RetroStuds of the Past: Focus on Paul Rappalo

posted by Madame Bubby

Paul Rappalo in Manshots

Who is Paul Rappalo? Paul calls himself, in an interview with Manshots magazine in December 1992, an iconoclast, and based on the variety of and attitude toward his porn making, I would agree.

Manshots caught up with Paul aka David Rappalo aka Rappalo aka Rappalo Fox when he was doing a show at NYC's Show Palace, and the interviewer noted that he spoke Japanese to the guy at the sushi bar.

There's the paradox: he does shows that show off his tautly sculpted, Greek god physique, he speaks a language which is not easily learned, and, looking at his oeuvre on the trusty Gay Erotic Video Index, a good number of his films are bondage/BDSM flicks. Who is Paul Rappalo?

Paul divulges plenty in the interview, but what is interesting is the information he claims he doesn't want revealed. For example, he mentions he is Cherokee Indian. He also claims he likes high heels (he likes others to wear them).

He learned Japanese, one of five languages he also speaks, as part of his personal protection/anti-terrorism training. Rappalo is unclear as to what this training entails and its results, which adds to the mystery. No, he is not lying.

He hustled for a while (he claimed both guys and gays had long admired his cock).

He was also imprisoned for an assault case, and the prison doctor knew about his by then extensive porm film career; in the interview, he imitates the doctor's “minty” voice, “With all the money you've been making, seems that you would have been bailed out a long time ago.”

In the annals of porn history, however, some of his best work (and that includes acting, and he did do a bit of “legitimate” acting in Los Angeles) occurs in Toby Ross's award-winning Tough Guys Do Dance.
 

Paul Rappalo in Tough Guys Do Dance
Paul Rappalo in Tough Guys Do Dance

The second vignette in this flick, “Love Bug,” tells the story of a man who bugs his straight neighbor's house in an effort to share vicariously in the man's lovemaking to his wife. When the neighbor's wife leaves him, however, the gay man comes over to console and seduce him. Paul Rappalo plays the sensitive straight neighbor and David Bach is the wily gay man.

Now, what could be a sleazy take off on Reagan-era yuppie drama is actually sensitively done, and Rappalo manages to be both vulnerable and confidently sexy at the same time.
 

Paul Rappalo and David Bach in Tough Guys Do Dance
Paul Rappalo & David Bach in Tough Guys Do Dance

I like to think of him as the many faces of the Eternal Male. He wears a white shirt and tie and exudes sexiness wearing it, but when he gets naked, he can submit to getting tied up by an older, more experienced guy, enjoys, even relishes sex with women, but, as he honestly reflects in his interview, “one thing I would change is that it takes me forever to learn one lesson.”

Based on his variegated interests, I would counter that he wasn't afraid to keep learning. And that for him, life was best lived when one is aware that it is a theater where one discovers oneself by acting so many roles.
 

Paul Rappalo and Michael White in Private Workout
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Retrostuds of the Past: Focus on Lon Flexx

Lon Flexx, born David Lee Anderson, was one of those performers who did so much and died so young. He wasn't wild and at times unfocused like the great nineteenth century opera singer Maria Malibran who would ride a horse all day and sing all night and also find time to visit a hospital for dying children, or like THE Judy, who could sing and dance and act all night but killed herself to do it. Lon, as one Bijou reviewer notes, “might have been fucking like Whitney and Bobby on a crack binge, but at Little Jackie-O always shone through the sweat.” 

Lon made over thirty gay porn films, the bulk of which were made between 1989 and 1992, including two Bijou classics, He-Devils and Tough Guys Do Dance. He made other films such as Sleeping Under the Stars (according to one gossipy source, Lon wore a hairpiece in this one), Heat in the Night, and Davey and The Cruisers
 

One memorable scene in He-Devils features Lon Flexx dreaming of beefcake Alex Stone in a railroad tunnel. Alex strips from macho clothing and fondles his chest and tits. Rubbing his tits hard, Alex jacks off as the camera offers larger-than-life close-ups. Both Lon and Alex take to beating off in this red-lighted segment. 


Later, after Lon wakes, his buddy and traveler, Michael Braun, imagines himself with lovely Lon in a bathroom of a hotel. Uncut and handsome Michael sucks Lon off before being fucked up the ass. Their oral sex is excellently photographed, too, with lots of saliva dripping from cock and mouth. 
 

Tough Guys Do Dance cover

In one scene from Tough Guys Do Dance, called “Phone Call From a Stranger,” a young man in a tuxedo (Lon Flexx) is seen cruising dark alleys when a nearby pay phone rings. He answers it and a mysterious voice instructs him to come to an apartment across the street. He arrives to find a nude man masturbating. The man reveals an extraordinarily large cock. The young visitor slowly strips out of his clothes and joins the stranger for sex that is sensuous and also somewhat threatening. 

The consensus about Lon's legacy is that he was passionate, not mechanical, in his performances. He combined, as he shows in the scene from Tough Guys Do Dance, sensuality and power. 
 

Lon Flexx in Tough Guys Do Dance


And perhaps the power came from a confidence about his own sexuality. In an interview with Manshots magazine in October 1990, he mentions how he danced with other guys in a straight bar after helping in a fundraising drive for a local opera company (class act, he was!) when he was going to the University of Oklahoma. Not exactly the jolly tearoom for gays, especially in the 1980s.

 

Lon reflected, “We danced all night – and sure we got some stares, even some gawks, but nobody said a word to us. And at the same time, at the other college, guys were getting beat up for just attending gay meetings on campus. People don't mess with you when you feel strongly about something. I never forgot that, and that's how I decided to live my life.” 

 

And he lived his life with power and passion and integrity, but we lost him too soon, as he succumbed to something unfortunately more powerful, AIDS, at the age of thirty. 

 

 

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