Q-Seattle Events: Tacky Tourist Clubs

Since everyone else has already found this one too juicy let pass, we'll pile on and throw in a link to two to the blog-scrum. Seems this hunky Marine reserve corporal/Columbia student, Matt Sanchez, was popular on the right-wing talkies in the past week or two.

He had a story to tell about what he said was a rude encounter with a leftist activist group at a Columbia event. Fox's Hannity spun it out into major dissing-the-troops meme.

It's not hard to believe that a group of college leftist activists would be rude. And the story Sanchez tells fits in well with the standard woe-is-me conservative meme about about their victimization. It helps that Sanchez is an attractive and highly articulate spokesman.

So, what's the problem? Turns out Sanchez spent a few years in the gay porn biz where his considerable gifts were on display under the name Rod Majors and Pierre LaBranche. Here are the not-safe-for-work details.

Joe.My.God promises an interview with Sanchez tomorrow, and links out to the wealth of other posts that have followed him and the aforementioned nsf Tom Bacchus on the story.

Andy Towle of Towleroad even dated him back in the day:

I was shocked to see this story this morning, for the main reason that Matthew Sanchez and I met at a gay bar in San Jose, California and went on a few dates in 1989 when I was a graduate student at Stanford. I haven't seen him since. It was brought to my attention after we had finished dating that he had gone on to do gay adult films but I had no idea he had joined the military and was also holding hands with folks who would be so loath to accept him into their ranks had they any clue to his background.

[update] Joe.My.God has the brief interview with Sanchez up on his site. Sanchez says that his conservative friends have been kind to him, and offers a few sound bites should (all things being equal) earn him more appearances on the right-talker shows.

There's something about the beleaguered gay psyche that wants to prove to the world that everyone is just as messed up as they are. So, they start off with the term hypocrite and work their way backwards looking for signs of deviant behavior in hopes of discovering some type of bastard kinship.

Sanchez has even more to say in a letter to Salon.

Being in the adult entertainment industry was sort of like being in a cult, and like all followers of a cult, I have a difficult time figuring out when I stopped believing in the party line. I can tell you, though, that by the time I finished my brief tour of the major studios, I was pretty disgusted with myself. It was an emotional low, and the people who surrounded me were like drug dealers interested only in being with the anesthetized in order not to shake off the stupor of being high.

Hmm. Maybe that's why the porn biz produces so many conservative voices. Max Blumenthal touched on it last night in an interview on MSNBC's Countdown.

[S]everal gay bloggers, like for instance T Rex and Firedoglake have talked for years about the existence of sort of a gay Republican underground railroad that's funneled people like Jeff Gannon and Corporal Matt Sanchez from the fringes of the adult industry into the core of the conservative movement and they've played an influential role in the backlash politics of the conservative movement and the Republican party. That's really what's relevant here.

Labels: celebrities, link bites