Andy DehnartIf you need evidence that gender, sex, and sexual orientation are complicated, look no further than The Real World, where last night, Dustin Zito demonstrated clear homophobia–and yes, he is the cast member who has had gay sex on camera.
On last night’s episode, Adam Royer was kicked out of the Hard Rock Hotel for being a destructive drunk, so the cast will get a new roommate–and Dustin fears having a gay roommate. In this clip, he says, “It’s tough. Because a guy dude I would just be like, hey don’t be sniffing my underwears man. I sniff girls underwears!” In an interview, he then says, “Over the years, you get a level of paranoia. You’re walking and you see a gay person and you get nervous. And some of them approached me and I’m like, dude, you gotta back this up.”
Presumably, he doesn’t mean back up so he can put his penis into their anus, even though he’s done that before. Seriously, Dustin’s pluralization of “underwear” isn’t the only appalling thing here: His literal fear of gay people is the very definition of homophobia.
In a new interview with Ology, Dustin said he’s straight and adds, “With me, I was never homophobic or scared to be around guys making out. I’m comfortable with my sexuality.” He also said, “I’m not trying to cover anything up — is it that hard to grasp the concept that I’m comfortable enough with myself to do something with another guy for money? Is it that impossible? Can you not understand? Can your mind not fathom?”
What I can’t fathom is why, if he’s so comfortable with having sex with men for money, that he fears sharing a room with a man who wants to have sex with men for love or pleasure, and why there’s been a pathetic attempt to remove all evidence of his gay sex from the Internet. There’s a new twist to that: DudeTube has new images of Dustin’s naked times and reports that Dustin’s timeline for his porn work doesn’t match reality, and even better, reports that at a recent convention, “Dustin was there working the gay porn convention for Fratmen.”
As to the disappearance of images online, the creator of The Real World, Jon Murray, told me came from Dustin, not producers or MTV, which many people have speculated was the case. In an interview I did with Jon for an upcoming feature story in Playboy, I asked him about Dustin and the disappearance of the images, and he said, “I think he’s talked with the site and his former employer, and I think he may have been working with them to try to get some of it taken down. But I’m not really involved in that, and I don’t know specifically if that’s the case, but that’s sort of generally what I’ve heard.”
Jon said that, during casting, “There were a lot of conversations with him and part of why he wanted to do this was to just get it out in the open and get it behind him. And I thought it was a really interesting story, because whether it’s that’s particular story, having done one of these voyeuristic web sites, or some other mistake someone’s made in life, there are a lot of people out there that society might judge them badly for or they might judge themselves badly for, and part of how to deal with that and how to move on is a really important story for our audience.”