I know how Russell’s fans speak about him today. And let me take a moment here to explain to his fans why I keep calling him “Russell” and not “Kyle”: I didn’t know him as ‘Kyle” even though the last time I saw him he was already doing porn under that name. And I think if I call Russell “Kyle” then I’m buying into some of the stories that are on the ‘Net about him. I also don’t know where “Kyle” came from, who created his name and his story. This is someone I was totally ignorant of. What I do want to know who got Russell into his first porn, and why he did it because he could have done anything with his life. No judgment; I just want to know. Kyle’s fans speak about his performances on the screen as artistic achievements, but here are some things that Kyle’s fans may not know about Russell.
Russell’s Bible by seventh grade was The Preppy Handbook, though he was a Preppy long before that. Before anyone else knew that it was gauche to wear white after Labor Day, Russell was wearing an alligator over his left pec. I had never before heard the term “status symbol” until he was explaining the importance of Izod one day. Along the same lines, Russell’s mom didn’t let him and his brother eat chocolate, but they were allowed to eat carob. She never struck me as a “health food nut” (as they were called in those days), so part of me thinks this was a bit of a “status symbol” as well.
Knowing what Izod was when most of us were more concerned about how to win at Asteroids was a harbinger of a deft wit in the making. Going to St George’s Catholic School, we were required to go to Mass every Friday. One of the songs was called, “Take My Hands”, and as a kid I had a difficult time with this verse:
Take my hands and make them as your own,
And use them for your kingdom here on earth,
Consecrate them to your care,
Anoint them for your service where,
You may need your Gospel to be sown.
I thought that the Gospel needing “sewn” (as I thought it was spelled) had something to do with book binding, which didn’t make a lot of sense to me because the Bible was supposed to be the infallible Word of God and thereby, one would assume, immune to glue rot. So, one day at lunch, I expressed this confusion and Russell rolled his eyes and said, “S-O-W-N, like seeds being sown. This is the Bible, not Simplicity Patterns.”
Back in the 70’s there was a campaign by the Pittsburgh Children’s Hospital to discourage kids from ingesting cleaners or detergents or solvents or poisons around the house that used a character called “Mr. Yuck.” Parents were given Mr. Yuck stickers to put on any containers with dangerous substances inside, while commercials with Mr. Yuck ran during weekday afternoon and Saturday morning children’s shows. The song went:
Mr. Yuck is mean.
Mr. Yuck is green!
MUAH-HAH-HAH-HAH-HAH!
Russell’s (much) gayer version went (in the tradition of “Boy’s Beware”):
Mr. Yum is pink.
Mr. Yum will wink.
Hee hee hee hee hee!
I say it was “gayer” now, but at the time, I didn’t know Russell was gay. I was only vaguely aware of myself being gay, but I also knew that being at a Catholic school in a very small Pennsylvania town saying it out loud would be a bad idea. It would make sense for Russell being as private as he was to not say anything about his orientation one way or the other, but looking back I can see clues here and there.
Russell liked ABBA, Devo and Blondie. He was, of course, well aware of New Wave well before anyone else was. When he said “New Wave” for the first time, I remember asking, “What was the ‘old wave’”? He rolled his eyes and tsked.
In eighth grade, when Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” was a mega-hit, Russell and Scott created a pimp named “Skinner”, and Russell wrote:
Darkness falls across the land
the Skinner hour is now at hand
Skinner’s out in search of bods
Slinking through your neighborhoods.
And though you fight to free yourself,
your start to writhe and quiver
for no mere child can resist the of
THE SKINNER!!!!!!
This is from my freshman year yearbook, and the only drawing of Russell’s that I have of Skinner:
The line about Gar-animals refers to a junior at Prep, Kevin Gorny, who was a friend of a friend, but who also went out of his way to pick on Russell and me and our friends. We were freshmen, so brave guy, right? In English class, Russell wrote an ode to him, then read it out loud to the class. The only line I remember is the beginning:
Adorned ye, Gorny,
In small patterns of barn animals
Clothed in thy older brother’s Gar-animals.
Again, he was quite the wit.
Russell took piano lessons for just about forever, and in fifth grade started taking guitar lessons at school (everyone had to choose an instrument or go into General Music). For a while he sang with Scott and me in the Eire Kiwana’s Boy’s Choir, but he soon backed out when he found out we had a concert scheduled at St. George’s. He had a solo and was embarrassed to sing in front of so many people who might have known him.
Russell was also a swimmer and in high school a water polo player. Like playing the piano, he had been swimming forever. I know he set a few records and won many meets, but I don’t remember the who’s and where’s.
Because Russell was smart, everyone assumed he’d go on to have a career in the sciences. He once made this hard plastic out of toilet bowl cleaner. He said there was flour in it as well. I tried it once, but failed to get the same result. To this day I have no idea how he did it. Unfortunately, because he was so different and so smart and so mature, he got bullied a lot. This one kid, John Root, called Russel “S.A.” for “Scientific Ass”. Russell used to chant at him
John Root’s a hippie!
John Root’s a hippie!
By this time we were in seventh or eighth grade, and Russell was pretty advanced in terms of sexual awareness. Probably as early as fifth grade he started talking about jacking off (as my brother recalls), and knew that ADIDAS (his preferred brand of sneaker) stood for “All Day I Dream About Sex”. He was also drawing hawkpeople, which were exactly as it sounds like – heavily-armed and barely-clad men and women wearing hawk heads with wings growing from their backs. This was probably the first time I had ever seen anyone draw boobs. Scott and I started copying the characters into our own drawings, and it was quite the scandal when our parents found the drawings. By this time we were in seventh or eighth grade and rationalized it by saying boobs were “no big deal” and, really, everyone had nipples; it was just that women’s were raised up a bit. They didn’t buy all the way into the explanation, but we were on the cusp of puberty, so the issue was dropped pretty quickly.
Like I said before, if there was one thing Russell excelled at, it was drawing. He had wanted to be an architect when he grew up. I think around fourth grade Russell started to carry around the blueprints for the original Star Trek’s U.S.S. Enterprise. I don’t think Russell actually watched Star Trek, but he studied the plans for details, scale, and design elements. He had a steady and exacting hand, and I wish I had some of his pictures still. When I visited him in 1994, he showed me some of his current drawings. Most notably, there was a detailed close-up of the feet of four men in black Doc Martin boots and white socks which were pushed down to just above the top of the boots. At the time, that was the height of fashionable gay clubwear. I looked at the drawing, then to Russell, hoping he’d say something about being gay, but he was silent. “Ah yes.” I hinted. “I see this in the clubs all the time. I sadly can’t afford Doc Martins.” But his response was something along the lines of, “I think this fad is starting to fade anyway.”
On the advice of my friend Steve, I picked up Lev Grossman’s The Magicians, a sort of self-conscious, Victorian-style Harry Potter and the Horny Teens. When it’s not trying too hard to hide the fact that it knows it’s riding Harry’s scar (though the “trying too hard to hide” doesn’t often succeed), it’s actually an entertaining read. Mostly. In this passage, Quentin, the protagonist, describes the animated library of Brakebills College of Magical Pedagogy:
But the system turned out to be totally impractical. The wear and tear on the spines alone was too costly, and the books were horribly disobedient. The librarian imagined he could summon a given book to perch on his hand just by shouting out its call number, but in actuality they were just too willful, and some of them were actively predatory. The Librarian was swiftly deposed, and his successor set about domesticating the books again, but even now there were stragglers, notably in Swiss History and Architecture 300-1399, that stubbornly flapped around near the ceiling. Once in a while and entire sub-sub-category that had long been thought safely dormant would take wing with an indescribable papery susurrus.
Who doesn’t love onomatopoeia?
When you say these words together, they sound very close to being the same, and while there is some overlap in meanings, their usages are different. “Furor” is the beginning of an emotional surge, the geyser that suddenly bursts from the heart. “Fervor” is the emotion, the water that is expressed. While both words have their basis in emotion, “furor” has a mostly negative connotation, while “fervor” can be either positive or negative.
Even though Russell didn’t like comic books’ portrayals of magic and sorcery, he was completely enamored of The Lord of the Rings. This was around the same time that the animated version played on television for the first time along with the animated The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. By the time we were in fourth grade, he had read the entire trilogy, and I’m pretty sure he had committed The Hobbit to memory. Within the year, Scott had read The Hobbit and I started to (I was much more interested in Michael Moorcock than Tolkien). Russell’s drawings started to take on a more fantastical element at this time, and he started to keep a journal that looked just like this one:
One drawing I remember in particular was a battle between rival wizards, some riding dragons with membranous wings, others shooting mountain-sized lightning bolts from their staves. Large wolves roamed the battlefield and carried off the unwary in their iron jaws. Like everything Russell drew it was precise, well-composed, and technically proficient. But the journal was the rule book for “The Istari II of the New World”, based on The Lord of the Rings‘ council of which Gandalf was a member. Potential members were tested by answering questions from The Hobbit, including naming all of Bilbo’s dwarven companions. The four members were Russell (the White), Scott (the Grey), Nate (the Blue), and me (the Brown). We all had names, I think in Quenya, that Russell had learned to write in runes. I cannot remember what my name was, but I do remember it translated as “Rock-Head”. I was alternately pleased that I passed the test to become a member, but annoyed that it wasn’t enough to be friends with Russell.
Still, his journal was a beautiful piece of work. He drew a map of the woods and creek near our family’s house in such detail that it could have been done by Daniel Reeve, the Middle-Earth map artist.
When Russell and his family moved to California, he left the journal behind with me. I have no idea where it is now, which is a source of distress for me. On some days I imagine that it’s in my mother’s basement in a box somewhere with all the missing letters. On other days, I have a cloudy recollection of giving it back to him when I visited him in 1994.
Fantasy was one of the few overlaps Russell and I had. When I started to get people together to play Dungeons and Dragons in earnest, Russell joined in a few times. He even got me a module one year for Christmas (it was “The Tomb of Horrors”), and I got him several “Choose Your Own Adventure” books. I was told that they certainly didn’t measure up to the thought he put into my gift. Emily Post maybe would have cheered, but I was hurt.
And that was the nature of our relationship – this back-and-forth, push-and-pull, hate-and-make-up dynamic. I admired Russell and I wanted to be friends with him until I didn’t. And that was a really bad time.
To be continued…
I want to set the record straight as best I can. I don’t know if all the stories I’ve read about Russell since learning that he was a performer in gay porn under the name “Kyle McKenna” and that he killed himself back in 2000 came from his own mind or from the studios he worked for, but most of them are wrong, if not flat-out fabrications. If the former is true and Russell deliberately obfuscated his background, then I run the risk of offending his privacy (and Russell was a very private person), but if the latter is true, then Kyle numerous fans don’t know the truth about this man they adore. I worry also that the story about his family not claiming his body after he killed himself is also true and that this article will embarrass them or cause them pain, and I always liked his family. However, if the story is true, then my childhood impressions of them were completely wrong and they are horrible people for doing that to their son.
I first learned that Russell was dead during my Christmas break in 2007. I was staying with my brother, and one idle night wondered vaguely what Russell was up to since I hadn’t seen him since 1994. Yeah, that makes me a really horrible person, I know. But finding answers to vague questions is why the Good Lord invented Google in the first place, and its top entry was surprisingly from IMDB. When I followed the link I didn’t believe what I was reading. People always talk about “cognitive dissonance”, but what I felt was as if I had gone momentarily stupid.
I thought it couldn’t be the same person I was looking for. Russell had done porn? Gay porn? Anything was possible, sure, but someone from Erie, someone I knew had done gay porn? And he was dead?
“Scott?” I asked my brother.
“Yeah?”
“What was Russell’s middle name?”
“Charles.”
“Was he born a year before us?”
“Yeah. 1968. Why?”
“Apparently, he’s dead.”
“What??”
“And did gay porn.”
“WHAT?!?”
Scott leapt over to the futon where I was sitting and we started to read the page together. He had the same difficulty believing this was the boy we had known because the biographical details were all wrong: Russell moved out to California with his family after freshman year in high school because his father had been transferred with GE, not because he ran away from a physically and sexually abusive father. Russell had a brother four years his junior, not an older one in the army who roughed him up when he came home on leave. If this was the Russell we had known, why were there all these lies being said about him? And if it wasn’t Russell, who in the world would have taken his name and claimed Erie, PA as his hometown?
“Holy. Crap.” Scott said.
“Yeah. Is this Russell?”
“I don’t know. Is there a picture?”
“Uh. No. Let me find one.”
In about five seconds, I had a picture of Kyle McKenna on the screen, and it was Russell. The chin was the giveaway. He had grown up to look like his father, but I could still see the parts of him I remembered.
“Jesus,” my brother said. “It is him.”
“Yeah, it is. How did we not know this before now? I mean, don’t you think we would have known somehow or other?”
“How?”
“I don’t know. It’s just weird that someone we know is dead.”
“It’s weird that someone we know did porn. Maybe we didn’t know him that well.”
“That’s… distressing. And somewhat sad. Why didn’t someone tell us?”
For the next few days, I dwelt on that question. Even now, I can’t fully explain why I felt I was entitled to some kind of an explanation, some truth in the matter. I think I felt ashamed that I hadn’t kept up contact with him, writing like I had promised I would, and in the end when he felt no one was there for him, I was one of those “no ones.” Nothing punctuated, bolded and underlined that “no oneness” than when I found a Charles McCoy listed in the Erie phonebook, and called thinking that it was Russell’s dad. A woman answered the phone, her voice timid and suspicious, “Hello?”
I didn’t recognize her voice, but then again if it were Russell’s mom, how would I know what her voice even sounded like anymore? I decided to play it dumb.
“Yes, hello. My name is Sean McGrath. May I speak with Charles McCoy, please?”
“Oh, I’m sorry, but he’s dead.”
My heart ker-plunked. “Oh, no. Really? Charles was so young. I’m sorry to hear is. Is his wife Caroline there by any chance?”
The woman’s voice audibly relaxed. “I’m afraid there’s been a misunderstanding. It was Charles Senior who passed away. His son, Charles Junior, is still alive as far as I know.”
“Ah! Is he still in California?”
“Who is this again?”
“My name is Sean McGrath, and… well, let me explain. I went to school with Charles’ son, and I wanted to get back in touch with him. I live in Texas now and am visiting Erie for Christmas, and on a whim thought I would look up… the family and see if anyone was in the area for the holiday.”
“Isn’t that sweet? No, I’m afraid they’re all still out in California, and with Charles gone now, I don’t think that they’ll be coming back to the area again.”
“Would you happen to have a phone number for Charles or Caroline?”
“I don’t. Sorry.”
I did a mental double-take. Someone who knows the grandfather, is living at his address and answering his phone, but has no idea how to get in touch with the extended family? Or was she lying? Who was this woman?
“What about Ryan? Or… Russell?”
At the mention of Russell’s name, the woman became stern and inquisitive. “Who did you go to school with? Where did you go to school?” she practically yelled.
Still trying to sound out-of-the-know, I answered, “I went to Saint George’s with both Ryan and Russell, but I graduated with Russell.”
Now she was yelling. “Who is this?!?”
“My name is Sean McGrath,” I repeated. “And…”
“NEVER CALL HERE AGAIN!!!!” Then she hung up on me. I was left with the impression that she knew what had happened to Russell (judging from her reaction to his name), and that there was more than a little shame attached to it. Granted, she didn’t know me from a Big Mac, and it’s possible that back in 2000 Kyle McKenna fans were calling out of the woodwork to get a statement or a memento. But seven years later to still be that angered by a phone call, she would rather have forgotten Russell existed than to remember any unpleasantness. Again, it was just my impression.
In the end, there are many things I don’t know about Russell and his life in California as Kyle McKenna, but I would like to know. Maybe someone can tell me. I’d love to find out. Even what I think I know and remember is unraveled around the edges, but as it comes to me, I’ll tell you. Feel free to correct me if I’m wrong.
Russell Charles McCoy was born October 27, 1968. His first school was Erie Day School, and in 2nd grade transferred to Saint George’s. His father’s name was Charles, Jr. and his mother’s name was Caroline. He had a younger brother named Ryan and a dog named Raisin. He lived at 1777 (or “one triple seven” as Russell put it in his supercilious way) Emory Drive. Russell and my brother Scott became friends quickly, and at dinner, we would hear about how smart Russell was, how good at math and science, how good at drawing… and he was. Russell’s mind was stunningly clutter-free and disciplined even in second grade. He was also unfailingly polite. Teachers and parents often used him as an example of the right way to behave in class. Russell was kinda scary, almost alien compared with the sloppiness we were used to (we were, after all, just seven years old). How this happened is anyone’s guess: natural inclination, training at Erie Day School, his parents’ influence… I remember my Mom saying that Russell’s mom was too hard on him, that she never let him have any fun. It’s possible that his meticulousness came from her. If I recall correctly, Carolyn was a student most of the time that we were in elementary school. I don’t recall what she was studying, nor if she had a job. But I do remember that she scared me a bit. She was aloof and always had some activity going on that didn’t involve us kids when we would visit their house. Charles, Russell’s father, was an engineer for GE and just a friendly guy, even a bit goofy (he kept an ABBA poster taped to the family room wall). He planned a birthday party for Russell one year that had us running around the house in a riddle-based scavenger hunt, playing party games, and winning comic books. I think Russell was alternately delighted and embarrassed. Embarrassed because what we were doing was so childish (Russell wasn’t really a “kid”), but delighted because he was having fun. Every once in a while he’d step out of his mature-beyond-his-years façade and really smile, like when he blew the candles out on his birthday cake. And that smile was a rare thing. At most, one would get a Spockian cocked-eyebrow if he was amused. Really, any emotion from Russell was unusual, he was so even-keeled, so controlled. I think the entire time I knew him, I saw him cry once. A bully had been picking on him on the playground before school, and had said something to really upset him. When Scott and I arrived, Russell was crying and told us the kid had spat on him. We said he should report it, but he wouldn’t. If nothing else, Russell was driven by pride.
When we first met, Russell hated me, and I wasn’t too thrilled by him either. Russell was in the same class as my brother Scott. The two of them were a lot alike: mature, had talents for writing and drawing, and were both… let’s call it “well-ordered”. I, however, wasn’t. I was emotional to the point of being gregarious, demonstrative, and spilled a lot of Kool-Aid. I think there was also a “tag-along” feature that Russell didn’t like (he often compared me to his younger brother, Ryan, who did the same thing). Scott and Russell became really good friends very quickly, and Scott would tell stories at the dinner table about what he and Russell did that day in school. If I recall correctly, Russell and I were introduced after school one day while we were all waiting for the bus. I had heard so much about Russell that I was eager to meet him, and when Scott said, “That’s Russell over there,” I insisted on an introduction. The exchange went something like this:
Scott: Russell, this is my brother, Sean.
Me: Nice to meet you.
Russell: I’ve heard a lot about you, and most of it’s not good.
Me: The fuck…?
Of course, this is recalled through the filter of 30-some years, so I don’t expect this is exactly what was said, but the content is accurate. And this began our rivalry, if it can even be called that. We weren’t competing for anything except to put the other in his place, but it was an on-again, off-again affair throughout grade school. Sometimes (OK, rarely) we’d get along like peanut butter and bananas, and other times we’d be at each other’s throats like Joan Collins and Linda Evans. An example of the former was when we were in fourth grade and our teachers decided that an inter-classroom Multiplication/Division Off would be just the thing to get us learning our times tables. There were three fourth-grade classes, and in the end, my room won. Scott and Russell’s lost. At lunch that day, I was ready to brag a little bit (even though I wasn’t the one who cinched for my room), and when I asked Scott and Russell how it felt to lose, Russell said, “I decided that anyone who brings up that event will get a noogie.” So, he gave me one, but I let him. It was kind of funny.
There were plenty of times when we had sleepovers that went well. We slept over Russell’s house one night and he created a burglar alarm on one of those “Hey, Kids! Electronics!” kits that one could buy at Radio Shack to let us know when Ryan was coming down the hall to the bedroom so we could pretend to be asleep and not have to play with him. Of course, it was all much more “Doctor Doom’s Lair” in our imaginations than it was in actuality, but it was fun pretending what we would do if the kit were more advanced.
Another sleepover I remember happened when we were probably in fourth grade because that was the time I started to get into playing Dungeons & Dragons and the whole nerdfest of associated obsessions: comic books (Doctor Strange was a favorite), Michael Moorcock novels, and an interest in the occult (I got my first set of tarot cards not long after this); and Russell was reading The Lord of the Rings. More accurately, he was memorizing it, and learning to read and write runes. I found out that night that Charles was a Ham radio operator, and in my very spastic, over-eager, and utterly ridiculous way, asked if he could radio Tibet for us and ask if they could give us magic lessons. Charles (God love him for being so nice about this) said, “Well, I’m not sure you’d find many Hams in Tibet who speak English.” Russell for the occasion had composed a song to the tune of “Frere Jacques”:
Mystic arts, mystic arts;
Dormamu, Dormamu.
Doctor Strange is dying.
Ancient One is crying,
“Help me, too, Dormamu!”
Even though Russell didn’t like comic books’ portrayals of magic and sorcery, he was completely enamored of The Lord of the Rings.
To be continued…
This week, my new favorite website Awful Library Books, featured Clown Ministry (shown above), a guide to bringing joy and childlike wonder to otherwise ponderous and incense-laden church services. I remember this trend back in the early 80′s and always felt slightly embarrassed for the people on the altar who were trying to make people laugh at things like The Beatitudes, which are painfully unfunny. Clowns and church seem like they would go together well (since there’s already so much dress-up going on), but it’s more like a failed Reese’s experiment marrying chocolate and potting soil. In the comments section,
Christy remarks
I’ve thought about it a lot because a lot of people don’t understand it, and I think I dislike clowns because they fall into a bit of an “uncanny valley”. It’s like they’re just not quite human, and it gives me the willies! It’s not like I have paralyzing clown nightmares or anything, but they do make me feel vaguely uncomfortable.
An uncanny valley is an area of perception in which something artificial comes close to perfectly looking like a human being, eliciting a deep-seated revulsion towards the object. I had never heard of an uncanny valley before, but I do know the symptoms. A friend of mine is irrationally terrified of zombies even though they certainly aren’t going to bring about the end of the world. Today. I hope.
UPDATE: The Japanese are paving the way for our robot overlords.
