Corey Taylor was granted complete access to porn mogul Michael Lucas, his friends, family and co-workers when writing Naked: The Life and Pornography of Michael Lucas. The biography he pieced together using these interview transcripts depicts the rise of Michael, born Andrei Treyvas in Communist Russia in 1972, from a naive boy who thought he was dying the first time he ejaculated to hustling in Germany and France to becoming an exclusive Falcon porn model in America and finally the CEO of one of the biggest gay-porn studios in the world.
After saving $100,000 of the money he made through his sex work, Michael started Lucas Entertainment and has since defined his studio by producing movies featuring no gay-for-pay actors, strict condom use and unprecedented drug testing of his models. In the fast-paced, erratic, hedonistic world of porn, Lucas’s discipline and ambition have raised the stakes.
Taylor is obviously a fan of his subject, and so the biography is a flattering portrait, and because of Lucas’s involvement in its creation, it reads as one-sided. As Lucas talks about his past relationships, the kiss-and-tell bitterness jumps off the page and comes across as more pathetic than revealing.
Despite its bias, Naked still manages to capture many of Lucas’s truths. He is strict. He is arrogant. He is beautiful — and he knows it.
But most of all, Michael Lucas gets what he wants.
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