Sex for Sale~Prostitution, Pornography and the Sex Industry (16 page)

F i g u r e 3 . 1

T h e 2 0 0 7 G a y V N A w a r d s S h o w , E m c e e K a t h y G r i f f i n ,
p e r f o r m e r R o m a n H e a r t , a n d d i r e c t o r C h i C h i L a R u e . P h o t o
c o u r t e s y o f A d u l t V i d e o N e w s .

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GAY MALE PORNOGRAPHY SINCE STONEWALL

Actors making the dance circuit in the nation’s gay bars became an integral part of the gay porn industry—and a major boost to performers’

incomes.40 Go-go boys had been around for years, but in the late 1980s, following the lead of the popular Chippendale’s dancers for women, roving troupes of muscular male dancers began making the circuits of America’s gay bars. Most bars seemed to have dancers on the menu at least once a week by the early 1990s.41 These dancing boys represented the same peak of physical perfection that one found in contemporaneous videos. In the 1990s, many gay porn performers used their video work primarily as a means to make a name for themselves to obtain work on the dance circuit in gay bars, where they could make much more money.42

Additional work was necessary because working in gay sex films did not pay a living wage. Pay varied tremendously depending on the popularity and experience of the performer and the company and kind of work they were expected to do. Performers generally were paid by the scene, the rate ranging from about $500 to $2500 a scene.43 Tops usually were paid more than bottoms because, as in the straight porn industry, reliable erections were a scarce commodity. There were no fringe benefits such as medical insurance.

Pay was among a variety of factors luring self-identified straight men into the industry (known as gay-for-pay);44 men were paid much less in straight porn than in gay. However, the rise of exclusively web-based porn has upset the economic status quo. Rumors have circulated about exorbitant rates paid in order to keep prize performers exclusive to a particular site. Initially, few of these performers participated in traditional studio DVDs, but in 2009 a number of popular Internet stars such as Leo Giamani began working for major studios as well as websites.

Gay porn performers for traditional studios more frequently pursued careers or had jobs outside the industry than did straight porn performers.

Porn often provided only supplemental income, and usually only for a few years.45 Most performers had “day jobs,” such as realtor, hotel clerk, personal trainer, financial consultant, or registered nurse.46 In addition, prostitution was not uncommon as a means of supplementing a performer’s income.

Indeed, for many escorting was their primary source of income.47 According to porn star Blue Blake, as an escort he made “more money than God.”48 In the 1990s, magazines such as
Unzipped
(national) and
Frontiers
(southern California) contained hundreds of ads for escorts, which often included pictures of the “product.” During the digital era these ads moved online, where multiple venues existed for listing their services, as well as for customers to post reviews. Many ads made note that the advertiser was a “porn star” or

“former porn star” or “Colt model.” Thus the porn performances became an
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important means of building a market for escort services. Charging $250 an hour or more, this could be a much more profitable occupation than working in videos.

The gay porn industry had important parallels with and differences from straight porn. The two branches of the industry saw similar growth during the expansion of the market in the video era of the 1980s. Both gay and straight porn had a well-developed “star system” in which certain popular performers received higher salaries and better working conditions.49 Both segments of the industry were also geographically centered in California, and often used the same sound stages. Some performers even crossed over between genres: straight male performers occasionally performed masturbation scenes in gay videos, and female performers such as Sharon Kane had frequent cameos or nonsexual acting roles. In straight videos, however, women were always the primary focus. Men were purely supporting characters. Another important difference was the lack of a gay market for “softcore,” which deletes images of penetration. Many straight videos were released in two versions: a hardcore version for the home video market and a softcore version for adult cable television channels. Gay videos were scarce in the lucrative cable market, and only a few studios occasionally made softcore versions of major gay features.

One would think that a medium that flouted societal taboos about sexuality would itself be less subject to taboos. Instead, both gay and straight pornography was bound by unwritten rules of representation. Restrictive sexual roles (e.g., tops and bottoms, often determined by physical type) were only one aspect of pornography’s strange dedication to tradition. The visible ejaculation, or “cum shot,” was another necessity. Also typical: a third party who discovered a couple having sex would immediately join in. That such cliché tropes became something of a joke for both viewers and producers had little effect on their ongoing prevalence.

Consolidation and migration has taken place in the large gay porn studios during the digital era. In the film era, products were made in New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, but during the video era production was almost exclusively in Los Angeles (except for Falcon Studios in San Francisco). Two new studios that appeared during the 1990s, Titan and Raging Stallion, were also based there; All Worlds Video was in San Diego, and the rest were in Los Angeles. During the digital era the new bareback studios were based in San Francisco, and several Los Angeles companies moved there as well, such as Studio 2000 and Colt. In Los Angeles, Chi Chi LaRue gradually bought most of the remaining studios, establishing a southern California porn empire. By the end of the 2000s, the bulk of gay porn production was based in San Francisco.50 Meanwhile, one maverick, Russian immigrant Michael Lucas,
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established a large company in New York. In some ways, the gay porn world has returned to its roots with three capitals.

However, during the digital era other major centers of porn production, both gay and straight, emerged in Europe and Latin America. In gay porn’s early years, the only significant overseas product was made by Jean-Daniel Cadinot in France. Kristen Bjorn pioneered gay porn in Latin America and central Europe, and others soon followed. Most significant in Europe was Georges DuRoy and his Bel Ami studio in Slovakia and the Czech Republic, which soon became the brand of choice for youth-oriented viewers. Another center developed in Hungary, where the stable of performers was older and more muscular. During the digital era, dozens of directors and brands sprang up in Europe, and foreign directors from France and the U.S. also took advantage of the lower overhead and fresh faces available there. Brazil became the capital of the Latin American scene; only one major Brazilian producer distributed videos in the U.S. in the 1990s, but in the next decade numerous directors turned out an ever expanding stream of product. Between the explosion of Internet porn and the growth of overseas studios, gay porn is clearly a full participant in the new globalized economy.

P O R N I N TH E G AY C O M M U N IT Y

Who watches gay porn videos? Statistical studies are scarce, but judging from its prominence in gay media and entertainment, viewership in the gay community appears to be quite high. Even in 1979, when print pornography was the main form of pornographic expression, one informal survey found that more than 50% of the 1038 gay male respondents said that they sometimes used pornography for sexual stimulation.51 When
Frontiers
magazine held a survey of its readers in 1997, about one-quarter said they watched porn videos once a month, and about 15% viewed them once a week.52 A 2004 study showed that gay men viewed pornographic videos and Internet porn at over twice the rate of heterosexual men.53 Perhaps not surprisingly, heterosexual women sometimes confessed to enjoying gay porn, just as straight men enjoyed watching women have sex with each other. Much more surprising was the presence of a small but enthusiastic audience of lesbians. Falcon Studios’ promotions director estimated in 2001 that 10% of their customers were female, and half of those were lesbians, for whom the attraction of gay porn ranged from its overall production quality to identification with the intensity of the sex portrayed.54

Porn has played an important role in the social and cultural life of gay America. As Bruce Whitehead put it: “Pornography is so ubiquitous in the
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gay community that I’m not sure you could escape it and still claim to be an active part of gay culture.”55 A major difference between gay and straight pornography was that gay porn was more thoroughly integrated into gay life, whereas straight porn was typically considered deviant and stigmatized by much of the mainstream heterosexual world (despite inroads made by popular performers such as Jenna Jameson). One gay porn industry insider wrote that straights were far more fascinated with his work than gays: “To gay men, the concept of screwing a stranger is not beyond the pale of everyday life.”56

Michael Warner has argued for the importance of a public culture of sex in gay society,57 of which pornography is a major part. Porn has always held a more accepted, even exalted position in gay culture than in straight; as sexual outlaws, gays were less concerned about being called perverts. As Michael Bronski pointed out, straight culture generally considered pornography to be highly dangerous, and gay pornography doubly so.58 In spite of the changes wrought by the sexual revolution, mainstream America remained highly discomfited by the open display of sexuality, even heterosexuality. What better way to assert a gay identity than by the open, casual acceptance and celebration of homophobically dreaded sex acts? The omnipresence of sexual imagery in gay media—even beyond pornography—has been explained as a way for gays to create a “positive definition” for themselves.59 Charles Isherwood has written that porn came “out of the closet” in the late 1980s in conjunction with a politicization of the gay community that found a vehicle in groups such as ACT-UP; porn thus became a personal assertion of gay identity.60

Heterosexual society’s continued discomfort with sexuality in general and pornography in particular meant that gay men’s casual acceptance of pornography provided another tool for thwarting the norms of the dominant culture.

As a means of social communication, in some ways porn has supplanted the earlier tradition of the “camp” sensibility. Camp’s arch appreciation for the marginal provided an oppressed subculture with a secret code of taste that helped to unite and identify closeted gay men. Porn, a marginalized genre, perhaps provided a more aggressive unifying force for a later generation—one that openly celebrated gay sexuality.61

In the gay community, video porn has become as common and quotidian as bar hopping. Or, as one writer put it: “That pornography is so accepted in the gay community that we are almost blasé about it, is a cliché.”62 Along Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood, a predominantly gay neighborhood in Los Angeles, a large billboard was used at least twice in the 1990s to advertise newly released porn films: for
Idol in the Sky
, superstar Ryan Idol’s last movie, and later for
Ryker’s Revenge
, the comeback film for the popular early 1990s’ star Ken Ryker. Porn star Tom Chase’s image graced two
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GAY MALE PORNOGRAPHY SINCE STONEWALL

billboard advertisements for an adult video store in the gay quarter of Houston in 1998. Such public ads are hard to imagine for a straight video outside the immediate vicinity of a porn store.

Gay videos have achieved an almost respectable position in gay life. The swapping of gay porn videos has become common, and rental outlets are no longer the sleazy adult stores and arcades that were the initial locus for pornography. During the 1990s, legitimate gay bookstores began to rent and sell porn videos alongside pride flags and
New York Times
bestsellers, and in the digital era, Netflix-style online rental businesses sprang up. Robert Hofler reported that porn stars have been seen regularly at disco openings and various public and private parties. Porn work could even provide an entry into influential gay social circles—ones available to those with the proper abs and pecs but without other credentials.63 A number of popular documentary films about gay porn have been produced.64 DVDs often feature “making-of”

documentaries as part of the special features. Porn videos themselves have included an inordinate number of stories involving the industry itself: from
Giants
(1983) to
The Making of a Gay Video
(1995).65

Gay videos themselves sometimes actively demonstrated a connection between porn and gay life. In
Show Your Pride
(1997) scenes from an actual gay pride parade centered around the float of director Chi Chi LaRue, who was surrounded by hordes of scantily clad, muscular porn models dancing to the disco beat, much as they might during their frequent club performances. This montage played out against the sound of a plaintive voice wailing “Show your pride” to a repetitive disco tune. This scene, sandwiched in the middle of the video, segued abruptly to a massive orgy. This video illustrated the exalted position of porn stars in gay life through their prominent position on a float in a real pride parade; and through its quick jump cut from scenes of a cultural event to hardcore sex, it was also a metaphor for the casual ease with which many gay men approach pornography.

Despite its integration into gay life, gay porn has not been without its critics. Writers such as Michelangelo Signorile and Daniel Harris have vilified gay porn and its muscular bodies as presenting destructive and impossible models of beauty and sexuality.66 However, research on responses to pornography has shown only a minor correlation of gay porn viewing with social physique anxiety and a drive for muscularity, and no connection to negative body image or other psychological problems.67 Gay porn has also been subject to much of the same criticism applied to straight porn: that it is sexist, degrading, and violent. These arguments have depended largely on the assumption that pornography, per se, was demeaning and aggressive, and that in gay pornography one partner (the bottom) was inevitably subordinate,
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