WOODY FOX

Woody Fox is famous for his work in the adult film industry, but he’s also an acrobat, a teacher, and a man who’s been on a long journey of self-discovery. Feature MARK MCFARL ANE Photography

RILE Y-MCFARL ANE PHOTOGRAPHY

hose following Woody Fox’s very

Tactive social media posts know him as a gregarious, thoughtful and genuine person who is passionate about community, friendship, acrobatics and challenging the heteronormative rules of society. But the Woody Fox we know today has been shaped by pivotal, formative events of his life so far.

Now 32, young Woody grew up on the Central Coast of New South Wales, Australia. “I knew at a really young age that I was gay,” he recalls. “I was probably 10 or 11. I came out when I was in Grade 7; I was 13 in my first year of high school.”

But that’s not where his story starts.

“On my first day of school, I stood up and told my class that I wanted to be a farmer and everyone laughed at me. Then this boy, who had just walked into the room, walked right up next to me and turned to the class and said, ‘Well my name’s Tim and I want to be a chicken farmer.’ Then everyone laughed at him, too. We sat down next to each other and Tim held my hand and said, ‘We’re going to be best friends.’ We spent every day together. We even slept in the same bed when we had sleepovers. We didn’t think anything of it until one day someone said, ‘You guys are fags.’”

That was the first time Woody had heard the word, so had no idea what it meant. When he found out, he instantly thought, “Oh, yeah, I am, definitely.”

Woody struggled at school on several levels. “I wasn’t masculine at all. I was very f lamboyant and a weedy little twink of a gay, yet I was a physical kid. Unfortunately, I was petrified to try any sports because that was where the guys who were bullying and bashing me were.”

Even at this age, Woody couldn’t fathom the idea of this being an issue or why he had to be labelled. “This is me, just like this is the colour of my skin or the colour of my hair,” he thought. He tried to commit to the academic side of school but, he says, “I wasn’t very smart at all. Even my family expected that I was not going to be anything but a nice guy who would probably just pick up a regular minimum wage job befitting a high school drop-out.”

So, with very few expectations, that’s what he tried to do. After finishing Grade 8, Woody began working in a pet store. Fortunately, a friend convinced him to go back to school and, while he ended up changing high schools several times because of bullying, he persevered. “Then, finally, in Grade 11, I got into a performing arts school and all of a sudden being gay was something that was great,” he says.

While the performing arts school lifted him up as he discovered a love of acting, he still found learning the craft challenging. “I finished school still not knowing who I was going to be or what I was going to do,” he says.

Like so many young gays who are bullied at school and have no real support, he felt lost and alone. In Sydney, Woody found Twenty10, a housing, training and employment assistance organisation for LGBTQIA+ youth. He found a community and he also discovered drag queens. After hearing Maxi Shield speaking about ACON (the AIDS Council Of NSW), Woody joined an ACON group called Schools Out.

“That helped me make friends and through it I met other drag queens. I was always hanging out with different queens while they were shopping for jewellery. Because I was too young to go to the clubs, I would hang out with them while they were doing their makeup.” And so a connection that lasts to this day was formed.

Eventually, Woody became a facilitator of one of the youth programs at ACON called Fun And Esteem. “I’d run these workshops for young gays who were coming out and I’d teach them about the community and that was my main gig for a while.” On the surface, it appeared that Woody had settled into a better life since leaving school, but this was not necessarily the case. The world was calling and a curious Woody left Australia to travel and work in North America, but he still hadn’t found his true vocation and the scars from those school years had not healed.

On returning to Australia, Woody reveals he contemplated the worst: “There was a moment, when I was around 22, where I was at the edge, thinking there’s no point to life, I don’t understand why I’m here. I would walk up to North Bondi Golf Course and stand on the edge of the cliff with a big bottle of wine, like every second night, just thinking, let’s get really, really drunk until I get the confidence to jump.”

Woody feels very strongly that one of the main reasons he found himself on this dark path was the lack of early education about gay issues in our school system.

“Religion, the hetero-normative construct, toxic masculinity, they’re all in there,” he says. “There are limited programs to address LGBTQIA+ issues in schools… take trans kids, for example. During their high-school life they’re told, ‘Oh you’re such a girl,’ yet when they transition it’s, ‘Yeah, but you’re really a man.’ So it’s like, what do you want? Do you want to call me a girl because I’m not man enough? Or do you want to call me a man because I’m not girl enough?

“And don’t even get me started on the fight for marriage equality and the religious inf luence on that debate!”

So how did Woody step back from the edge?

“I was at the precipice, and when I confided to my best friend at the time, he said, ‘How about, instead, you just say, ‘Fuck everyone and do what you want?’ And you know, I said why not?

“From then on, when opportunities started arising to try new things, I just started saying, ‘Yes, I’m going to break the so-called rules, I’m going to do what I want, I’m going to try this and try that’… luckily it wasn’t drugs,” he says with a laugh.

As a result, Woody discovered two things about himself: he loved circus or, more precisely, acrobatics, which he found he had a natural aptitude for. He also found that he was something of an exhibitionist and enjoyed getting his clothes off in front of a camera. The later revelation occurred after a chance meeting at a party with renowned photographer Paul Freemen, who photographed and published nudes of him.

Deciding that circus performing felt like his true vocation, he returned to America, hoping to learn all he could about the art and craft of circus. But circus school was expensive. Here, his newfound exhibitionism became a moneymaking asset. It turned out that taking your clothes off in front of the camera can be a good paying job if it’s managed well.

An adult entertainment studio saw some of Woody’s photographs and approached him about working in the industry. After initially rejecting their offers, he soon realised that here was a way to pay for acrobatics training and have a bit of fun – so began the life of Woody Fox, porn star.

While in the UK filming for one of the studios, Woody started classes with an acrobatic rope artist. His skills developed quickly until one day his teacher told him there was no point in him taking any more classes as he’d outgrown them. Woody proposed that, if his skills were that good, they could work together on creating a duet performance piece. The act evolved so well that they entered the biggest circus competition in the UK, Circus Maximus and made it through to the finals.

“During our final performance, we were halfway through our act and the music stopped – a technical hitch,” says Woody. “So there we were suspended in mid-air and my partner looked up at me and said, ‘Keep going.’ It was completely silent. The audience could hear the creak of the ropes, the sounds of our hands and bodies connecting, our every breath. It became so real, so intense, so intimate. We won the competition and continued to perform as duet partners for over a year.

“The act depicted an unrequited gay love story. The love story ended up becoming reality as my teacher, my aerial partner, had fallen in love with me and, while I cared for him >>

>> deeply, I wasn’t in love with him. We stopped performing together and went our separate ways, but we’re still friends and talk when we can. Happily, he is now married to a man, so he has found what he was searching for. But our performance, that was a turning point for me. It was the moment when I realised this is exactly what I want to do, what I want to be and how I want to tell stories.”

Work as a circus aerialist began to increase to the point where, in 2014, Woody publicly announced his retirement from the adult entertainment industry. He’d had enough of the online haters and that some studios did not treat their talent well. He moved to Canada and began teaching at a circus school.

Up to this time, Woody had used his birth name for everything, except porn, but that was about to be used against him.

“While at the school, this guy came up and asked ‘So, when are we going to have sex?’ And I was like, ‘Oh, we’re not having sex. We’re going to work together in this circus school professionally and be friends.’ He became quite obsessed and said, ‘You have to have sex with me.’ And when I told him it wasn’t going to happen he said, ‘Well, I know about Woody Fox.’ And I was like, ‘Fuck! This is it!”

He was fired from the circus school after the guy outed him to management. Worse still, says Woody, the guy would turn up at castings and tell the casting directors that he was a porn star.

“I wasn’t getting any call backs. It wasn’t until an acrobatic coach at Cirque du Soleil, who was on one of the selection panels, came up to me and said, ‘Hey, we know you’re a porn star.’ My heart dropped and I thought, I’m never going to get into any circus shows. Instead, he said, ‘You need to own this Woody Fox thing, otherwise for your whole life people are going to use it to sabotage you.’ So I took his advice and ever since then I have only be known as Woody Fox.”

More circus work began arriving but, after being outed, he still needed to supplement his income so he made a comeback as an exclusive model for Falcon Studios and retired a second time in 2018 with nine industry award nominations.

At about the same time, he returned to Australia and became a lot more active on social media. “I’ve moved on and created this big platform from something that is scandalous and fun, but I want to go further. I want to start doing a lot more community outreach, I want to uplift people that don’t have a platform in our community, be it trans people or just anyone in our community, to be able to provide positive recognition and a voice for them.

“Then, outside of social media, I really want to start a ‘family’. Not dad, dad and kids; I want to start a tribe of people who will lift each other up and support each other. I think that’s important and it’s something we don’t see enough of. We’re fed this one narrative, from outside our community, that we just have to love a certain way. We don’t actually turn to ourselves and say, ‘Hey, what do I want?’

“Instinctively, I want to meet many people. I want to be around many people. Why can’t we start creating our own family units, a bit like the television series Pose?”

Woody is also ready to perform more. “I’ve been working on creating some new pieces. I want to tell my story through these performances. I realise that gay-themed performances may not be as popular in the mainstream, but that’s what I want to do.”

Also, while overseas, Woody met someone – Justin. They met the old-fashioned way, via Grindr. In the beginning it was just hooking up, says Woody. In fact, they hooked-up six times and barely exchanged a word. However, once they started chatting, that was it. “We became the best of friends,” says Woody.

His work as both a circus artist and Falcon Studios exclusive had him travelling a lot, and Justin became that one constant. While others faded in and out of his life, Justin arranged ways to meet up in different towns and cities, coinciding with Woody’s schedule.

“Whenever we did it was as if nothing had ever changed, we’d still be best friends. Then it got to a point where whenever I’d leave him, we would be crying, and it wasn’t just like a little bit sad, we’d be devastated to leave each other. We’d be thinking about each other all

How about you just say, ‘Fuck ever yone and do what you want?’ W hy not?

the time and I was asking myself what is this, we’re just best friends?

“Then we started exploring what it meant, and we realised we were in love. We wanted the same things – a house together, a life together and a family together, but just not in the exact heteronormative form that we’d been taught. Then, about four years ago, we had the realisation that, you know what?, we want to be in each other’s lives forever! Like this is the person that I love!

“One night we were walking home from circus school and talking about the possibility of spending the rest of our lives together and even marrying, when this ring fell from an apartment block and dropped right in front of us. It was such a weird yet obvious moment. Justin bent down to pick it up and said, ‘Hey, maybe this is a sign.’ Then he said, ‘Would you marry me?’ and I was, like, my life f lashed before me and I thought this is exactly who I want to be with forever, so I said yes.”

Even as he was saying yes, though, Woody was struggling against the conditioning of his formative years.

That this couldn’t be love, he thought, he’ll never actually get married and eventually this too will fade. But it didn’t. Instead, Woody says, “it just kept getting stronger and even as I travelled for work or back to Australia, my love for him just kept growing. Now it’s got to a point, all these years later, that we’re finally doing it. Finally tying the knot.”

For the last two years, Woody’s been back in Australia, working on his circus training and posting his hopes, aspirations and daily musings on social media. When international borders out of Australia finally reopened, he was on a f light back to Canada and in October, Woody and Justin were married.

So what are Woody’s life lessons? That you can follow your dreams. You don’t have to accept the labels others put on you. That life can be peppered with challenges and even dark moments but you can survive them. And that you can even find that happy ending. •

If this story has raised issues for you contact… W: Lifeline.org.au T: 13 11 14 for 24/7 crisis support.

W: Beyondblue.org.au T: 1300 22 4636

W: qlife.org.au T: 1800 184 527

Search “Queer and LGBTQI+ community support services in Australia” at www.ABC. net.au

USA Telehealth lgbtqtherapyspace.com