For my Sunday morning recreational viewing, a Vivid Video compilation tape entitled Nutrageous (the titles of these things are, well, outrageous), an assortment of man-man porn encounters involving mouths on balls (which scarcely narrows down the field of eligible scenes at all). One of them paired veteran pornstar Peter Wilder with cute dark-haired twink Brad Weber, who was new to me but caught my fancy, so I googled on him, to discover that he has almost no track record in porn, at least under that name. (Pornstars often run through several names in their careers, and occasionally even act under different names according to their film personas.)
But I did find another Vivid compilation, called A Bronco Named Brad — a title that seemed to promise hours of guys riding Brad Weber, but turned out to be something much more peculiar: hours of porn scenes involving pornstars named Brad. Brad Hunter, Brad Chase, Brad Michaels, Brad Weber, Brad Carlton, Brad Phillips, Brad King, and Brad Davis, plus of course a considerable assortment of non-Brad partners for them.
These 8 Brads are just the tip of the porn-Brad iceberg. Some others: Star, Armstrong, Stone, McGuire, Patton, Baldwin, Mason, Rioux, Williams, Hunt, Benton, Thunders, Jarek, Boy. (Brad Boy was inevitable, I suppose.) It’s hard to remember pornstar names, when so many of them are so whitebread. We should be thankful for Brad Rioux, Brad Thunders, Brad Jarek, and of course bad-boy Brad Boy.
But Brad is far from the top porn name; indeed, it’s well down in the pack, way behind Mark/Marc. From my 2005 “Name that porn star handout” (here):
2. Source of data: cast lists in Adam Gay Video directories for 1993, 1997.
Removed: specifically Black, Hispanic, French, Thai, or Eastern European films. (Some of the actors nevertheless belong to these groups.)
Raw data: 2,622 tokens. Analysis of FNs only.
Removed: 27 initialisms (J.D., K.C., J.T., T.J., J.R., J.W, B.J., P.C., etc.), 3 nicknames (Papa Bear, Bat Boy, Angel Boy)…
Remaining: 456 types, counting homophones as a single type.3. Distribution by # of tokens:
65 Mark/Marc
56 Steve
54 Mike, John/Jon
51 Tony49 Sean/Shawn/Shaun
48 Chris/Kris
47 Eric/Erik/Erick/Erich
46 Rick
44 Jeff, Michael, Scott/Scot
43 David
42 Tom/Thom34 Joe
33 Brian/Bryan/Bryon, Kevin
30 Jim, Nick/Nic/Nik29 Paul
27 Brad
26 Peter
23 Matt
22 Bill, Jason/Jayson
20 Dan, Greg/Gregg(At this point, the number of names with a given frequency shoots up.)
In fact, there were 202 unique first names in my data, 44% of the sample.
Still, there are plenty of Brads to go around. And Brad Pitt’s popularity — and his role as an icon of masculinity, a crucial commodity in the pornstar world — might well have moved Brad up the list in the 14 years since my sources were published.
