Photo: Ric Ide
Spencer Keasey’s Memoir Hits Shelves
by Steve Desroches
Spencer Keasey wanted an adventure. He’d studied literature and was always fond of stories about epic journeys like those of Odysseus and Dante or the modern-day mythology in Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces—tales of solitary travels into unknown worlds to find one’s true self and test our own mettle in the face of unforeseen obstacles. Keasey was 36 years old and coming out of a 17-year relationship that left him unsure of himself and made raw those issues he had with his sexuality as a gay man, with his own body image and self-worth, drives within that drew him toward exhibitionism and internal demons that continually threw him onto the rocky shores of self-destruction driven by trade winds of trauma.
Since childhood, he had felt destined to write, to live a story that matched the combustion within, to live an interesting life. Those years in his relationship left him a bit detached from who he was and feeling he’d missed exploring sex, as his relationship was monogamous, and living in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont he had no connection at all to the gay community or having gay friends. Within weeks of his break up he left rural Vermont for Palm Springs to film his first gay adult film as an exclusive performer with Titan Media, choosing Spencer Quest as his nom du porn, quickly becoming a bona fide porn star.
“I started the porn journey to give myself something to write about,” says Keasey. “I went into porn to get a story, and boy did I get one.”
Keasey examines his meteoric rise to porn fame, as well as what led him to and from the porn industry, in his new memoir A Nice Guy Like Me. While only in porn for a few years, Keasey, as Quest, was on magazine covers and posters in gay bars and bookstores all the while earning a large fan base giving him a partially clandestine level of fame, particularly amongst gay men, but largely shielded from mainstream attention, and judgement. But his story also includes addiction, self-harm, recovery, and relapse. Keasey says he lays it all out there: the good, the bad, the beautiful, and the ugly. After all, telling all after showing all shouldn’t be so difficult. But it did prove to be so, not out of remaining stigma or taboo, but because he was revisiting trauma, abuse, and unfortunate truths stirring up a hurricane of emotions that he refused to turn away from while writing. Ignoring reality would have made the book practically fiction. Coming out the other side of the looking glass is what allowed Keasey to be so candid, creating a non-linear narrative that shows the complexity of life in general, and the prismatic nature of sex and sexuality.
“I had nothing but good experiences on set,” says Keasey. “I didn’t even use drugs on set. It was forbidden. All the sets were drug-free. I would stop using about a week before the shoot and then start using right after. But I enjoyed filming, the sex, the process, the friends. I do not connect porn to my addictions. They were like two parallel lives. They existed at the same time, but were not related.”
While Spencer Quest was having the time of his life, Spencer Keasey was not. He traces the roots of his addictions and self-harm behavior to when he was three or four and would hurt himself to get attention. By age 12 he was bulimic and come 15, he had started drinking and partying. Following a period of sobriety, he began using meth. Family dysfunction and sexual abuse braided their way into his early life, as well. Embracing his exhibitionism and being honest about a certain need for attention, Keasey feels naturally drawn to storytelling, within the erotic arena of the past and now on stage and on the page. His porn notoriety eventually did get the attention of the mainstream when he was offered a role in the off-Broadway production of Naked Boys Singing, in which he performed the musical number “Perky Little Porn Star.” But it was during that run that Keasey hit a wall, with both his physical and mental health. He left porn and off-Broadway and checked into rehab.
It was in 2007 that Keasey moved to Provincetown, where he has made his home ever since. And it’s on the Cape tip over the past two decades that Keasey has worked on his sobriety, as well as with HIV and meth use prevention, sharing stories of his own addiction and positive status. He acted on stage in productions of Two Boys in a Bed on a Cold Winter’s Night, Edward II, Venus in Fur, and The Normal Heart. And he was co-grand marshal of the Carnival Parade alongside Coco Peru in 2008. Now, he works at the Bakker Gallery, which specializes in Provincetown art. Through it all he still gets recognized as Spencer Quest, and not just by gay men, but fans that may surprise others. But it’s not surprising to Keasey, as people’s relationships to porn are complicated and not always as one may think.
Since his memoir was published, he can feel it’s being widely read around town as people approach him about passages in the book or treat him a little differently.
“I’m getting less dick pics,” laughs Keasey. “I guess now that people know all about me and that I’m not just the character they saw, they feel uncomfortable or something. But I’ve also had people reach out to say thank you for sharing my story and that it helped them come to terms with their own.”
A Nice Guy Like Me: A Memoir by Spencer Keasey is available at a number of book stores in Provincetown, as well as online everywhere.
