Being an international gay porn icon with the body of a pumped-up French God might seem like the dream job, but for François Sagat it comes with complications. As his first two forays into independent film come to GAZE in Dublin, Shane McNamara wonders if he’ll ever really be able to break free of the fluffers

This article originally appeared in GCN Issue 260, August 2011.

According to Brian Mills, one of the three directors of Titan Media, the largest gay porn company in the US, François Sagat is the most famous gay porn star in the world today.

Yet, he has not made a porn movie since 2007 and although he might make noises now and then about a return to the industry, instead he seems to be trying to break into the mainstream.

It may seem like a natural move for the man with the tattooed scalp – in his native France he’s a household name – but there are big hurdles in the way, not the least of which is his self-sculpted body.

Le Petit François

Born in 1979 to Slovakian parents in the town of Cognac in the southwest of France, Sagat is on record saying he was a skinny and feminine child. “I looked like a little girl until I was 12 or 13 years old.

“There was a lot of teasing because you could see I was a little bit different. So, they said, ‘That’s the faggot’. Maybe it’s good because it makes you stronger. It made me who I am.”

His parents’ separation when he was 11 also had a big part to play. “My father was not really into being my father,” he told Out magazine in December. “He was not really into affection with me.”

The underlying feeling Sagat seems to have been left with is a sense of uncertainty. In the Out Interview he voiced it several times, saying that before he started working out at the age of 25, he “didn’t know if I had this power or not.”

Then, when talking about whether his foray into the non-porn film industry would be successful he said, “We don’t know if I have the real power or not.”

It’s a question that seems to underline everything he’s done since leaving school. Much time in his formative years was spent drawing pictures of his childhood idol, Darryl Hannah – “I was obsessed with the films, Splash and Blade Runner, so I was always drawing mermaids and crazy blonde girls.”

Fashion

The natural progression when he left school was to go to art college. He chose fashion as his degree and after graduating worked for the stars in the Parisian fashion houses, ending up drawing for Thierry Mugler. The industry didn’t suit him.

“I was more the shadow of myself than really myself,” he told fashion guru Filep Motwary in 2008.

“Someone not really ready to work in this industry with all these sophisticated people. I was somebody who was young and shy, whose life was kind of cool but not really structured.

“There was a lot of insecurity about my future and money, a lack of energy to completely express myself. Let’s say I was a person under construction.”

Click below to keep reading and find out how Sagat went from skinny to French God when he turned 25.

François Sagat will be making a special guest appearance over the Halloween Bank Holiday weekend at Sweatbox on Friday 28 October 2016.

Buffed Up

Aged 23, Sagat left Paris and moved back home to his mother, giving himself a year to finish the construction and figure out what he wanted out of life.

His decision was to divert his interest in clothing to a project that would re-create his own body.

The skinny duckling became a muscled swan – the body shape achieved with the help of steroids – he admits, and moved back to Paris where first he got jobs stripping.

https://www.instagram.com/p/-wdWrFQrMw/?taken-by=francoisssagat

This led to three films for the French porn studio, Citebeur, under the pseudonym Azzedine.

Sagan claims that he found self-empowerment on the set of porn movies. “I had to do it. I had to prove myself,” he says. “I was very, very sickly shy before, but now I’m not afraid.”

Nuanced Masculinity

Sagat’s subsequent rise to the pantheon of global porn stars has something, he believes, to do with a different kind of masculinity he portrays.

“I think I am nuanced in my masculinity because I am not afraid of showing my femininity,” he’s said.

“Using steroids is like being transsexual for me. I have a friend who is trans [Allanah Star] and we have the same stories about the changes that we had in our bodies.”

Can’t Get No Satisfaction

Ultimately, although Sagat is ambivalent about bowing out of the porn industry altogether, the sense of empowerment it gave him was superficial.

“Porn is not satisfying,” he told a reporter in June. “Maybe it is satisfying for your ego but that’s not what I want now.

“It’s two years since I’ve shot a porn movie. I was thinking of stopping it forever. You have this different energy when you do films like Man at Bath, but maybe the good thing is doing this and at the same time doing porn.”

Click below to keep reading about François Sagat’s non-porn films and what he thinks is truly sexy.

François Sagat will be making a special guest appearance over the Halloween Bank Holiday weekend at Sweatbox on Friday 28 October 2016.

Non-Porn Films

Man at Bath is the first of two forays beyond the porn industry into low-budget independent film, both of which are showing at this year’s GAZE film festival.

Directed by the prolific French auteur Christophe Honoré, it sells itself as a meditative film about the break-up of a gay relationship, but Honoré freely admits that his overriding intention was an exploration of the sculpted beauty of Sagat’s body.

The second film, Bruce LaBruce’s LA Zombie, has Sagat starring as a homeless man who thinks he’s a zombie who must fuck dead people back to life. In both films we get to see Sagat in graphic sex scenes.

Both directors specifically sought Sagat out to star in their films and Sagat is in no doubt as to why. “I was used in both projects as an object of fascination,” he told Out magazine, not mincing his words.

Breaking Free

The conundrum is clear. If Sagat wants to move beyond the confines of pornography he has to get film roles that are not only about his body and don’t feature him having graphic gay sex.

He cites John Waters as a director he’d like to work with possibly because Waters successfully cast straight porn queen Traci Lords in Cry Baby, the follow up to his 1988 mainstream breakthrough, Hairspray. Lords didn’t have to strip for the role and although her character was sexualised, she didn’t have to have sex on screen.

David Lynch pulled off a similar feat, casting porn star Laura Harring in his 2001 lesbian crime romance, Mulholland Drive.

Both Cry Baby and Mullholland Drive made megastars out of Johnny Depp and Naomi Watts respectively, but neither Lords and Harring were much heard from again.

Return Of The King

Sagat is certainly not a man who wants to fade into the powerless background the way he once did in the fashion industry, so perhaps a return to porn where he has a God-like stature might be inevitable.

Yet in the meantime he’s trying to break into the most background arena of both industries – writing.

“I am writing something for porn and something else that’s not porn,” he says. “I didn’t have any plan to be an actor. It’s not my main goal in life. If there is something else that’s very interesting, then I will do it with 100 percent of myself.”

Boyfriend Material

Meanwhile, in his personal life, Sagat finds it equally complex negotiating the field of relationships.

“People think you are going to be like a robot, always ready to go. But I’m not thinking about sex all the time and I’m not sexual all the time. I think sexy is somebody who doesn’t know it, but it’s very hard to find those guys.”

Sexy guys who don’t realise they’re sexy, form an orderly queue, but don’t expect anything like the Sagat you see on film.

François Sagat will be making a special guest appearance over the Halloween Bank Holiday weekend at Sweatbox on Friday 28 October 2016.