“All Boys”–porn and prostitution

“All Boys”

Prostitution and Porn

Amos Lassen

“All Boys” is a documentary about the gay porn industry in eastern Europe and it is the story of drug abuse, prostitution and homelessness and in these ways it somewhat mirrors the same industry in America. We see the industry as being cut-throat and how the porn companies become surrogate families for the young men and that there is often a Fagin-like father figure (the producer) at the head. Many of the young men are straight when they begin working at age 18 and they have a tenure of ab out two years before they are thought to be too old. Dan Komar introduced bareback sex to the young men of Prague when he introduced them to gay porn and he shows how they are expendable once they reach the age of twenty. The movie follows Komar’s rise and fall and we meet some of his actors especially one known as Ruda and we see the dysfunctional relationship between the two. Komar found Ruda on the streets of Prague and he exploited him and seduced him. They were a couple for three years even though Komar cheated all the time. We see Komar as a manipulative dirty man who used his boy for his own gain and as a sex toy. It should be noted that Komar is not the only one who does this. As a matter of fact, within ten years, Komar went bankrupt because of a saturated market and the bourgeoning Internet.
Gay porn is the fastest growing segment of the entertainment business in eastern Europe and it’s the exploitation of the lonely that this film deals with.

The film exposes the production chain of East European boy porn. It is the poor, uneducated, unemployed young men without strong family ties or social networks, who drift into the porn industry and its ‘foster care’. For some it offers survival and peers in the porn community, at least for a while, but in many cases the quick, easy money comes at a high cost in the long run. After five films these boys are already too old.
We see East Europe’s boys, mostly with heterosexual identities, in casting sessions, before and after shoots, with the team they work with.
Porn and prostitution often go hand in hand. For consumers porn is mainly entertainment, but maybe it often also serves to alleviate the same wounds, the same loneliness, as in the production side of the business. It is the exploitation of the lonely on all sides. The film does point out that most of the boys who are roped into doing gay porn to survive, once they are too old to continue, are so addicted to sex and drugs that they turn to hustling to feed their needs. It’s a sad story.