Gay Video Review	Gay Video Reviews Archive

I Live for Sex
Rating: 2 Stars
Produced, written and directed by Toby Ross. Starring Nark Holland, Ajax Styros, Chuck, Bart Braden, Adam Ross, Jeff Devin, Butch Hardon, and Ryan Wagner.
How to order

Toby Ross belongs to that 70s generation of gay porn directors who trained as film-makers and first worked in film. Like Fred Halsted, Artie Bressan, and Joe Gage, he once aspired to create erotic theatrical features with artistic merit. In a career that has endured for over 30 years, he has created such classics as Boys of the Slums and A Family Affair.

One of a handful of his peers to have made the transition from film to video, Ross continues to turn out about two videos a year, often under the pseudonym Butch Detroit. Because I Live for Sex, his latest, is clearly the work of a talented pro, it's too bad it doesn't quite work.

View our poll archive

The video is set in a four-story building whose ground floor houses an adult bookstore. From the windows of his apartment on the top floor, Jeff Devin cruises the building superintendent, Ramon (Butch Hardon) and lures him upstairs. In the sex club on the floor below, "Carl and Bill from Wisconsin" (Bart Braden and Adam Ross) have a fantasy encounter as cop and drug dealer.

Finally, in the peepshow maze on the second floor, the power dynamics of cruising are explored in a long, complex sequence that could have had the grit and veracity of a Boyd McDonald narrative if Ross had stuck to the cinéma vérité techniques that serve him best. The performances of the two focal players, Mark Holland and Ajax Styros, are sabotaged by arty filigree: pretentious voice-overs, super-impositions, color manipulation, black-and-white inserts, stop-motion, negative images, and split-screen effects. It's difficult to be aroused by a blow job when the color decomposes, the image flattens, and the person fellating a big hard cock begins to look as if he has a map of Madagascar in his mouth.