© 1988 Rich Grzesiak, all rights reserved.
The AIDS crisis has forced gay men to seriously re-examine many sexual attitudes they've taken for granted—that sex is an all-encompassing cure-all for common experiences like boredom, losing a lover, being lonely, even a way to be physically rejuvenated in the face of aging. Sex is rarely a cure all for anything, and, as AIDS teaches us daily, it can function as the means to spread lethal disease or even have all the abusive side effects of an addiction.
Up until very recently, gay male pornography has featured a relative cornucopia of unhealthy behaviors. The glorification of drug use, alcoholism, sexual objectification (using people as objects), violence/sadism, the spread of disease—they're all there. One porn flick I recently viewed features performers who take swigs from a vodka bottle, treating it almost as casually as a container of Diet 7-Up. There's even one scene where the gentleman in question appears to be proudly displaying either acne or a tell tale Kaposi's sarcoma sore.
The notorious New York erotic video producer Christopher Rage has titles unabashedly glorifying scat or piss—there's even one featuring the late Casey Donovan (he died of AIDS last year) called Fucked Up. The performers in that epic engage in a paean of undiluted anal sadism that would make the Marquis de Sade blush.
Don't get me wrong: I'm neither pro- nor anti-porn. But I do think we've reached a critical point in our developing attitudes about gay male sexuality. It's not chic anymore to simply fuck people and leave them, heavily drug while having sex, or exclusively pursue sexual friendships that leave no room for warmth, compassion, tenderness, sensitivity or—dare we use that overused noun—love?
I think what disturbs me most about the pornography I've watched has nothing to do with the sex-crazed images that many of these works are chock full of, but how artless and fundamentally flaccid so many of these works are when you're searching for something truly erotic. Some of the sex scenes in these clunkers are so mechanical you swear the "performers" do it with all the passion of a truck driver who scratches his ass. Have you ever really counted just how bored some of these guys look?
Ironically, some of the most erotic porno films are the emptiest ethically and morally. I'm thinking here particularly of titles like Rage's obsession-driven I Need It Bad or some of the older works of Al Parker. Parker doesn't even make porn anymore, having told The ADVOCATE they're simply getting too expensive to produce.
One subject porn industry people don't like to talk about is the astonishing number of performers who have either died from or been diagnosed as having AIDS: Val Martin, Casey Donovan, John Holmes (a/k/a Johnny Wadd), J.W. (Jim) King, and others are all gone. Periodically, while watching some of these titles I found myself wondering, who else has, will or might die among the people I've seen? It's one thing to morbidly speculate on how time has robbed these young narcissists of beauty, age and youth; it's something else to sit there and ponder just which sexy youngster is already dead from the disease.
One development that has revolutionized the porn world is the advent of the VCR. In theory, anybody with access to a video camera and some hot bodies can make their own porno tape. Forget plot, ignore character development let alone dialogue. Katsam Productions producer/wit T.R. Witomski openly advertises for models in periodicals ranging from The ADVOCATE to Drummer and makes no bones about how simple the process is. "Darling," he confesses, "all you really have to know is which way to point the camera. Any queen this side of cataracts or glaucoma can do that." Some couples (even bachelors) have taken to advertising in the classified sections of these magazines for people interested in swapping their own home made videos. A redhaired Irishman of my acquaintance told me recently that he doesn't even bother to rent porn any longer; he simply makes his own, using himself and/or friends, and watches those.
One magazine (ADVOCATE Men) actually has two videocassettes on the market, opting to duplicate electronically what it's already achieved through print media. Thus far they've interviewed the real life porn hero "Phil Andros" (the nom de plume of Berkeley, California's esteemed writer Samuel M. Steward) and featured some hot men.
A popular image of the successful porno star is a leisurely life awash with sex, money and drugs. The reality in most cases is quite the reverse. Many porn flix pay next to nada for the "performance" (a well-known porno tape made five years ago, and already having sold 20,000 copies, paid its star $500, and there's no such thing as royalties). You get diseases if you fuck with infected people. And drugs cost money and are known to take away two of the key attributes of success in this business, namely looks and health.
Porno has taken on a whole new importance as a safe sex substitute for AIDS-worried gay men, yet the actual number of pieces in production to keep up with the huge demand appears to be lower than it's ever been. And the savvier "stars" are getting picky about things quite unrelated to money—they practically demand everyone from the Mayo clinic to the Sloan-Kettering Institute produce a certified clean bill of health for the fucker or fuckee.
You don't film porn anymore, you videotape everything. Performers don't have the time or patience to stand around for days at a time under hot spotlights, waiting for a camera to be reloaded with film prior to a take.
A word of advice to the savvy porn consumer: don't always believe the publicity stills. There are, however, three relatively reliable guides to pornography: Al's 1986 Male Video Guide (it doesn't feature more recent releases, nor does it really grade the product, settling mainly for bibliographical details like running time and pretty straightforward descriptions of the "action"); Skin magazine editor John Rowberry's excellent if quirky Male Video Guide, available from the Gay Sunshine Press; the quarterly catalogue from the Chicago-based Bijou Video, one of the nation's largest purveyors of gay male pornography—recently raided by the F.B.I.
In this feature, I'm going to quiz five very interesting gay men on the subject of pornography: an anonymous, recovering, self-described sex addict (hereafter referred to as "anonymous") now active in a national organization patterned after Alcoholics Anonymous known as Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous (SLAA); Edwin Clark "Toby" Johnson, author of Plague: A Novel about Healing [Alyson; $7.95/softcover] as well as two critical works, The Myth of the Great Secret: A Search for Spiritual Meaning in the Face of Emptiness and In Search of God in the Sexual Underground: A Mystical Journey; Boyd McDonald, Christopher Street Contributing Editor, author of Cruising the Movies: A Sexual Guide to "Oldies" on TV, editor of Filth (Gay Presses of New York), and "Sex in the News" columnist for Blueboy and The Guide to the Gay Northeast; John Mitzel, activist, writer and columnist ("Common Sense") for Boston's The Guide as well as Philadelphia's Au Courant; and T.R. Witomski, executive director of Katsam Productions, a video production and distribution company:
Rich Grzesiak: Do you think pornography can be addicting, much in the same way that, say, alcohol, cigarettes or drugs can be?
anonymous: I have no doubt this can be so. I've spent hundreds of dollars renting pornography, to the point where it absolutely conflicted with my capacity to have sex with people! As a handsome man in my thirties, I think this is a rather ridiculous predicament to be in. Nothing can compare to the bleakness of spending many a weekend evening in my apartment, with four or even more porno tapes adjacent to the VCR, doing poppers and imagining having real sex by submerging myself into this, my sex addiction.
Talk to any really honest urban video store entrepreneur and she/he can point out the real porn addicts that patronize the store, providing much in the way of exploitive profits.
Edwin Clark "Toby" Johnson: It does not seem to me that this is inherently psychopathological anymore than being dependent on a car or a stereo. Human beings are necessarily "dependent" on things outside ourselves. That's the nature of civilization and of human social intercourse.
The Reagan Administration's curious approach to drugs has exaggerated this notion of addiction way out of proportion (by telling children to say no while the generals are all saying yes to South American drug salesman who support the C.I.A.'s covert operations).
A few years ago a book entitled Love and Addiction argued that falling in love was addicting because it released opiate-like chemicals (endorphins) in the brain. Does that mean that falling in love is morally objectionable? Or does it simply mean that our brains respond to things we like by giving us the feelings that we like them?
I see how chemicals like heroin can be said to be addicting but I suspect that most of these other sorts of addictions are tautological. Only a Savanarola would object to something that felt good simply on the grounds that it felt good.
John Mitzel: Your question hits at the misreferencing of the "issue" of pornography. I think Walter Kendrick did a pretty good job, in his brainy book The Secret Museum, of contending that the modern arguments over pornography are based on false premises. Depictions of sexual activity are a constant in civilizations. Our civilization has favored repression and perversion of this standard impulse. Individual's fascinations with sexual acts are at their highest in the libidinal stages of life. The interest wanes with the libido.
Of course, it all comes down to a matter of taste, with which there is no arguing. My chief complaint is against the unattractiveness of so many of the males used in pictographic and filmic sexual performances.
T.R. Witomski: Oh, Mary!People collect porn much as they accumulate stamps, coins, or the recordings of opera diva Renata Scotto. But it's all a matter of tasteif anything, too much porn will make you bored, not addicted.
Just visit the skid row of any city and ask who got there from their addiction to pornographyPersonally, I feel that porn is much less harmful than overexposure to the "singing" of Ms. Scotto.
Rich Grzesiak: Do you have any ethical reservations on certain images integral to gay porno, e.g., depersonalized sex; depictions of sadomasochism, unhealthy (as in unsafe) sex, etc.?
anonymous: The thing that bothers me the most is the use of drugs in gay porno filmsDrugs, sex, and alcohol have ruined many relationships and friendships in my life. Pornography reflects reality, and, to the extent it exhibits addictive people and their behaviors, I think it is both morally and ethically wrong.
Edwin Clark "Toby" Johnson: Yes, I do. let me say that when we learn a particular computer program, we tend to stick with it, even to tell other people that it's better than the one they use.
Porn seems a little like that. Once we learn a particular convention—in this case, a particular style of sexual arousal—we tend to defend and prefer it even when it's got significant drawbacks.
I'd like to turn the question around and say that I think the most interesting aspect of pornography/erotica is its pedagogical power: porn is a way to learn how to do sex, a way of reinforcing and developing certain styles of behavior (just like a computer program!)gay erotic presentations of loving romantic sex could give those styles greater turnon power.
Most of us need and want lovewe want to feel that we matter in the worldgay men especially have been excluded by those feelings by internalized homophobia, social disapproval, parental injunction, even gay capitalism (e.g., bars that would rather sell alcohol than encourage conversation). We're living at a time when relationships are being valued moreso I think it's especially important to use the experience of porno in such a way that it encourages sexual feelings that are loving and not depersonalizing.
Boyd McDonald: We must obey the law, no matter how stupid it may be—writers, photographers and artists have talents too valuable to waste away in jailI solve the problem of unsafe sex by marketing my books as drawing from the Classical Period of American Homosexuality, 1940-80.
I don't know what to do about AIDS When most bright and humane people seem to agree that certain things should be done—such as the use of scumbags (more vulgarly known as condoms)—naturally we should follow their advice, no?
John Mitzel: I haven't the time or the energy to be "ethical" in such a judgmental way. I'll leave that exercise to the frothers (sic). The problem, it seems to me, is that in a privatized culture such as ours, we must all work out sexual fantasies and practices on our own. We have no public sex rituals. Thus, sexual parameters are defined by a privatist bourgeois impulse. I fault the Marquis de Sade (Andrea "Fatty" Dworkin's favorite obsession) with removing rituals of humiliation and violence from the mysteries of the caves and bringing them into the bedroom and the parlor.
T.R. Witomski: My dear! "Depersonalized sex"? As soon as you photograph or write about sex, you've instantly depersonalized it.
Remember, the pornographic world is a fantasy creationThat's why you have all these conventions in pornography: people never fail to get it up, if a guy enters an apartment while his lover is sucking the landlord's cock, he doesn't throw a fit—he joins in!
I kinda like S&M and I like watching the older porn films filled with all that "nasty" sex. But as a creator of porn, I no longer write about unsafe sex acts, and I've never made a video that included unsafe sex. I'd die from the guilt of paying someone to do something I wouldn't do.
As a pornographer, I do have a moral responsibility to consumers: I want to turn them on, but I also want to show them that there are all sorts of sexual behaviors they can do (many quite strange and wonderful) and not risk dying for.
Rich Grzesiak: Do you agree/disagree with the criticism frequently advanced by feminists and religionists that pornography is degrading to human dignity, and inherently subversive of "mature" relationships?
anonymous: My addiction to sex made me experience porn as a degrading exercise. As to whether porn itself is subversive of mature relationships, I would have to say, no, no more than alcohol or drugs are—provided you're not addicted to these things.
Edwin Clark "Toby" Johnson: I think that pornography today, especially the videotaped variety, is an altogether new phenomenon in human history. Through the miracle of technology, we're able to live vicariously, to experience many different personalities and value systems, to imagine adventures that boggle the mind.
Part of maturity is the ability to experience compassion, to identify with other people and their problems. One of the most beautiful aspects of pornography is that it allows us to experience other sexual lives vicariously.
I am not a blonde haired, blue eyed beauty with pectorals of death. I never have been and never will be and, to be very frank and intimate with you, there've been times in my life when I've felt pretty bad about myself because I wasn't that blonde beauty. But through erotic video, I can be that boy for a few minutes, I can live in his body and imagine being or having him. I can be whom I'm not. I don't have to be stuck in one life; I can be legion.
Vicarious sexuality is the most powerful use of pornography, and that's how we should be taught to experience porn. Porn can be depersonalizing because it reduces sex to frozen images on a screen; it idealizes unrealistic images of attractiveness. But, viewed differently, it can be mind-expanding and conducive of compassion and empathy.
Boyd McDonald: Of coursePorn and sex exist for men who can afford to be degraded, who have enough going for them so that they love degrading sex. The best sex is, and should be, degrading sex(In the world of porn) lovers, gay marriages and life partners are extremely boring as a subject. What men want to hear about is the conquest of total strangers. These easy forays commemorate homosexuality's great advantage over heterosexuality. We should not copy the hetero institutions of violence (football, war, etc.).
John Mitzel: I suppose many are. The libido, after all, is not a rational force. And when the libido gets intertwined with a death wish, monstrous ambitions or dangerous risk-taking (Yukio Mishima, Pasolini, Fassbinder, inter alia), who knows what the human mind will dream up and then enact?
As to degrading acts being harmful to human "mature" relationships, I have little to say, only that "modern maturity" has a therapeutic stink to it, and I haven't observed many marriages which don't contain some aspects of S&M, master/slave, giver and taker, etc. It boils down to what individuals find tolerable.
T.R. Witomski: I disagree. Why are all the people who oppose porn the very epitome of individuals you'd never want to fuck? If Ed Meese and Andrea Dworkin exemplify human dignity and "mature" relationships, I'm glad I'm busily subverting them. No, I'm happy with immature cocksucking and bondage and watersports Immature Bondage—now, that sounds like a good title for a video. You don't think people will think it's kid porn, do you?
Rich Grzesiak: Do you believe that there is any connection between having a healthy sex life and examining pornographic books, films or tapes?
anonymous: No! Healthy sex has nothing to do with pornography. Viewing life in purely sexual terms as a subset of human relationships is sick.
Edwin Clark "Toby" Johnson: I think a healthy sex life should include the ability to imagine and experience vicariously other people's sexual experiences. It's considered healthy to be able to understand where "somebody else is coming from." Shouldn't that be true of sexual experiences as much as anything else?
Boyd McDonald: Yes, but not what you might think. When I was young and having sex every night, you couldn't get me to look at photos of men having sex. Now that I no longer go on the sexual prowl, I enjoy collecting and publishing men's letters about their sexual experiencesdo have a block against fiction and fantasy and can only be turned on by what did happen, not about some California model who's some 3,000 miles away from me.
John Mitzel: What a curious question—the zanies always assume a negative correlation, an odd point of view reached in a market-based economy which assumes that the more information consumers have, the more wisely they will choose (although how do we explain the popularity of Ronni RayGun?).
It's clear to me that there is a positive correlation, and I think Kinsey discovered it first. Give young people as much access to sexual materials as they seek. Especially in gay life but also among bright hetro's, too, adults who are sexually open, tolerant and sex-positive and sexually experimental tend to be sexually curious early in life (before puberty), have a sense of propriety about the sexual expression (i.e., don't easily cower to dissuasion), and came to sexual maturity early, not just in their own physical development but in exposure to what the world offered. It's not the prissy, up-tight types we must watch out for but, rather, those who lived repressed lives and then exploded late or perhaps never at all.
T.R. Witomski: What's a healthy sex life? Healthy as in "satisfying"? Healthy as in "not likely to risk exposure to the AIDS virus"? Healthy as in both?
It doesn't appear to be true that people use porn as "how-to" material—at least not to any great extent. Rather, porn is used for solo j/o. Does masturbation fit into your definition of "healthy"?
Rich Grzesiak: How do you view the Reagan Administration Justice Department's attempts to regulate and censor pornography? Do you see a political backlash growing from groups opposed to the production and distribution of pornography?
anonymous: I applaud any crackdown on pornography that motivates people to closely examine their addictive behaviors. If the Administration's efforts to regulate porn force (gay) smut producers to adopt standards mandating safe sex rituals, I think this will promote healthy living—and not death from dread AIDS
Edwin Clark "Toby" Johnson: The government's misperception of pornography is a serious problem and a source of anti-gay backlash. The Administration has attacked gay porn because it is naturally repugnant to heterosexuals. Ironically, gay porn is not violent, doesn't degrade women, tends to depict sex between equals doing what is mutually satisfying to both.
In his book Sexual Landscapes, James Weinrich explains that straight men are desperately afraid gay men will force sex on them because they are likely to force sex on women. The fact is that gay men do not tend to force sex and are very open to being told no. Straight men don't accept no for an answer, and they think that's how gay men are.
We get blamed for their sexual sins. That's the nature of a scapegoat, isn't it?
Boyd McDonald: Reagan and his cronies are presently giving us the second great Republican crime wave of our era. What makes the Reaganites more offensive than the Mafia in that the Mafia is not always boasting about how moral it is—they're honest hoods. Does Reagan think that homosexuals should model themselves after him and Nancy? The image of the President sticking his stinking pecker into the First Lady, with her puny legs wrapped around his fat midriff, is not all that inspiring, nor is the image of Ed Meese, with his big, fat ass, falling into the conjugal fart sack with Ursula and her big fat ass—these people must have industrial strength bedsprings and mattresses! I hope they leave the window open because fat people fart more often.
John Mitzel: Things would be considerably different if old Ron had made a few blue movies back in the thirties and forties but, who knows? Maybe he did and the late C.I.A. Director Bill Casey kept them locked up.
I read the Meese Commission's report on pornography, and it's just the same old crap from the right-wingers. They have this as an item on their agenda and they never change their line. It's actually funny in one respect in that pornography has always been a more obsessive interest to the up-tight right-wingers than to the liberal left, as the recent flood of preacher/prostitute scandals has so well demonstrated.
One whore, interviewed about her liaisons with Rev. Jimmy Swaggart, said the preacher used to pay her to get in and out of cars naked. She thought this kinky. Does this mean Rev. Jimmy is "auto-erotic"? Maybe it's a throwback to the Great Car Shows of yesterday, where beautiful young women stroked cars on revolving platforms? Or perhaps Jimmy would like to jerk off on Lee Iaccocca?
The bad news is that the RayGun thugs have been given the green light to harass all those groups they don't like. Several videotape distributors have been raided by Justice Department goons and, under the R.I.C.O. laws, they are authorized to steal everything. And worse is yet to come. A friend of mine, who heads the Boston AIDS Commission, said he saw a report from a major news service focusing on a secret Justice Department memo. The memo said, essentially, just go out and bust heads for the next eight months and don't worry about the consequences.
What happens to civil liberties groups, AIDS support groups, refugee help groups?
T.R. Witomski: The administration is saying, "Look, the country is falling apart, but the smut peddlers are on the run"in the end, of course, nothing much happens. A few people go to jail, but the D.A.'s don't want to go after the Hefners or Gucciones because these guys have the financial resources to drag these cases out for a thousand years.
Kiddie porn is very, very underground. I know a lot of pornographers, but I don't know one who's dealing in the real young stuff. If the government does convict a few kiddie pornographers, it'll feel like it's done something to save the republic from the demon forces of filth and corruption. For most of us in the business, it'll be business as usual.
Rich Grzesiak: Should there be restrictions on who can have access to pornography, e.g., minors, children, certain adults?
anonymous: Sadly, I don't think laws or regulations are the means to deal with pornography. Ultimately, our own individual moral and ethical codes govern these matters. If human beings are corrupt, laws do nothing but provide a semblance of morality.
Edwin Clark "Toby" Johnson: I think porn only makes sense to people who are sexually mature and experienced. Children are not ready for it in the same way that they are not ready for Tolstoy.
As a high school student I read Saint John of the Cross' crazy mystical stuff about the dark night of the soul and how one should strive for the most miserable life possible. One of my teachers told me I was too young for it. He was right. If you're too young to read certain religious works, you can be too young to deal with certain sexual works.
T.R. Witomski: I've accepted that pornography should be restricted to adults, but I'd probably vote to lower the age of consent because most fourteen year olds today know more about sex than my grandmother. Letting them have access to photos of cunts and cocks hardly seems harmful.
Rich Grzesiak: Should there be proscriptions on certain topics in pornographic works, like, say, pedophilia, incest?
anonymous: Yes. Any pornographic work that promotes addiction or unsafe sex should be restricted and prohibited from sale.
Edwin Clark "Toby" Johnson: The British commission on pornography recommended a pretty sensible approach. They suggested that porn should be treated like the acts it portrayed, i.e., if you can't have sex in public—say, on a downtown street—then you shouldn't show a picture of sex on a downtown street. If it's against the law to have sex with children, then it should be illegal to show pictures of people having sex with them. Notice how this approach simply drops the entire issue of pornography from the question.
There's also the parallel point of whether porn should portray unsafe sex. Since porn can feed fantasies, why not show what can be fantasized even if it can't actually be done (e.g., unprotected fucking)? At the same time, watching unprotected fucking is possibly watching one person infect another. That ought to be abhorrent, if only because it's a turnoff.
If there's something objectionable involved in the act, then there ought to be something objectionable in watching it.
To assure safety, all porn stars should want to be tested voluntarily before making a film. In fact, why not include this information in the plot?
John Mitzel: This is an unlikely development, given the hugeness and diversity of tastes. Incest is hardly a new theme in literature. What was the poor lad's name Oedipus? The question is: should all incest-themed entertainments be tragic? A friend of mine offers this wisdom: that all sets of male twins are curious about sex with each other. This seems to me a legitimate theme to explore. And we might do it, in an open-minded scientific way, rather in the morality-laden therapeutic track we're stuck on.
T.R. Witomski: you could probably create an entire book in response to this question. Let's just say that in pornography, there are matters of tasteAs a video producer, newsletter publisher [Kink Confidential], and writer, I don't have to deal with topics I find offensiveI don't care for racist pornography or sex with Fido or bloody S&M. I'm also not prepared to say that someone whose fondest sexual fantasy is to be whipped bloody by a black Nazi while Fido and a 12 year old watch is wrong or sick or crazy—but I will say that I won't be involved with the production of images that would satisfy that someone.
Rich Grzesiak: Can pornography function as art?
anonymous: That's like saying, "Can art be created while under the influence of sex, drugs, or alcohol? Maybe so, but the price the creator pays for such originality can be a deadly one. Need I mention the careers of John Holmes or others?
Edwin Clark "Toby" Johnson: I think this question confuses things by implying that if porn is art, then it's okay. I think it's just the other way around: porn specifically induces a sexual state of consciousness in the same way that prayer, incense and statues induce a religious state of awareness
Boyd McDonald: Pornography does function as art—and also as history. The men who write letters about their true sex experiences are giving the real history of homosexuality, history written by the men who made it, not by the piss elegant, pompously pretentious academics with their "in terms of" and their "sense of deja vu."
John Mitzel: Pornography is, again, a false construct. And "functioning" is something glands and banks do. But yes, the best art is infused with a spiritual or hungry sexuality. When Michelangelo Buonarroti carved out the David, what was on his mind? If the National Endowment for the Arts today commissioned Claus Oldenburg to do a similar statue for the National Gallery, wouldn't cries of "Porn!" ejaculate from the repressed?
T.R. Witomski: Yes, it can, but it rarely does. Susan Sontag goes into great detail about pornography as art in her essay "The Pornographic Imagination." There are works that turn us on and merit the most serious consideration as art. Most examples I can think of are literary: Story of O, Anne Rice's Beauty books, parts of John Preston's I Once Had a Master and Other Tales of Erotic Love. I think Christopher Rage's videos approach art, but I almost feel a little silly stating that—it sounds like Rage's videos are pretentious and they're not.
Rich Grzesiak: Finally, there seems to be an upswing in gay male interest in pornography, primarily as a substitute for unsafe sex. If you agree with this assessment, do you think these trends will persist over the long term (5 years)?
anonymous: This phenomenon disturbs, depresses and puzzles me. Yes, it's great that people stay at home watching unsafe sex acts via porno tapes they've rented, but I'm afraid there are studies made by social scientists indicating that viewers of such pornographic works wind up being more inclined to pursuing unsafe sexual acts and not less so. I am frightened that people who watch a great deal of pornography will look for real life sexual situations that mirror the unsafe ones they see on video.
Edwin Clark "Toby" Johnson: I agree that porn is substituting for unsafe sexa very good, healthy adjustment.
Porn is a nice way to satisfy sexual urges in a safe and "romanticized" way while we're looking for or working on developing a serious relationship with another person that includes sex and much more. I also think that enjoying porn with a lover is a wonderful way of acknowledging sexuality that isn't always romantic—and a useful way to satisfy needs for recreational sex that don't threaten the relationship.
John Mitzel: AIDS has made sex on video for faggots a given. It's really quite profound—the performers assume the risk and viewers get to eat it all. It's a weird kind of reification the Marxist analysts haven't explored yet, but it is an event in our community and the "porno consciousness" has never been greater. I just wish people had more fun with it instead of taking sex so seriously!
T.R. Witomski: Yes, gay men are buying more smut. Thank God! In Manhattan, where's to go? No more Mineshaft, no more Everard Baths. I stay home with the VCR, mostly watching really obscure 1960's horror films—and I'm not alone.
While some of the increased interest in porn results from the AIDS crisis, that's not the whole reason: the Stonewall studs are getting older and richer. I can't go out to the bars 'til 4 A.M. and expect to function the next day, and I think many guys of my generation now experience this situation. Being a slut took a lot of my time and energyit's so much easier to just j/o with porn.
Plus, as we age, we become more domestic. So you and your lover don't go to the baths, you stay home and watch Transsexual Cycle Sluts in Diaper Bondage. Or you invite friends over for popcorn and a double bill of Cobra Woman and Shave Slave (Shave Slave's one of my productions, of course—I deserve some free publicity!).