Japanese censorship laws require blurring genitalia, but social stigma leads many performers (regardless of gender) to obscure their faces, too.
“It’s my duty to take care of him,” Masaki said, glancing over at Tenten.īy the time he died from peritonitis after an appendix operation, at just 29, Masaki had established a celebrity persona in a business where such a thing hadn’t existed before. In the video, Masaki, soft-spoken and with a close-cropped beard circling his angular face, never talks explicitly about his work in adult film, but his many fans would have had no trouble recognizing him. They were talking to the photographer Keiichi Nitta for a recent video series profiling gay couples for Vice Japan. I’ve realized that recently,” Masaki said, about his partner, Tenten, a model and Chinese expatriate that he met on a train home from a Lady Gaga concert. “It must have taken him a lot of courage to decide to live in Japan. Koh Masaki was Japan’s foremost gay porn star when he died one month ago today.
