Closet Case: Dirk Caber

Closet Case: Dirk Caber
Image: Dirk Caber (front) with husband Jesse Jackman. (Supplied photo)

FOR Dirk Caber — the porn alter ego of composer Jack Parton — his coming out experience couldn’t have been further from his partner’s. With parents who were New England libertarians, their responses to Caber’s confession were variations on: “That makes sense.”

Years later, when Caber decided to go into porn he had to come out to his parents a second time, and the prospect made him a little more nervous. He’d already been in the industry for a few years by that stage, and had been filming for some of the most high-profile studios in the US.

“I was getting worried, because Jesse and I, through some of the activism we were doing… we were becoming known outside of the porn world as porn stars, visually,” he said.

“We knew it was probably only a matter of time before somebody sent [my parents] an email with a picture saying, ‘is this Jack’?”

Caber decided it needed to come from him, so he drove to his parents house for dinner.

“Halfway through dinner, ‘I actually need to talk to you about something, and this is a little awkward, because I don’t know how you’re going to react’,” he said.

“I proceeded to catalogue all the great things that have come into my life because of porn.”

Before giving any explanation for what he was talking about, Caber rattled off a whole list of changes: relocating from Chicago to Boston, achieving some financial security, reaching out to a whole new group of people engaged with his music, even meeting Jackman, a partner his parents adore.

“‘So what I’m trying to say is, I have become a porn star’,” Caber recounted.

“The moment I said, ‘What I’m telling you is I’ve been acting in gay porn’, my mother’s first response was to heave this huge sigh of relief and say, ‘I thought you were going to tell us you had cancer’.”

After the dinner-table conversation, Caber’s father went away and googled what his son had been up to.

“He’s looking at my blog and he’s looking at Jesse’s blog, and he’s looking at all these mentions of us online and reading some of the things we’re writing and taking about and he says, ‘you guys are famous’,” Caber said.

“His final word on it was, the only thing he didn’t like about it was he had nobody he could brag about it to.”

RELATED: Closet Case: Jesse Jackman

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**This was first published in the July edition of the Star Observer, which is available to read in digital flip-book format. To obtain a physical copy, click here to find out where you can grab one in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Adelaide, Canberra and select regional/coastal areas.

Read our previous instalments of “Closet Case”:

Tony Briffa

Mariam Margolyes

Kerryn Phelps & Jackie Stricker

Benjamin Law

Beccy Cole

Buck Angel

Thomas Jaspers

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