I Went to a Freak Off @ Diddy's Place Where I Learned That the Little Guy Always Gets It in the End

"Rectum? I almost KILLED him," said Diddy when reached around for a comment.

“I…I fell on a sprinkler head…”

Porn can sometimes be an interesting place in space. Typically the most honest of endeavors we’re all routinely dishonest about, its normative pull is undeniable. Technologically speaking the truth can be told though. We had VHS because of porn and in lots of regards (streaming, AI and the preponderance of trans performers, either undercover or not), it’s been a leading indicator.

Think not? When was the last time you had sex with someone with a significant amount of pubic hair? Thank you, porn.

And so it is that I found myself on the Venice set of a porn film back in the late ‘90s. The occasion was an article on pornstar Mr. Marcus, the unofficial “luckiest Black man in America”. On account of? On account of a three day filming of a video wherein he bed over 100 women, a so-called “reverse gangbang”, it had made Marcus famous.

Spending the day with him in Los Angeles, on and off the film set, celebrities stopping us on the streets, it was pretty clearly the case as even cops were waving at him. Marcus also made sure I had a bunch of his product line which, he had explained, were staffed fairly exclusively with women he had met at the Beverly Center while shopping.

Unsexy because how is it that it never seems — whether we’re talking about Epstein, Combs or even Hugh Hefner — to be about any real kind of pleasure, but is much more about the conspicuous display of power and control?

The mega mall on the edge of Beverly Hills held all kinds of secrets and while watching one of his videos for review I noticed something. A woman who had been brought in by Marcus for a boy-girl-boy scene, mid-scene, started crying. You could see it working its way to the surface in the first five minutes since while one of the boys was the very handsome Marcus, the other boy? Aggressively overweight and probably no one’s definition of handsome.

I later brought this up to Marcus. He paused, sighed and explained to me, in his best porn-management speak: “she knew what the job was when she took it.”

And there it was.

Simple and simply put this explanation undergirded the mechanics of life in the City of Angels writ both large and small. So much so that when the news hits that Sean “Diddy” Combs has been arrested at a luxury hotel in New York for sex trafficking and racketeering, preceded six months earlier by raids on his properties in Los Angeles, New York, and Miami, it was really no surprise at all.

This all, a crescendo of legal activity begun at the end of a long screed of a variety of other charges all involving some admixture of assault, rape, physical abuse, sexual assault, sexual harassment, and infliction of emotional distress, was years in the making. Even if years and years of bad behavioral patterns that were smoothed over by continuing celebrity associations and large amounts of money, had kept the party going.

Some have already made the connection between Combs and Jeffrey Epstein. A move that makes sense since with some of the same characters appearing in both narrative skeins, the trend is to focus on the more salacious elements, the ones that excite the same sort of patterns of revelation and then outrage, and those in the face of which I find myself less impressed by the so-called perversions and much more shocked that the focus hasn’t returned to focus on how unsexy it all was.

Unsexy because how is it that it never seems — whether we’re talking about Epstein, Combs or even Hugh Hefner — to be about any real kind of pleasure, but is much more about the conspicuous display of power and control? And if that’s your jam, then their proclivities must seem sexier than all get out. The very essence of management philosophy it doesn’t seem strange at all that this is the net that’s caught everyone (and why say “everyone” when we’re talking about almost exclusively men) from Bill Gates and Bill Clinton to Prince Harry and Donald Trump.

If power is the weight you bring to bear you’ll never weigh more than the house, and in casino terms, the house always wins.

Of course the temptation, as we’ve attempted to litigate this pre-court with our random bloviating, is to cast around for reasons. Race, that ol’ American fave, being first and foremost. And here it echoes the spirit of Public Enemy’s “Who Stole the Soul?” with people like Boosie Badazz saying that sex parties aren’t crimes (and he’s right there) and suggesting like Chuck D. raps “The bigger the Blacks get/The bigger the feds want/A piece of that ... booty”.

This is the same claim made by financial fraudster Carlos Watson in an effort to avoid prison time (coincidentally Watson was remanded into custody at the same facility where Combs is): yes, he was a criminal, but the fact that he was a Black criminal is the reason he was in jail. Which might be the case but what’s definitely not the case is that in Combs’ case, like in Watson’s, there was no crime there.

There was in fact, a crime there, several in fact, and if Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell cooling their heels in the stony lonesome wasn’t proof enough, we need look no further than Harvey Weinstein or Danny Masterson.

The Feds are not fucking around anymore in regards to fucking around since even in the face of massive amounts of fucking and 1000 bottles of lube, as found at one of Combs’ properties, this is not about fucking nearly as much as it is about power. And the kind of power that inevitably trends toward criminality.

A criminality that Combs found necessary to conceal from all non-Freak Off attendees, his very obvious interest in homosexual activity. There’s a claim made in A Walk Across Dirty Water & Straight Into Murderer’s Row, my memoir, that men who haven’t come to terms with the homosexual elements of their sexuality, that is, repressed homosexuals, can be dangerous in their efforts to fight the gay man inside of them, and their public identification with such.

So it goes that Combs, strolling through his mansions, impresario to the end who with a mix of well-crafted aesthetics (not illegal), drugs (not so legal), locked doors (ok, illegal) and video, kept his movable feasts moving. Having so much fun he clearly forgot the number one rule of criminal behavior: don’t be filmed doing it.

Which is why he was arrested after his properties were raided and why his defenders at present are so scant. The proof — video, video, video — was irrefutable.

But is it the case that interests, like these, inevitably lead to criminal expressions? Or were criminal expressions always just the real draw? In the case of Bill Cosby it was clear he could have gotten exactly what he had taken with a prior arrangement, given the nature of celebrity, but this is not what he wanted. The kink was in the lack, or absence, of consent.

When someone very close to me tells me that she had gone to a party sponsored by someone in the orbit of Justin Timberlake and she and a friend were drugged and raped, only she hadn’t been as thoroughly drugged as her friend so was completely conscious, though inert, through the evening’s events, the full horror of the exercise of power reveals itself.

She didn’t know what the job was when she took it. In fact these powermongers very much count on the baiting and switching and those of us mystified that having sex with someone unconscious, or unwilling, would be very fun at all, are left scratching our heads. Mostly because we’re thinking sex, and not power.

Mr. Marcus and Me at the Sklar Brothers headquarters. They shitcanned the show where I appeared when I made a joke about one of the comedy duo’s weight.

But it’s the power that creates the overarching sense of invincibility. The power that makes male on male sexual expression less about sex, and therefore homosexuality, and much more about domination. It’s the power and power adjacency that creates crazily bold beliefs in their untouchability. And ultimately? It’s power that’s imprisoned them.

During Stalin’s reign of terror in the Soviet Union during some show trials he had told his interrogators to force a confession out of a prisoner. The prisoner would not break and in a break from the proceedings Stalin asked his torturers a simple question: how much does Russia weigh?

Confused they puzzled this through as telling Stalin you didn’t know was a surefire way to end up on the business end of their business. So they tried to figure this out by triangulating land mass with populations and still no workable answer.

Stalin seeing he was getting nowhere with this, cut to the chase: “does he weigh more than Russia?” Emboldened they got their confession and so it goes with Combs, as it went with Epstein, Weinstein, Masterson, Elizabeth Holmes, Sam Bankman-Fried and yes, my former boss Carlos Watson. If power is the weight you bring to bear you’ll never weigh more than the house, and in casino terms, the house always wins.

And I’m glad it does.

Because for me, the sex is a superset, set off occasionally by power play, but just as well exercised without power or coercion at all, and my distaste is premised on, always, the kind of dishonesty that’s part and parcel of their angle of attack. It’s in this dishonesty that we see a knowledge of wrongdoing and the kind of self-awareness that’s highly unlikely to set them free.

And I’m glad that they won’t be.

Will these cautionary tales keep this from happening again, and again, and sickeningly again? Probably not. But is it somewhat of a relief to see some small measure of justice done?

No doubt. Not a single one at all.

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