Steve Cassidy

Steve Cassidy is an American gay adult film performer — a "post-millennium renegade" whose unlikely path into porn is more interesting than most. Born in California but raised with roots in Iowa, Cassidy was a self-described skinny kid who gained a lot of weight at 25 and joined a gym for one reason: so he could take his shirt off while dancing. The 6'1", 215lb muscular build that eventually got him cast was a gym-bunny makeover, not a birthright.

He found the industry by pure accident. Cassidy was in a gay bowling league where he became friendly with directors Casey and Peter O'Brian; while hanging around one of their shoots, he spotted performer Collin Jennings and joked he'd do a scene with the guy. The directors called his bluff — and that's how a 34-year-old non-model landed in gay porn.

His sexual arc was just as unplanned. His first-ever sexual experience was at a gloryhole in a porn shop — he didn't even like the taste of the first cock offered, and was hooked anyway, going back many times. After coming out, an assault left him strictly a top; it was a boyfriend who coaxed him into bottoming, which turned him into a full "power bottom" on camera — a rare pivot for a man his size. (A college girlfriend once faked a pregnancy to test him; he offered to marry her on the spot.)

He was game and got humbled for it: on the set of Fantasies of a Pig Bottom, challenged to take a huge black dildo, he joked he'd rather take the "anal balls" — then took all of them and stopped joking. Tattooed on his back, biceps, and deltoid, Cassidy kept a low personal profile and remains a cult name for those who remember the early-2000s era he helped define.