Gallery Carre
The New Pornographer (miaminewtimes)
Feb 23rd, 2024 by Viviane
Mikey Butders creates a sex scene empire one sweaty shot at a time
As a boy, Mikey Butders dreamed of distant galaxies. From the window of his family’s apartment in Queens, the night sky was a hazy fantasy swirling above the fluorescent wash of street lights. Butders would go there someday, he told himself, and float untethered through the blackness.
The astronaut reverie began to fade when Butders was ten years old. He had stumbled onto his big brother’s cache of skin mags and pornographic videotapes. He was fascinated, watching the sex scenes over and over, telling all of his friends about Ultimate Lover starring porn legend Nina Hartley. The Frankenstein-meets-porn plot revolved around Hartley’s quest to develop and use a “superstud” in her lab. It wasn’t long before Butders dreamed of being a porn star himself.
Fast-forward eleven years. Butders’s parents have separated and left the Jackson Heights neighborhood in which Butders grew up. After a few semesters of political science classes at Penn State, Butders has dropped out and moved to Miami to be closer to his mother in Coral Springs.
It is a weekday afternoon in early 2004. A 21-year-old Butders, sweat beading on his forehead, is going at it doggy-style with a brunette, her hands crumpling beige sheets in a low-ceiling South Beach apartment bedroom. The room is furnished with little more than a mattress and box spring, and the hospital-white walls are bare. Butders picks up the pace, and the Puerto Rican girl’s practiced moans grow louder. It is sex scene number twentysomething or thirtysomething of Butders’s budding porn career.
Just over five feet five inches tall, with short, curly black hair and a gleaming smile, Butders (the Uruguayan-American’s screen name) has a cherubic face that makes getting into bars without an ID nearly impossible. A shadow of stubble shades his jutting jaw, and a thin gold necklace dangles above his pecs like a rope bridge over rock formations. His toned arms and wide chest — products of regular visits to the gym and a regimen of muscle-boosting testosterone supplements — glisten in the modest set’s umbrella lights. The two-bedroom apartment where Butders sleeps and works is nearly spotless and smells of citrus air freshener. The refrigerator is full of bottled water and the cabinets are full of bags of potato chips. A hall closet is stocked with towels, condoms, anal beads, dildos, and lubricants — tools of the trade.
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