Cobra Killer (21 page)

Once in California, life was a struggle. Lockhart said “my mother failed to provide me with the stable home environment every growing, young adult sorely needs” which forced him to take numerous part-time jobs in retail to make enough money for food and everyday essentials.
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During this time, Lockhart says an older boyfriend “introduced me to a lifestyle that wasn’t very fitting of a sixteen-year-old. He was nothing but the worst influence on me. But I thought this was what gay people did.”
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Exposed to drinking binges, illicit drugs and as much ready-anonymous sex as he’d like, “I didn’t know that most of the gay community isn’t into drugs and being evil to each other, that there is a side of the gay community that actually takes care of each other.”
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His exposure to the grown up world of gay men included nude webcam videos of Lockhart sent to Bryan Kocis whom he had never met before. “(My boyfriend) was online with (Kocis),” Lockhart explained. “He whips around the webcam, points it at the bed, and rips my clothes off. I’m instantly hard because I’m a sixteen-year-old and this means sex. I’m pointing at the ceiling and he’s, like, ‘You’re on webcam.’”
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The images of Lockhart were ones that caught Kocis’ intense interest.

Lockhart and Kocis started up an almost immediate friendship, propped up by texting, e-mails, and phone calls. Lockhart’s boyfriend, however, quickly grew unhappy with Kocis’ intense interest in Lockhart. The answer? Lockhart says his cell phone was cut off by the jealous boyfriend. Enter Kocis. “Bryan understood (that he) would nearly lose all communication with me,” Lockhart said. “To avoid that from happening, (Kocis) sent me a Sprint cellular phone, validating it by offering me a job. By sending me the phone, Bryan knew it would be easier for me to get independence…”
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By January 2004, Lockhart said Kocis requested and received two personal casting tapes from him in addition to a private webcam show. “He told me he wanted to see how I would look on camera and spent a great deal of effort shipping his personal camera to me from across the country. He did not, however, spend any effort obtaining my identification.”
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By February, Lockhart was flying to Fort Lauderdale, Florida to shoot scenes for the infamous
Every Poolboy’s Dream
and
Casting Couch IV.
Lockhart was only seventeen and a junior in high school at the time.

After
Every Poolboy’s Dream
hit the shelves and was made available online via Kocis’ video site, things got “complicated,” Lockhart said.

Kocis eventually began asking him about his actual age, Lockhart said, but “Bryan’s concern appeared to be centered more on what would and could happen to me if it was verified I was seventeen. He spoke of fraud; that it was a federal crime. He told me that if the FBI were to get involved that I would be held solely responsible for the crime because he had done everything in compliance with the law.”
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Lockhart says Kocis’ entreaties to him also included threats to “out” him to his family, and advice that no other video company would employ him for porn productions because he had done “bareback scenes” for Cobra (just as Kocis wanted it). “The things Bryan told me made me feel like Cobra was the end all, be all for me in the adult industry,” Lockhart said.
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The success of
Every Poolboy’s Dream
quickly prompted Kocis to propose another film, this one titled
Schoolboy Crush.
Lockhart said filming of
Schoolboy Crush
left him with a feeling of doom.

“At the time, I was not out and I was still somewhat ashamed of my homosexuality, let alone having participated in gay porn,” Lockhart said. “Bryan knew this and was aware that if my family were to learn of my adult work, I would be shamed and embarrassed. At age seventeen, these types of feelings rule your world!”
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Despite the feelings of worry, doom, and shame, Lockhart was determined to get rid of the secret problem of his underage status. He obtained a fake California ID showing him to be eighteen years old and promptly showed it to Kocis. It was a move Lockhart says he regrets, he was now part and parcel to the lie. “I believed my only option was to provide him with an ID that read I was eighteen. Looking back now, armed with the truth, I understand it was yet another wrong decision on my part,” he said.
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Lockhart stays with Cobra Video

Kocis tapped into Lockhart’s stated interest in film school to entice him to come back east to work for Cobra Video so that he would gain “real-world” experience. With a forged “work study” letter in hand (one that purported to be from a university art school), Lockhart fooled his mother and set off for a whirlwind weekend in New York City at Kocis’ expense. “I arrived in New York to find a lavish setting,” Lockhart said at the Hudson Hotel in mid-town Manhattan. “Bryan had gifts of clothing to wear…at all the swank little gourmet dining places he brought me to. That weekend Bryan showed a world to me I had only seen portrayed on TV and in movies.”
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Lockhart said his introduction and connection to Kocis grew quickly because Bryan focused on every detail of his life and that “the absence of a strong, positive male figure (or any parental figure for that matter) in my life left me wide open to anyone’s advances; advances of any kind.”
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After the fact, Lockhart has been upfront about his entrance into gay porn at age seventeen, becoming the “Traci Lords,” as it were, of gay porn. But perspective is needed, Lockhart believes. “When I did the work underage, it was two shoots within one month of each other, for one studio,” he said. It was also for a porn producer, Kocis, who was far from the center of the gay porn empire of Southern California.
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His foray into gay porn was very much a part of the relationship with his boyfriend at the time, the first of what would be several relationships he would form with older gay men. Getting free from his boyfriend in California meant landing in another immediate relationship with Bryan Kocis, one that would hang over his young life for years long after the two summers he spent at Kocis’ home in Dallas Township, Pennsylvania. The summer trip to Pennsylvania was again perpetuated with a fake “art school” letter shown to Lockhart’s mom who asked no questions.

“I spent the summer in a small town tucked away in the middle of nowhere,” Lockhart said. “The first three weeks went smoothly.” But things changed quickly.

Kocis’ plans went beyond teaching Lockhart the business. They included a romantic partnership where Lockhart would permanently relocate to Pennsylvania, go to college there, and maybe even help run Cobra Video.

An emotional and sexual relationship developed with Kocis, Lockhart acknowledges, but today says the sexual interaction was “expected” and that he believed Kocis’ “help and support would end if I didn’t do it.”
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He also admits Kocis showed him a lifestyle he had never known when I was growing up, including fine dining and elaborate vacations. “I went to places I never had been (before).”
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Kocis’ “detailed plans” scared him, Lockhart said. “I did not like the idea, and I told him it would deter me from my focus on mainstream film. As soon as Bryan began understanding I was not going to relocate for him and his business, our arrangement there in Bum Fuck, Pennsylvania changed.”
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By the end of the summer of 2004, Lockhart says things had truly soured between him and Kocis. He accused Kocis of holding hostage his return airplane ticket to California after Lockhart fled Kocis’ home to go stay with another Pennsylvania man he met online.

His resentment of Kocis ran deep. In “A Siren’s Tale” published online by blogger Jason Sechrest, Lockhart refers to Kocis as a “forty-three-year-old, flat-faced, pig-nosed producer.”
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Venturing out on his own after leaving Kocis, Lockhart returned to San Diego and found home life with his mother none the better. While he was away, his mother had relocated to a new apartment, one that did not include a bedroom for Lockhart. Forced into working part-time to rent his own apartment, Lockhart struggled to complete his senior year of high school.

By December 2004, Kocis would be back in his life. Desperate for cash, “I agreed to film a scene for Bryan in La Jolla, California.”
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The offer of employment and cash also came with an offer for a Christmas get-away to Hawaii for Lockhart and Kocis. Lockhart took the offer, all the while trying to “make it plain and clear to Bryan, we were traveling as friends and that I was merely giving him the opportunity to fix things between us.”
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Kocis had other plans—booking a room for the two with just one bed. A confrontation ensued and Kocis backed off, avoiding the sexual advances Lockhart said he made on him previously.

While in Maui, Hawaii, Kocis rented a Ford Shelby Cobra for photo shoots featuring the sparkling Pacific Ocean in the background. The photo shoot was successful, but included a car ride in which Lockhart claims Kocis threatened his life.

Approaching the subject by telling a hypothetical story that matched their own struggles, Lockhart said Kocis’ story included references to a “producer hiring ‘waste management’ to go after the boy. Bryan was planting in my head that I could never allow the truth to come out,” Lockhart said. “If I did, my life would be in danger.”
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Kocis’ death, however, makes it impossible to verify the interaction Lockhart described on a high cliff overlooking the ocean on Maui. Kocis’ family members denied that he was ever violent with anyone or that he would ever threaten anyone.

Again, despite his fears and concerns and now of legal age, Lockhart continued to do various scenes for Cobra Video to get by as the months passed, believing Kocis’ claims that Cobra Video was his only option.
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Finishing his senior year in high school with perhaps the most unusual part time job ever, Lockhart said he grew more frustrated with having “nothing to show” for his work with Cobra. All the money he made went to pay daily expenses such as rent, gasoline and food, all necessities Lockhart said his mother had long ago stopped providing with any regularity.

Lockhart’s new partner: Grant Roy

Lockhart’s return to California coincided with his meeting a new lover and partner, Grant Roy, a Texas native twenty years Lockhart’s senior. Roy is credited by Lockhart into “making me into a man.”
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Roy said when the couple started dating, he told Lockhart, “First of all, I’m not gonna be your San Diego Bryan (Kocis).”
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What emerged was a variation on an open relationship—although that is not a term the couple embraced. They came to an agreement that if outside sexual contact happened, they would talk about it with each other afterward. “It doesn’t make any sense to throw away a perfectly good relationship, just because you enjoy someone else’s company,” Lockhart said. “Grant knows that I’m twenty (years old) and I have needs.”
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Roy said he knew Lockhart was performing in gay pornos and “I can’t expect (him) not to act on urges that happen sometimes, cause ya know, I told him, I end up in some of those situations sometimes, too, and it’s not fair and I wouldn’t want somebody taking that away from me when I was younger.”
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Lockhart said he believed that “part of our problem in the gay community is that we’re constantly trying to adhere ourselves to straight principles or relationships, monogamy for instance, and we’re men and we’re built differently and our brains are different, and we have different urges.”
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Eventually Lockhart and Roy, they said, transitioned from lovers into just friends and business partners and all sexual contact between the two men ended—though they continued to live together.

Lockhart’s plan to leave Kocis and Cobra Video behind, however, was not only a product of personal necessity, but also because he began noticing for himself his potential and popularity. It would take that sort of personal belief to help Lockhart overcome a withering assault from Kocis and others who saw him as a danger to all of gay porn because of his history in bareback porn.
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For Lockhart, the venture did not come without cost. Sued in federal court and recruited to be a key undercover witness in a cross-country murder investigation, Lockhart experienced a lifetime of living before he turned twenty. “Being nineteen and twenty and having to experience these things, it was as if the weight of the whole, raw and real world was compressed and grinding down upon my shoulders,” Lockhart said in a May 2008 interview.
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Lockhart credits his partner Grant Roy, not his family, for helping him get through. “Grant is the one who has liberated me and he’s been here ever since,” he said. “In some ways, these trying times have humbled me and taught me how to better regard the world and all it has to offer, good or bad.”
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Lockhart as a producer

Lockhart proclaims he’s “the youngest, most eager, most determined and creative young porn producer” in the history of gay porn. “Porn can be a bad business, but not my company,” he said. “Since I know what it’s like, I treat models right. I treat my models with the utmost respect from the beginning to end.”
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His video shoots have covered as long as two weeks where he played host to guys in multiples of twos and fours. “On those shoots, it’s all about the boys,” Lockhart boasted. “I do everything from feeding them, keeping them entertained, housing them, and filming the intended work.”
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