REMEMBERING ARPAD MIKLOS (My First Gay Porn Experience)

I recently came across an advice column on Slate.com. And the piece was about a guy wanting to know if it was weird that he still got turned on by and wanted to masturbate to the memory of a porn star he loved but who was dead.

“Dear How to Do It, what are the ethics of fantasizing about dead celebrities when masturbating?” the Slate subscriber who identified himself as Ghost-Wank queried. He went on to say: “I recently rewatched a film from the early 2000s starring someone who has sadly since passed away, and they played a character I found very charming the first time I watched the film and all the more so the second time around. The character later popped up in my thoughts during a self-love session, but I felt a little weird about it, since the person who portrayed them is dead! I have a lot of anxiety surrounding the concept of death and have PTSD from a loss I suffered in an especially traumatic way, so it may just be that I’m overthinking this. But is it OK to fantasize about characters played by actors who have since left us? What about the actors themselves?”

As I read this, I experienced a major mental flashback to a man I hadn’t thought about in quite some time. A man who represented a different edge to my sexual awakening when I was still maturing into my feelings as a gay boy.

This man’s name was Arpad Miklos. That was his stage name; he was born Peter Kozma, a Hungarian porn star who introduced me to a world of sex I hadn’t known existed before meeting him.

Arpad was the first adult film star I ever got to know. I remember it happened around 2005, when my father bought a desktop computer for the house. It was to be a family computer, and my brothers and I watched tons of movies and played games on that computer. (Watching Prison Break on that computer was a communal affair for my siblings and I). When my father added the internet to it, the desktop quickly became a gift that kept on giving. It was almost the source of contention between my brothers and I, as we often fought over maximum access to the computer.

Then came the night when I was up late, surfing the internet, and (I could never remember how or where) I stumbled on the video of a porn scene. I didn’t know it was porn; in fact, the video started out as a proper movie, with a hunk of a man getting acquainted with a twinkish younger man. I thought I’d discovered a gay film when I noticed, from the dialogue, that the two men were being flirtatious with each other, and I was pretty excited by this.

But I would quickly realise that it wasn’t just a gay film, but a gay adult film! I was astonished as I watched the hunky older man pull the other man to him when they stepped inside a room, and they started kissing, and pretty soon were tearing away at each other’s clothes. When hard cocks bounced into the full view of the camera, I gasped and shot a frantic look around, almost positive that someone in my family had stepped out into the dining room and was watching me with the thunderous judgment of the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

No one, of course, was around. It was late in the night; everyone was asleep in their rooms. Out there in the dining room, it was just me – and the two porn actors who the title of the film identified as Arpad Miklos and Zack Randall.

Arpad Miklos and Zack Randall

Zack Randall didn’t interest me. Arpad Miklos did. He was big. Sexy. Hairy. Tender with his kisses. Hurried with his hands. Hungry with the way he fingered Randall’s butthole. Gruff with his grunts as Randall sucked his uncut cock. Sly with the way he teased Randall’s ass-crack with that cock. And skilled with his thrusts inside Randall’s gloryhole.

I could not stop myself. I sat there and watched this scene from start to finish with rapt attention, not caring for the agitation of my erection inside my night shorts, afraid to take my eyes off of the magnificence of Arpad Miklos. He was a god. He was a sex god, who commanded my entire attention. I wanted to be the one in his arms. I wanted to be the one he tossed and turned on the bed. My mouth watered with the need to wrap it around his cock. My butthole pulsated with the vicarious sensation of his hard cock shafting through me. Moans rumbled in the back of my throat as I imagined myself wrapped by the heat of him.

And when he finally positioned his cock above Randall’s head and furiously wanked his spunk out all over those delicate Caucasian features, I realised from the moistness that had gathered on the inside of my shorts, that Arpad had led me to a climax of my own.

I became obsessed with the man after that night. I wanted him. I was in love with him. And I couldn’t afford to lose him; so I saved the URL of the site where I streamed the video and the next day, I sought out my friend who was techy and asked him if he could burn the video into a CD for me, because, well, CDs were the trend back then. He said OK, and a couple of days later, I was the proud owner of an unmarked video CD that contained my very first Western corruption.

And because I was terrified by the thought of my brothers discovering the CD, I agonized over where to hide it. I used to buy lots of CDs back then, both movies and music, and my brothers frequently pored through my collections, sometimes without telling me. I didn’t want them picking out a Ginuwine audio CD and opening the case to find Ginuwine in it – along with something else they’d curiously slot into the video player to see what it contained.

So I hid the porn CD in the one place I knew my brothers would never find it: inside the case that contained my Sex and the City VCDs, from season 1 to 6. Sex and the City was one TV show they never wanted to watch with me because they thought it was too girly and they abhorred the gay storylines in it. For some reason, they even liked Desperate Housewives, but not Sex and the City. So, in – among Carried Bradshaw and her New York sexcapades – went Arpad Miklos and his uncut cock.

The years passed and I brought out that CD to watch less and less. But I never stopped loving Arpad Miklos. Even as I began discovering the world of porn and all the gorgeous men in it, Arpad remained the love of my life. My first love. And that CD stayed safe in the Sex and the City pack as the years went by.

I had moved to Lagos by February 2013, when I learned that Arpad Miklos had taken his life. The news devastated me. (I would go on to grieve another celebrity death later that year – that of my favorite novelist, Vince Flynn, who died in June 2013). Upon reading the news reports on Arpad’s suicide, I learned for the first time his real name: Peter Kozma. He’d died at 45 years of age, his body found in his New York apartment. He’d apparently been battling depression, and left a suicide note, in which he wrote that though he “knows there will be judgment, the haters can hate and speculate”, but that he wasn’t going to give a specific reason as to why he took his own life.

The sadness that arose from his death became more poignant when the following month, another porn star, Wilfried Knight, committed suicide and media reports used that incident to highlight Arpad’s death and that of another porn star, Erik Rhodes, who died the previous year.

Life happened and I soon forgot about Arpad Miklos, occasionally remembering him whenever I watched the performances of porn industry veterans like Francois Sagat, Francesco D’Macho and Damien Crosse, who were his peers.

A couple of months ago, I stumbled on an old video of him fucking some unknown named Devin Draz. As I played the scene, I got very quickly turned on by Arpad’s familiar skill. His fingers. His tongue. His uncut cock. It was all coming back to me.

And then, I wanked myself to a climax, and thereafter, sat there, staring at the laptop screen, at the paused video and the frozen motion of Arpad’s hulking body – and I felt very weird. Like, was there not something creepy about getting turned on by the activities of a man who was dead?

Feeling flush with mortification, I hastily exited the internet page and tried to put what I’d done out of my mind. It felt like I’d somehow desecrated the memory of the man I loved.

But back to the Slate advice column, and the columnist had this to say to Ghost-Wank:

“Dear Ghost Wank,

“It’s OK to fantasize about dead celebrities because it’s OK to fantasize, period. Your experience illustrates the reflexive nature of fantasy: The actor popped up in your head. You didn’t conjure them. It just happened, and you went with it. I think it’s far less ethical to actively deprive yourself of something that feels good (that will hurt absolutely no one), especially when you’re in the middle of the act. Best to just get the job done. You aren’t fantasizing about banging a corpse.

“Besides, in all likelihood, part of this actor’s job was to be sexually appealing, so by getting off to them, you’re honoring their legacy … in a way. This comes up when a porn performer dies and sites like Str8UpGayPorn post professional pictures of happier times that inevitably involve erections and penetration of this now fallen star. I’m sure some people recoil, but undoubtedly plenty do what they always did to that guy’s naked pictures and rub one out. In that instance, it’s very easy to tuck your chin and tumble into the assumption that it’s what they would have wanted. Might as well. You’re fine.”

And so, I was indeed fine. I took this response to heart. I realised that I wouldn’t be desecrating the memory of Arpad Miklos if I ever wanked to his adult scenes. No. I’d instead be honoring his legacy of a man who was able to feed and satisfy the passions of all those who found him desirable.

Written by Pink Panther