Film director Christopher Honoré, who directed him in Homme au bain, once expressed that François Sagat, the openly gay French porn actor, “redefines the notion of masculinity”. Gilded with his blue inked crane, in less than ten years the humble boy from Cognac has conquered his righteous spot in the pantheon of pop culture, molding himself to unattainable iconic status. A Frenchman with Slovakian and Lebanese heritage, he moved to Paris to work in the fashion industry before giving it up and working in a sex shop and as a bartender and a stripper. In 2004 he began do gay porn work in France for Citebeur, but he reached the fame joining Raging Stallion studios in America in 2005, where he was later signed by Titan. In the world of gay erotica, Sagat has become something of a cult phenomenon. A painfully shy boy in his teens, he grew up to be a strong, almost otherworldly muscle vision, representing the extreme end of gay body culture. His most notable feature is his large scalp tattoo wich makes him one of the most recognizable faces in gay porn. Not very tall (a good thing for porn actors, because they look more endowed), caramel-colored leather, sculpted physique, nice face and nice ass: Sagat is an assembled image, designed and built to be deconstructed again, but always recognizable (and valuable). But what really separates Sagat from his peers is his ability to play with his image, lending himself to the world of art and creativity beyond the pornographic world. Coming from a training germinated in the fashion world, he has a wider visionary about the meaning of creating and managing an image, and he switchs from the frames of his porn movies to heterogeneous evasion in ultra-pop photoshoot and art-house films. Probably as a further move in this direction, in January 2013 Francois Sagat has announced on Twitter his retirement from gay porn, and his intention to concentrate his energies to consolidate his image outside the borders of gay culture.
