Our Exclusive Interview With One-Third Of The CockyBoys Brain Trust: Benny Morecock

There's no denying the impact that Benny Morecock has had during his tenure with CockyBoys. The site, which was formerly a bland site no different from the other gay porn sites all over the web, has had an incredible renaissance since he joined the creative team. The former porn blogger runs the site out of his New York home alongside the site's main content creator Jake Jaxson. Benny's embraced his behind the scenes role, and despite not flaunting his credentials as Creative Director, he is still a major driving force behind the site's look, feel, and overall aesthetic. I recently chatted with Benny about his role with the company, what he's done with the company that he's proudest of, and even his charity work with Hop Against Homophobia. 

Vincent Thrice: When did you first become aware of the adult industry, and did that coincide with you discovering that it was something that you wanted to do for a living, or were those two separate moments?

Benny Morecock: They were pretty much separate moments. I first became involved in the adult industry just because I found out my boyfriend ran a DVD distribution company for porn and I just started working with them. I started out just doing simple data entry and that data entry turned into what I do now. 

VT: So it was more of an evolution for you then as opposed to you setting out to make a career out of it?

BM: Yeah totally. 

VT: Talk a little bit about your start with CockyBoys, how you first got involved, and how your relationship with the studio has evolved over the years. 

BM: Since it is what you might say is a family-owned business, in that it’s owned and run by myself and my two boyfriends, our roles are never completely concrete. Back when we first started with CockyBoys, we had just purchased it and we were still figuring out how the whole membership/subscription site worked. I was the first one out of us to put my own creative vision into it and really try to turn it into something that we could be proud of. So at that time I kind of took on the role as Creative Director, which remains my position just because we haven’t thought of anything better to call it. 

Nowadays I think Jake Jaxson has the majority of the creative vision behind it and I do most of the web development, website work, managing our online team over here. So I’ve kind of moved back into the back seat. 

VT: That’s actually an interesting segue into my next question which is during your time as Creative Director, what are some things you’ve done at the studio which you’re most proud of?

BM: I’d have to say the look and feel of the website. When I redesigned the website to what you see today it was kind of the first moment that we looked at it and could kind of all see that we were all proud of it. It was something that we could show people and say, you know, not be ashamed that we work in porn because it’s great porn that we do.

So it was that kind of pride in what I was doing that led Jake Jaxson to look at it differently and engage himself creatively in what we were filming which sort of took it a little further. 

VT: You said that one of your goals in creating content for CockyBoys was to "make porn that looks like it’s from a television series or a mainstream film.” Do you feel you’ve been successful in doing that?

BM: I’d say we’re getting there. We’re always moving in that direction with each of our products, it evolves even further, the sophistication of it. And that’s all been, all the filming and the directing has all been done by Jake so I don’t want to take any credit for it. For instance RoadStrip which was our last series before Answered Prayers which is what we’re working on now, we were able to cut out all of the sex scenes and screen it as a short film at a film festival as a movie in and of itself. 

And that’s essentially the vision that we have for when we do these films is we want them to live on their own, minus the sex. 

VT: Which is great because, I’ve got to be honest I bounce back and forth between both worlds, and straight porn has moved away from that almost exclusively. The only films you really find with any sort of plot are the porn parodies, and so it’s nice to see a more artistic sensibility being added back in, so on a personal level I appreciate that. 

BM: Well thank you. We saw within the industry a lack of pride in people’s work, and I’m not saying that all the studios are like this, there are some phenomenal studios that put out amazing content, but just generally it was the kind of, wham bam thank you ma’am, generic kind of shit that we’d seen before. There was kind of a sense that people were just going through the motions trying to make money, and there wasn’t a sense that people were doing something that they loved. 

So that’s something we really try to do with CockyBoys as something that we own, and we run, it pretty much feels at times like it consumes our entire life just because it’s so much work. So we try to work in the same way that we live our lives which is that we work and we take pride in it and we try to make it the best it can be. 

VT: CockyBoys has a healthy mix of just straight up conventional porn setups and more artistic projects like Answered Prayers. Do you personally prefer one over the other?

BM: I’ll take one of our more artistic projects over just a generic porn scene, unless the generic porn scene happens to be an amazing generic porn scene in which the sex itself is art. You know those when you see those.  

VT: New York Magazine said “There’s nothing groundbreaking about CockyBoys content, which tends toward relatively vanilla activity performed by cute, scruffy models.” Which of those statements bothers you the most. 

BM: (Laughs) None of them probably. At the time they described our content pretty much the way it was, which at that time we weren’t doing anything particularly creative with our filming. That was before Jake Jaxson came out front and started doing the projects that he’s best known for.

VT: Okay, so for the time that the statement was made, you don’t take any umbrage with it?

BM: (Laughing) Yeah. 

VT: Okay, that’s totally fair. It seems like you don’t blog as much as you used to. Do you miss it, or do you find that social media outlets like Twitter make it easier for you to give more frequent updates and scratch that itch so to speak?

BM: Blogging is time consuming as you probably know (both laugh), and I just don’t have the time for it. I’m more interested, nowadays, in a two-way conversation as opposed to just a one-way conversation, and I find that Twitter and Facebook are really great with that and you can immediately interact with your fans and hear feedback and engage with people than you can by posting an article. 

VT: Absolutely, and I find that across the adult industry, both straight and gay, the engagement between the creative people whether its performers, directors, whomever, and the fans is actually much more personal. There’s a genuine love and care that you find for the fans which you don’t necessarily find in mainstream entertainment.

BM: Yeah, and hearing the fan feedback and all the positivity that we get from them is a huge driving force in what we want to do because it drives us to want to make our content better and make it the best it could possibly be, and I think that without that kind of interaction and feedback, we’d be missing a whole part of what drives the business. 

VT: Can you talk a little bit about the work you do with Hop Against Homophobia, and the mentoring you do with young people that maybe don’t see a lot of positivity in their lives?

BM: Oh yeah. I was approached by K-Lee (Klein) and she asked last year if I was interested in doing it and I hopped on it because it’s a great message. I remember growing up with absolutely no gay role models so any opportunity to speak to people that otherwise don’t have the opportunity to engage in an otherwise healthy LGBT community is really important. 

And when it came to mentoring, mentoring is something that can be extremely helpful and important, especially when you hear about the amount of depression and how people grow up completely alone in certain parts of the country, when there’s so many people that can give. That’s what really spoke to me about what K-Lee was doing. 

VT: Porn has really been breaking down a lot of taboos long before mainstream society gets around to them. What do you think is the greatest social taboo that you’d like to see tackled in porn? 

BM: I guess the general feeling of shame about sex and especially gay sex. We’re in a very sexually liberated time where, at the same time, there is a lot of secret shame to sex, and I think the more we’re up front about it, and open about it, and we’re free to talk about it, and engage in it, the more fulfilled we’ll be. 

VT: Personally I’d love to see that disappear altogether (both laugh). It’s funny because, and I don’t know if you run into this as much as I do, most of my social circle is not involved in the line of work that I am and I don’t realize that people have so many hang-ups about sex until I start talking about it like it’s the most normal thing in the world (both laugh). You know, you’ll run into these people that just look at you like, what on earth are you saying?

BM: Exactly, and I still get people who, when I tell them what I do, they’re so excited by it. They say things like, it must be so exciting and it must be amazing, and I just think it’s so completely normal that I’m like, why are you so interested in what I’m doing? (Both laugh). My day at the office is actually extremely boring. I mean, granted you get to see naked guys walking around my house, but even that has a sense of normalcy to it. 

VT: Yeah, it’s funny to think that you’d ever reach a point where that’s just the most normal thing in the world, like, oh, there’s that again (both laugh).

BM: Oh, actually, just to go back to your last question really quick, another interesting thing that we find really gratifying when we hear from our fans is that some of them have never… A lot of our fans are women, and some of them had never really watched porn before, but they had been a fan of the M4M and the Young Adult genre, and a lot of the feedback that we get from them is that it’s there first time ever being a member of a porn website and they turn into huge fans. They’re just surprised that they can engage in porn and not feel dirty about it because I think that’s kind of a misconception about what porn is. 

VT: Is there anyone you haven’t worked with yet that you’re dying to work with?

BM: That’s a hard one (both laugh). I don’t really have my feelers out in the industry because I don’t do much of the casting. We have worked with this guy before, but I think he’s an amazing performer and is always professional and great to work with and we always get amazing performances from him, and that is Colby Keller. So that’s not really answering your question.

VT: Oh no, that’s fine, I mean he’s arguably one of the most fascinating people that I’ve spoken with and whether you’ve worked with him or not, I could see the desire to work with him again, definitely. So my last question is if there’s anything else you’d like your fans or fans of CockyBoys to know? 

BM: Just thank you. Thank you for the positive energy in an industry where being cynical is so easy. I think that’s the main thing.