Danny Wylde Announces Retirement from Performing

LOS ANGELES—Veteran male adult performer Danny Wylde reluctantly announced on his blog Saturday that his career as an adult performer has come to an end—effective immediately. “Today marks the end of my career as a pornographic performer,” he wrote, adding quickly, “This was not planned out. I was looking forward to perhaps another decade in front of the camera.  “It's hard to imagine an end so abrupt,” he wrote of his eight-year career.  “I don't need to go into great detail, except to say that I've encountered a medical issue associated with my use of performance-enhancing, erectile dysfunction drugs,” he explained. “I've received professional medical advice to stop. If I don't, I face the likelihood of some pretty nasty, long-term problems.” Iafd.com lists 298 performer credits for Wylde, with only a very few denoted as compilation, for a career that began in 2006 when he was around 19, looking to make a few bucks to supplement his day job as a student at the University of California, Santa Cruz. “I started going on Craigslist to look at the gigs section and I found these weird jobs where people, mostly gay photographers, wanted to take pictures of naked guys and will pay you $50-100 or something for the day,” he said in a recent interview for Gore Gore Girl.  “I started doing that here and there but that’s still not really a substantial income, so I found this ad that was for Kink.com (they used to be called Cybernet back then) and they were looking for men to do femdom stuff. Like, get beat up by girls and fucked in the ass. I wouldn’t say I was a part of the BDSM community but it was very interesting to me. I was like, “That would be cool to try out,” and I thought as far as porn goes, that if I did something that seemed to be very marginalized then my parents probably wouldn’t find it [laughs]. So I applied, and they got back to me the next day. I went there and they were so nice to me. It was really different from what I imagined porn would be.” He also met Dana DeArmond, who he dated for three years and who introduced him to mainstream porn and the “stylistic punk rock porno” being made at the time by Eon MacKai and the Vivid Alt crew. “I grew up listening to hardcore and metal and was really into that scene, and so I was like ‘This is something cool’ and I could actually be proud of doing something like this,’” he recounted in the interview. “So that was my second step. Then I realized porn is really hard and I’m not that good at it. I moved to Los Angeles thinking I could work my way through school doing porn. Then I fucked up a lot in that first year, and I got this weird contract that I think really helped get my ego to the point where I thought I could do this for a living." Wylde is also a musician, novelist and filmmaker, has been an APHSS (now PASS) Advisory Committee Member and just spoke at CatalystCon West. He also can be seen in Dana Vespoli’s latest “psycho-sexual opus” for Evil Angel, Girl/Boy.