The president, the painter, and porn: actor-painter Jeff Griggs presented a portrait to President Bush in the White House. Then the tabloids discovered his gay-porn past. (People).

One Thursday morning in December 2001, Los Angeles artist Jeff Griggs got a call from Washington, D.C.: "Jeff, the president would like to meet with you tomorrow morning at 11:40 in the Oval Office for a formal presentation." The invitation was for Griggs to present the 9/11-themed George W. Bush portrait he had painted, which a friend of a friend had recommended to the White House. So he bought airline tickets for himself and his mom, checked his painting with the baggage, and went to meet the commander in chief.

Months later, the tabloids discovered that Griggs, a former Days of Our Lives cast member, had also done all-male adult films in the late 1980s. GAY PORN STAR PAINTS THE PRESIDENT INTO A CORNER, the headline shouted. The stow faded again until April of this year--when a gay gossip Web site and the New York Post dredged it up again.

The first time Griggs's porn past hit gossip columns was when he left Days in 1996. Tabloids claimed he'd been fired over his adult film work ("a flat-out lie," he says), and Griggs contemplated filing a libel suit. This time he decided to fight back by talking to The Advocate.

"It's unconscionable," he says of the gossipmongers' digs at Bush. "Look, you want to attack me. I'm an easy target. Get after it, do your damnedest. But the president ..."

It's true that Griggs did a number of gay sex videos in the late '80s, credited as Tony Sinatra or Tony Erickson. He was in his mid 20s, a golden boy from a small New Mexico town who'd become just another face in the crowd in Los Angeles. Feeling like a failure in his acting career, he took porn jobs so he could buy Christmas presents for his family. "I went home and gave everyone a good Christmas," he says, "and then I came back [to L.A.] and thought, This is it. It's over. Now I'm going to die."

Instead, he started to get other work. Stage roles led to action films with titles like Killer Instinct and Breaking Point and then to Days of Our Lives. A yearlong contract with Columbia TriStar television to develop a sitcom gave him the time he needed to learn to paint. The proposed TV series never flew, but his portraiture took off.

The culmination of his art so far has been Eyes of a Nation, the portrait he painted after seeing a tearful Bush in the Oval Office soon after 9/11. "I painted that moment, the moment of an emotional president, the president who was a man just like me," says Griggs.

Always a proud supporter of the president, Griggs says his conviction was strengthened by their meeting. "As we stood there and looked at my painting, as we were reminded of the loss," he says, "I was convinced that he was completely aware of his own humanity and of his failings. But I was also aware that--damn it--he was the president of the United States and he was going to do his damnedest to see that this never happens to our country again." (Griggs can't say where the painting is now, but he's been told its final destination is likely Bush's presidential library.)

Griggs, who's gay and "not single," speaks with admiration of Bush's international AIDS initiative but doesn't feel the need to debate the Administration's policies point by point. "Bottom line is this: I'm sold on the man. Period. He's for us. It's hard not to like the guy."

As for whether Griggs's past "bad choices" really painted the president into a corner, his D.C. contacts tell him that "the White House isn't one bit concerned," he says. "Maybe I needed to have that experience to keep me humble and to remind me that I'm not that far from falling," he says of the gossip eruptions. "It reminds me how fortunate I am to be able to paint and have great friends and family. I am a blessed man."