Mainstreaming Gay Porn

Indeed, the dirty secret seems to be out. Porn is everywhere, just a few clicks away. Not everybody will admit it, but for more men and women porn is becoming something they access without any qualms. And because it is so much a part of our lives, it is also something we need to think about. Gone are the times when substantial thinking on porn, as John Mercer reminds us at the start of his study Gay Pornography, was discouraged. The pioneering work by Linda Williams did a lot to legitimize conversation on porn and now it is a growing field of academic study. Personally, I became aware of this trend at the 2015 Montreal SCMS, a big Media Studies conference, when one could spend long stretches going from one session on porn to another and not having to do anything else.

But even out of academia, gay porn is becoming popular. Recent films such as King Cobra (on gay porn star Brent Corrigan) and the Tom of Finland biopic are unequivocal signs that gay porn is now sexy. Collections of the work of Tom of Finland and the Athletic Model Guild are reissued in luxurious volumes. It is not just that the internet made all kinds of images widely available. The Magic Mike films (2012, 2015) are also a sign of such mainstreaming. In a way this is a re-thread of the enormously popular The Full Monty (1997), which featured a group of working class men who stripped to survive. But the differences are interesting: the Magic Mike guys are "professionals", they take their work seriously, they are not embarrassed, they don't feel it is somehow humiliating to be in that position. And they are shockingly attractive.

The weakening of notions of masculinity has also allowed for objectification of the male body typical of porn. One consequence is that the kind of bodies only seen and fantasized about in porn is now the focus of innumerable TV series such as Euphoria and We Are Who We Are. The interest may also have to do with a process of re-shaping the whole idea of fantasy in our culture. Whereas fantasy was something personal, the internet makes everything public. 

Our innermost thoughts used to be secret and it seemed to us they needed to stay that way. We were educated to be discreet. Now calling attention to oneself through tweets or Facebook posts is becoming more and more central to social interaction and privacy seems a thing of the past: being shocking is one way to call attention, and our fantasies, ordinary to us, can be shocking to other people. How this will affect the psychic and the social in the future is not easy to tell.

This new visibility has not completely stifled debates. For every scholarly study, we find alarmed voices decrying "the pornification" of society. This suggests that porn is not just something we do, but rather, it seems, something very central to the dynamics of XXIst century culture: our culture as a whole functions very much like porn and often makes use of the moods and materials of porn. Old-style moralists will see it as a sign of social decadence, whereas for libertarians it might seem like the final blow to sexual repression. For Mercer gay porn can be seen as a space for exploration of alternative ideas on sex and masculinity, which is only one of its positive, progressive effects on society.

But what is happening to gay porn is even more radical than this. It is not so much that people seem to be watching a lot of it, but that very many people are turning their sexual lives into porn or are simply becoming their own producers. Although homemade porn had been with us for a long time, it was at the start of the XXIst Century, with the rise of online culture, that it became something everybody had access to. First producers saw new opportunities to make a buck with minimal investment by having young guys doing their thing on camera. Later, the guys decided to become their own producers. Reno Gold is one success story here, and he was featured in Forbes magazine in December 2020. And it is not merely a business: if the amount of young men out there doing homemade porn or behaving, even for a few fleeting minutes, like porn stars, something is changing in the configurations of sexuality in our culture.

In terms of gender politics, gay porn does not raise the same kind of issues as straight porn. Unlike straight porn, gay porn has been kept so much out of normal discourse that there are few mythologies built up around it. There are justified concerns about the place of women in culture which straight porn might be strengthening, but gay porn simply becomes a space where the imbalance of power is somehow lessened. Reservations don't seem to have the same strength; there are also few concerns expressed about the industrial practice: it is after all adult guys making a decision about their bodies. Ultimately, expressing concern about sex nowadays is not cool. Somehow performing in gay porn has not even considered to clash with traditional notions of masculinity. Straight sex seems to reinforce fantasies that, socialized into culture, have proved damaging to women, and so far it has been hard to introduce changes in its imaginary, but what about gay porn? 

The shift from old porn, based on "hard" media, to the new online practices, was signaled by the rise of the Sean Cody model. Actually, what the Sean Cody films resembled most was not the dangerous, urban, butch films of the eighties and nineties set in prisons, trucks or military barracks (favorite settings for the gay porn imagination), but the campier, naive images and videos of the Athletic Model Guild (AMG).camp or dressing up, they did not go for the cowboy or Hellenic fantasies that were convenient alibis in the 1950s, 

And it is quite fitting that one of the earliest signs of the mainstreaming of gay porn was Beefcake (1998) a film directed by Thom Fitzgerald that documented the life of Bob Mizer and, by extension, the AMG sessions. The film is quite sweet and it does present a somewhat rosy, utopian version of Mizer's studio.

A lot is made of the campy setups and the dynamics among the models smack of Dynasty-style bitchiness. Actual hardcore pornography is just hinted at, and in terms of representation it keeps it relatively prudish: this recreation was made before the time when full-frontal nudity was normal and the distinctions between porn and mainstream were strong. The film was distributed in the Gay Festival circuit, as it was clearly assumed nongay audiences would be resistant to this kind of story. Again, distribution in the 90s was more dependent on niches and it did not cross over beyond the gay interest section in video stores. 

In The Full Monty the whole plot hinged on the fact that no one would really get too excited just seeing these guys naked. The film was about something else. One reads the reactions to Magic Mike and it's all about that fleshly gorgeousness to be gazed at, no matter your sex. Granted, male strippers are not porn actors. And they were covered in the dirty 1980s at least twice in TV movies: the Chris Atkins A Night in Heaven (1983) and the Gregory Harrison For Ladies Only. But the popularization of men who earn a living by showing off their bodies, the fact that they are also into show business and are entitled to stardom, is certainly a new trend and a sign of change in our attitudes towards the display of male flesh. Male bodies are at the center of media interest. And then there are all those Disney boys. One fascinating (maybe not very significant, but fascinating) narrative of recent times is how boys who start in the Disney channel end up building their coming of age careers on their bodies.

This happened to Zac Efron. Ryan Gosling almost went that route about then years ago. Nick Jonas if following up a past in a christian boy band with a gay friendly body centered career. And last year Garrett Clayton starred in King Cobra, the story of an actual performer of Sean Cody-like porn site. Interestingly for a gay porn epic, the film is pretty tame. The hysterical gory details of the story are emphasized and there is little concern for the implications of gay porn. The facts may be close to the truth, but they are shot with a certain restraint.

And one might wonder what's the point of having gay porn as a selling point if one takes away what makes the genre exciting and distinctive. So, is this all about the absence of penises? Well, no, not really. But consider this: King Cobra is a film about the kind of entertainment whose distinction is showing certain parts of the male anatomy, made at a time when not only everybody can see penises everywhere, and everybody is into showing theirs and they are being shown, fleetingly but conspicuously, in some TV series. Is it not fair to expect King Cobra should tell the story with a bit more, er, detail? 

Surely, one watershed in the mainstreaming of gay porn was the website Sean Cody, which started in 2001. It made the whole thing so unthreatening and accessible. Like other sites from the late 1990s, this started as a cottage industry: a man and his camera, and lots of young white men who seemed to come largely from rural America. Sean Cody traded in fantasy and publicized the fact that his models were actually straight. Which of course has consequences on the definition of straightness, particularly given the enthusiasm displayed by the boys. To me, the secret weapon of the Sean Cody formula was not the lighting, the production values, the talent, or the fact that the boys somehow hit on popular gay fantasies, it was the brief interviews at the start of the solos and the somewhat naive smile the boys sported. 

There was indeed something engagingly camp in those boys who had sex in front of millions in order to buy some kind of bracelet for their girlfriends. And I fondly remember the guy from Alaska, where it's so cold that he had never really been naked, especially in front of people. Somehow it was assumed being naked in front of people was his mission in life, and he left Alaska just to fulfill it. No porn scriptwriter could have fired our imaginations more charmingly.

There had been smiling porn stars before (even serene, gentle ones: look at Casey Donovan in Wakefield Poole's 1971 Boys in the Sand), but somehow if one follows porn in the 1980s or 1990s there is this ridiculous attempt to support certain fantasies of masculinity that need to convey toughness, brutality, inarticulateness. A masculine attitude seemed to be a central alibi for audiences: "OK, I'm watching gay porn but I'm all man and so's my porn".

For the Sean Cody boys, there was no conflict between sex and a cool demeanor and therefore this particular alibi seems unnecessary. They were not effeminate, but they did not need to overdo butchness or show how painful this was for them. So they became available and the kind of guys who might in the right circumstances make good boyfriends (some of them did: in the early 2000s Sean Cody boys might be spotted with gay executive and celebrities). From the point of view of the performers, the videos were tapping on the kind of male narcissism that had taken off in the nineties: if being beautiful was now accepted, why not use it. 

More recent films engage differently with the Sean Cody legacy. I'm a Porn Star (2013) follows the lives of a group of young men who want to work on porn. The contributor to the storyline in the IMDB actually provides the promotional line for the film:

"There are an estimated 370 million pornographic websites online. Porn is now a thirteen billion-dollar business. So who's doing all this moonlighting? Turns out -- probably some people you know".

Fair point. We used not to care too much about the lives of gay porn stars, we accepted that they just came alive in the videos and did not care what they did out of the studio. Now it turns out they are around us, they are "normal" people. Although obviously salaciousness is counted on, many of the film's consumers will overlap with pornography consumers, and although the video was distributed by the gay company TLA Productions, there is an attempt to deal with the background seriously and one can see an element of general interest. 

This description underlines the fact that gay porn is becoming a type of film that provokes curiosity. "We" are now interested and "we" are all invited to consider the facts, the stories, the lifestyles. Porn star Reno Gold has succeeded in creating a persona for the new media: in YouTube videos and Instagram, it teases the attention of customers who then can access his paying site in OnlyFans. At a time when mothers of porn stars appear on the web feeling proud of their sons' attributes, it is certainly a new business model which is making gay porn more of a mainstream commodity. 

So what does this all mean? At the very least it means that sharp distinctions between porn and mainstream are becoming a thing of the past, and also that the old mystique surrounding gay porn is now less strong. That we can now think in terms that do not need to be labeled as porn to be very close to porn.

Taboos on watching attractive guys showing off their bodies are falling: it does not seem to bother the guys anymore, and it seems uncool to show their discomfort about it. Male nudity is everywhere and the shame porn suggested has been overcome. And there is a paradox here: is the function of fantasy fulfilled when fantasies are in fact public and freely circulating? This issue has always been at heart in calls for stronger censorship. Now it is a fact that censorship is impossible and we shall just have to live in a new situation.

What shall we do about it? Was the shock actually what we were going for? What happens if simple porn does not shock us anymore? How shall we be thrilled sexually? Some answers suggest themselves, although I am not going into them now. Yet, consider this: can it be that the porn that is being mainstreamed is becoming another form of repression? Is gay porn only allowed to break out in certain conditions? Are fantasies acceptable only because they are widely marketable? So, white, curly, cute, toned boys can be porn stars but others who may need it more are frowned upon.

The final question is about the future: has the mainstreaming of gay porn reached its limit? Was it just an opening up to support big corporations? Or is this the beginning of a process in which everything we thought about the experience of sex is about to change? Well, the future can't be that far away now.