Disheartened by how her family was portrayed in his biography, and distrustful of those looking to cash in on his story, she decided she would never publicly touch on the subject. Linda has never spoken about Nick to the media. Her dialect, meanwhile, shines through as that of the small-town neighbor who boisterously emotes while telling a story.
More tough-looking than her brother, the stress lines now etched into the contours of her face don’t distract from the same remarkable pair of eyes that he had. Nick, who she says behaved like a “big Toys ‘R’ Us kid,” would visit her regularly when she moved away from home to start a family. Linda was six years older than Nick, but the two got along like twins. Like a child guilty of sweeping brussels sprouts into a napkin, she’d be grounded the moment he’d point their parents toward her cigarette-stuffed shoes.īut today, sitting in the living room of her Glenolden apartment, pointing to a picture of Nick hanging on her wall and holding a lit cigarette between her fingers, she recalls the memory with fondness. Nick, in a portrait that hangs in his sister Linda's living room in Glenolden.Īs a teenager, Linda Iacona would resent her little brother when he squealed on her for smoking. The better question is: Who was Nick Iacona? It’s enough to make you wonder: Why? Why does a boy from the Philly ’burbs who went on to become a gay-porn icon continue to blow up news feeds and entertainment mediums-continue to fascinate-after all these years? Just who was Joey Stefano? Stefano’s story has been told several times, in a biography and several plays, and will be again in Darnell’s soon-to-come film. “He looked like Tom Cruise, only his eyes were much nicer.” “He had these timeless looks to him,” says Robert Prion, a New Jersey–based porn director who shot three flicks with Stefano. When he entered a room, he would sway, grin and, whether he wanted to or not, attract the eyes of everyone else in it. Musto later dubbed it “the Heinie-kin.” Stefano was a bottom living on top.ĭespite his subsequent battles with drugs, and contracting HIV before the dawn of retroviral drugs, Stefano never lost his movie-star glow. During a dinner together in 1990, Musto says Stefano implanted a Heineken bottle into his ass like a flag on the moon. He was one of the only porn stars the Village Voice’s Michael Musto says he ever found attractive. First bottom to hit big in what was previously an industry of straight-acting tops? You bet your butt cheeks. 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. Winner of the Best Actor trophy at the 1992 Gay Erotic Video Awards? Score. 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.įeatured model in Madonna’s salacious Sex book? Check. A small-town, big-dreaming, all-American “dude,” he didn’t just settle for porn, but rather aspired to it. Stefano was Philly’s Bradley Cooper of gay porn. “But the real villain in the script is addiction, which Joey had.
“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. Devouring the book in a single sitting, he instantly saw its potential as a movie. (Though the film, for which Darnell interviewed more than 50 sources over a three-year period, is still short $450,000 in funding.) 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.ĭarnell’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. 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.
Yet 17 years after his death, Joey Stefano’s presence in both the mainstream and adult entertainment industries couldn’t be more noticeable. His final resting place bears no headstone, making his presence in the cemetery derelict if not absent. 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.