What are the requirements for working in a large gay porn production company? To have an athletic body. To be well endowed. To not be camera shy. To be white. This last one is not made explicit by adult entertainment producers and is no general rule, but it is pretty much the reality of facts: as we reported three years ago, the top five male-only adult sites had a percentage of non-white performers ranging from 0 to 2%. Since then, even though there is still a long way to go, things have slightly improved: several new companies seem to be more open to ethnic diversity, even if the verdict on their choices is far from unanimous.
On Men.com and Sean Cody, the two largest gay porn sites in the world, black, Latino, and Asian performers on the whole are still a minority, but they have growing visibility. Things are a little worse on Gay Hoopla, the third site in the ranking: it does feature non-white performers, but they all are virtually hidden. The same goes for Helix Studios, fourth in the ranking, even though, just to look on the bright side, three years ago only white performers worked for this production company. Coming to the fifth site, Tim Tale, it gives more space to ethnic minorities than its larger competitors. In short, there has been progress, but definitely not enough.
One-colour friends
Meanwhile Bel Ami, that in three years has gone from the fifth to the tenth position in the gay porn site chart, has loudly announced that it engaged a black actor, Kedar Marchetti. This is big news for a production company, founded in the United States in 1993 and moved to Slovakia in 2000, renowned for its very young, very thin and very white performers. In nearly 30 years, Bel Ami has strayed from this rule very few times: in 2006 it shot a few scenes with Adam Dexter, and in 2012, after allegations of racism, it disclosed that its performer Austin Merrick, despite being very light-skinned, is “mulatto”. When the remedy is worse than the disease…
Soon after Kedar Marchetti, the third non-fully-white performer (sigh…), the production company hired a fourth one, Joshua Graf, who performed in a ping pong porn contest (sic!) with seven other – all white – guys – unless, of course, Bel Ami won’t disclose that some of them has an Indian ancestor… Truth be said, while black performers were generally very well received on other sites, the Bel Ami audience divided sharply, with heated arguments between those who thought that Marchetti and Graf “don’t mix well with the rest of the group” (but not because of their skin colour, mind you!) and those who dismissed this and other statements as outright racism.
Duty and pleasure
In the meanwhile, also Active Duty has opened its doors to ethnic diversity. This adult entertainment production company, founded in 1998, specializes in portraying sex between U.S. soldiers. Yet, while whites make up 57% of U.S. military men in service, only one black actor so far, Arlington Jones, appeared in Active Duty videos, in just two scenes filmed in February and May 2019. Now, along comes African-American Adrian Hart: some consider it just a fig-leaf operation in the wake of the #BlackLivesMatter movement by a company that is still bound to racist clichés (incidentally Hart, like Jones, performs as a top), some others see it as an important progress towards awareness.
Only time will tell whether the adult entertainment industry, long accused of racism both for its representation of ethnic minorities and for its discriminatory practices against non-white performers, has learned its lesson. Surely the solution cannot be, as some suggest, self-entrepreneurship: yes, everyone can get involved on sites like OnlyFans and evade the rules of the porn industry, but this sounds a bit like saying that because few women hold executive posts, they should go and set up a stall at the market. All in all, the choices made by the adult entertainment industry should not be underestimated, because it holds the near-monopoly over the representation of sexuality and the creation of aesthetic models. And that is no small thing.
Pier Cesare Notaro
translation by Antonio Pauletta
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immagini: Il Grande Colibrì
