Porn star and producer Michael Lucas says he was held up for two hours at the Canadian border this weekend because of “homophobic” border agents.
Lucas flew from New York City to Toronto on Apr 18 for a performance at St Marc’s Spa, a gay men’s bathhouse.
“It was instigated as I went through the first passport control zone,” Lucas wrote Apr 20 on his blog, lucasblog.com. “The unpleasantly bored man started off with the usual questions: What are you doing in Canada, eh? How long will you be here? Then the survey went a little deeper, probing at what I did for a living. What kind of company is it? Is it softcore or hardcore? His obnoxiously tired act turned abrasive and superior. His agenda at this point was to get my porny ass back to America.”
Lucas says the border agents then picked through his luggage piece-by-piece.
“Of course I had my movies on me, a stack of nude pictures to sign and lube. The essentials,” he wrote. “Homophobia was running rampant with these captors and they were highly offended by said essentials. They questioned why I had so many images that depict me nude — I told them it was for my friends who enjoy my movies.”
Canadian border agents have a history of targeting gays and lesbians at the border. In Jun 2008, Canadian border agents seized a gay couple’s laptop because it contained “questionable material” — gay porn. Vancouver’s Little Sister’s bookstore has also fought a long battle with border officials over unfair seizure of gay and lesbian material.
Lucas says dealing with Canadian customs was like the “Canadian re-envisioning of Guantanamo.”
“In all seriousness, I have travelled extensively around the world, I have stepped foot in the most strict and forbidden countries yet I have never felt the homophobic and anti-pornographic force of the Canadian border patrol,” he wrote on his blog.
This is not the first time Lucas and the Canada Border Services Agency have shared headlines. In February, Xtra.ca broke the story that the CBSA banned two of Lucas Entertainment’s films, Piss! and Farts!, from entering Canada because it found them to be “obscene.”
In the CBSA’s “Policy on the Classification of Obscene Material,” the “ingestion of someone else’s urine… with a sexual purpose” is listed as an indicator of obscenity.
CBSA considers the act of urinating into someone “degrading and dehumanizing, with a risk of substantial harm.”
Lucas called the obscenity rules “old-fashioned” and weeks later announced his plans to visit the Toronto bathhouse for a performance.
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