Page 33 - AVN Men 2022

“It’s nice to be part of the change...I had to use my voice.”
When he joined the adult industry in 2018, Dillon Diaz didn’t fully comprehend the impact he was about to have.
“I was just changing careers and I needed to make an income—and so in a way, I wasn’t thinking so much about the symbolism and what it meant for young men of color coming up,” he shares. “Then I started getting messages and DMs from people on Twitter, thanking me for being present because they now saw someone like them having sex and enjoying it. That’s when I started to realize that it was important for young guys to see examples of themselves, because I didn’t have that growing up.”
Which is especially frightening when you consider that Diaz grew up in a diverse part of New York.
“It was almost non-existent, to be completely honest. I feel like my first experiences looking at porn was always white men, and I’m a diverse person—I find lots of different types of people attractive, so I looked at it and I thought they were beautiful. But I was confused about why I maybe thought black men were not supposed to be gay. That was part of the messaging I received when I was young...”
But that all changed when his porn education continued to evolve.
“The first time I saw somebody that looked like me was Latino Fan Club. I would watch all of Tiger Tyson’s movies, because those were the guys that were all over New York. ... But what I realized even at that time was it was almost like a fetish—if you wanted to see men of color, you had to look for men of color.”
But with his role in front of and behind the camera—where he added “writer” and “director” to his resume last year with his work at Noir Male— Diaz is changing the narrative.
“It’s nice to be part of the change...I had to use my voice. I realized that I had one, and people were willing to listen to it, and that was a big deal,” Diaz says, his voice quivering. “I’m getting choked up thinking about that part.”
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