Illinois Republican Aaron Schock hasn't announced if he's reached a final agreement with TitanMen for his new gay porn career. I bet the million dollars they're negotiating is a lot more than sweaty little Marco Rubio was ever offered by the down-market Miami Cuban gay porn operators he got involved with when he was a teenager. Rubio has been the most obsessively homophobic of all the anti-gay Republicans running for office-- careful to never let Ted Cruz get to the right of him on homophobia-- and has obviously been over-compensating to hide his own shady past as a gay-for-pay hooker. Rubio, who had been running cocaine for his entrepreneurial brother-in-law, Orlando Cicilia, when he was just 16, was not quite 19 when he was arrested in Miami's notorious Coconut Grove gay pick-up spot, Alice C. Wainwright Park in 1990. He had flunked out of Tarkio College in Missouri and was back in Miami and in desperate need of money. With brother-in-law Cicilia arrested 3 years previously and then in prison, the family cocaine business was over and Rubio was selling his ass to older gay men, although, for some reason, he never wrote about that episode of his life in his autobiography, An American Son. He claims when he was arrested in the closed park he was only drinking beer, not looking for a john for some quick cash.One of the guys arrested with Rubio, Angel Barrios, laughably claimed they were "trying to get pretty girls," although Coconut Grove was well-known as the totally wrong neighborhood for that. Last week, Miami's New Times interviewed Barrios in regard to Rubio's old life as a gay prostitute. (There are no current allegations that Rubio is still having sex with men, but he is notorious for selling himself to rich older males-- like Sheldon Adelson, Larry Ellison, Norman Braman, Jose "Pepe" Fanjul, Paul Singer, Joe Ricketts, Charles Schwab, Ron Weiser, and the Koch brothers-- for his political career.)
Decades after his legal run-in with Rubio, Barrios was associated with perhaps the most notorious gay porn ring in Miami history, an Edgewater house full of models with names like “Khali Kreme” and “Sincere Luv” who had sex all day in front of dozens of webcams. Couple that with the fact that the park where Rubio was arrested was a well-known gay cruising spot and lurid rumors-- with no basis in documented fact-- have blown up all this week on the internet, eagerly stoked by Donald Trump supporters casting Rubio as a closeted homosexual. Right-wing conspiracy monger Alex Jones devoted a five-minute segment to the allegations yesterday, while posts on the claims have been heavily upvoted on a Reddit page for Trump supporters.“I have nothing against gay people, but this is just so far from the truth,” says Barrios, who laughs out loud at the idea of having had a sexual relationship with Rubio. “I have kids, and now they’re reading all this garbage online. It’s insane.” Yet the story does add to a trend for Rubio, who has dealt with multiple news cycles about shady connections and sketchy choices back in his hometown, from a pile of traffic citations to mountains of questionable credit card debt to a brother-in-law convicted of dealing cocaine. Now Rubio can add to the mix a childhood buddy wrapped up in a years-long legal war over gay porn....On May 23, 1990, Rubio and Barrios were with another friend, 18-year-old Derek Preston Wilson, after dark at Alice C. Wainwright Park, a leafy Brickell public space then infamous as a late-night trouble spot. (“People went out there to smoke illegal substances, have sex, drink,” a police spokesman told the Post in its story published last Friday.) At 9:37 p.m., the three teens were booked.A report obtained by New Times casts little light on why they were arrested, though; an officer notes only that they were “located in main... park after hours.” (The cop does note that Rubio was “calm” and “clean shaven” and that his teeth were “very white.”) Rubio’s spokesperson suggested to the Post that the teens were drinking beer in the park. (The senator’s office didn’t respond to New Times' emails seeking comment for this story.) ...[T]wo years after his childhood friend was sworn in as speaker of the Florida House-- accepting a ceremonial sword from his then-mentor Jeb Bush as cameras clicked away-- Barrios had his own brush with media infamy.It was May 9, 2007, when an NBC 6 investigative TV crew swarmed a sedate, two-story brick house that Barrios’ father owned on NE 27th Street just east of Biscayne Boulevard. In a special report ominously titled The House Next Door, reporters breathlessly revealed that a website called CocoDorm.com had set up dozens of webcams inside the home.Scores of ripped, young Hispanic and black male models had been hired at a $1,200 monthly fee, plus free room and board, to live inside, where the cameras caught their every move-- including regularly scheduled orgies. (An ad on the site revealed CocoDorm's recruiting tactics, offering to fly in young models for “30 days of nonstop fucking, sucking, licking, and more with other hot Black and Latin boys.”)Today Barrios strongly denies he knew anything about the gay smut business. He says his property management company rented the house to Flava Works, the firm behind CocoDorm, with the understanding it was a “digital media” company. He didn’t know the truth, he says, until Channel 6’s report; the next day, Barrios recalls, a Miami Herald reporter knocked on his elderly father’s door to ask about the website.“We are not in the gay porn business. We are not in the straight porn business. We are not in the porn business,” Barrios says. “My poor father, he had no idea what was going on in there."Some dirty old men go for this lookBarrios should have done a better background check on Flava Works' owner, Phillip Bleicher. As the Herald later reported, just before renting Barrios’ house, Bleicher left Chicago while prosecutors were investigating allegations that a student charity he had helped run had been bilked of $3 million that had been used for everything from liposuction procedures to flights to Brazil. (No charges were ever filed in that case; Bleicher’s last known address in Miami is now vacant.)Barrios also should have had warnings that something was amiss at the house. Police were called there at least twice the year before Channel 6’s story aired. Once, an irate, drunken housemate began throwing rocks through windows; on another occasion, police showed up after a resident known only as “Twerk” became enraged when housemates told him he couldn’t sleep with a new arrival. Twerk then punched another man repeatedly in the face.Shortly after the TV report, the City of Miami Code Enforcement Board hit CocoDorm and Barrios with multiple citations for illegally running an adult business in a residential area. In August 2007, the city sued Barrios and his investment group in Miami-Dade civil court.Barrios says that he moved quickly to force the business out and that the gay porn site was gone within six months. But that wasn’t the end of his association with CocoDorm. In September 2007, Barrios sued the city in federal court-- with the porn company as a co-plaintiff.They argued that the business was protected by the First Amendment and that CocoDorm wasn’t an adult business because the webcam footage was consumed elsewhere-- not at the Edgewater house.Why would Barrios go to court with the gay-porn producers if he was so horrified to learn what they were up to?...While the courts battled it out, Barrios dropped out of the property management game-- perhaps scarred by his brush with porn infamy-- and opened a chain of coin laundromats, with two in Little Havana and a new outlet in Homestead.
Rubio, who has two families and is well-known in Tallahassee and in DC for screwing women lobbyists, tried to minimize the damage to his macho reputation-- particularly after the high-heeled booties incident-- by releasing this video last month:Rubio totally blew it last night in the New Hampshire debate. He got plowed under right before our eyes, mercilessly so, by grotesque New Jersey bully Chris Christie, who exposed him as a robotic little twerp who lacks the capacity to think on his feet. As Elias Isquith pointed out for Salon readers right after the debate, when challenged the über-ambitious empty suit and young fogey went right into self-destruction mode.
Things got started when Rubio was asked to respond to Christie’s allegation that, after experiencing the presidency of Barack Obama, who was elected as a first-term U.S. senator, it would be especially unfortunate if the Republican Party were itself to nominate Marco Rubio, a first term U.S. senator, for the White House. “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me,” Christie had said (bettering his former benefactor, George).Rubio’s comeback was pretty good, if a little obvious in its intent: He argued that experience was overrated; if it mattered, Vice President Joe Biden would be a good candidate for commander-in-chief. He then argued that an unspoken premise of the criticism-- that Obama has failed in part due to his inexperience-- is faulty. Obama knows exactly what he’s doing, Rubio said. The president is not a fool; he’s a menace.Christie wasn’t having it, dismissing Rubio’s Biden straw man and recommitting to his initial attack. Rubio’s a nice guy, a smart guy, Christie said; but the simple fact is that he’s never had to make an important decision. This got a noticeable round of applause from the audience. And perhaps that’s why Rubio then proceeded to self-destruct.What Rubio’s next five or so minutes such a disaster wasn’t really what he said-- but the fact that he had already just said it. Looking mighty flummoxed, Rubio tried to parry Christie’s second attack by pivoting once again to Obama, hoping to bring the crowd around to his side by using generous helpings of ideological red meat to help their tribal identification overwhelm their intellect. It had already failed, but he was doing it again. Worse still, his second answer was almost a verbatim repeat of his first.Marcobot malfunction-- replace model STATRemember: The knock on Rubio has always been, essentially, that he’s a lightweight. He’s young, pretty good-looking, and he exudes the kind of Kennedy-esque earnest, “idealistic” machismo that seems to send a thrill up the legs of the Republican Party’s aged voter base (as well the aging ranks of the elite political press). As they once said of that cherubic whippersnapper Al Gore, Rubio is an older person’s idea of a young person. There may not be much there there, in short.Well, it’s hard to imagine anything Rubio could have possibly done that would more immediately, and humorously, affirm the caricature. Here he was, really being challenged for the first time-- and by Christie, a world-class bully, no less-- and he was wilting. He was like an artificially intelligent robot confronted with a logical question his programming couldn’t handle. I worried for a moment that my stream of the debate had begun to skip.Whether due to incompetence or pity, the moderators tried to move on. But like a really big, mean, and sadistic shark, Christie was all over it. He mocked Rubio for falling back on his talking points-- something all politicians do, but rarely so conspicuously-- and continued to shred the senator’s (lack of a) record, as well as tout his own hands-on experience governing New Jersey.Rubio tried to tu quoque Christie, noting that the governor had only grudgingly returned to the Garden State during a recent snowstorm. Christie all but rolled his eyes and laughed it off while the audience booed-- at Rubio. And then, unbelievably, Rubio started to fall back into repeating the talking point (let’s not pretend Obama doesn’t know what he’s doing…) yet again. “There it is!” Christie interjected. The crowd was with him. Rubio’s emasculation was all but complete.And, I swear to God, about 40 minutes later, he used the same line again.
