuit over the dildo and a self-defence video⁹.

The star of the shop window

Stryker's career belonged to the age of the shop and the mailbox. He signed tapes and books at Circus of Books in West Hollywood, the shop whose owners distributed gay video across America, and he appears in Rachel Mason's documentary Circus of Books (2019), one of the voices recalling the years when that small store was at the centre of the gay video trade¹⁰.

What he built there has not been repeated. The stars of the internet age became famous through free clips and social media, and the stars of the creator economy sell to their own followers. Stryker was a star of a different kind: rare, managed, packaged and sold like a product line, from the tape to the toy. The wider story of the business that made him is told in the chapter on VHS to DVD.