BRANDON BAKER for PHILLY MAG

Immaculate Heart Cemetery in Marcus Hook would seem an unlikely resting place for a power-bottom porn star, but this is indeed where Chester native Joey Stefano, né Nicholas Iacona Jr., lays in perpetual sleep. His final resting place bears no headstone, making his presence in the cemetery derelict if not absent.

Yet 17 years after his death, Joey Stefano’s presence in both the mainstream and adult entertainment industries couldn’t be more noticeable. Hollywood director Chad Darnell, whose prior credits include casting Spider-Man and Lost, has spent the bulk of the past three years crafting a 107-page script that he hopes to shape into a two-hour indie biopic by February of next year. The film’s working title is X-Rated, and it recounts the fast life and slow death of one of the biggest gay-porn stars of the 1990s, an era when being in adult film carried far more star power than uploading an amateur video to Xtube.

Darnell’s fascination with Stefano began when a copy of a 1996 biography, Wonder Bread and Ecstasy, fell—literally—at his feet in an L.A. bookstore. Devouring the book in a single sitting, he instantly saw its potential as a movie. “It’s that story of ‘little boy comes to Hollywood and gets taken by the scene,’” says Darnell, who has yet to cast the role of Stefano. “But the real villain in the script is addiction, which Joey had. They all did.”

Stefano was Philly’s Bradley Cooper of gay porn. A small-town, big-dreaming, all-American “dude,” he didn’t just settle for porn, but rather aspired to it. And though his story ended in an almost cliché drug-induced tragedy in November 1994, his list of accomplishments accrued by his death at the age of 26 remains impressive.

Featured model in Madonna’s salacious Sex book? Check. Winner of the Best Actor trophy at the 1992 Gay Erotic Video Awards? Score. Line of Joey Stefano-branded apparel? Just ask the former Spruce Street Video employee about his signature Stefano sweatpants, created to commemorate Joey’s appearance at the 1992 PrideDay Parade. First bottom to hit big in what was previously an industry of straight-acting tops? You bet your butt cheeks. He was one of the only porn stars the Village Voice’s Michael Musto says he ever found attractive. During a dinner together in 1990, Musto says Stefano implanted a Heineken bottle into his ass like a flag on the moon. Musto later dubbed it “the Heinie-kin.” Stefano was a bottom living on top.

Despite his subsequent battles with drugs, and contracting HIV before the dawn of retroviral drugs, Stefano never lost his movie-star glow. When he entered a room, he would sway, grin and, whether he wanted to or not, attract the eyes of everyone else in it.

“He had these timeless looks to him,” says Robert Prion, a New Jersey–based porn director who shot three flicks with Stefano. “He looked like Tom Cruise, only his eyes were much nicer.”

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