The Real Super Chad: The Story of Ricardo Fort (Part Two)

As we saw in the first part of this story, the breakup of his relationship with Gabriel was a message for Ricardo: he had realized he wanted to be truly free. That meant no partners and no romantic ties. Loneliness, freedom, parties, and a full-on gay life. For a life like that, everyone recommended a single destination: Miami.

Vice City

Going back and forth between Miami Beach and Key Biscayne, Ricardo felt he could show himself exactly as he was, without fear of other people’s prejudice. Completely freed from the pressure of other people’s gaze –which he had long both chased and suffered– the youngest of the Forts moved through the queer nightlife of South Beach (clubs like Twist, Palace, and the drag circuit), in a Miami marked by a Latin mix and the hedonistic pulse of an era in which Ricardo was the king of the night. That’s how the Australian gay magazine Blue+ remembers him in Issue 32: a dreamboy model who made the cover over a certain Keanu Reeves.

But the family mandate never stopped weighing on him, and Ricardo was always looking for ways to please his father, trying to contribute his often undervalued vision to the business. Although the ’90s had not been the most glorious years for his family’s chocolate factory, the youngest of the brothers would be the architect of a product that would save the decade for them.

Inspired by a relatively wholesome snack bar that was all the rage among Miami bodybuilders around 1997, Ricardo suggested to his father that they become the first in the country to enter the market for energy cereal bars.

For the Fort family, music was a hobby they kept up in their spare time from work. Probably the most accomplished of the three brothers, up to that point, was Jorge, the eldest, who was not only a great trumpet player but would go on to become a major music producer, even winning a Grammy.

For Ricardo, however, music was not a pastime –he wanted to devote his life to being recognized as the artist he believed he was. In the mid-’90s, he met his first American boyfriend, Lawrence, a model and graphic designer. As Ricardo recalls in his personal journal, Lawrence was deeply plugged into the city of vice’s jet set. The relationship didn’t last long, but those three months were enough for Fort to break into the star system he dreamed of.

“Dating him, I had the opportunity to do a catalog for Versace. A friend asked if my partner and I could work on a catalog and of course we accepted. After the shoot, Donatella Versace showed up at the studio and invited us to have dinner at her house that night. From there, we were going to the White Party that’s held every year in Miami. When we arrived at the Versace mansion, they served us drinks and we waited for the guest of honor to sit down at the table. Who was it? Madonna,” he would later write.

Madonna recognized him from their previous encounter in California, and at that party –and the ones that followed– Ricardo was able to gather contacts to keep exploring his path and try to become a new Latin voice.

“We were recording the third Romance album by Luis Miguel… with his famous arranger, Bebu Silvetti. There was a break, like a recess, between the sections we were recording”, recalls Eduardo Pérez Guerrero, an Argentine music producer, lawyer, and businessman based in Miami. “It was a call from someone important from the tango industry who was recommending an artist that had been sending us material for a while, including a very strange photo book. We had already seen it, and the aesthetics of the whole thing had caught our attention… In the photos he was dressed with wings, there were chains. It was all very diffuse.”

Eduardo was working on that album together with Rudy Pérez, the renowned Cuban-American musician, composer, producer, arranger, and sound engineer. The producer remembers seriously talking about the possibility of jointly taking on Ricardo’s musical project, because “it was a pretty unique –or striking– artist profile…” “We had a lot of projects in motion at the time. It was a boom period for Latin pop artists.” But Ricardo had a problem his competition of the era didn’t: he lacked the necessary financial firepower. The answer ended up being no, and the rejections kept piling up, but Fort’s pulse never trembled.

Via Mexico

“I wanted to be a singer, and I’d been told Mexico was the best place to make it”, Ricardo recalls. He moved there with the help of Gabriel, his ex-boyfriend turned lifelong friend, who flew with him. In Mexico City, he landed a meeting with a very well-known producer, who was managing Yuri, the Mexican singer and TV host. According to Fort, the man had promised to promote him, but never did a thing –he let himself be swept away instead by a young Puerto Rican, the singer of a famous group, who wanted to go solo.

Ricardo kept going and secured a casting at Sony Music to sign his first contract. At first, he was thrilled, but the months went by with no activity. “I spent four months doing nothing; they didn’t tell me anything, and like an idiot I got mad and asked them to cancel the contract, which they did without even thinking about it”, he would later say.

Shortly after that, he heard rumors that the company was investing everything in a new talent who was supposedly going to take over the world. The same Puerto Rican kid who had pulled him away from Yuri’s manager: Ricky Martin.

Do It Yourself

With the turn of the century, Ricardo rolled down the shutters on “the singer”: a cheap music video, a hundred thousand dollars blown on ghost producers, promises that evaporated the next day. The lesson was surgical: the only missing ingredient was budget. He started studying the manual that was already being written in the United States: reality TV as a platform, scandal as engine, ostentation as aesthetic. Live, 24/7. He took notes and waited.

In the meantime, he put on the businessman’s mask to keep his family happy. In parallel, he drew up his plan for fatherhood and put his life in order. He did his research on the surrogacy clinics that were starting to pop up in California. He chose a partner in the project: his only friend who had always shunned frivolity, Gus, a low-profile bodybuilder he had always loved. And all the while, he sat and waited for the transfer of the great inheritance from the chocolate empire that would arrive before long.

When Lalo died, the equation changed. The company he had to run was no longer Felfort; it was himself. Perfume, clothing, champagne, cartoons, cameras, theaters –an entire ecosystem built around a single product: his own name and body. DIY, but with an unlimited checkbook. The Super Chad was ready to conquer the hearts of the many after the rejection of the few who had blacklisted him from his own dream. All it would take was a couple of live remotes with Alejandro Fantino for liftoff –because the turbines had been roaring for a long time already.