The appearance this week on Fratmen of Raphael, who died in June this year, has started an interesting discussion about the ethics of promoting scenes featuring performers who are no longer with us. It’s an interesting discussion because there’s much more to it than there seems.
The consensus seems to be that it’s not appropriate to promote scenes featuring dead gay porn stars, such as Arpad Miklos (above) and, sadly, numerous others. But why is that? When movie stars die, nobody objects to their movies being played. On the contrary, one of the ways we pay respect to dead movie stars is by keeping their image alive in as many ways as possible – think Marilyn Monroe or River Phoenix.
So, what’s the difference? You tell us in this week’s QueerClick Open Forum.
Not all of us are white, and not all of us only get off on white men, so why is gay porn so, well, white?
It seems sometimes that you really have to search for non-white men in gay porn, indeed, there’s entire studios that don’t feature any models of non-European backgrounds at all. And often, when you find some racial diversity in gay porn, it’s often framed inside cartoonish and stereotyped boundaries: hung black guys who are ultra-macho and dominant, or pliant Asian men, who are 100% passive.
And this is quite odd, really, since many of us live in racially mixed environments where we have sex with all comers, and interracial relationships are so common that it seems dated and odd to even note that they are “interracial”.
What’s your view? Does the racial mix of gay porn match your reality? Do you want it to – does it need to? And what do you think drives it? This great speech from Diesel Washington gives some insight into an interesting possibility:
Nothing compares 2 an Open Letter, especially now that it’s all the rage. Bring out your inner Sinead (or Miley, whatever suits) in this week’s Queerclick Open Forum and pen your own Open Letter to the gay porn industry. Tell those who produce the gay porn we’re all addicted to what you really think about what they make, and what they might want to do instead. You can do it anonymously, or angrily sign your name to your lengthy list of complaints. Or, you might have no complaints — there’s no reason why an Open Letter can’t be a Love Letter too, you know. The forum is all yours. Img: Donnie Russo and his bored partner wait for “Action” to be called on the set of one of Falcon’s classic vintage gay pornos.
In our last Open Forum, we discussed barebacking in gay porn, and the lively discussion reached a mixed consensus, with the QC Jury still out on whether barebacking in gay porn is acceptable at all, and if it influences our own sexual behavior or if it doesn’t.
This time around, we wanted to look at something that caught our eye in the UK media recently, a strange article from the UK’s Daily Mail about children and teenagers having surprisingly broad vocabularies from their exposure to porn got us thinking about this week’s discussion: is gay porn, long thought to be the apex of all that’s decadent, queer and subversive about the gays, actually far less experimental and much tamer than its straight counterpart.
If you read the Daily Mail article, you may be surprised to read that local children and teenagers appear to be very familiar with porn at such a young age. But look at the type of porn they (presumably via their parents, older siblings, or other children at school) are being exposed to: porn featuring limbless people, sex with animals, and more anal than you’d see in a Treasure Island 50,000 Load Weekend marathon. And this is all straight porn.
Haven’t you ever noticed that beyond differences in body type – fratboy porn, bear porn, muscle porn, office porn and so on – gay porn tends to be pretty formulaic. Is it that gay sexual tastes are actually quite “straight” forward? Do you ever watch gay porn that is really off the beam, featuring things that are relatively way out, even shocking?
Do you wish gay porn was a bit more experimental, and if so, what would you be curious about seeing?
And, did you watch porn when you were an early teen or child? None of us on the QC editorial staff had ever heard of such a thing until we came of age.
Let’s discuss.
(Image: Race Cooper gets in touch with his inner dog at Fetish Force).
Rod Daily’s recent admission that he tested positive for HIV(after his girlfriend Cameron Bay’s similar announcement the week before that shut down the hetero porn industry LA-wide) has re-ignited a whole bunch of conversations, and no small amount of finger-pointing.
Today, we’d like to put the finger pointing away (we have no information on how Rod came to be infected, and frankly, we don’t think it’s really any of our business) and concentrate on one particular conversation that’s doing the rounds since Rod’s announcement: we’d like to know what you think about the rights-versus-wrongs of condom-free porn.
