You may know him because he’s a fixture on the London gay scene or because he’s an award-winning escort. But now he’s also a poster boy for the anti-censorship campaign.
Last month Sleazy Michael was acquitted of all charges brought against him under the Obscene Publications Act.
David McGillivray reports on what could be one of the most significant gay obscenity trials of the 21st century…
In certain circles Sleazy Michael has been a star for years. No matter where you went on the London gay scene, it seemed he’d got there first. He cut a highly distinctive figure, stick thin in luminous Lycra that a man half his age (he’s 53) would think twice about wearing.
There he was, on snogging terms with every drag queen and door whore in the business, jumping on stage to strip naked and pull metres of bicycle chain out of his arse, and drinking the regulars under the table until chucking out time.
His back story was quite well-known. Married with children, he’d come out aged 46, and wanted to make up for every gay minute he’d lost. Some people would hide their faces as soon as they saw him coming.
But I found his completely genuine joie de vivre irresistible. He was a Technicolor person in a black-and-white world. He personified the word “gay” in all its meanings and, yes, that includes naff. I just wondered how on earth he found time to hold down his day job as an escort.
But he did and he was very popular, so popular that in 2007 he won an award (a winged, golden phallus) as Male Sex Worker of the Year.
In January, however, Sleazy Michael found honest-to-God, real McCoy fame. He got himself into the quality press and Radio 4 and he turned up all over the Internet, grinning and raising his fist in triumph. He’d beaten the system.
How? The Observer headline said it all: “Gay pornography verdict puts obscenity law’s future in doubt.” What had happened is that Sleazy Michael, real name Michael Peacock, had been caught, in a sting operation, selling gay porn DVDs in contravention of the Obscene Publications Act (OPA) 1959.
If he’d pleaded guilty to the charges, the case wouldn’t have gone to trial and probably wouldn’t have even made the papers. But Michael pleaded not guilty and the jury took only two hours to acquit him.
This verdict may result in the repeal of the OPA and will almost certainly result in the British Board of Film Classification revising its guidelines. In future DVDs featuring watersports, “rape”, “torture” and fisting up to the elbow may have to be passed by the Board.
This is all because of Michael, who has made legal history that will now be cited along with the Lady Chatterley case of 1960, the Oz case of 1971, and the Inside Linda Lovelace case of 1976.
Michael’s case is particularly significant because for the first time a not guilty verdict was returned for the “publication” of gay materials. We’ll be hearing from Michael again, in chat shows and documentaries. But you read the whole story here first.
A couple of days after the trial, Michael comes to the door of his London flat, “just 14 minutes from Victoria by train” (as he tells clients), wearing a dressing gown he has thrown on and almost missed.
He was up most of last night replying to hundreds of messages of support from Facebook friends. For some time he bustles about the place, making coffee, smoking cigars, making calls to the media, taking them from clients, and showing me his favourite porn film, Cadinot’s Harem (“I’ve always said that if I was on a desert island and could only have one DVD it would be this.”)
Compared to the stuff for which he was prosecuted, it’s Mary Poppins. Somewhat disarmingly Michael is Michael even when he’s describing a legal system that could have made him an Oscar Wilde-type martyr.
What happened when he was taken in for questioning? “I thought I love all these men in uniform!” How did he dress for court? “Every day I was wearing my brightest outfits.
My legal team didn’t even bother to ask if I was going to wear a suit. In fact the vice squad were taking bets on what I was going to wear each day.” Did he ever think, while people were giving evidence, this is ludicrous?
“People had to try and keep a straight face when the judge referred to Fist Pack 5. Believe it or not I thought, well, I hope this is a once in a lifetime experience, but I really enjoyed it!”
Michael enjoys everything he does but he enjoys his work as an escort most of all. Naturally he’s in it for the money (“The judge kept mentioning sleazymichael.com because my website was an integral part of the case.
I thought…if I win, it could do wonders for my business.”) But he goes out of his way to provide a de luxe service (“I do something unique, a client loyalty card, so every time you have a session you get 25 loyalty points.
After four sessions you get a free hour. As they say – every little helps!”) In the summer of 2007 a client asked him if he had any DVDs for sale. Michael went to Amsterdam and bought thirty for €2.50 each.
The client bought twenty of them. “I made about £170 profit”, Michael says proudly. “When I see an opportunity I grab it. It was a handy supplement to my income as a male escort. I said to my website designer, ‘Could you add a page for DVDs?’”
By the time he was arrested just over two years later, Michael was offering 2,157 titles. Most of them were cheaper versions of stuff in licensed sex shops. But a tiny minority (“3.6%”) featured allegedly “obscene articles.”
After a test purchase made by an undercover cop, SCD9, which includes the Metropolitan Police’s old Clubs and Vice Squad, reckoned that charges could be brought under the OPA. Half an hour after a second test purchase, seven cops raided Michael’s flat.
“They came armed with handcuffs but PC Paul Mathewson said they could tell straight away that I was going to be co-operative. They spent about an hour in the flat asking me questions and then said we’re going to have to take you to Charing Cross for interview.
They subsequently had to bring back a much larger van to collect all the material. There was so much of it. They even took my VHS porn collection. Within weeks – I’ll give the police full credit – they returned a lot of material which wasn’t related including my Erotic Awards trophy – ‘We weren’t sure what you were going to do with it when we entered the flat’!”
We all know what we’re supposed to say when we’re arrested – “No comment.” But because Michael claims he’s never had anything to hide (well, apart from the years when he was married and watching gay porn in secret), he answered every question.
“As it turned out it paid dividends”, Michael reveals. “I was arrested on December 14th 2009. The trial was postponed twice in 2011. So if I’d have said, ‘no comment, no comment’, a lot of the questions asked by the prosecution, I would have replied, ‘I’m sorry, I can’t remember.’
But as it was we had a full transcript of the interview read out by the judge.” The trial got off to a good start when even the prosecution acknowledged to the jury that Michael had been completely open, frank and honest.
“Early on I had to make a decision about how I was going to plead. 80% of me said I want to defend this, but there was 20% holding me back because of being married”, Michael confesses.
“My wife always said, if there was some scandal about me being a male prostitute, the last thing she’d want is people turning up at her door.” Needing guidance, Michael contacted the International Union of Sex Workers and was told to call Nigel Richardson, senior partner at Hodge, Jones and Allen.
“I didn’t question it and it was the best advice I ever had”, Michael says. Having done most of the preparation, Richardson then handed the case to a junior, on this occasion another shrewd move. “[Nigel] said, ‘The reason I want Sandra Paul is because she’s a woman and that will have a definite impact on the jury.’
And when I met her – she’s got a terrific personality, she’s a no nonsense woman. When she viewed the material, what was funny was that nothing fazed her. The only thing she found distasteful was the spitting.”
In future DVDs featuring watersports, “rape”, “torture” and fisting up to the elbow may have to be passed by the Board. This is all because of Michael, who has made legal history that will now be cited along with the Lady Chatterley case of 1960, the Oz case of 1971, and the Inside Linda Lovelace case of 1976.
Michael was brought to Southwark Crown Court charged with publishing six obscene DVDs liable to “deprave and corrupt.” You’ll want the titles so here they are: Dirty Raw Bastards, Freaks 2 & 3, Fist Pack 5 – Anal Tap, Fist Pack 6 – Can Openers, Impressive Impacts and HM-T2D.
The last two titles were the most contentious. In Michael’s opinion Impressive Impacts is Cazzo’s best film. “I like that film because it has so many different elements in it”, he says. But one of the elements is a guy having his scrotum – filled with saline – punched. HM-T2D depicts “very hardcore S&M” even by Michael’s standards.
There were discussions about whether to plead guilty on just those two titles. It was feared that they’d be too much for the average jury. But Michael decided to throw caution to the wind.
“From when I started this business I never felt that I was in any way going to deprave and corrupt my customers. They all made clear the material they wanted to view and, bar the 5% that weren’t personal callers, they all had the opportunity to view the material on a 46” screen TV.
I said what’s the point of me running this service if you buy blindly, go home and say this is a load of crap? One of the things the prosecution spent a lot of time on was the 5% that didn’t come to view. I said, ‘We had a telephone conversation. They knew what they wanted, they wanted specific titles, or from a specific studio, or a specific genre.’
“I did not feel I’d done anything wrong because there was nothing depicted in any of those 2000 films that I didn’t feel comfortable with. All the acts portrayed in the six contentious DVDs I have experienced myself. If you asked me for anything with shit in, anything with animals or anything underage, it wasn’t available. I said don’t even go there.”
Michael felt confident as soon as the jury had been selected – six men, six women, a good racial mix, mostly under 30. Sandra looked at Michael and indicated “fine!”
There were anxious moments as the jury watched the material and an Asian woman juror covered her face in dismay. (Michael guesses that her opinion was changed by one of the male jurors. “He didn’t have gay written on his head, but to me it was obvious.
Do you know what I mean? When they retired he would probably have said, ‘Look, this is what gay men do.’”) Michael says he has huge respect for the jury. “At the end of the day it came down to those twelve people and I’m heartened that they came to the right decision.”
Lawyer Myles Jackman feels that the OPA, with its archaic “deprave and corrupt” test, is now unworkable. He told BBC Radio 4, “Juries are so used, as just normal members of society, to seeing explicit sexual acts portrayed on the Internet and other media.
[They are] familiarised with them and the possibility that they can choose or not choose to watch them as they please and they didn’t have a problem with it.”
Michael believes it’s no accident he ended up in court fighting for a cause he believes in. “He’s long gone, bless him, but my father was a great campaigner. He did things that affected change and I suppose I got some inspiration from him.
Their first place where they retired was about 40 acres and there was a big battle about a bridle path going through and he managed to get it diverted. I never felt I was on a crusade but as time went on the enormity of what I could do if I was successful really hit me.
I feel proud of what I’ve done.” Will he continue to sell DVDs? “Oh yes. And there will be a limited edition box set of the six I was prosecuted for.”
