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It wasn’t easy to write a history of gay porn and its evolution between the decades since Andy Warhol’s time till the present time. It was necessary an extraordinary documentation, a great patience, the will not to surrender to the reluctance of a lot of the workers of this industry. The one who’s been able to realize it is Kevin Clarke, who re-published his “Porn. From Andy Warhol to X-Tube” (Bruno Gmünder Verlag). In this research the editor-in-chief of Männer retraces the main moments that, after the 70s’ boys-next-door and the frozen adonis of the post-HIV era, led the common men and the most wild fantasies to become characters of the most recent movies.

Between interviews, analysis and old documents, a lot of exciting pictures accompany the 260 pages of the book: but finally porn has a place in museums and in sociological analysis, is the subject of academic thesis and of exhibitions and conferences. Starting to realize Clarke’s dream: that gay is just a category to be found on search engine in porn websites and that porn regularization removes the moralism that have always relegated it as a perversion, as he explains in this interview to Il Grande Colibrì.

How were you able to collect and select all the material published in your book?

Luckily, there were two main sources. One was the archive of the Schwule Museum in Berlin, the other the online data base of Bruno Gmünder Publishing. I had curated an exhibition at the Museum last year, so I knew the people there well. They allowed me to open their boxes in a very non-bureaucratic way. What I found were piles and piles of porn magazines from the 1940s, 50s, 60s and 70s, that gay men had left to the Museum when they died. It’s very difficult to find these vintage magazines today because most of the publishers don’t exist anymore and libraries don’t collect pornography. On top of that, the museum had a lot of historically important material, items reflecting the struggle for gay liberation as well as the AIDS crisis in the 1980s.

Moreover there are some 19th century erotic pictures…

These images are among my own favorites in the book. Even in our modern world where any kind of porn image seems to be available, and not further away than a mouse click, it would be very hard to find such photos. I believe that’s one of the reasons so many people bought my book – it’s a form of time travel. It takes you beyond anything you see on current porn websites; even though vintage porn has made a surprising comeback there too.

The other source, as you said, was Gmünder’s archive…

Gmünder has been the German distributor for nearly every great American porn studio, and luckily they have access to nearly all the data bases of these studios. That covered most of the period from 1980 onwards. Since Gmünder still deals with porn today, they are also in contact with most of the new studios, which was a great help. Because porn people – I discovered to my horror – can be notoriously difficult to deal with or get hold off. The big exception here is Lucas Kazan, the Italian filmmaker from Milan. He helped me with this project from the very beginning. Without his guidance “Porn” never would have been possible to complete. Whenever no one answered my emails or behaved inexplicitly weird, Lucas intervened and smoothed the way. I cannot thank him enough!

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What were the main evolutions of porn since Andy Warhol?

Just like any other, the history of pornography moves along in small steps that can sometimes – later – form larger episodes. What happened in the time of Andy Warhol, that is in North America in the 1960s, is that porn became partly legalized, including gay porn. You were allowed to make porn, distribute it, and even show it in public. A film such as Wakefield Poole’s pioneering “Boys in the Sand” (1971) played in a public cinema in Manhattan, it was advertised in the New York Times and reviewed by magazines such as Variety. There were queues a mile long around the theater, not just gay men wanted to see it, but women and straight men too. “Boys in the Sand” became a mass phenomenon; but it remained an exception.

How was pornography in the 70s?

In those years gay porn reflected the sex people had themselves. Porn and reality were often very much alike. It was the so called “Golden Age of Promiscuity”. “Pornography couldn’t compete with real life,” recalls a gay man in Rodger McFarlane’s “Gay Sex in the 1970s”, “anything that was in pornography you could have in abundance on the street any day, walk in any gym – more beautiful men, more dick, more available dick – right out the door into their apartment, the party starts in an hour, you can go in the backroom right now. It was like life was a pornographic film.”

When became porn so relevant, then?

This phase ended when AIDS hit and no one dared to have sex anymore. Porn became a substitute. Instead of reflecting real life, as before, it became a total fantasy product. The men you see – stars such as Jeff Stryker, Ryan Idol or Ken Ryker – were a new type of actor: gay-for-pay. They indirectly suggest that being straight means being risk free in terms of HIV and thus the ultimate safe object of desire for homosexuals. There was an enormous demand for porn-on-video-cassette, and these new superstars – using condoms for the first time in gay porn history – were paid up to $50,000 dollars a film. A whole series of merchandizing products was built on their brand names.

The 2009 catalogue Gay Icons of London’s National Portrait Gallery states: “Stryker’s iconic status is derived from something larger than just acting: it is his unashamed commercialization, from Stryker Lube and the Jeff Stryker Action Figure to the best-selling Jeff Stryker Cock and Balls, a dildo cast directly from his erect penis. By capitalizing on his celebrity status in this way, he ensured that he was the first gay porn star to become a brand in his own right.” Stryker is, to this day, one of the few gay porn personalities to have become something of a household name.

And then come the 80s and 90s…

The porn films of that time, all made by a handful of studios in the US, became increasingly plastic looking, surreal even. These super-hunks with white socks, white Calvin Klein briefs, gigantic cocks and frozen faces never seemed to actually enjoy sex. They just fucked, like machines. No kissing, no communication, they just did their “job.” It’s not surprising that people got tired of seeing this, at some point.

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And we finally arrived to the present time, isn’t it? Now everyone can post his own porn on web sites and social networks, reaching those “fifteen minutes of celebrity” promised by Warhol…

Exactly. When the World Wide Web offered us a chance to make our own films and put them out there, a true revolution began: most of the established studios were blown away and went bankrupt, and a wave of so called free “reality porn” swept the internet – with X-Tube as first and famous outlet. Also, thanks to the internet, every fetish imaginable was now available online because people anywhere could find specialized studios via google or other search engines.

The result?

There has never been so much porn as today, and porn has never been so democratic. Instead of five main US-studios dictating what we can see (and what we can’t see) we now decide for ourselves, by going to the websites of our choice. This also brought forth the enormous boom for bareback porn and studios such as Treasure Island Media which do not just make condom-less porn but who fetishize HIV and the idea of pozzing with films like “90 Loads in One Week-End”. There is a shocking, yet great, film documentary on them available called “The Island”. Definitely worth watching!

In the Gmünder book “Positive Pictures” by Paul Schulz and Christian Lütjens [Il Grande Colibrì], the theme of the relation between porn and HIV was faced distinguishing between bareback made in a HIV-positive community and videos which prompt to unsafe sex. What’s your opinion about this theme?

The term “bareback” is used very randomly in porn today. It has become a sort of advertising slogan, as if “bareback sex” means “hotter sex”. In my opinion, there are two sorts of bareback porn. One shows young men having standard porn sex, but without condoms. They seem to suggest: “We are young and healthy, HIV doesn’t concern us because we were born long after the AIDS crisis, so we don’t need to worry about condoms.” Most of the new mainstream online porn studios show that kind of sex, including Bel Ami in selected scenes.

The other variety are films that fetishize sperm explicitly, and the idea of pumping as much sperm into another person as possible, which is then called “breeding”. As if to say: “We are not afraid of sperm and HIV, because we don’t care, or we are already positive and thus don’t need any further precaution. We can simply enjoy ourselves!” These barebacking “breeders” often have totally unhinged sex on screen, and many viewers seem to find this kind of sex more thrilling than the more carefully staged young-and-pretty-variety. As a consequence, many barebackers have become something of urban heroes, lifestyle icons even, if you want to call them that way.

Do you think that these movies have an influence on the sex habits of the public?

I personally know a lot of people who aim to copy this bareback role model, including the fact that they stage their own sex parties where ten tops spurt into a willing bottom, everything filmed for private use of course, to make it extra kinky. These two versions of bareback porn don’t have much in common, except for the sales slogan.

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Why did bareback become so popular?

I think, that gay men are tired of the never ending AIDS crisis and its aftermath. They want it to be over and move on, or get back to that glorious Golden Age of Promiscuity. It’s probably no coincidence that vintage porn from the 70s has made such a comeback on the internet, even with young viewers who did not live through the seventies themselves. The sex you see there is so much more relaxed and liberated, compared with the films from the 80s and 90s. It’s not just a question of using condoms. It’s the whole attitude that has been lost. And that many try to regain.

Whether bareback is the fast-lane to achieve that goal remains to be seen. Certainly, the return of the barebacking sex pigs, that everyone can see and admire online is something many (young and old) dream of copying. Because, in a way, porn always reflects real life and it always inspires real life at the same time. Since this bareback problem is out there, and it is a problem, I believe we should address it openly and discuss it openly, instead of pretending it doesn’t exist, which is, sort of, what the authors of “Positive Pictures” do.

Porn is still considered by the masses as something wrong and even in the LGBT community a lot of people think that it shouldn’t be spread out. What do you think about this?

There has recently been a university research that claimed: straight men and teenagers who consume a lot of internet porn are more tolerant towards sexual minorities. I think that’s great!

It’s something revolutionary, isn’t it?

Hopefully, for the next generation growing up with online porn gay sex will be just another category on PornHub, right next to “Big Tits” or “MILFS.” If you click your way through these categories, you’ll see similar people having similar sex: boy on boy, or boy on girl, or girl on girl, or everything mixed up, trans, bondage, and it’s all right next to each other. On these porn sites, sex is finally freed from the Christian ideal of divine reproduction and reduced to fun. Nothing more, nothing less. You can see it as such, you can enjoy it as such. Without feeling morally guilty. That’s truly revolutionary. And of course it has huge political implications for the Christian-conservative society. If that were the only thing porn has achieved in the new millennium, in terms of liberation, it should be nominated for an Oscar right away.

Porn didn’t get an Oscar, but it’s much more visible than in the past, as shown by the exhibition you curated in Berlin and your book…

Porn studies – gay, straight, queer, whatever – are taught at renowned universities worldwide; there are acclaimed museum exhibitions showing porn in art or porn stars as seen by great artists such as Warhol, Jeff Koons or Pierre & Gilles; there are academic conferences on porn influences in literature, film etc. There even was an exhibition on something so supposedly old-fashioned as operetta at the Theatermuseum Wien last year: “The Birth of Operetta from the Spirit of Pornography”. I loved it! Porn is not about to go away. On the contrary, it has become – more and more openly, and more and more matter-of-factly – a part of daily life, on all levels. It had been there before already, only until recently no one talked about it.

 

Michele
©2013 Il Grande Colibrì

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