CockyBoy’s Jake Jaxson is Outed in the Wake of his Distant Snowden Connection [Part 1 of 2]

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CockyBoys and its owner Jake Jaxson have been all over the news lately. Admittedly, we’ve kept our distance from the story a little bit, both because the story was still unfolding and because every blog with wifi and a coffee machine has been printing half-formed, not-particularly-balanced accounts of the story. Frankly, we owe it to one of favorite sites (not to mention our readers) to avoid simply reproducing the kind of reporting that created this story in the first place. And so, without further ado, we present to you The Tale of CockyBoys Worst/Best Two Weeks Ever Told in Two Parts with Gratuitous Adjectives, Pictures, and High-Fives or Hugs, Depending on Which is More Appropriate at the Moment.
The whole affair began just before the July 4th holiday when Jason Buchtel (aka Jake Jaxson, the owner and director of CockyBoys) posted a short piece on his Tumblr, in which he both defends Glen Greenwald and details the extent to which his personal and professional lives have been affected by his distant connection to the Edward Snowden story. [More after the jump.]


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No, you read that last bit correctly. You see, Glen Greenwald — the reporter who broke and then defended the Edward Snowden story — is a former business partner of our very own Jake Jaxson. This past connection means a number of things, though obviously you can pretty well guess which of them has been seized upon by the media. It means that Glen Greenwald has a distant relation to the porn industry. It means that Cockyboys, the gay porn love of our lives, has a distant relation to America’s national security. It means that business ventures occasionally create strange (and not-so-strange) bedfellows. The whole affair reminds us that the journalistic hunt for a story is often what inadvertently creates the story. Most importantly, contrary to the way the Snowden story has primarily been reported, the faceless monolith of national security has real, often disastrous consequences for the citizens it is theoretically supposed to serve.
[For the record, the reality of Greenwald’s involvement in the gay porn industry appears limited to the fact that Master Notions, Jaxson and Greenwald’s marketing company, owned and operated several gay porn sites.] jake_jaxson_2.jpg
The primary result of this mess, from Jaxson’s perspective, is that his real name has entered the news cycle. Which means, among other things, that his family is finally in the know about his career as an adult filmmaker. In his Tumblr post, though, Jaxson is quick to point out that his hesitation has nothing to do with shame. He’s wildly committed to and proud of his work in the adult industry — as well he should be. The hitch comes with his stormy relationship to his family:

I most regret that my legal last name has been attached to these stories. This has nothing to do with shame, because as I already wrote, I am very proud of my work. The reason is that my last name is not mine – it was a gift given to me from a man who is all that is good and right in the world, my father.

I never wanted to tell my parents I’m an adult filmmaker. They are very religious, and after having been rejected by them once already for being gay, I never wanted to repeat the event. While they have since accepted my sexuality, they still feel it’s a sin and in the later years of their life, I did not want to confront them over this issue yet again. My profession now is going to register way off the morally acceptable Richter scale, and my last name — their last name — will forever be linked in to the Lexis-Nexis-Google-sphere-of-forever-and-forever. Their name, their son, and the gay adult film industry. For that, I am deeply sorry.

In the spirit of evenhandedness, perhaps a fair response to a story like this is just to say that in 2013, virality is the name of the game; the same interwebz that Jaxson uses to market and spread his brand can just as easily bite him on the ass. On a more human level though, we don’t quite see how anyone can grudge another person their family ties. We can only hope, in the wake of this somewhat traumatic outing, that Jake Jaxson’s family rises to the occasion in a much more accepting way than he is anticipating. In either case, Jake, you’ve always got friends at QC!

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There’s a slightly contorted (and almost certainly tendentious) parallel forming in our minds between this kind of forced outing at the national level and other kinds of outing — those addressed in the It Gets Better campaign, for example. Who would be the bully in this scenario? American National Security? Reporters? Snowden? We’ll let you form your own conclusions, but it does have us wondering about the way outing gets framed and the kinds of circumstances that allow outing to be framed in one way or another. This is all really just to say that we should never ignore the extent to which abstract national news and nation-to-nation rumblings are always built on the backs of flesh-and-blood citizens with real families whose circumstances we are incapable of knowing fully.
Stay tuned for Part Two!

Jul 16, 2013 By will 7 Comments