How Jonathan Agassi Navigated the Perks and Perils of Gay Adult Film Life
advocate.comJonathan Agassi Saved My Life, the documentary’s titular subject, clad in leather pants and a gladiator helmet, takes the stage at HustlaBall Berlin to accept one of the gay porn industry’s highest honors in front of a cheering crowd.
Afterward, he texts his mother, “Mom, I’m the best actor in the porn world.”The high doesn’t last. The camera returns to the HustlaBall another year to capture the reality of how some of the world’s most beautiful men project an illusion.
Dozens of muscled bodies crowd in a back room, injecting each other’s penises with stimulants to stay hard. Agassi, crouched in a corner, smokes a pipe of crystal meth.“Every time I watch this scene, I get scents of mold in my nose, because it was so dirty,” Agassi shares in the present day. “The way that I remembered it, it was completely different.
So this is what the movie does to me. It shows me how things really were.”Lifting the curtain for Agassi (and audience members) is precisely what happens in Jonathan Agassi Saved My Life, a documentary that follows the Israeli figure as he launches to international fame with the release of Michael Lucas’s Men of Israel before becoming entangled in a dark underbelly of sex work and drug addiction.
