Dante Colle: Owning It

LOS ANGELES—Dante Colle still thinks about how people from home might react—not only to his porn career but also to the scope of it—but he’s not worried. Having grown up in the suburbs of Chicago, Colle says he wasn’t aware until he got to L.A. of the sexual freedom available to him, “but I was still a little concerned what people might think if they found out I was working with guys.” Regardless, Colle says, there’s something about porn—and the two-year hiatus he took from it while working for another large organization—”that makes you grow up fast and really own what you’re doing. At first I tried to keep (my porn work) under wraps but quickly realized I don’t give a fuck.” When he got to town in 2013 at age 18, Colle shot six gay scenes that summer and then, in August, he went into the military. “I was in training for Special Forces,” he says. “It sounded very exciting, but when you’re 18 you might not make the best decisions. I ended up telling one or two people about my porn scenes, and word got around to my instructors, who took it very seriously. They looked through my records and found out I had lied about my asthma—which I had, and that was the excuse they needed. I was in for two years and they spent the last six months of it processing me out.” Despite this setback, Colle credits his military service for giving him a discipline he might not otherwise have had. Not only that, but he is grateful he left the military when he did. “(If I’d stayed for the whole enlistment) I’d have just gotten out last year,” Colle says. “I would have missed a lot.” What strikes you about Colle is how candid he is without overcompensating with cockiness. You might even give him a pass for being cocky because he is so handsome, but he’s grounded—we’ll get to how grounded in a moment—and thoughtful in his answers. This is a rarity in porn, where all the attention threatens to make people overconfident. Instead, Colle is affable, like he’s seen some shit over the last eight years and is just happy to be here. “Even on a bad day on set,” he says, “this is still the best job in the world, and I know it.” Colle’s adult work runs the gamut from straight to bi to gay to trans scenes, and he has picked up nominations and awards for all of it. He is an in-demand performer in a world that, within institutional memory, has transitioned from an uneasiness about stars “crossing over from the gay side” to a celebration of it. “Things are moving so fast toward acceptance (of sexual fluidity) now,” says Colle, who is represented by OC Modeling. “I think people just didn’t know it existed before.” While Colle notes “progress” in leveling the playing field of what is known throughout the adult business as “the gay side and the straight side,” he says there is still a major difference in how those two worlds handle hardcore content. “On the gay side, it can be very vanilla,” he says, laughing. “Unless it’s a Kink.com scene. But on the gay side we ask questions like, ‘Are you OK with a little rimming?’ But then you can watch an Evil Angel video and see some little (woman) getting fucking destroyed. The straight side is way more hardcore, in general, and the gay side is more pretty. We’re just showing off.” Especially since the pandemic but even when he’d just got back in the business after returning from the military, Colle doesn’t spend a lot of time going to parties and getting wild. His passion is his motorcycle. “I would not survive in L.A. without a motorcycle,” he says, describing riding the canyons of Los Angeles at unprintable speeds. “Riding really makes me happy” (in fact, the only things on his public Amazon wishlist are motorcycle accessories). He found a motorsports track, Willow Springs, in the high desert an hour north of L.A. where he takes his racing bike, a Yamaha R1 that he is in love with. Shortly after he got it, however, he literally rode it into the ground. “I would take corners and drag my knee on the track,” he says, “and I’m thinking, ‘This is it; this is where I need to be.’ And then there was this one corner where I almost touched my shoulder.” On that corner his back tire gave out and he found himself—”calm, no extra adrenaline”—riding his bike into the earth.  He is still giddy about it. “Even as I was crashing, I just thought: ‘Bummer. This is where my day ends.’” Colle walked away from the accident with a few scratches and a banged-up bike. He is happy to report that he has replaced the bike with the exact same model, but one year newer, and will be fixing up the old one for his daily driver. But in addition to fixing up his battle-scarred Yamaha to drive to porn sets, how does Colle’s passion for motorcycles reflect his adult career? “I am always splitting lanes,” he says. Photography by Chris Streams