‘Modern Family’ Character Actor Turned Tumblr Porn Star David Pevsner Has No Shame

“People can laugh at me and say, ‘Oh he’s just putting his dick up on the internet and getting off on it.’ If that’s what they want to think, that’s what they want to think.” I’m talking on the phone with David Pevsner, an LA-based actor, writer and performer best-known for writing some of the songs in the hit 1998 Off-Broadway musical Naked Boys Singing!, which was later turned into a feature film. Over the past year, the subjects of Pevsner’s songs for that show, which explore shame about the male body and the desire to be a porn star, have taken on a new meaning. A little over a year ago, Pevsner launched his own Tumblr called Shameless, an erotic photo site featuring nearly 15 years worth of pictures of the 56-year-old actor in varying states of undress and arousal.

Initially, he was worried about what would happen and how people would react to his body in our youth-obsessed gay culture. “There’s a couple of gossip sites that people have shown me, where the comments range from “That’s hot to see an older guy in good shape” to “Grandpa put it away, you’re fugly.” I’ve seen it all. If you put yourself out there, you have to be ready for the good and the bad,” he explains. But his followers are vocal and enthusiastic, both daddies like himself, and daddy-chasers from younger generations. One of his followers even started a “Fuck Yeah” fan site devoted to his images. I spoke with David about the effect his new porn pursuits have had on his career, coffee-table erotica, and whether he’s planning on moving from photography into porn films anytime soon.

Adam: How are things in LA?

David Pevsner: I’m sitting outside and we’re having nice sunny weather. That’s one thing I don’t miss about New York.

Tom Bianchi
Photo by Tom Bianchi

How long did you live in New York?

I lived there for 16 years. I’ve been here about 16 years also.

Before you messaged me about Shameless, I only knew one side of you, which is that you wrote some of the songs for the musical Naked Boys Singing.

Right. I wrote three of the songs for that, and I had a couple of one-man shows that I did. I’ve written for various novelty things, and I’ve also done a lot of things as an actor.

Would you call them — character or extra parts?

Well on TV shows I’ve mostly played doctors and lawyers. The guy who comes in and either gives the good news or the bad news on shows like Modern Family or Grey’s Anatomy. Little supporting roles on TV. My bigger roles have come in independent films and on the web.

The independent films are mostly gay films?

Yeah. I played Ebenezer Scrooge in Scrooge and Marley. Role/Play. Joshua Tree, 1951: A Portrait of James Dean. Those are the things that really give me a chance to dig in.

When did you start taking sexually explicit photos of yourself?

It started when I was on the national tour of Fiddler on the Roof. It was a tour that came to Broadway in 1989, I think. Maybe 1990. I was on the beach in Fire Island and I ran into Tom Bianchi, who was there with a friend of mine. I had met Tom the year before when I was visiting LA. He approached me and said he wanted to shoot me, but at the time I didn’t know who he was. I didn’t really want to do it. My low self-esteem was talking. A year later I ran into him on the beach and I was like, “I know you,” and he said, “Yeah we chatted in LA.” My friend said, “David, if you’re ever going to get nudes shot, this is the guy to do it. So we did a shoot on Fire Island and that ended up in his first book. Then I did another shoot for him a couple of years later and that was really it. I shot for a couple of other guys in New York but nothing that I was too excited about at the time. But then when I moved to LA in 1998, I started to go to some of the erotic art fairs and I would see people like Jay Jorgensen and he was probably the first LA photographer to shoot me.

Where would these photos get shown?

They would get shown in a gallery or one time I was in a calendar. But they weren’t all over the place.

It’s sort of like this weird subculture of porn that’s not quite porn, like coffee-table erotica books and calendars and things that are sold in gay book shops that men of a certain type buy. They’re somehow more acceptable because they’re presented as art.

Right. Leaning more towards art. I try to ride the fine line between art and porn, but one man’s art is another man’s porn. Just showing your cock to people sometimes is porn. I can’t be responsible for that kind of thinking. Whenever I work with somebody, I try to find something that has a point of view to it, that isn’t just spread your legs and show me what you got. I try to find something that tells a little more of a story and that’s more collaborative between me and the photographer.

Why did you decide to start putting them up on Tumblr?

I did a bunch of shoots with people and they weren’t really seeing the light of day, just a shot here or there. Finally I thought with Tumblr I could do it. I had all these pictures, but they weren’t seeing the light of day because I was holding my cards close. There was a bit of shame involved. I worried about my career, would it hurt it to put them out there. Most of them were shot after I was 40 years old. But then I thought, no, I’m tired of being shameful about sexuality and my body and the ageism that’s out there. I thought, I can actually make a little statement here about putting them out. That’s how Shameless started.

That was about a year ago, right?

A little over a year. I put them out little by little. If I had been putting them out little by little over the years, it wouldn’t seem like that much. I tried to put some things out every few days or weeks, and I tried to put something out that had the mindset that I wanted to put out there.

Which is what?

Partly, feel good about your bodies. There’s so much shame and coyness. America, as we know, treats sexuality and physicality in a whole other way than they do overseas. I grew up shy and filled with shame and avoided the locker room in gym class because it scared the crap out of me because I had to take showers. I wrote a song about that that wound up in Naked Boys Singing. That came from a very truthful place of the fear and shame I felt about showing my body. Also, guys my age, we lived through the eighties and that was a very difficult time, sex was a very scary thing. The remnants of that don’t go away that easily. On top of that, being a guy of a certain age, and everybody in the media is in their twenties and looking hot – I’m an average guy and I take care of myself, so I thought, why not celebrate that too?

So you just up and pulled the trigger one day?

Yeah, I was just like, just do it, you’re too fuckin’ old, nobody cares anymore. Is it gonna kill my career? I don’t know. My joke is that I have enough dirt to kill twelve careers, so really I believe that if you own it, it can’t hurt you. It’s all speculative as to what it’s going to do to me. All I know is that the positive feedback I’ve gotten from people has been great. I think it’s kind of fun. I’m not gonna lie, there’s definitely a narcissistic part of it that I enjoy. Plus, doing photoshoots over a long time has kept me in shape. The more I do, the more I want to see how far the photographer wants to go with it and push the envelope and try different things. It’s kind of performance art for me.

If it was ten years earlier you could still get into porn magazines for daddies and things like that.

Right. The good thing about Tumblr is that I’m a bit of a control freak, so I can control these images. I can’t control where they go once they get blogged and reblogged, but I can put up the image that I want to put up. It is a form of art for me. People can laugh at me and say, “Oh he’s just putting his dick up on the internet and getting off on it.” If that’s what they want to think, that’s what they want to think. I can’t really address it.

But you said there’s been a pretty great response?

Yeah. I get a lot of emails and comments on my Tumblr blog, people saying exactly what I wanted them to say. “I’m kind of inspired by this. I always had such shame about my body and maybe I need to rethink that.” Or “I’m an older guy and I see you putting yourself out there and I’m tired of being afraid of putting on a bathing suit and going to the beach. Who cares anymore?” There’s a couple of gossip sites that people have shown me, where the comments range from “That’s hot to see an older guy in good shape” to “Grandpa put it away, you’re fugly.” I’ve seen it all. If you put yourself out there, you have to be ready for the good and the bad. I’m an average guy, but I feel like I have something to say when I’m in front of the camera.

You see a lot more older guy porn out there in the world now, on Xtube and places like that. I feel like there are probably a lot more guys like you who are just doing that now. 

Yeah. We have had so many years of feeling crappy about ourselves and our sexuality, that when the Internet makes it so easy to express it, people are doing that now. I’m all for it. I can’t say it’s all something I want to watch, just like there are people who probably don’t want to look at my pictures and think my expiration date was ten years ago. But I get a lot of nice comments and it’s not just “Hey, what are you doing Saturday night?” It’s been good.

“Up…Against the Wall” by Aaron Jay Young
“Up…Against the Wall” by Aaron Jay Young

So if someone came and said we want you to be in daddy porn or older-guy porn, would that be something you would do?

Well, you know one of the first songs I ever wrote was a song called “Perky Little Porn Star” which is about a Jewish guy from Skokie, Illinois who does porn. I’ll be honest and say, ever since I could watch porn there was a part of me that wanted to do it. But there was also a part of me that wanted a mainstream career. I figured, that’s probably not a good idea. Now, I’ve had a few offers, and I’m not gonna say never. I wrote a film that has a really strong penetrative sexuality to it, and that’s something I want to do first if I can. It’s not just a porn film. Something like Shortbus is really interesting to me, because it uses sexuality to tell the story and it’s not coy about it and it really gets into that. I love that. That’s what I’m really interested in. If I’m going to do it, I would do it in the hands of someone like that. It would have to be the right thing and it wouldn’t just be to fuck in front of the camera.

Somebody created a Tumblr homage to you, I saw. 

Yeah there’s a fan site called Fuck Yeah David Pevsner. I don’t know who it is. But it’s fine. It’s very nice that somebody took my pics and wanted to their own thing with them. I take it as a very positive thing. I like it when people mention the things that I’ve done. Nothing is more important to me than my work as an actor and writer. But this aspect of me has always been a part of me. I chose to put it out up front.

Some of the photos I quite like, that are just simply you in front of the camera. But I don’t like the ones where you’re done up in costumes or body paint or things like that.

I buy that. Just like there’s the whole art-porn thing, there’s some things that appeal to me and some don’t. When I work with people there are sometimes when I say, let’s do it and others when I say absolutely not. “We are not using that picture.” Or I say, I see what you see in the picture, let’s put it out there. Some of them get blogged a bunch of times and some of them don’t. You want people to love everything you do but that’s not going to happen. Sometimes the ones that you think are marginal become the really popular ones. You go, oh well, I didn’t see that coming.

What’s your most popular picture?

There’s one that came out a couple of months ago that got re-blogged really fast called “The Gentlemen” by this artist Johnny Thornton. He sent it to me and said, “This is a really good picture and you need to use it.” I put it out there and it really got wildfire reblogging. When I first started, I didn’t have as many followers, but now I have lots more and things go a little faster.

You said earlier that you have enough dirt to end twelve careers. Can we dig some of it up here?

I have a new show coming out, a one-man musical that I wrote. I don’t want to go into the details because there’s a mystery going into the theater that I want people to discover while they’re there. The show is called Musical Comedy Whore. I’m going to leave it at that.

Is it about your affairs with various people on Broadway? Were you a literal whore?

Um, if we could just leave it at, the title is more than you think, when the show comes again, I’ll talk more about it. But I really want to leave it at that. The show talks about my sexual exploits, and the pictures and that kind of thing. A lot of mainstream actors aren’t willing to go there, and I totally understand that. But need to express myself has trumped my desire to — I don’t know. I don’t want to hold back anymore.

David Pevsner in Tom Bianchi's “All American” 1990
David Pevsner in Tom Bianchi’s “All American” 1990

I mean, that’s admirable, but in terms of your status, you’re not exactly a mainstream actor. You don’t have as much to lose.

Right, I know that. I’m not trying to say I am. But the thing is, I’ve stuck my toe everywhere, Broadway, off-Broadway, TV. Even though I haven’t played a lead on Modern Family, I’ve played recognizable doctors on TV, but I’m also on two webseries right now. I was in 300: Rise of an Empire in a small role. I think I have one of the most schiz-y career of anyone I know. I’m not trying to say I’m a star by any stretch. But I have a place. I have a place in smaller independent stuff, and that’s the stuff I like more than anything.

Has anyone on the TV shows you do ever mentioned they saw your Tumblr?

No. That’s the thing, I don’t know who has seen these of my friends. Sometimes I’ll get a random Faceook message and somebody will say they saw my Tumblr. Or a random email. I don’t know. This is one of those situations where I just put them out and don’t think about the results. Is it foolish or narcissistic or delusional? I don’t know. It’s something that I felt like was backlogged in my computer and I felt like doing it. And it’s been pretty great. It fulfills a lot of what I wanted to say all my life about these issues. I don’t want people to get the sense that I’m so full of myself that I put my pictures on the Internet. That’s not what it’s about for me.

In what ways did you feel shame in your sexuality besides growing up during the height of AIDS? Did people make you feel shame about your body?

Yeah. Growing up I didn’t want to be seen in a bathing suit because my sisters would make fun of me. Gym class they made fun of me because I was a skinny guy. Also growing up in Chicago, nobody talked about sexuality and I would have to look in the back of After Dark magazine to satisfy my desire to look at men who turned me on. It was very secretive and quiet and done in shadows. Once you get into college everything is a little easier, but the germ of that shame takes a while to go away. When I started working out that helped, I had more pride in my body, but that was a band aid because I looked better but I still had that fear to take my shirt off. I don’t have fear anymore.

Well you do have a little fear which is to tell me any good printable dirt.

That will come in the next interview.

You think you’re getting a second interview with me if you don’t give me any good dirt?

What kind of dirt do you want?

You said you had enough to end 12 careers? I want a good, juicy, dirt-filled story.

You know what, I think I’ll have to wait until to the show comes out.

Alright.

It’s not enough that I’m naked all over the Internet?

Not really, I talk to people every week who are. I just wanted some good dirt. You also said you were an open book.

That’s true I did say that. I just don’t want to ruin the effect of the show. There’s just one element I want to hold close until the show comes out.

Alright, until then, David. Thanks for talking to me!

“The Leather Edge” by Jeff Compasso
“The Leather Edge” by Jeff Compasso

 

___________________________
Adam Baran is a filmmaker, blogger, former online editor of Butt Magazine and co-curator of Queer/Art/Film. His short film JACKPOT, about a porn-hunting gay teen, won Best Short Film at the Miami Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, and was recently featured on The Huffington Post, Queerty, and Towleroad, among others. He is a features programmer at Outfest Los Angeles LGBT Film Festival and NewFest in New York. In his spare time, he complains about things to his friends. “Fisting for Compliments”, his weekly musings about the intersection of sex, art, porn, and history, will appear every Monday on TheSword. You can contact him at Adam@TheSword.com and follow him on Twitter at @ABaran999. Check out his previous columns in the Fisting For Compliments Archive.

25 thoughts on “‘Modern Family’ Character Actor Turned Tumblr Porn Star David Pevsner Has No Shame”

  1. He’s a really sexy guy, in fact in my humble opinion I would say perfect & I’m gratefuk he decided to share his beautiful photos, the guy is hot as…

  2. I have been following David’s blog since it began and get off looking at him nude. But, by now, the pinching of his nipples and illusions of sucking cock should be replaced by David having actual sex. I imagine he wants to. I imagine he gets off just thinking about it. So, I do hope he takes the leap and shows us fucking a guy or being fucked.

  3. Love David’s Shameless blog. His nude pictures, particularly the erection shots, are plenty to shoot a load looking at. But I think he needs to take the plunge and fuck on camera. He definitely wants us to see him cum.

  4. Obviously this is a man who gets off by other men looking at him nude. There is no shame in that. And I would like to see him go the next step and pose in sexual positions with another guy…maybe see the end result and some actual sex.

  5. Versatility in all forms of life, sexual or not is a good thing …
    David has a nice presence and photographs well.
    More men of his caliber would be a wel”cum”
    addition to draw back the curtain from
    men of a certain age …

  6. I don’t care how old you are, what your dick size is, or what body type you have beauty is in the eye of the beholder and can be appreciated in whatever form it takes. There is someone out there for everyone if we have the courage to find them.

  7. I’ve been a fan of Mr Pevsner for some time.

    Obviously, he’s a good looking guy – and he definitely has a narcissistic streak to his personality – but once you strip (yeah, I know) away the fact he’s naked, and sometimes an erection, there is an intensely artistic/creative aspect to what he’s doing. He’s literally ‘Shameless’. He uses his entire body to create an image that he wants to portray to the world.

    Usually, Mr Baran, I’m a major flag-waving fan of yours. I really appreciate what you’re doing because you’re curating a whole part of life/society that no-one else is prepared to do with any seriousness. And you don’t just do it, you do it with excellence.

    So please don’t take this as an insult or dig at your abilities, Mr Baran, but I felt this was the weakest of the interviews you’ve done.

    Pevsner is clearly a master at revealing his flesh to hide his inner creative processes – and the things that drive him to be the person he is. I don’t think you penetrated that outer emotional or intellectual armour in the way that you have done virtually every other interview of yours I’ve read.

    As a result, I’d REALLY like you to do a follow-up interview with Mr Pevsner at some later date. This interview cam off as a PR junket (yeah, I know,if we ever met in real life – unlikely – Mr Baran, you have my full permission to take a swing at me) and you usually go a great deal further than that in the incisiveness of your interviews. (Also, in any future interview you do with him, can you ask him if he’s in any way elated to Nicholas Pevsner – one of the all-time great architectural writers/historians in the UK?)

    Again, sorry if I’ve come across as negative here,Mr Baran. Although I’d never wear a cheerleader’s uniform for you, I’d be in the first ranks to wave a vaguely rhythmic pom-pom in your support.

    Oh well, Mr Baran, I’m still wishing you the merriest of Christmases (insert holiday of your persuasion) and a Happy, Healthy, Safe, Secure, Prosperous New Year.

    Thank you for all the work you’ve done in 2014 – it’s been an eye-opening (and incredibly enjoyable) blast of knowledge I never had before and never knew I needed. Thank you, sir.

  8. David is such an inspiration. It is true how age can free you from some of the fears that have held you back your whole life, and to have him out front creating this amazing imagery challenging not only that notion of internal fear, but the shame society projects onto aging bodies helps immensely. I’m really hoping that he gets the chance to produce the movie he talked about; I love the intersection between film and porn that movies like “Shortbus” and “I Want Your Love” have created, and I think he’d be the perfect person to continue that exploration. Mr. Pevsner, you are one brave, hot, sexy man, and I hope you are able to keep pushing forward in all your endeavors.

  9. Don’t let these words fool you: -” America, as we know, treats sexuality and fisicality in a whole other way than they do overseas. ” It’s a partial truth and only works if you look to certain groups of people. I’m not American, I don’t live in USA and I never travalled to US, but as America is a country very well known it becomes easy to compare things in and out US. Moral issues are quite the same in all western world and I think things are harder in the Orient. In my country, for exemple, prostitution isn’t a crime ( but to pimp someone is ) although people in their majority continue to see whores as dirty people and prostitution a debased activity. I read the same occurs in Germany, a country that is taken as a liberal place with all those naked people in the parks…

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

The maximum upload file size: 50 MB. You can upload: image. Links to YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and other services inserted in the comment text will be automatically embedded. Drop file here

Scroll to Top