Who's Behind those Eyes?
Uncovering Steve Fox
Last week, as I thumbed through SkinFlicks for my article, curiosity got the better of me.
See, we make snap judgments about people hundreds of times a day. We have entire concepts of people that are based solely on photos and videos from the internet. So I wanted to know, what snap judgments was I making about Steve Fox, this handsome cover star?
He looks plucked from my earliest fantasies in a white jockstrap, red sweatbands on his wrists, holding a football helmet. He’s the proverbial quarterback that every closeted gay boy lusts after (or at least I did). His skin is oiled to a shine so bright it blends in with the background, and try as I might, I cannot find a single piece of hair on his body. But it’s his eyes that really draw me in. I read something apprehensive in them. I wonder what he was looking at on the other side of the camera. What was running through his brain? How did he feel about gracing the cover of this particular magazine?
What started as a question grew into a Google search and quickly led me down a dark rabbit hole of what it really meant to be a pornstar in the south at the turn of the century and what led to Steve’s unfortunate death only two years after this photo was taken.
A cursory Google of “Steve Fox gay porn star” shows me his greatest hits first: ButtBusters, Taboo Brotherly Love, Fox Tail. Each one, a fascinating time capsule of sweaty men.
Take ButtBusters, for instance. A sweet Steve Fox is coming home from the gym, bounding up the stairs with youthful exuberance to a soundtrack that I can only describe as pornographic disco muzak. He reaches his apartment only to be apprehended by three men in black S&M masks, the music abruptly cutting to an ominous electronic tone while the leader says, “Somebody told us you can’t get it up. Let’s see if we can fix that.” Then the drums kick in, and the sex starts; it’s assertive, but not rough, and soon everyone has let go of their roles. They’re no longer perpetrators and victim, they’re just four men doing a scene together, politely helping each other with clothes, holding a leg here, an arm there, pausing to put on condoms, because this is the 90s after all.
But after that entertaining detour, I remember, I’m not looking for his work. I want to know who Steve was. I head back to the front page of the internet and scroll a bit further, passing over xHamster and BoyfriendTV, until I find a headline, “Gay Porn Star Steve Fox (1966-1997)” from a site I’d never heard of: The DataLounge. I click on the link and stumble into one of my least favorite mediums of the internet, the open forum.
While a site like Reddit is my go-to search when I need human input, the darker, unmoderated message boards of the web make me deeply uncomfortable. Left unchecked, these sites can become dark havens where members try to gain access to people they have no right to. There used to be a Broadway forum where folks’ nudes would get leaked constantly. Users would resort to code, asking for pictures or videos of certain Broadway celebrities, and they’d even cross-reference carpet patterns to verify if the nude really belonged to who they said it was. These people believed that if the pictures were out there, there wasn’t anything wrong with trying to get them. Then they’d talk about these people, my friends, as if they knew them, judging them as they exposed their sexual secrets.
So when I see this forum talking about Steve, I wade into it with trepidation. But what I was met with turned my views around. Here were countless men who wanted to know more, just like me, but from a place of reverence and respect, not misguided lust. As I keep reading, a picture emerges of a man, deeply troubled by his upbringing, turning to porn, but unable to escape a fatal mental illness.
Steve Fox was born Rommel E. Hunt to upper-middle-class parents in Alabama before moving to Atlanta at the age of six. His parents were both educated, having received doctorate degrees, but raised him in a strictly religious household. According to a high school friend, “I had always known about his female roommate. She was a stripper and did many other things to earn money. He had described their relationship as both sexual and non-sexual. He was prone to telling many different versions of the same story. I found her to be very nice and very much in love with him. I believe that he was a bisexual. He talked a great deal about women and always seemed to notice them. He was a male stripper, too, having performed for many, many women. He could at times be very nice and also be very rude to people. I don’t feel that he was ever very comfortable with himself.“
The details start to get hazier, the older he gets, with many accounts coming from scene partners or directors, but little was known about his personal life. However, one man on the forum, John Butler, claims that he was Steve’s partner near the end of his life.
According to John, “In March of 1993, my partner died, after we had been ‘married’ happily for exactly twenty-four years. I was bereft, of course, and felt that my sexual life was over (I was 62 years old)…Exactly two and a half years later, in September of 1995, I answered a solicitation to join a “Steve Fox Fan Club”, hoping to perhaps get an autograph, maybe talk to him—who knows? Soon, I drove to Atlanta (about two hours away) and met with Steve Fox in a hotel room for the kind of meeting I thought never to have again…Within two weeks, I met him at his house, he was Rommel Hunt (and was always that to me after that, never “Steve Fox”), and we didn’t have sex, we MADE LOVE…For the next six months, I made love with Rommel at least once a week (and sometimes twice), he stopped (as far as I know) escorting, and we planned a life together (admittedly, I was much older—only a few months younger than his dad—but he said that was no problem for him).
In February of 1996, he agreed to marry me and told me he was my life partner. In March, after several days of frustrating inability to contact him for any reasonable conversation by telephone (we had until that time talked every day for at least a while by phone), he called to tell me that it was all over between us. The bitterness and pain I experienced were set aside a month or so later when I saw him again (the last time I was to see him in person) and learned he had just been released from a mental hospital, diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic. From that point on, it was a painful series of admissions and releases from the hospital for him, and for me, a confusing and frustrating series of conversations with him where he told me he still wanted us to be partners. Finally, two days before he shot himself, after apparently escaping from the mental hospital, he telephoned me, and we talked about getting together. The day after his suicide, his mother called to tell me about the tragedy and when the memorial service was to be. He was cremated, and his family does not plan to inter his ashes. Sadly—so very sadly—this magnificent man is gone, and many questions will never be answered, and we will never see him on film or in magazines again. He was very troubled, and he is at least at peace.”
Now, this story, while heartbreaking, is very difficult to verify. But it is true that Steve Fox did indeed shoot himself in 1997. This could have been made up by a random person with a keyboard in any corner of the world. It could have been written by a man named John Butler who knew of Rommel. It could have been written by John Butler, who did have a relationship with Rommel, but was skewed by the perceptions of age and class, and power. Or it could be entirely factual.
But what we do know is that Steve Fox, Rommel Hunt is forever captured on the cover of this magazine. Endlessly gazing up at whoever picks him up.
My biggest takeaway from reading about Steve is that many of his fans out there built a connection with him. He may have known them, he may not have, but regardless, he served not only a physical need, but an emotional one as well. These parasocial relationships run rampant among gay men. When growing up in the closet, while existing in the closet, we project our own beliefs, hopes, and fears onto those we see.
If we see a beautifully fit, all-American gay man having sex freely, we want to believe that we can be like him. Maybe we could even be with him one day. It’s clear that Steve was good at making people feel special. But that connection ran one way.
Sex can be an incredible form of connection, and it can also tear people apart. I wonder what could have happened if Steve had formed different connections, ones that could have helped him manage his Schizophrenia? I’m not saying that the porn industry drove him to suicide or exacerbated his mental health. I know many porn creators who are very mentally healthy. But he was a product of a wildly conservative upbringing, and the religious trauma may have been simply too much to escape from.
But even if he lacked connection, he certainly gave it to others. He gave it to them in magazines and VHS tapes, in the occasional escort, in the private release of an adult video store. Because even then, even through this medium, there was still connection.
It turns out that I feel like I know even less about Steve now than I did before all of this. I may have learned bits and pieces, but for someone so public with his body, the private details are hard to pin down.
But it does give me a bit more grace when looking at others on the internet today. We can’t ever really know someone through a screen, but we can give them all a bit more grace because who knows what they’re going through on the other side.
you write so well
Yes, it's a sad story. Thank you, though, for bringing up the theme of connection. It's so true for some gay men that even the illusion of connection matters.