They say what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. That’s assuming you leave, right? I spent a year in Vegas filming pornos. A year and a half, to be exact. Half that time I spent rolling film; the rest of the time I spent rolling pipes. Sometimes, at the same time. You get it.

It is doubtful that Let There Be Light would have ever happened were it not for the Stone brothers. I say this because my crew and I, having spent a year in Vegas shooting Smoking Boyz, were all suffering from loss of ambition, as well as all the other trappings inherent with “staying in Vegas”. We showed up the life of the party. We left the party barely alive at all. But the Stones were Vegas natives. They were like fucking machines. They called me up, ready to work, as usual. We met up at my place in Summerlin. The brothers had a seemingly great idea for the film’s plot, so, we rented a room at the Cabanas at El Cortez in downtown Vegas where we set out to make sexy happen.

Once at the hotel, the Stones got to work on Grindr, setting up meetings with as many Vegas fags as they could. We offered each interested dick sucker $300 to come through and blow Kyle, Cyrus and Lowes while my crew and I filmed. What faggot in his right mind would balk at that offer? In a better world, there would have been a line of homos outside the door to our hotel room, just bucking for a chance to blow the Stone brothers and James Lowes. In a kinder world, they’d be willing to do it for free. In a perfect world, they’d have paid just to meet me. But, I digress. I cast two of the eager mouths that were desperate to audition for the part. The rest, I can’t account for.

We kicked things off with a little Latin guy named Alex. All his life, Alex had dreamed of being a fluffer on a hetero-porn set. Being in the business of making dreams come true, how could I refuse him? I cast him as fluffer to the Stones brothers. What a great opening scene this would make! We shot it as we waited for Lowes to arrive, late as usual. I’d sent Austin to go pick him up from whatever whore’s apartment he’d crashed in the night before. That left me and Kai to do the filming.

Although Alex was a little wetter behind the ears than I would have liked, I decided to roll with it. I was already committed to the shoot and besides, although Alex may not have looked like he’d been fucked hard and put away spun, he passed for a smoking boy – on short notice. Once we were rolling, the Stones took center stage and Alex by the ears. Gave him a real lesson on how to suck a dick. I was cool with the scene. At double the average price of production, it was the most expensive scene I’d shot to date. That being said, the Stones were in rare rough form and Lowes was in route, and I was fresh off a bender. I had every reason to believe things would only get hotter. And crazier.

And things did. Get crazier. And hotter. It wasn’t long until it was hard to know exactly what was going on all the time but it hardly mattered. The night lingered on for 5 hours over which time I filmed some of the craziest shit I’d ever seen. Lowes arrived in what had become his usual form and gave me enough Hollywood movie star shots to do a mainstream film. There was more shit-talking and one-upping between the guys than you’d hear in a hockey game dugout (or whatever they call them in hockey) which resulted in some very amusing illustrations of “penis envy” for your enjoyment. Nonetheless, the chemistry was present in the room, albeit, unconventional. I wasn’t sure how much of the shoot would be usable, what, with the singing and dancing and dicksuckers too hungry to suck cock and everything like that, but I did my job. I filmed the scene. And at the end of the night, it was clear I’d been changed by the experience. For better or for worse, I can’t say. Who can keep clear perspective after a year at the party? We started out with keen ideas of why we were in Vegas. By the time we’d shot every episode of Smoking Boyz that we needed, all we had were fuzzy recollections of the means to our mission’s end. It was fine. We had everything on tape to reference. We had most of our values intact. Not really. But we really did have tapes. Shortly thereafter, I was gone.

Back in Providence, I got to work cutting film. It was purely out of sick curiosity that I even reviewed the raw footage from the El Cortez. Sick curiousness about a night that went by like a fast, fast blur. I had this stack of tapes from that night containing hours and hours of footage of the Stone brothers and James Lowes violating some of Vegas’ finest fags, with their consent, of course.

The resulting film is something that passes for porno. Replete with open mutual animosity (all detailed in subtitles for those who like verbal scenes) gay-bashing, humiliation and other so-called atrocities, this thing, this so-called adult film, this last tango in Vegas on high-speed has consequently enchanted me in ways it didn’t the night it was filmed. It’s one of our most popular titles. I couldn’t be happier with this epic depiction of homophobic, covetous, steroidal rage I had the privilege of filming.

So, then… let there be light, lighters, and lights. Let there be the chaotic, highly-entertaining, hetero-infused manhandling of “fags”. And when the smoke clears, in its wake, may you be enlightened.