Good Bye, Old Friend.

It is with a heavy heart that we announce the passing of our friend and editor, Don Mantle. Don passed away peacefully in his sleep on March 3rd, 2010. He was 58 years old. One of the tough parts about being an internet only enterprise, is we are often insulated from the “real” lives of our colleagues, and it was only by chance that we learned of his passing.

Don came on board in September 2005, the day before Peter van Aarle, our founder, died, making him our most tenured staff member (after myself).

I enjoyed the pleasure of Don’s company a few times at AEE, and I’ll never the time we (Don, myself, another guy or two) were having dinner at the steakhouse in the Mirage and Don excused himself for a moment, and comes back with with a few $100 chips and throws them on the table. When we asked him where they came from, he smiled and said “the blackjack table” and that the dinner was on him. The man was class.

He was a valued member of our staff, watching the review queue, ensuring that the latest movies reviewed by Den, Rog and others were entered on our site in a timely manner. He was also a moderator of the IAFD Direct forum over at Adult DVD Talk.

His talents and good humor will be sorely missed and never duplicated.

Gay Only Search

Got an email yesterday — oddly, the first one of its kind. It said (in part):

“I don’t understand why your advanced search doesnt have the capacity to search only gay male porn stars? why don’t you have a search option for gay/bi men film stars?? I don’t want to see women when searching!! no men come up?? … This database sucks!”

Surprisingly, this kind of he-man-woman-haters-club request never game up (and please know that I use the Little Rascals term with endearment, not derision) so we never developed the functionality. But it turns out it wasn’t that hard to do, so it’s done.

I don’t think this is something that belongs only on the “Advanced Search” page, so in the dropdown at the top of the page, there’s now an option for “Title/Person/Review (Gay Only)” which will limit your search results to titles in the DB which are tagged as being all-male.

The only thing we couldn’t do (at this time, anyway) was include all of the bi titles or performers in those search results as we don’t tag them as being “Gay” titles, since they go both ways, as it were. Ditto TS stars are not tagged as being “Gay” — it’s just a remnant of how the database is structured and how we added the gay titles back in the day…