HIV Australia | Vol. 8 No. 1 | April 2010

Sordid Truths: Selling My Innocence for a Taste of Stardom by Aiden Shaw, Alyson Books, 2009. Reviewed by Jennifer Power.

The second instalment of Aiden Shaw’s memoirs reads like a boys’ own adventure, albeit a grown up adventure for gay men. The tale carries us on a rollicking ride with Shaw’s friends, lovers and clients, each chapter revealing a new encounter, presumably the characters-most-memorable in Shaw’s life of many encounters.

Aiden Shaw was the highest paid, and arguably most famous, porn star of his generation, starring in over fifty films through the 1990s which won him numerous awards, including the accolade of having one of Carrie Bradshaw’s Sex in the City boyfriends named after him. He now makes his living as a novelist and poet.

Sordid Truths … is the prequel to Shaw’s original, best-selling memoir My Undoing: Love in the Thick of Sex, Drugs, Pornography, and Prostitution. It follows Shaw’s life from the mid 1980s, when he was working as a rent-boy in London, through to 1991 when he travels to the US to meet renowned film producer Chi Chi LaRue, who would go on to make him a star.

The title of this memoir, Selling My Innocence for a Taste of Stardom, is deceptive in some ways. It suggests the story could be one of regret. But apart from the occasional reference to ‘Little Fella’, the name Shaw gives his childhood inner-self, there is very little sense of regret or loss in the book. In fact, Shaw seems to be having a grand old time navigating his world of sex and drugs and the book is fun as a result. It’s not until the self-reflective epilogue that a hint of uncertainty and sadness emerges:

Thinking about my life – the hustling to be paid for sex, on streets in various cities, on porn sets in California surrounded by naked bodies, shooting up crystal meth at some grungy dealer’s pad, lying in a hospital ward with some HIV complication – I’ve asked myself why I did it the way I did.

Shaw uses some fairly obvious pop-culture markers to situate his text in the 1980s – setting his VCR to record the first-ever episode of The Simpsons, deciding he doesn’t like the new Swatch watches everyone is wearing and discussing whether or not this new singer Madonna will take off. There is something self-conscious about this, as though Shaw is concerned his readers will forget what decade he is talking about. Or perhaps it is just that, as it is for many of us, the reference points for his memories are grounded in the music and television (or hairstyles) of the time. Either way, a bit of ‘80s culture spotting certainly adds to the fun of the book.

This is a story told with good humour and a healthy sense of cockiness. Shaw is popular with the lads and his eccentric parade of clients are quite fascinating in themselves, from the wealthy and famous to the downright strange. There is no doubt that Shaw has lived a life-less-ordinary. This is expressed most succinctly in the prologue to the memoir by a young fan who Shaw meets in a San Francisco bar in 1997. ‘It must be kind of weird being you,’ says the fan. ‘Sometimes,’ Shaw replies.

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