Ali Eteraz - Native Believer

Compounding his insecurity was that he was the sole West Asian at his high school. There was a group of white kids and there was a group of black kids. Neither accepted him. And if they did allow him in, they never elevated him, which was what he really wanted. Being dark-skinned, he couldn’t achieve the social popularity that leading white guys could claim. And being of small stature, he couldn’t possess the physical authority exuded by the leading black guys. He therefore became interminably jealous of two things at once: white charisma and black strength. “That is the sexual yin and yang of America,” he said, polishing off a Stella. “And I didn’t fit into either.”

The college years were a time of depression. He tried everything from joining a white fraternity to joining a black stepping group that toured historically black universities. But because he always felt that in these pursuits he was not locating something essential about himself — something he hadn’t yet learned how to define — his efforts never brought him peace. In the end he stopped trying, became a hermit of sorts, and indulged his doldrums by watching interracial porn. Strong black men having intercourse with pretty pale-skinned white girls. In masturbating to the American yin and yang — the inaccessible — Ali Ansari finally found a bit of relief. He dropped out of his premed program and set about getting trained in film.

After college Ali Ansari told his parents he was going to Dominica to study at the medical school; instead he moved out to North Philly and sent his résumé to various pornographic websites specializing in interracial porn. One company, Aphrodiesel Spanktertainment, based out of Baltimore, recognized his name from the subscription he had bought and renewed at the gold level for four years. They decided to give him a job. Ali was assigned to travel with a Jamaican-American former wrestler named Blake Nails who, due to his fragile mental state and repressed homosexuality, needed a more encouraging cameraman than the one he had. Managing Blake really meant getting him cocaine, holding his hand when he got male-enhancement procedures done, and stroking him until he was hard. “I used a glove at first and then one day I didn’t,” Ali shrugged. On these trips Ali developed his directorial craft. Looping a scene to extend the pounding. Doing the money shot first. Learning to hide the ejaculating hand pump. The use of glory holes and prosthetics. Point-of-view tricks. Camera angles. He also learned about the most up-to-date male-enhancement medical techniques, everything from penile widening to suspensory ligament incisions to platelet-rich plasma injections and glandular grafting. Together Ali and Blake traveled across the country, from motels in Miami to hotels in Houston, from casinos in Las Vegas to private homes in Montana. Under Ali’s management Blake also started freelancing, answering swingers ads from the web. Everywhere there were men eager to give their white wife to a black porn performer and pay good money for it. The freelancing became lucrative and allowed Blake to transition into physical therapy and let Ali buy his own film equipment.

During his travels, Ali also met others similar to him. People seeking inclusion in America through sexuality. One, like a Kashmiri-American girl named Shazia, believed that she was actually a white girl, and proved it by being contrasted against black skin. Blake Nails had her regularly. Another, like a Persian-Swedish-American named Mitra, demanded that she would only be with white guys, because she was pure Aryan. Both girls eventually devolved into a glassy-eyed sadism. Shazia ended up a sugar baby in Las Vegas, getting five thousand a month from a forty-seven-year-old lawyer and accountant who liked to be forced to eat his own semen. Mitra got pregnant by an Egyptian plastic surgeon who lied and said he was Caucasian. She killed herself and left the baby in Tijuana.

At some point in the middle of the decade Ali Ansari started to wonder why there were no Muslim men performing in porn. He figured the answer was that there was no demand. No one got off on the idea of seeing a Muslim boning a white girl. He wanted to know why not. The answer he settled on was that America simply didn’t recognize Muslim masculinity. The only image of Muslim men America saw was of those at the receiving end of invasion, at the receiving end of the torture like at Abu Ghraib, or simply exploding themselves out of desperation. The Muslim was the butt of humiliation. Ali Ansari decided he wanted to change that.

And so Talibang Productions was launched. Ali envisioned a Muslim version of the interracial porn that he had made with Blake Nails. Husband humiliation. Cheating wife. Forced entry. Abduction. Inexplicable erotic romance in the men’s section of the mosque, with the entire congregation. He imagined nothing less than a revolution in the way the Muslim man was viewed by America.

In order to find performers, however, he had to do the hard task of wading into Muslim communities. He started by getting a hold of some cab drivers and chefs, but all of them were new to the country and wanted visa sponsorships before committing to anything experimental. Ali then turned to the second-generation youth, finding them at Sufi orders, Salafi mosques, progressive circles. He hit the big conventions, the ethnic speed-dating services that parents set up to get their children married off, and the lecture circuit where the Islamic pundits peddled books that blamed American consumerism for all the world’s ills. It turned out that finding Muslim guys eager to get into pornography was not very easy. Even more difficult was the persuasion that followed. He had to convince men who had attended mosques and listened to sermons about chastity their entire lives to unshackle themselves from their restrictions. It was next to impossible. Even the promise of touching naked white girls wouldn’t convince them.

In the end, the only group of Muslims he found who didn’t care what their community thought about them were those loosely affiliated with the Gay Commie Muzzies. They were open to performing for Talibang Productions. But as aspiring intellectuals they could only do porn ironically. It had to be meta. It had to be self-reflexive. It had to have something that undermined the very idea of “pornyness.”

At first Ali was resistant to these requirements. But as a playwright without players he had no other choice than to consent to the limitations that his performers imposed. Within a few months of working together, Talibang Productions and Gay Commie Muzzies put out their first video, entitled Gangs of Abu Ghraib . In it, a fictional and much hotter Lynndie England was put on a leash and passed around from cell block to cell block at Abu Ghraib prison. That was when Ali met Tot, who ended up playing the Iraqi prison guard who groomed Lynndie to share her body with the prisoners. The entire thing was filmed at Eastern State Penitentiary.

The film ended up being a modest financial success. There were ten thousand downloads and nearly a thousand people paid to subscribe to Ali’s video channel. He was pretty sure most of these subscribers were Muslim kids around the world. The bloggers hailed him for pushing back against the image of the Muslim male as abused, hungry, tortured, subservient. He had gotten the image of the naked victims of Abu Ghraib out of people’s minds and replaced it with machismo. Galvanized by the reception, Ali quickly directed The Terrorist , which was about a skinny Muslim guy with a small penis who started sleeping with white women and found that, compared to the men they had been with before, his penis was massive. Partly because of the uniqueness of the venture and partly because of the international network that the Gay Commie Muzzies possessed, Ali started making a good deal of money. Subscriptions made it necessary to come up with new projects, of which Osama and Ayman in the MILFline was the newest.