QX interviews Kayden Gray and asks, who are the people catfishing porn stars? 

By Patrick Cash

‘People who knew me were laughing because there was a Kayden Gray in every town and city,’ says softly spoken gay porn star Kayden Gray, seated opposite me in smiling 3D real life. ‘I got asked ‘are you in Berlin? Are you in Australia?’ and I’ve never been to Australia! There are two Kayden Grays in London apart from me on Grindr.’

I first heard about this robbing of adult entertainers’ images when I asked Kayden to speak on a panel last year. After meeting to discuss the project, I said that I’d message him the details on Facebook. He scowl-laughed.

‘I don’t have Facebook,’ he said.

‘But KD Gray is always posting photos -’

He shakes his head, still half-grinning.

‘That’s not me.’

What was strangest for me was that I’d had a brief conversation with this KD Gray. I knew Kayden, as in the real Kayden, in passing from my adventures on the scene’s merry-go-round and so I wasn’t surprised when he – or who I thought he was – added me as a friend. He messaged me thanking for the acceptance and we spoke fleeting Facebook; all typo’d one-liners and excessive emojis.

After Kayden told me the account was a fake, I began noting its posts. It seemed eerily akin to a real profile of a porn star. Pictures were often shared, that were quite clearly Kayden, of him on set with his co-stars. But then these pics were easily obtained from Kayden’s official Twitter account – KaydenGrayXXX –, and apparently one of the keys to the mystery were the headless cam shot videos frequently offered.

“They advertise camshows that I apparently participate in, which I have never done.”

‘They advertise camshows that I apparently participate in, which I have never done,’ Kayden explains. ‘I don’t know how people do it, maybe they have a twin of my body, because they’re obviously not going to be my twin. I do camshows but I only advertise it on Twitter and it’s in my bio, that’s it. Somehow they get away with getting people signed up for sites and I’ve actually been accused by someone who may have been a victim of it of doing that on Growler and I’ve never had a Growler account.’

In the name of researching this article, I contacted the KD Gray profile. I said: ‘Don’t freak out, but I’m writing a feature for QX about people impersonating porn stars online and I was wondering if you’d want to take part in it?’

As of going to press the KD Gray profile is now dead on Facebook. It’s still searchable but says ‘sorry, this page doesn’t exist’ when clicked.

‘I don’t have a Facebook account myself,’ says Kayden. ‘But I did have one that was Kayden Gray XXX, and I was stupid enough to add people as friends that I didn’t know and Facebook basically started questioning me about it. They blocked me and said ‘who are these people?’ I couldn’t answer. Funnily enough, it takes them forever to actually do anything about the recurring impersonation pattern. Nothing you find on Facebook is authentic.’

Financial gain may be one motivation for creating these false accounts, but then that doesn’t explain pretending to be Kayden in conversation, too. Porn is a fantasy

But surely the ultimate fantasy for the obsessive porn wanker (literally, not derogatively), would be not just to meet, not even to sleep with, but to become porn stars. The vast, lubricated slipperiness of social media and its anonymity between user and screen enables this impersonation to happen. We’re all wise to ‘it’s time I told the truth… I’m gay’ frapes, but we can’t really know that any post on our newsfeed actually belongs to the person its Facebook name purports to represent, unless we are sitting next to them when they post.

Now we’re waltzing into wild, uncharted territory; we ain’t in Kansas no more, Toto, and we don’t want to spin your daily Facebook use into a conspiracy theory of whether your friends are really posting their Fifty Shades updates on the top of Jamie Dornan’s cock, or it’s GCHQ fucking with your mind. So let’s keep it angled on the porn, one of our favourite phrases in the QX office, and take a tiptoe down the sexual garden path to the flickering, dark windowed shed of porn obsession.

As luck would have it, just as we were writing this article, the god of emails dropped a zinger into our inbox from someone named ‘Gay Porn Addict’. He claims to have watched porn non-stop without sleep from Friday evening to Sunday evening before, and to have 568 GB of pure porn perfection downloaded on to a hallowed hard drive.

I ask GPA if he thinks his porn watching adversely affects his day-to-day life. His answer walks that delicate tightrope between lucidly honest and unhinged: ‘Not at all, I think about porn during the day for sure but it doesn’t affect me. I like to think of it as a dirty secret that no one knows but at the same time I wish I could win an award for being the best gay porn addict in the world.’

“Porn is a fantasy spun by aesthetic desire, lusting for horse-hung boys in a kaleidoscopic collage of Adonis bodies and bubble butts.”

You might think GPA would be an enthusiastic gay porn impersonator, but his answer is to the contrary. ‘I could imagine hanging out with them but being so addicted to porn they’d probably find it off-putting,’ he says, with remarkable self-awareness. ‘I’d rather just wank off over them. I don’t agree with [impersonation] at all! Gay porn stars should be respected, I think they’re amazing!’

But perhaps it’s GPA’s final point that’s most revealing in our relation to porn and its pixelated constellation of sex-sweating stars: ‘I used to be obsessed with gay porn stars. I fell in love with them on a sexual porn level. I kept a very long list of names but lost it. Mainly I recognize them by appearance and not by name anyway.’

Our gay porn stars don’t have personalities. They don’t speak but for moans, they don’t feel but for dicks and ass, they don’t do but for fucking. They’re loosely tied knots of sex, image and body. When a body is on your screen, stripped of its emotional complexity that makes him human, sure they’re fair game for any opportunistic persona-sculptor to thieve.

‘I had a mini identity crisis last year because I felt most people knew me as Kayden instead of the person I am really,’ says the sweet-talking boy who’s known as Kayden Gray. ‘When you become a public figure of any calibre you can’t defend yourself directly, because it is an indirect relationship that you have with your audience. That way, it’s very easy for someone to sneak behind a picture and call themselves you. I will set up a Facebook account eventually and make sure I authenticate it, otherwise: ‘who is the real Kayden Gray?’’

• Kayden’s Twitter account, as told directly to QX, is: www.twitter.com/KaydenGrayXXX

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