Remembering Johnny Rahm
June 11th, 2007
On my pornstar birthday calendar, I ran across a name I haven’t heard in a looonnnggg time … Johnny Rahm! Born on June 11, 1965
As someone, who started buying porn in the mid-90’s, Johnny was one of my first crushes. He was versatile and always turned in a great performance.
Oddly enough, it was years before I found out that, despite his latin looks, he wasn’t Hispanic. However, it didn’t slow me down from buying his tapes.
(It also didn’t stop studios from marketing him as a Latino.)
The true story of Barry Thomas Rogers (the real name of “Johnny Rahm”) was both fascinating and tragic.
Here are a few snippets from the Johnny Rahm wikipedia biography:
“Barry Thomas Rogers, who was known to friends as “J.T.,” was born in Milledgeville, Georgia, the son of J.T. and Connie Rogers, and raised in a conservative Baptist home. He attended Gilead Christian Academy, a Christian high school in Macon, Georgia and the fundamentalist Bob Jones University (BJU) in Greenville, South Carolina. Rogers was expelled from the university midway through his senior year when he chose to come out.In the 1988, Rogers moved to California and worked for more than a decade in the gay pornography industry, often making films for Chi Chi LaRue. He won two Adult Erotic Gay Video Awards: “Best Supporting Actor” in 1993 for the film Body Search (directed by Chi Chi Larue) and in 1995 for All About Steve he also won the AVN Award for “Best Supporting Actor” for the latter film.
After April 2004, Rogers shared a house with his friend Adam Kahn in midtown Atlanta and sought financial assistance to find a home of his own. Rogers suffered from chronic depression, and lived with both HIV and hepatitis. He committed suicide on 7 November 2004 by hanging himself with wire on the fence of the Atlanta Botanical Garden. A suicide note complained of his frustration at not being able to receive assistance from Social Security.“