August Ames

Source: Wikimedia Commons

At age 23, female porn star August Ames had already appeared in nearly 300 movies, among them such beloved chestnuts as Big Wet Breasts, Don’t Tell Hubby, Baby Got Boobs, Spandex Loads, and Titty Attack 8.

Although suffering from intractable mental problems and having a history of being sexually abused are not prerequisites for porn industry stardom, they certainly don’t seem to be a hindrance. Over the summer, Ames—born Mercedes Grabowski in Nova Scotia—claimed on porn photographer Holly Randall’s podcast that during her childhood, her paternal grandfather had molested her repeatedly. She said that her own father refused to believe her and banished her to a group home at age 12.

From there it was the well-trod future-porn-star spiral of doing stripteases for cocaine at age 15…to alcoholism and drug addiction…to diagnoses for bipolar disorder and multiple personality disorder…to psychiatric medications…to lingering depression…and, ultimately, to willfully having sex under hot camera lights in nearly 300 different features at an age when many people are only graduating college. Ames told Randall that she still has days where it’s difficult to get out of bed so she can get down to the porn studio and get into bed with some stranger:

Some days I’ll be fine, and if I’m not doing anything I’ll get these awful flashbacks of my childhood and I get very depressed. I can’t get out of bed and cancel my scenes for like a week or two….It’s still recent where I have to keep myself occupied or else I start thinking about all that shit and then I fall into a depression.

Last Sunday, Ames tweeted that she was pulling out—pun entirely intended—from a porn shoot due to the fact that her potential costar was known for mainly doing gay porn:

whichever (lady) performer is replacing me tomorrow for @EroticaXNews, you’re shooting with a guy who has shot gay porn, just to let cha know.  BS is all I can say…Do agents really not care about who they’re representing?…I do my homework for my body

In the year 2017, nearly fifty years after the noble Stonewall riots and a full four decades after Middle America accepted flaming fags such as Paul Lynde and Charles Nelson Reilly into their households via television, why must gay male porn stars still be forced to deal with troglodytic, hate-filled females who cloak their homophobia under some half-assed alibi that they don’t want to be infected with a deadly disease?

Sure, there will be some of you basement-dwelling Asperger’s casualties out there who will diligently trot out your so-called “statistics” about how gay men comprise only 4% of the male population but account for nearly 80% of all new HIV infections in the USA.

Among those will be impenitent racists who feel the need to also needlessly point out that black men are about six times more likely to be HIV+ than white men are, but we all know that this is due to racist tropes about savage and unrestrained black concupiscence and some discredited and debunked pseudoscience about black males’ genetic lack of impulse control. There was really no need to inject race into this discussion at all, but since there are so many racists out there who would jump at the chance to make it all about race, I figure I’d cut them off at the pass before they even got the chance to do so.

The point is that we, the righteous, all know—because we alone are able to read minds, while the wicked stick to their “facts”—that August Ames didn’t really care about whether or not she’d receive a hot, steamy load of HIV from her mostly gay costar. Neither does it matter that there were porn-industry rumors that the costar in question was notorious for either not taking his HIV tests or even forging the test results. Instead, it is blindingly clear that August Ames merely wished to announce to the world that she hates gay people and wishes they’d all die or at least be tortured.