Michael Lucas: The Porn King of New York -- New York Magazine. I bolded and underlined all things that I basically think are ridiculous. And the annoyance doesn't even come from jealousy, lol, it just comes from how stupid gay people act sometimes.
It is obvious, upon stepping out of the elevator into the hall of Lucas’s Chelsea building, which apartment is his. All the doors have traditional peepholes and push bells, save for the one that has a large lion’s head with a ring in its mouth.
Lucas lives in the multilevel apartment with his boyfriend of five years, Richard Winger, a 50-year-old Austrian international investor; their enormous Great Pyrénées dog, Bianca; and a long-haired Peruvian guinea pig, a local delicacy that Lucas smuggled back from a recent vacation in his carry-on. He gives a tour while nibbling on fresh dates from a silver chalice. In the kitchen, he motions to a Richard Avedon photograph of a nude Nureyev, his penis almost touching his knee. “A lot of people think I look like him.” Lucas tells me of problems with their neighbor, the actor Frank Whaley, saying that Whaley preferred to take the stairs rather than ride the elevator with him. Lucas confronted Whaley’s wife about this. “I said, ‘Your husband is a homophobe,’ and she said, ‘Don’t you dare call him a homophobe, you who are doing your movies.’ And I said, ‘At least I can afford not to do my laundry and you and your husband are running around with buckets of clothes soaked in piss from your babies.’ More recently, a crew was with him at the Gay VN Awards in March when he accepted the trophy for Best Film for Dangerous Liaisons, which substitutes Chelsea for eighteenth-century France (not as difficult a switch as you might think). Lucas gave the following speech: “Thank you for those who voted for me and fuck you to those who didn’t. I’d like to thank my chauffeur, my pilot … ” Many in the industry-only crowd hissed. Some chucked ice. “You don’t want to make a boring documentary,” explains Lucas, “so I got them reacting. It was like a bunch of dogs barking. They were throwing ice from their empty booze glasses—that’s a reaction from alcoholics.”
Lucas’s relationship with his own talent is often just as tempestuous as his feuds with the competition can be. This summer, one of his best-known models, Bruce Beckham, left his stable on bad terms. “All porn actors are incredibly insecure,” says Lucas, who practically requires his stars to come in for a monthly weigh-in as if they worked at a fifties airline. “This is the No. 1 thing that unites them. They are desperate for attention. They have no patience. They are big-time liars, and just not together.” I remind him that he himself is a porn star. He insists that these traits don’t apply to him.