I remember sitting on the outside steps of my high school gym waiting for a friend to pick me up. He drove a white Volkswagen. I scanned each car that passed by on the street. Damn! It seemed like every couple of minutes a white Volkswagen would go by - but it wasn't him. What's with all the white Volkswagens? That must be the most popular car in the world, I thought.
No, not really. It's an illusion. When you have an important detail in your head, every repetition confirms a pattern. Your brain is filtering out everything that doesn't match, and just holding on to the things that do.
In this case you are noticing the suicides, but not paying attention to the many other ways porn actors die - and of course most don't die at all. Not to mention all the people who kill themselves that you aren't aware of because they have nothing to do with porn.
So, what is going on? I only have statistics for the US, but it shows some factors that increase the probability of suicide.
- 7 out of 10 suicides are male.
- Suicide rates for white males have climbed over the past 10 years.
- Suicide rates are far higher in more rural states (Wyoming, Oklahoma, Nebraska, Montana, Arizona) than in more urban states (New York, California, Connecticut, Illinois).
- The sharpest rate of increase is for middle aged men: 35-45.
Where do porn stars fit in to this? Well, for a white male aged 25-35 the average is about 17 individuals per 100 thousand in any given year. That makes them pretty high-risk already, since the average for the whole population is 13.5 per 100k.
All that being said, I think it is probably true that porn actors have an even higher rate of suicide than these averages - but not what you are expecting.
I think what is likely more alarming is that they have a much higher death rate - from all causes - than their statistical averages. They don't have health care through their porn work - so like many young uninsured people they put off seeing a doctor until it may be too late. On the positive side, the industry rewards good looking bodies, which encourages exercise and a healthy diet. But the culture also has a lot of drugs, alcohol, and risky sexual activity.
So what is the suiicde rate in the gay porn industry? To answer that you need to know how many actors are working in gay porn, and at the moment that is almost an unknowable figure because of the way that the industry has changed in the past ten years. Very few actors now have studio contracts, rates have plummeted, and non-studio shot-on-an-iPhone stuff is everywhere. Ten years ago there were about 600 performers working world-wide. Today with both more product and more performers doing less work than before I would just take that up to an even 1000. (That also makes the math easier.)
Final question - how many performers committed suicide this year? You do the research, and you will have a number per 1000.
If you isolate just the Americans - note that about 45,000 die by suicide every year. Your number would show how many of those were contributed by the porn industry.
My guess is that it is not all that many. Maybe 3 or 4 US porn performers take their life and the other 45,996 committed suicide for non-porn related reasons.
Back to my original point, if you expand your view to not just the gay porn industry but instead pay attention to all the suicides that are happening then you find that gay porn actors don't reall make up a significant total.
We all need to do what we can to encourage and provide better health care, both for general and mental health. But the vast majority of both straight and gay porn actors are moving along in life just fine.