Fredrik Eklund
Fredrik Eklund (b. 17 January 1977 in Stockholm) is a New York City real estate broker, who was formerly an IT entrepreneur in his native Sweden and has also made a name for himself as a gay porn actor (under the pseudonym Tag Eriksson, also written Tag Ericsson) and most recently as a novelist.
He is the son of Klas Eklund, author of several books on economic subjects and a political thriller made into a TV-series, and (as of 2005) chief economist of Skandinaviska Enskilda Banken, and grandson of the actor couple Bengt Eklund (1925-1998) and Fylgia Zadig (1921-1994). Fredrik Eklund's older brother Sigge is a writer and webdesigner who has published three novels.
Fredrik Eklund studied at the Stockholm School of Economics, and also worked for the financial newspaper Finanstidningen. During his student days, he also got involved in the Stockholm gay club scene, and with some friends started a club named "Billy". In 1999 he founded the internet company Humany, with his father and former Swedish premier Carl Bildt on the board, among others.
With the passing of the IT boom, he left Sweden for New York, and entered a brief career in gay pornographic film under the pseudonym Tag Eriksson (or Tag Ericsson). A representative of a company producing gay porn, Falcon, having seen images of him on the internet, wrote him an e-mail asking if he wanted to make movies with them. After considering the offer for a long time, he decided to accept it "as an experiment", as a way to satisfy his own curiosity, and something to write about. He starred in the movie The Hole (2003), received an award for his role, and appeared on the cover of a gay soft porn magazine.
After his stint in pornography, he went into the real estate business in New York City and became vice president at the Chelsea office of the company JC DeNiro & Associates. In the presentation of Eklund on the corporate website, he is called "one of the city's best brokers, being quick, efficient and always on top of the market".
In March 2005, Eklund made his literary debut with a novel called Bananflugornas herre ("The Lord of the Banana Flies"), a story based on his experiences of the gay porn industry. Because of the subject matter and the background of the author, it has received a considerable amount of publicity. The reviewer in the Swedish daily paper Svenska Dagbladet commented that the novel describes the choice of the author's alter ego to enter a career in porn as "a kind of salvation from a society trying to force him into the TV-night and suburban normality, a way to find the true self". Others have commented on the liberal and unashamed attitude towards pornography of the novel, uncommon in Sweden, where the view of pornography as a form of oppression is dominant in political discourse. An article author in the other large Swedish daily paper, Dagens Nyheter (presumably humourously) commented that he saw Eklund's work as a successful real estate broker as morally more dubious than his work in pornography.
Bibliography
- Bananflugornas herre (Stockholm: Debutantförlaget 2005)