It's Still About Porn

Wow -- Writing about porn really increases one’s blog traffic.

Over the past couple of days, I learned something important: We gay boys take our porn very seriously. Reading the comments and e-mails over the last post, I found most articulated a striking relationship to porn, whether they agreed with me or not. Even some who put forward the argument that we shouldn’t take porn that seriously seemed ready to come to fisticuffs to defend their side.

It should come as no surprise, I can talk about porn all day. Alive or not, that horse begs for another beating.

I love all my queer brothers (with the singular exception of the ex, who gets nothing). It distresses me, therefore, that some felt I wanted to dictate their desires. Whatever makes an individual happy is cool with me. Let me be clear that I don’t think watching SeanCody or other porn films is tantamount to treason against the gay cause. If this was the case, I would be the queer-Benedict Arnold. Hey, I even like some elements of the classic porn films like Sailor in the Wild or the Gage films. Other elements of those films, however, make me squirm.

What I did intend to suggest is that we need to talk and think about the types of images we consume as queer folk. We don’t (and couldn’t) agree on everything. Nor does it mean that we can’t have our own internal conflicting visions.

Opting not to think critically about any form of media makes me extremely nervous. Yes, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Other times, though, a cigar is a phallic shaped object that suggests an oral fixation that developed during one’s childhood.

I agree with Jockohomo that the hetero/homo divide occurred relatively recently and only in particular places. Before the nineteenth century, most historians argue, people did not conceive of sexuality in these terms. Without a doubt, I also agree with the several commentators who suggested that some porn can serve as a type of resistance against that divide between hetero/homo. I am just not convinced that most of the porn organized around “straight” men does this type of cultural work.

Even with the recentness of the hetero/homo divide, we can’t forget that those of us in “Western” culture all grew up within that discourse and learned that the divide was immutable. We are, in other words, part of that historical specificity even as we try to undermine it. Our own ideas about our sexuality cannot be easily untangled from that dichotomy.

There is much gay men don’t have in common. We didn’t all grow up in the same place, with the same family structure, or the same class and ethnic background. Yet we do have a shared history nonetheless.

Throughout our lives, we grew up with the same unending messages about what it meant to have sex with somebody of the same sex. We all internalized at least some parts of these messages from mass media, our families, churches, and so on.

Whether gay porn leads social change or lags behind, I think, is not quite the issue. Rather, gay porn mirrors the anxieties, obsessions, and contradictions over how we are dealing with those internalized messages within our community. Almost daily, each one of us has to constantly re-rack the billiard balls of gender and sexuality that we learned throughout our lives to make sense of our place and identity. The fervent discussion on porn suggests that many of us feel tension and a conflicted relationship to gay porn.


Not all our porn is embarrassing and it’s not just irrelevant fantasy. True, some of it can be pretty darn silly – I mean, when was the last time you had sex in the middle of the Dallas Cowboy’s locker-room with three male cheerleaders and the quarterback?

Classic seventies gay-porn films, though, also testify to previous generations’ mobilization and demand to have images of queer desire. Rather than the banality of most modern gay porn, these earlier films (which, btw, weren’t the earliest, but that is another entry far from now) seemed to show genuine sexual lust and pleasure from the actors. Perhaps one of the reasons that these earlier films continue to have such a cult following is that they serve as type of scrapbook that records a bit of our collective history. Granted, it’s a triple-X scrapbook that we don’t always share with our neighbors. Still, it’s part of our collective scrapbook. During times when social forces attempted to conceal or deny these desires, these films provided individuals with acknowledgment and fulfillment, even if it was illusory.

Having conceded that form of resistance, though, does not erase the equally troubling elements of the films. Gay-porn shows tremendous contradiction. Even as they overtly celebrate the erotic possibilities of same-sex sex, they also uphold some of the most conservative views about gender roles in our society.