Had I heard of the alleged gay sex party “full of Broadway stars that you love and adore.” This reporter had not. “They get together and have sex with newcomers,” Mark Peikert said. “This is second-hand information, I have not been invited myself. At the end of the night, there are party gifts. So, one bottom [a sex partner who prefers getting penetrated] reaches into the bowl of gifts and plucks out his prize. ‘King Lear tickets!’ he shouted.”
Peikert laughed—a hearty roar, really. “Imagine that. You’re a bottom and you’ve gotten fucked at a group sex party. And now you have to sit on your ass for four hours and watch Glenda Jackson as King Lear!”
This anecdote encapsulates a few facets of Peikert’s life and work: his love of gossip, his riotous sense of humor, his past as a Broadway grand fromage as editor-in-chief of Playbill from 2016 to earlier this year, and his new life running a gay porn site, The Gay Goods—which, alongside the erect penises and headlines like “Forget Self-Care! Learn to Self-Suck,” also features pieces berating left-wing progressives, how to do dirty talk properly, and why Trump’s supporters have made him a Bible story. This is a porn site, proudly so—but it wants to make you think as well as get horny.
A siren’s wail suddenly interrupted my conversation with the 36-year-old Peikert: “What happens when you live between a hospital and police station,” he said apologetically. He said he was at his desk having his first scotch of the evening, “and one too many cigarettes. I tell myself that it’s a holiday treat, then find myself doing them both weeks after the holidays have ended. I had given both alcohol and cigarettes up. I was doing so well. It’s amazing that you stop self-medicating when you’re not miserable in your job all the time.”
Since he left Playbill, Peikert has been teasing on Twitter that he will reveal scandals and name names. So far, there has been much stirring of the pot but no substantial dish. The tension between revelation and discretion, wit and fury, is visible in both Peikert’s tweets and conversation.
In our interview, as well as talking about the alleged celebrity orgy, he mentioned the unnamed Broadway star, who unlike their peers, refused to donate their fees for appearing on Cameo videos to charity. Then there was the famous actress who, in a discussion about dialects, brought up what she called “the gay voice.”
“I was so taken aback,” said Peikert. “The worst thing my mother ever drilled into me was politeness, and to never make someone feel uncomfortable even if they had made me feel wildly uncomfortable as this actress had. I wanted to say, ‘What do you mean, ‘the gay voice’ is a dialect?’”
He was interviewing one male Oscar winner when said Oscar winner placed his hand on Peikert’s upper thigh and kept it there. “I was so taken aback that I did that thing of ‘Oh well, our legs are under the table. Maybe he thinks my thigh is his,’ or he did realize, and didn’t want to remove his hand to insult me. Later, he walked past me ostentatiously into the restroom. I thought, ‘Does he think, at this really very public office space, that I am going to follow him into the bathroom?’”
The handsome, bearded Peikert (pronounced Pike-urt) is happy to be free of the schmoozing and grating editorial capitulations he had to oversee for all those Playbills so familiar to theatergoers. In a sense, his new job is a return to how he started out.
“My first job out of college was in gay porn. I was a casting director for [famed porn actor, director, and filmmaker] Michael Lucas. Then I was a ‘cam boy’ in 2017 for a few months. I would get on a camera site and jerk off for money. I would do it in the mornings and weekends. It’s so tragic. I would make around 200 dollars a month.” How much did he think he earned per jerk off? “Probably 5 dollars… I got fans and people liked it. I was shameless. I showed my face. A lot of people don’t. I stopped doing it. It was just a lot of work, honestly.”
Another hearty laugh. One guy was friendly with Peikert every time he was online. They would chat about movies. A year later the same guy sent him an Instagram message. Peikert asked how had he found him. His fan had seen him, in his Playbill editor in chief guise, on NY1’s theater show, On Stage. “I was tickled that this guy who I had met through jerking off had then seen me on NY1.”
As a porn casting director, sex was the last thing on Peikert’s mind after a day vetting wannabe porn stars. “This was in 2005, so the photos were not of the quality we have today. I read their applications, talked about what they were into. Monday was the busiest day. A lot of the guys had been out at the bars at the weekend, got drunk, come home, watched a porn video, and seen the ‘Apply to be a model’ callout and thought they’d give it a shot. Many would never reply to our emails. I think they were taken aback someone was taking them up on it.”
Peikert oversaw Backstage and New York Press before landing the top job at Playbill. “Somehow I have been lucky enough to be an editor in chief four times, which is outrageous. Every time I have thought, ‘This will be the last time I will be editor in chief.’”
For someone who loves theater and is as charismatic as Peikert, it sounds like a dream job in the beating heart of Broadway, your work—all those distinctive, yellow-covered theater programs—pored over and sometimes collected and treasured by theater lovers.
“It wasn’t my dream job for a number of reasons, but in a broad sense I became very disenchanted with mainstream media journalism in general,” said Peikert. “So much of it is dictated by things out of your control, by other forces. You have to interview a nobody so you build a relationship with the publicity person to get the big star you really want. Or you cover a project because it’s advertising in the publication.
“It’s all so carefully orchestrated. Everyone is so media-trained there is no authenticity. Playbill’s place in the industry makes it very difficult to have really interesting conversations, both because of the low word-count which is down to the size of the magazine, and because of Playbill’s role as Broadway cheerleader there to support theater. It became very one-note.”
Peikert only ever felt really engaged when talking to a craftsperson, like a costume designer or wig maker. Otherwise, he dutifully edited the soft interviews, photo galleries, and listicles that did so well on Playbill’s website. He makes clear he is not criticizing his much-missed and valued colleagues. “If people don’t want their favorite sites to be full of listicles, they have to stop clicking on them, because at the end of the day—no matter what publication you’re at—you have to get page views.”
Peikert likes being “bitchy and sassy and hopefully funny” on Twitter, and in his new job. He did not feel the same at Playbill, “where you really have to be that person who wants to go to parties and have connections—and be ‘the editor of Playbill’ people want to meet as ‘the editor of Playbill.’ I tend to self-deprecate to a self-sabotaging degree.
“I never felt like ‘that bitch.’ I never felt like a powerbroker in the industry in any way, shape, or form. People treat you in a way that you present yourself to be treated to a certain extent. I got invited to five opening nights in four years, which is not a big deal. I was never offended, but it was a strange situation to be in when you’re editor in chief of Playbill. You expect to be feted a little bit, and I was quickly disabused of that notion.”
“As I get further and further away from Playbill, I probably will share the names of really poorly behaved people in the industry,” said Peikert. “I don’t care about myself. I never expect to work in theater again. I think theater will return, but I have done it and worked at the highest level within it, so what would entice me to return?”
Peikert’s only caution when it comes to naming names, and dishing the dishiest dish, is in any way hurting, or damaging the relationship he has with Broadway producer Dori Berinstein (The Prom, Legally Blonde), with whom he has been writing the new, Broadway-set podcast soap As The Curtain Rises. “I think she is one of the most remarkable people in the theater industry. I would hate to put her in the wrong, or make her answerable for me.”
Peikert is enjoying writing with Berinstein, whose reputation and connections have meant the involvement of star names such as Lillias White, James Monroe Iglehart, Sarah Stiles, Alex Brightman, and Michael Urie.
The scripts combine her insider knowledge and his bitchiness and Broadway-nerdery—and Peikert has been so excited hearing his words and lyrics bought to life by stars he has admired for so long. The plot focuses on two writers trying to mount a chamber musical called Avatar getting mixed up with producers who think they are writing the musical of the movie of the same name. Ten episodes are being made.
Whatever cynicism Peikert has, it does not extend to the many Broadway producers he met who just wanted to make theater “against all the odds, and for no earthly reason, as theater is not a get-rich-quick scheme. Producers like Daryl Roth and Dori, both of whom I was lucky enough to become friends with, just really passionately care about the art form, in the way that dedicated theatergoers care. They produce things that say something and mean something, and that can change lives.”
How about higher-profile producers like Scott Rudin? “Stories about Scott Rudin’s temper are legion—but that’s not enough to prevent A-listers from working with him,” Peikert said. “I’m thrilled to be in a new environment where no one gives a fuck about a Rudin production. I hardly ever like them anyway.”
As for Broadway’s return, Peikert has observed “a real lack of leadership” when compared to the high-profile interventions in London of producers like Cameron Mackintosh and Andrew Lloyd Webber—and where the government financially supports theater and where some video-recorded pandemic productions—like Andrew Scott in Stephen Beresford’s Three Kings for the Old Vic—have made waves.
“People want to make theater again in New York, but when the pandemic hit we had hit a tipping point where these amazing shows, like (Michael R. Jackson’s Pulitzer-winning) A Strange Loop had no Broadway theater to transfer to,” said Peikert. “Instead, we got three more movie-to-stage adaptations. There is nothing wrong with that. My first cast album was Applause, the stage musical based on All About Eve. I love Mean Girls. But there is no real sense of Broadway as a place of innovation, and I would like to think that when Broadway is given the all-clear to return, people are much more thoughtful about diversity and representation and doing things with more thought.
“It’s dangerously naive to think the gatekeepers of any industry, including Broadway, act out of anything but their best interests. The only way to effect real, lasting change is to keep up a steady drumbeat of discontent—and to remind people that not prioritizing the next generation will only hurt their bottom lines. That’s the only language they understand. But it’s an industry that too often rewards longevity over talent, so change will be frustratingly slow to come.”
Will he be heading back to the theater as soon as it does return? “I’m going to need some decompression time. It was four years of doing a very theater-specific job and I needed a break regardless. I am happy to cheer from the sidelines, but in terms of getting back into theater, I would not want that. And, my god, to go to the theater as just a [stage whisper] civilian, I think that might make some regrets bubble up.”
“Nothing was as conducive in motivating me to study as the chance to have gay sex.”
Peikert grew up in the small town of Dickinson, Texas before moving to New York at age 17 to attend Sarah Lawrence College.
“I grew up thinking that any time I jerked off all my dead relations were watching,” he recalled. “That did not stop me, but it did make me feel terrible afterwards. I vividly remember in high school, thinking: ‘Oh, I think I’m gay,’ and then remember my immediate second thought was, ‘You know what, just push that down until you get out of here because there’s no point trying anything here.’ I had my first kiss at college. Let’s be clear. I was so horny I graduated in three years. Nothing was as conducive in motivating me to study as the chance to have gay sex.”
Being gay was “very other” for a boy who was “already so other.” His mother once described living with the young Peikert as “living with a middle-aged man as a roommate who was just biding his time until it was socially acceptable to live somewhere else.”
At this point, he says that his parents have always been very supportive of him. He laughed, recalling seeing the Carole Lombard film No Man of Her Own at Film Forum a few years ago, a movie he hadn’t seen since he was a young teenager. He called his mother immediately afterward, asking what did she think when he made her watch the same movie when he was 13. “Well, you were just ‘Mark,’” she replied. “Which is so lovely. Growing up in small-town Texas is not the best for any gay person. Having parents like I had is a gift, and I do not take that lightly.”
Peikert was raised as a Southern Baptist, but there was no religious judgment around his sexuality, he said. His parents saw the church as a “social thing. Your friends went to church, you went to church.”
Peikert came out in his freshman year in college. “My mother was taken aback, then she rallied and came back to the living room to continue the conversation. I said, ‘But you bought me a Judy at Carnegie Hall album for my 17th birthday.’”
Did he grow up with any shame around sex itself, or did he never have that? “Certainly when I came out I told a friend, ‘I’m gay but I’m never going to have anal sex because that’s too far.’ Cut to my 20s, my god! I definitely had shame around it. I probably did that thing a lot of people do, masking that shame by being very forcefully open about it and being very promiscuous in a way I would never recommend people do because I didn’t enjoy most of it. But it felt very much like a chance to prove something to myself.”
How did Peikert bring it to an end? “I got tired!” Really? “I’m very happy with how I look. I’m confident. I post near-naked photographs of myself on Instagram, which is something I never would have done, aged 20. At a certain point, I thought, 'I’m hot,’ and whether that was a product of being promiscuous, or having a tipping point of men thinking I am hot, it became a thing like anything you do to excess where you end up thinking, ‘Why am I doing this? I’m not enjoying it. I could still be at the bar with my friends.’”
Peikert sighed, and laughed. “The things people do or say… One guy I went home with in August because he had air conditioning and I didn’t. He made me take my shirt off in the hallway to walk past his roommate in the living room to make him jealous I guess. One guy had his electricity cut off. I thought, ‘Why am I in this dark apartment with this guy?’ No thank you.’ I just had to stop, it was too much.”
At 24, Peikert entered what would become a seven-and-a-half-year relationship, which began as a non-open relationship in an era pre-Grindr and the availability of PrEP drugs. When that relationship ended in 2015, it was a “steep learning curve” for Peikert, “with everyone on PrEP. I’m a child of the '80s and you did not have unprotected sex—that was drilled into you from childhood on. In pre-school I kissed a girl and her mother confronted me in the library and said”—and he puts on a deep Texan accent—“'That is how you spread AIDS.’”
He was very wary of anything new at that time. He also felt settled in his Playbill career at a time when things were going well with it. “I had some not-great sex and some really good sex and ended up in a relationship four months later. He laughed. “There have been many break-ups and nervous breakdowns since then.”
Peikert is now in a relationship and living with a partner he has been with for one and a half years. “He’s lovely. He’s very charmingly supportive of this new endeavor. He’ll walk past me, and see a naked guy on my laptop and ask, ‘Who’s that?’ I’m like, ‘It’s work. Calm down.’” Sex really has just become work then? “Yeah, depending on what I’ve accomplished that day, it’s very much like, ‘Oh, can we watch an episode of GLOW.”
“Major brands don’t want to be affiliated to cocks, sex, and cum on the homepage.”
When it comes to editing The Gay Goods, Peikert wants to make it clear, “I took a massive pay cut to do this—perhaps too big of a pay cut, oh well.” He would have had no interest had it been a site simply dedicated to porn, without all the provocative feature content he has commissioned.
“My boss (Legrand Wolf, a pornographer who runs the company Carnal Media with his husband) wanted to do a site de-stigmatizing gay sex by being very open about it, and you cannot be more open than explain hardcore pornography and gay sex on the homepage,” said Peikert.
“With The Gay Goods, Legrand just wanted to create a site he wanted to read,” said Peikert. “He not only owns the company, but he is also one of its stars, so once again I am working for a man I have seen having sex.” Peikert laughed. “We’ve now had too many FaceTime meetings talking about very mundane things for me to ever get an erection watching him again.”
Mark Peikert.
Courtesy Mark PeikertBoth Peikert and Wolf think mainstream gay outlets don’t take sex seriously—their round-ups of hot guys, for example, rarely include porn stars, said Peikert. “Is that because you would be acknowledging you know who the porn star is and that you follow him?” Sex-related advice in such outlets, he feels, comes with a “pastel-colored Taylor Swift rejected album design.”
Peikert says this odd mixture of reticence and prudery in magazines and on websites that still celebrate hot bodies comes down to advertising. “The Gay Goods will not get mainstream advertisers—yet,” he said. “If we become successful we will, but right now I’d be laughed out of the room if we went to Pepsi or a brand like that. Major brands don’t want to be affiliated to cocks, sex, and cum on the homepage. We live in a country where people share videos on social media in which people are murdered, yet a friend of mine looked at our homepage and said, ‘Why do you have to have so many dicks on it?’”
Mainstream gay sites approach sex in a “clinical” way, said Peikert. “When I read those articles it doesn’t feel like they are talking about the sex I’ve had in my life. It feels like a platonic ideal of sex, but I don’t want someone to hold my hand and walk me through bottoming like they’re my older sister in a Judy Blume novel and I’ve just started menstruating. I want someone to pour me a scotch, sit me down, and say, ‘OK, you’re a bottom, here’s how you get fucked.’”
Wolf, said Peikert, wants The Gay Goods to show porn “as a fact of life, and gay sex as a fact of life.” It’s gay sex which lies at the root of most homophobia, he added, “and until we engage with that in a meaningful way that is not exploitative or click-baity we will never make any progress.” LGBTQ people can be reticent about the sex they have. “I’m guilty of that too,” said Peikert, “which is insane. I’m a big old bottom! I just need to tell people. But that immediately in people’s heads marks me out as a very specific category of man.”
Peikert said he realized why sex had been downplayed in discussions of LGBTQ life and political equality in public, as weaponized by the right as it is. He observed that one of the central arguments in marriage equality had been around the inequality facing the surviving partner if their partner died. “Gay marriage got sold off the backs of dying gay men. I want to get gay rights because I love someone and deserve the same rights as someone who loves someone of the opposite sex.”
Peikert wants The Gay Goods to be a place of debate. “At Playbill I could never give my own opinion. Here we want to be a place where people with the most unpopular opinions can share them. If you are a gay man who voted for Donald Trump, I want to know why, and I want to know why without you being immediately canceled.”
OK, but LGBTQ people, particularly trans people, have been attacked by this administration for the last four years. It’s fine if you want to be a contrarian site, but why bother provoking people who have been so discriminated against?
“I don’t want to label the site contrarian,” Peikert said. “Where I think the conversation is necessary is as someone who never voted for Donald Trump, I am fascinated by fellow gay men who did rather than writing them off. What could possibly have convinced you that you were voting for him in the best interests of the country versus your own best interests? If we dismiss the people who voted for him without trying to understand them, it’s going to happen again.”
When this reporter said that The Gay Goods feels like it’s intended as the gay Playboy—in its calculated mix of sex and cultural commentary—Peikert laughs that they consulted the first issues of Playboy when planning the site. “My job with this site is to get you thinking, get you laughing, and get you off. If I can do one of those things, fantastic. If I get to do all three, then I get to cum.”
After all the careful editorial dancing while at Playbill, The Gay Goods feels immensely liberating for Peikert, including all his tweeted provocations and promises to dish all.
“These are all stories I told friends for years but didn’t want to burn bridges. But honestly, I have never found that I needed a bridge that I burned. I say burn all the bridges, and just figure out a way to go forward without them.”
Peikert thinks about porn consumption and addiction; he is now part of that world. “I see porn like alcohol, cigarettes, and junk food. Either you are capable of enjoying that as your pleasure, or it becomes an addiction and that becomes an issue. I also think the way we approach porn is not exploitative, it’s not ‘You must watch this all day long.’ I think what we are doing is celebrating people making their living as sex workers. As a Tony-winning Broadway star once said to me, ‘Porn stars are athletes without the lucrative endorsement deals.’”
Just as Broadway is going through its reckoning on race, is porn doing the same, and will The Gay Goods be part of it if so?
“Starting any new project right now is an exciting undertaking, because every industry is grappling with how things are done in the wake of the reignited Black Lives Matter movement, and that includes porn,” Peikert said. “This is my first time at anything other than a beloved legacy publication, so I’m really looking forward to starting out fresh with a brand-new site that doesn’t come with baggage, and that can be a vanguard as we cover the world of gay porn.”
“I think some men are taking this as an opportunity to show they are not going to have their sexuality controlled.”
Like some heterosexuals, some gay men are meeting for hook-ups during the pandemic.
“You could look at it one of two ways,” said Peikert. “Why are you doing this? Why are you not following the rules and restrictions? This is putting so many more people at risk than you know. But you could also look at it as this is a community that has been subject to pandemics and government restrictions and incompetence before. So, this is why they may pursue their own sexual explorations and liberation. It is part of our heritage.”
But in the '80s men who had sex with men knew at least a condom that stayed intact provided some form of barrier to infection, this reporter said. In this pandemic, simply meeting with someone with no sex happening at all is perilous.
“Look, I personally agree,” said Peikert. “This is not anything I want to fuck with even if I were single,” said Peikert. “But I do think some people hooking up are supposedly woke, Biden-voting Democrats who supposedly know better.”
One early contributor to The Gay Goods wrote about hooking up with someone over the summer. He had been trying to get over a recent heartbreak. Others are “purely horny,” said Peikert—and he wants more articles about people not simply hooking up but about why they are hooking up.
“I think some gay men are taking this as an opportunity to show they are not going to have their sexuality controlled,” said Peikert, “whether or not it’s a conscious decision, a political act, or just someone being horny and thinking, ‘No, you’re not going to tell me I can’t get laid, I’m horny and want to get laid. I’ve always gotten laid, now I don’t have options.’ I think that’s an interesting aspect of gay culture—this very big part of it has been taken away and what do you fill that void with?”
Even if the need to do whatever it is puts yourself and others at risk? “I think that’s the question,” said Peikert. “At which point does your sexuality outweigh public service? Many gay men are dealing with issues of isolation, unable to go to places where they can meet men like them.”
One writer has submitted an article to Peikert about why Zoom sex parties “will never equal real sex because you can’t smell anything—cum, pheromones, sweat. It’s so sanitized. People who really need the senses around sex find something huge missing with sex on Zoom—“and there are too many people on screen to know what they smell like.”
Peikert said that people are using alternative, anonymous Twitter accounts to exchange sexually explicit messages and pictures: “Horny on alt, as opposed to horny on main.”
Will gay men’s sex and social lives snap back to normality after all this? “I’m not sure, honestly,” said Peikert. “For myself, I want to go back to indoor dining but I don’t think I’m ready to. It’s going to be an interesting situation. A lot of people are discovering new things they’re into: a new kink, fetish, or new addiction to porn or jerking off on Skype. Are those people who have been able to jerk off in front of a stranger in a chatroom, cum, and close the computer and sleep want to go back to the ‘Would you like to stay overnight, grrreat!’ of hooking up in person?”
“There is very much a fury behind the funny.”
Before he began his new job, Peikert had an interview with a mainstream publication to be its theater editor, but the (to him) conflicting pressures of scoop-getting and sucking up to everyone in the industry put him off. “I thought, ‘I don’t want to do this anymore.’” He is not looking too far in the future; just to work “without parameters is a gift.”
So, really, will he ever deliver on all the tweets promising all manner of scandal and dish? “I probably will!” There seems to be a mixture of wit and fury to the tweets, a genuine anger, this reporter said. Peikert agreed. “There is very much a fury behind the funny,” he said. “Why did I tolerate all this terrible behavior for so long in my career? Because I worked in a job, and if I wanted to continue in it I had to play the game. I couldn’t burn bridges, piss off one star, because then their publicist would call my boss and complain and we’d probably have to take the story down.”
Right now at least, he is in the mood to settle scores and name names. “It releases a valve, but every single time I tweet something I am terrified there are going to be repercussions, and someone will be upset or message me.” He laughed, noting that his most mustache-twirling Twitter thread to date didn’t merit a chat thread on Broadway World. “That’s how little people paid attention!”
In one sense, Peikert says we are watching him express his professional frustrations. “It’s also like burning that bridge, so I am never tempted to go back into mainstream journalism again.” Peikert paused, and said he had been thinking “a lot” about Dorothy Parker’s poem, “Sanctuary.” Then he intoned gently:
“My land is bare of chattering folk;
The clouds are low along the ridges,
And sweet’s the air with curly smoke
From all my burning bridges.”
