October 9, 2013 | The Biz

Popular blogger calls it quits at The Sword

For 5 years, Zachary Sire was the voice of TheSword.com. At times witty, often cranky, and always controversial, he was certainly not someone afraid to make a point. But he's decided it is time to move on.

He admitted on his personal blog that he never planned on a career in porn. It just fell in his lap shortly after leaving school. "It had been two years since I graduated college, so I was thankful to finally have my first writing job. And I was thankful that even though I'd be writing about porn, at least I'd be writing. (And that's not a dig against porn—I love porn, but it's never something I thought I'd write about for a living.)"

But he said he soon started hating the work, in large part because of the people he met.

"Not counting a few true friends and a few true talents, I've never worked with a group of people so vindictive and so insecure. Many will say: You worked in the porn industry—what did you expect?! And they're right. But, I never really expected death threats and lawsuits just for writing a blog."

Others in the industry were not surprised by some of the push back he received for his writings. He seemed to specifically target certain studios. He was known for making some pretty nasty comments and calling people out on their bullshit, while at the same time sporting a perma-erection and verbally humping the legs of others.

Of his former web-baby, he said: "The Sword was a site specifically designed to lampoon, satirize, and (if I was doing my job well enough) humiliate people in the gay porn industry who had said or done something stupid (usually during a Twitter meltdown or while begging for money on an e-panhandling site like GoFundMe). I was paid to call out bullshit, be it something as mundane as a gay porn studio filming their 8,000th sex scene with the same lifeless gay-for-pay performers on the same ugly white sofa next to the same potted plant, or be it something as obscenely irresponsible as a gay porn studio filming gay porn stars injecting themselves with methamphetamine before having unprotected sex (yes, that actually happened)."

He later invented 'interns' to help with his blog posts. It let him flex a little creative muscle, he said.

"One of my fake interns happened to be a straight female college student ("Chelsea") who ended up dying during childbirth after being impregnated by a gay-for-pay porn star. Another was a sexually promiscuous and woefully ignorant young man named "Brandon" who died of meningitis (or maybe a drug overdose) after attending White Party. The last fake persona I invented ("Benjamin Bottoms") was actually my weak attempt at getting my real self fired."

He knew several industry leaders wanted him fired. Failing that, they demanded his blog be censored and posts removed. So in September, with little noise, he finally left his post as editor-in-chief.

What the future holds now, he isn't sure. You can read about his decision to move on from porn and The Sword here.