First bottom to hit big in what was previously an industry of straight-acting tops? You bet your butt cheeks. Line of Joey Stefano-branded apparel? Just ask the former Spruce Street Video employee about his signature Stefano sweatpants, created to commemorate Joey’s appearance at the 1992 PrideDay Parade. Winner of the Best Actor trophy at the 1992 Gay Erotic Video Awards? Score. And though his story ended in an almost cliché drug-induced tragedy in November 1994, his list of accomplishments accrued by his death at the age of 26 remains impressive.įeatured model in Madonna’s salacious Sex book? Check. A small-town, big-dreaming, all-American “dude,” he didn’t just settle for porn, but rather aspired to it. Stefano was Philly’s Bradley Cooper of gay porn. “But the real villain in the script is addiction, which Joey had. “It’s that story of ‘little boy comes to Hollywood and gets taken by the scene,’” says Darnell, who has yet to cast the role of Stefano. Devouring the book in a single sitting, he instantly saw its potential as a movie. (Though the film, for which Darnell interviewed more than 50 sources over a three-year period, is still short $450,000 in funding.) The film’s working title is X-Rated, and it recounts the fast life and slow death of one of the biggest gay-porn stars of the 1990s, an era when being in adult film carried far more star power than uploading an amateur video to Xtube.ĭarnell’s fascination with Stefano began when a copy of a 1996 biography, Wonder Bread and Ecstasy, fell-literally-at his feet in an L.A. Hollywood director Chad Darnell, whose prior credits include casting Spider-Man and Lost, has spent the bulk of the past three years crafting a 107-page script that he hopes to shape into a two-hour indie biopic by February of next year.
Yet 17 years after his death, Joey Stefano’s presence in both the mainstream and adult entertainment industries couldn’t be more noticeable. His final resting place bears no headstone, making his presence in the cemetery derelict if not absent.
Immaculate Heart Cemetery in Marcus Hook would seem an unlikely resting place for a power-bottom porn star, but this is indeed where Chester native Joey Stefano, né Nicholas Iacona Jr., lays in perpetual sleep.