Porn persona real persona

For a man that thousands of men love to look at, Sharok (as Shahrokh Mosavi

Nejad is more commonly known)—porn actor, painter, political activist, and poultry farmer— has a lot of trouble looking (literally, not figuratively) at himself. Having grown up obese, in an Iranian family of recovering addicts exiled in LA, porn acting became an escape from the critical light in which he saw his own body. Sharok, like innumerable gay men, has long suffered from body dysmorphia. But sex work was a way of outsourcing the (inevitably critical) way of looking at himself to others, at a time

gay pornography often rotates around ‘exploitable heroes’ that are ‘also dumb’ – but if dumbness is built into the conventions of pornographic scene-making, so too is education. The gay porn actor is often the gateway through which young people learn about sex

when his self-esteem was at an all-time low. If tens of thousands of viewers could be turned on by his physique, then who was he to say otherwise?

The somewhat startling openness with which he talks to me about his body dysmorphia is consistent with the strident insistence with which he brings attention to the range of political issues he cares deeply, some would say too deeply, about. Long lusted after by a certain kind of online gay man, Sharok would break into a more general public consciousness after he staged a protest at

Paris Fashion Week in January, 2023. Modeling for a Louis Gabriel Nouchi show inspired by the work of Bret Easton Ellis of Sharok’s own native LA, the porn actor unbuttoned his shirt to reveal a tattoo of the slogan Zan, Zandagi, Azadi (‘Woman, Life, Freedom’) that became a rallying cry in Iran after the alleged killing of Mahsa/Jina Amini as well as holding up a Stop Executions in Iran sign. When we speak this summer, the news of Sinéad O’Connor’s death had just broken and it is on my mind as I learn that it’s on his. As is the question of the mental health cost of a life lived fully committed to the cause of the political.

HUSSEIN AH OMAR When we first met, you told me that your parents came to America at around the time of the Iranian revolution of 1979. Were your parents involved in the revolution?

SHAROK No, they couldn’t have been: they were too young. There had also been a few attempts on the life of my Jewish great-great grandfather Murad just before the protests broke out. As a result, my mother was afraid and always looking over her shoulder and saying don’t tell anyone about our family. Now she is still paranoid and scared of the regime and carries a lot of religious trauma especially vis a vis Muslims.

HO Were they politically active in exile? To what extent were your own political commitments formed in the crucible of your exiled family?

SHAROK My parents left Iran and never went back. They come from completely different socio-economic backgrounds. They’d never have met had they stayed there. That’s one of the first good things to come out of the revolution. My mother’s maternal grandfather was a Jewish MP who had a reserved seat in Parliament. He had been a prominent and wealthy business man at the time. He was in Italy on business during the 1953 Mossadegh coup which overthrew the Shah, who was forced into brief exile. My great-grandfather gave him a blank cheque in that brief period, for which the Shah always remained grateful for.

My mother’s father Shahroukh was Muslim, prominent in the navy. He was a Hedayat and was a first cousin of Sadegh [Hedayat: perhaps the greatest Iranian modernist writer of the Twentieth century who died by suicide in 1951]. Sadegh’s sister is in LA now and is 94. I visit her every Sunday. My mother’s mother was a Jewish socialite that came to LA to open a Persian restaurant and my dad was the chef in the restaurant in the early Eighties. He was a hot, big muscle guy.

He was a chef in my mother’s mother’s restaurant and my other grandmother also worked in the restaurant. At sixteen my mother ran off with my father, who was a bit older. This scandalized everyone – not only because he was Muslim, or because he was a chef but also because they left to set up a competitor restaurant. This was just after the revolution. My dad was from a different family than my mother: he was a working-class Muslim but was not pious. My father’s grandmother was a Kurdish woman who fled as an orphan and was saved by her would-be husband who was Turkic. My Turkic great-grandfather picked her up on horseback and took her back to his village, they got married and my grandmother was born. That’s why my father grew up speaking both Azeri and Farsi.

I was raised by my father’s mother who was devout and prayed and went to Mecca.

I flirted with Buddhism and Christianity and Sufism. They even sent me and my brother to Catholic elementary school and they pulled me out in second grade.

I was soft and effeminate and a shy child so the nuns were not nice – there was one nun in particular that wasn’t nice. My mother immediately saw that that kind of religious environment wasn’t right for me. I soon developed a drug problem. I’d been overweight and struggled with my appearance. I had a severe eating disorder and body dysmorphia but I don’t binge and purge as I used to or use laxatives to suppress my appetite. My parents got divorced when I was nine and being in the restaurant business both have food issues. Both are sober now. My immediate family is sober or dead. My uncle died at thirty-eight and the rest are pretty much sober. I feel like when we have parents who are in active addiction or around it so we had to suppress it through food, or lack of food and binging and purging. I had and still have low self-esteem – but if other people would pay me to have sex with them I felt okay about it.

I started going into West Hollywood when I was sixteen, seventeen and into a lot of cruising spots on the gold coast between Melrose and Santa Monica. I was cute and young and if I could charge for sex I would. I soon signed with an escort agency off the Kings Road. He had a site and guys would request us and I would show up. The agent would take a cut of thirty-five percent.

I then did porn when I was eighteen.

I’d only bottomed once in my life. And it wasn’t pleasurable, he had a giant penis. I turned up on set and I was with this Iranian guy and he wanted to be a white twink and he had bleached everything.

They had rented a cabin in San Diego and it was like a big slumber party of just boys for three days. Then I had to figure out how to bottom and it was a condom scene because there was no PREP. At the time I was living between my dad’s place and my friend’s.

My dad had no idea I was doing this.

My mom had lost her house and she was with her ex-husband in a studio and my brother was strung out on drugs. My Jewish relatives didn’t accept us – because of class and religious differences – until they got to know me as a teenager, but when I came out at sixteen they abandoned me. ‘We don’t care that you’re gay, my mother said, but don’t tell them that you’re gay because they think you will molest the children’.

I stopped hanging out with that side of the family. I see them at funerals and things like that but I never came out to them as gay.

I had always wanted to be close to that side of the family because they were in NY but that dissipated at sixteen, seventeen. They weren’t malicious, it was just how they were raised. They thought gay men were pedophiles

In any event, I got paid 800 dollars for making the porn and I constructed an aviary in my dad’s back yard. I paid for a rooster with 250 dollars that I got from escorting. I was so gay I didn’t know how to interact with other kids. The kids were mean but the animals were always nice. My dad’s father was a pigeon breeder and he smuggled his pair of pigeons with him into the USA through his coat sleeves. He was gay but got solace from the birds. He and my grandmother had divorced in Iran but when he moved here he lived with this white professor (super gay) until he died. It was cute but nobody talked about it.

HO Porn and pigeons were a kind of refuge for you.

SHAROK At twenty-one I wanted to get my life back together after spending a year in Thailand and I had no idea what I was doing with my life. I found a community college in horticulture in Maui [Hawaii] which was cheap. I wanted to work on a farm and to garden. I started working on an estate which used to be an orchard for five years. I then met a makeup artist on Maui who became a boyfriend and when we got back to LA he did my makeup and hair for a while.

HO I’ve seen from your Instagram that you used to drag as well.

SHAROK The only other gay Iranian I knew was my cousin who died of AIDS when we were fifteen, and there was the guy in his sixties I lost my virginity to. I was a roadie and a hanger on to many of the drag queens. It was a way of being gay and not being sexualized, to be praised and admired for another reason. I was attached to Tammy Brown and Sparkle Stone and her boyfriend Holly Day. I stopped doing sex work, but I was a gardener and a landscaper and doing drag twice a week on the side. Gardening wasn’t providing anything so I wanted to go to cosmetology school to do hair. I did and

I was doing drag and going to school for hair. And then I met a boy at a time when my paternal grandmother was dying of cancer. I became totally codependent on this boy and he didn’t like the drag because he thought it was too gay. I gave my drag away but ended up not doing hair because that was too gay. He wanted me to go work in my dad’s restaurant and I did. And that was the boyfriend I went to Egypt for three, four months and I was on a lot of drugs so everything was blurry. My grandmother passed, and I sold my truck.

We used the money to escape LA to Turkey first and he wanted to go to Egypt in 2011. We were staying close to Tahrir.

HO Is that when you became active on social media?

SHAROK I didn’t have social media until 2017/8. I had Facebook but that was it.

When we came back to LA from Egypt, we had no place to stay. We stayed with a friend for a while until my boyfriend's mom let him come back into her house. We lived on her couch for two years. We were super fucked up on drugs. I had my second suicide attempt in 2014 and in 2016. They keep you in a psych ward for 72 hours. The third time was the same psychiatrist that had seen me when I was seventeen. She said you’ve been here before, if I let you out in 72 hours as you are likely to succeed at killing yourself so she kept me for a month and a half in the psych ward. The psych ward was interesting. There was a guy called Malik from Yemen who couldn’t speak English. He was in complete psychosis. I could understand his broken English and his accent.

That gave me purpose while I was there.

And I tried to calm him down and be his translator and I would do art and paint.

Even in those times, politics was always in the background. My great aunt who is an Orthodox Jew wanted me to go on Birthright to Israel. Even as a young teenager, I couldn’t bring myself to do it. The politics started there. When the US invaded Iraq in 2003 I went to my first protest. I had always been super interested in Iran but engaging its politics always felt sad and defeatist. I grew up with stories of the beautiful time before revolution and then it happened and it was all doom and gloom. My mother’s family could never go but my dad’s could. They would never let me go because a) I am gay b) my mother is scared they would hold me hostage to get her back. Some of it isn’t irrational. When my mother’s family were in London they had someone working for them who intended to blow them up. He was living with them at the time. He went to get the car and the car detonated before he could get to them. When I first started using Instagram it was LGBTQ and Palestine mixed in. Twitter is the only platform that allows posting anything sexual. I am on my third Instagram account. It’s not for sex work.

HO You combine an engagement with politics of the Middle East (Iraq, Iran, Palestine and Egypt) and your main form of work which is pornography. Do your porn fans ever respond negatively when you post political stuff?

SHAROK When they followed me they saw plant and animal stuff, they saw politics of LGBT. I got a lot of attention in 2020 around BLM stuff when I was assaulted in a protest when my lip was cut and I posted it. Audiences that were likely to get offended by politics they unfollowed. There was a dropoff in follower numbers, but that meant they got weeded out. I also lost a bunch of followers because the transphobes saw a video I made with a trans man. They nearly got my account deactivated in 2021/2 because they kept reporting it, but that also weeded out followers.

HO Another thing that marks you out as relatively unusual in the world of digital pornography is that your screen name is the same as your real, birth name. Why did you choose to do that?

SHAROK I chose Sharok as a character that was aligned with my birth name. It’s good and bad. I joined my porn persona with my real person and now I can’t escape it. I am flattered when people take pictures of me and I am grateful to be still relevant in the industry. This beautiful young woman came up to me when I was walking with my boyfriend and told me she was such a fan. I was a bit surprised that such a woman would know about, let alone watch, gay porn but of course she meant my political advocacy.

HO Sinéad O’Connor just passed and she was someone who struggled to balance political activism with mental health. A lot of us can understand and identify with that.

SHAROK Political advocacy corrodes my peace of mind while giving me a sense of purpose at the same time. You know. You are Egyptian. You went through the Arab Spring. You know how it hurts when your own flesh and blood are being killed. I don’t like bullies because I was bullied. It was only after I was deep in my activism that I realized how corrosive to my peace of mind it can be. After Paris Fashion Week it hit me. I needed to take a break. But I have so much privilege: I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t use my privilege. I used to get angry at my family for not being outspoken, but they were so traumatized

I now understand it. One thing I am adamant not to do is to tell people who are living in

Iran how to behave or to behave differently.

HO It's always struck me that there’s something like the work of a translator in what you do. You translate between worlds – pornography and politics – that don’t often speak to each other.

SHAROK I became well known as a Porn star and a performer but I always get messages from fans who read my political posts that tell me they had no idea that this was going on. I feel good about that. I am anxious about writing this profile because it’s all too common for writers writing about sex workers that they express – although often in an understated, inexplicit, and suggestive way – a surprise that the latter have a depth or intelligence that isn’t always immediately visible on the screen. This performative gesture is as much a reflection of a general patronizing attitude towards sex workers by the putatively intellectual, as it is of the aesthetics of gay pornography itself, which often rotates around ‘exploitable heroes’ that are ‘also dumb’, in the memorable phrase of Californian poet Robert Glück. If dumbness is built into the conventions of pornographic scene-making, so too is education.

It isn’t just that much of pornography takes the form of the Bildüngsromanen as Glück reminds us, but the porn actor, and especially the gay porn actor, is often the gateway through which young people learn about sex – what it is, and how to do it – in the first place. It is perhaps from that impulse – to educate – that Sharok’s own political activism might be understood, bringing to new audiences concerns that they didn’t yet know they had. Porn, like politics, cannot be but pedagogical.