On one of those nights out, “someone asked me if I’d ever done gay porn. Yet like so many queer coming of age stories, it was still complicated. “I was that little twink dancing in the corner, and I loved all the attention,” he says. For the first time, Ross visited the gayborhood, and began to find his own self.
I started stealing her Xanax, eventually taking so much I couldn’t remember what I had for breakfast.”Įventually, the family moved back to Dallas, and back into their old home (mom had claimed she’d sold it, but it had still been there all along) but the damage was done. The only thing to do there was go jump off the cliffs or go jump in the lake. It wasn’t all bad, but it wasn’t great, Ross says. In reality, she was desperately chasing an old boyfriend. When the family abruptly moved to rural Tennessee, Ross’ mother claimed it was for financial reasons. “She went off the deep end,” he now says. His mother went into a tailspin, worsened by another stressor - Ross’ parents got divorced. She crushed it - it was her identity,” Ross says. It didn’t help when his mother suddenly lost her job, due to the financial meltdown. “There were maybe two out kids in my school, and they were considered ‘weird.’ I used to think, ‘I wish I was born a girl so this would be socially acceptable.’” “I was struggling with myself and being OK with being gay,” he says. But Ross still faced the same intense difficulties so many in the LGBTQ community do at that age. It was the mid-2000s and his mother was making $300,000 a year, with his father not doing too badly himself. I want them to be able to say ‘Maybe I’m not so different.’”Īt first, Ross was “different” in a privileged way - growing up in a wealthy suburb of Dallas, attending private schools.
Maybe their parents have thrown them out. “There are so many people out there in the middle of nowhere, who are going through the same thing,” Ross says in a phone interview.
#KYLE TWINK GAY PORN STAR SERIES#
Despite the title, Twink isn’t erotica rather, it’s Ross telling his story plainly to LGBTQ youth like he was, who often struggle as preteens and teens, and to let them know that they are not alone. (The Rise Up Series was started by Saracen, a former middle and high school teacher with a degree in applied psychology, to help to de-stigmatize less orthodox coming of age stories.) Ross’ unusual journey is chronicled in Twink, the second book in 13 Red Media’s Rise Up Series, written by Taylor Saracen. He’d been uprooted from a great life in Dallas to here. In 2008, he was stuck in a tiny burg, looking for tiny pills. He’d still be into the Xanax, but he’d be out of Tennessee, living life as someone sought after and, in some circles, famous.īut that was the future. In a few years, life would be different - he’d be a well-known model for Helix Studios (an adult film company) known for his wholesome good looks and his youthful body. I n 2008, Kyle Ross was 17 years old, living in a tiny Tennessee town, digging through his mother’s medicine cabinet, searching for Xanax. How Dallas native Kyle Ross went from drug addict to porn star to the subject of the YA bio ‘Twink’