Gay Adult Star Sharok Explains His Viral Protest at Fashion Week – Out Magazine

He actually had no idea I was going to do that. I specifically wanted to do the show so that it would give me that kind of platform to do it. That sounds a bit shady, but… it worked. I haven’t spoken to him about it since but he had no idea I was going to do that. I did specifically unbutton my shirt to the point where you can see my tattoo that says “Women. Life. Freedom.” And that was going to be the statement but I had written the sign and kept it in my bag up until the last moment. When the music was on and we were all in line and about to walk out, I was like, “Fuck it, I’m going to do it.”

How has the response been? How has that been for you? 

It’s been great. It achieved the goal that I wanted which was to go viral. So Vogue Italia and Vogue Poland put it on their Instagram. A lot of the Iranian news online posted it but of course they haven’t tagged me because of the whole porn thing. Which is fine, because I don’t really care, but it does kind of annoy me that even within my own community there’s still a stigma when it comes to homosexuality, porn, and sex work.

I have a friend who works at one of the biggest Persian-Iranian news agencies. He wanted to run a story on me about the whole thing. They were like, “Yeah, this is great. He’s amazing.” And then at the end of the meeting, he told them I did porn and they’re like, “Oh, no, we can’t. We can’t do anything. We can’t even post his picture.”

Photo: Instagram (@the_sharok)