Former male performer Danny Wylde featured in The Independent

Former male performer Danny Wylde, who retired from porn in October of 2013, was just interviewed by The Independent. In the interview he reveals some very interesting tidbits.

Danny Wylde was in the adult industry for 8 years, during which time he did about 600 scenes.

He said he started doing porn because he needed a job while he was in school.

In this interview he implies he began her career in porn because his girlfriend at the time (Dana DeArmond), “introduced him to various adult producers and directors in Los Angeles”. But in another interview he said that he got into porn by answering an ad “seeking submissive males” for a porn shoot (for Kink.com).

He started out making around $300 a scene and eventually worked his way up to $500 to $700 per scene.

He mentions in the article that he landed a contract job, which for males is rare and he was paid $4,000 per month, despite having to work only 6 days a month.

I’m not sure how true that is. I can’t find much information on this contract, but he did mention it in an AVN interview years ago, where he says “I fucked up a lot in that first year, and I got this weird contract that I think really helped get my ego to the point where I thought I could do this for a living.”

He talks about how girls make more per scene, typically $1,000 for a male-female scene but that he thinks men have the upper hand financially because they are able to work more. Keep in mind back then, we only had so many male performers. Today we have them coming out of our ass. Not sure why we are recruiting so many new males in the business, but damn we have a lot of them lately, despite the fact that we have less work today than years ago.

Don’t get the reason agents are recruiting male talent so heavily when they clearly can’t book enough work for them, but that’s another story for another day.

Next he talks about how early in his career he did gay porn and that as a crossover male, he faced a lot of stigma because the gay porn industry doesn’t require testing.

After participating in group sex videos with both men and women, where he says all performers were tested, he claims he almost got blacklisted from working with girls from several agencies.

He also points out that he is attracted to men, something he has previously denied, saying he was only “gay for pay”.

People have the right to have sex with whoever they want. If my attraction to men bums someone out, we don’t have to have sex,” he says.

Being a crossover wasn’t what ended his career though. It was his addiction to erectile dysfunction drugs such as Cialis.

“Over the course of an eight year career, I ended up in the emergency room three times. All for priapism. After the third time, a doctor said to me that if I kept using the drugs, I could cause some serious long-term damage, like scar tissue build up in my penis, which could lead to impotence. I quit performing in porn the following day,” he says.

He has now turned his attention to film and video production (of which around 60 per cent of his clients are from the adult industry), writing and co-founding a hot sauce business.

He enjoys working with people from the industry, who he says are usually a lot easier to get on with than those from a corporate background, but has found some difficulties in navigating a new career path for himself.

“My difficulties are probably not that unusual, at least, for anyone who has spent a lot of time in one industry and who wants to transition. In any field, people often give work to their friends and business associates. It is hard to develop those types of relationships when I spent nearly a decade having sex for a living. It is kind of like starting over from the bottom.”

You can read the full interview here.