Tom Judson (aka Gus Mattox) :: Porn, Ptown and ’Canned Ham’
I’m doing probably the last thing one wants to be doing when Tom Judson rings up. Before we chat about Judson’s new one-man-show Canned Ham, I’m trying to squeeze in the last ten minutes of Doug Sirk’s 1955 potboiler All That Heaven Allows. In the Sirk film, Jane Wyman plays a lonely, top-shelf widow who gets in on with her New England lawn guy who’s played by Rock Hudson. The two proceed to scandalize Wyman’s country club lady friends while planning a getaway to Hudson’s remote, old Mill fixer-upper on his de facto Walden Pond.
It’s an important film, to be sure, inspiring directors as wide-ranging as Rainer Werner Fassbinder and John Waters; Todd Haynes and Francois Ozon, but it’s not exactly the head you want to be in while talking to a theatrical legend who’s every bit as ruggedly handsome as Rock Hudson and also handy enough to flip both houses and porn stars. The 49-year-old Judson is better known to some as Gus Mattox (winner of the GayVN Award - Gay Porn’s Oscar - for Best Actor for Michael Lucas’s Dangerous Liaisons). When we caught up with him he was finishing up a week off before resuming the summer-long run of his one-man-show in Provincetown. He lets the air out of my Jane Wyman histrionics with his very first answer, still our chat leaves me with a strange craving for all the Canned Ham that heaven allows.
Cross-country trip
EDGE: So tell me how’s your week off been going?
Tom Judson: Oh, it’s been great because the weather’s been so nice up in Catskills and because Jonathan, my boyfriend, was up for half the week.
EDGE: That sounds nice.
Tom Judson: It was really nice, and we’re not going to see each other again for the rest of the summer, except for one time when he gets up to Provincetown so...
EDGE: So lots of paying it forward this week?
Tom Judson: We didn’t do a heck of a lot. I have a screened-in room off the side of my house and we spent a lot of time in there with my cat, just the three of us. Jonathan and I would be reading while the cat would be napping. It was really, really lovely.
EDGE: You originally planned on working on the piece on a trip around the country. How was that trip?
Tom Judson: Well, you know, the trip as I originally envisioned it in terms of getting in the camper and driving around the country, that never materialized, because of the way script ended up. It became more of an actual play, albeit a one-person show, so doing it in informal settings like at an open mike at a bar really wasn’t feasible. I did do a couple of trips with the cat in the camper and the cat actually loved it.
EDGE: Is that cross-country drive still something that’s on your list?
Tom Judson: Yeah, but not with the show just because it’s a just a bigger thing than I had originally envisioned. There’s a tech element to it. It’s an actual play, so to do a tour of this show, it wouldn’t actually be possible in the camper.
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Watch this interview with Tom Judson about ’Canned Ham’:
