Michael Lucas
Michael lucas
I’m Michael Lucas. I’m 52, a lawyer by training, a businessman by choice, and a long-time producer in the adult industry — or, as James Kirchick once described me, “gay porn’s neocon kingpin.” And I’m not shy about saying what’s on my mind.
Occupation: Founder, CEO, director, producer, and performer at Lucas Entertainment
Location: New York City and Fire Island, United States
The Sex in My Business: Lucas Entertainment is a gay porn studio that has produced hundreds of films and thousands of scenes in the more than 25 years since I started it. Sex isn’t in my business; sex is my business.
How I Got Here: Working in porn wasn’t my dream nor my plan. It was something I fell into through sheer happenstance. I was born and raised in Russia, but as a Jew, I never felt I belonged there. In Russia, Jews have been discriminated against for a very long time — both by the Russian people and the state. On my Russian passport and birth certificate, my nationality was listed not as “Russian”, even though I was born there — but as “Jewish.” My Soviet birth certificate, as it happens, is featured on the Wikipedia page “History of the Jews in Russia.” Living in the US, people refer to me as a Russian, and yet that was never how people saw us in Russia. Growing up, we were outsiders to Russian society and culture — we were simply Jews. And I was tired of being a perpetual outsider.
It wasn’t just that I yearned to live in a society in which I belonged; I wanted freedom of speech and expression. As a young person coming to understand that I was gay, I wanted to live some place where I could have a good life and not be forced to live in the closet. I wanted to live in the West.
In 1995, shortly after graduating from law school in Moscow, I left Russia when I was 23 and moved to Germany. I had very little money, and everything was extremely expensive. I needed a job fast. Except I was undocumented. Back then in Germany, you couldn’t get a job without the proper paperwork and documentation, and you couldn’t work on a tourist visa. It was impossible to find a job in any above-board field. Instead, you had to work for the kinds of employers who didn’t ask too many questions. That’s how I got into porn and sex work within a day of arriving in the country. At first I performed in some straight films, but was soon invited to work with the French gay porn director Jean-Daniel Cadinot, which really helped my career. In 1997, I moved to America and continued working with gay porn studios before starting Lucas Entertainment in 1998.
A Typical Day: My day-to-day work has varied a lot over my career. In 1995 and ’96, I was doing a lot of escorting. In the late ’90s and early 2000s I was building my own adult studio, with all of the business logistics and corporate office work that entails. This was in addition to being on set, both as a director/producer and a performer. Nowadays, I still go to productions, usually from around 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., and we film up to three scenes a day. I oversee everything, from the filming to the editing, to the promotions — and I still perform in my movies. It doesn’t always sound as sexy as people think, but it’s a business, and you have to manage it.
The Best Part: I have the freedom and autonomy to set my own terms and work on my own schedule. I’ve been my own boss for almost all of my adult life, and I intend to keep it that way. I have two other businesses outside of Lucas Entertainment that aren’t sex-related, so porn is just one aspect of what I do these days, and I prefer having that variety.
The Worst Part: Dealing with models. One of the reasons I still routinely go to productions on set is because I need to be there to work with the models. A lot of models are very difficult. There are so many clichés about the industry, and many of them happen to be true. Lots of models are undisciplined or have bad tempers, for example — they’ll seem very friendly at first, and then go completely berserk at the slightest provocation. But it’s more than that, really.
In my experience, most people go into porn not because they find it interesting, but because they are insecure. They think that by becoming a pornstar, they’ll gain confidence, but that’s often the opposite of what happens. From the moment you arrive on set, someone else will always have bigger muscles, a bigger dick, less body fat, etc. I’ve seen so many models who arrive with attractive, normal-looking bodies, and within a month, they’re shooting steroids. Other models make the mistake of reading their fan mail, and being told over and over that they’re the most beautiful and sexy guy in the world. It goes to your head and you develop a kind of god complex, only to come crashing back down to reality at some point.
There’s also a lot of loneliness in the industry. When you work in porn, the pool of people you can date shrinks dramatically. Not everyone wants to see their partner fucking on camera. It’s usually very hard on people’s families and relatives when they find out. It also closes a lot of doors professionally. There’s a small number of people who know how to make it work — people who are disciplined, don’t do drugs, save their money, and approach the work as work rather than a way to become famous or to fill some psychological hole. Unfortunately, these are exceptions, not the rule.
In general, I try to discourage people from going into porn. I get to know all the models I work with before I hire them. If I meet someone new to porn, someone young who has a lot going for them, I always explain the downsides of the industry. I’ll suggest they take three months to really think about whether this is the right decision for them. People message me months or years later to thank me, saying that they were in a bad place at the time and that I could have taken advantage of them. They tell me about the great careers they have and the lives they’ve built, and how glad they are that they didn’t go into porn. So even in the worst part of the job, there is still that silver lining where you can help people.
What Society Thinks: Well, the perception of porn has changed a lot over the years. It used to be taboo, but today it's very common. Of course, people still see porn as unserious, unsavory, even dirty. They associate it with drugs and all of the stereotypes — some of which, again, are true. They view porn as something they would never want to do, something they’d be horrified to find out their son or daughter was doing — even while they all consume it themselves. That said, I have never personally experienced any kind of backlash for making porn. I have a very loving and understanding family and a wonderful circle of friends who have nothing to do with the industry, but that’s not the norm.
When I’m Not at Work: I spend most of my free time with my partner, my family, and my friends. (Over the years, I brought my relatives to America.) I also love reading, gardening, home projects, the opera, and classical music. In the last five years, I’ve spent a lot of time abroad, between Israel and Mexico, where I have another house. Put it this way: I’m never bored.
Published in Issue XIII: Heretic
