The starting juncture for this odyssey is naturally a revisiting of the biography, and I am happy that Thomas Waugh has been persuaded to provide his own reassessment of what has develop a foundational venture because of scholars of gay porn and his own reflections on the voice of the field. As continually, his humour and acuity is first-class (his description of Gail Dines as this record book’s ‘demogogue nemesis’ has мейд me go into hysterics every in good time I have announce it), as is his modesty, acknowledging, as he does in ‘Men’s Erotica, Gay vs. Unqualified: a Familiar Revisit’ that his essay was past no means the pre-eminent on the subject. ‘Men’s Pornography: Gay vs Straightforward’ is nonetheless in my view (and this is a view shared by numberless others) an particularly substantial intervention. In this brand-new article, Waugh describes the set of communal and cultural circumstances that experience to the putting out of his effort in Jump Cut in 1985. In particular this reappraisal usefully works to remind readers of the innovations contained therein. These comprise a planned rubric in behalf of analysis and the uncommonly apposite (and in diverse regards prophetic) observation that gay porn does not exist in luxurious isolation and should be more meaningfully agreed as part of what Tom describes as a ‘continuum’ here.

Stephen Maddison’s article ‘Comradeship of Cock? Gay Porn and the Entrepreneurial Voyeur’ takes up many of the account themes that Waugh has identified, and his intervention can be accepted both as a answer to Waugh’s earlier essay as opulently as his own perceptive appraisal of 30 years of research into gay porn. Maddison has previously written entirely astutely give the grinding of a distinguishing gay erudition and the attendant federal implications of gay assimilation. In this article he ages again draws our prominence to David Halperin’s (2014) recently made excellence between a gay personality associated with capitalism, commodification and assimilation and a gay subjectivity that offers the odds of dissidence. Maddison engages critically with the suggestion that diverse others accept made hither the centrality of porn to gay mores and interrogates this proclamation into done with the lens of neoliberalism. In his article he looks at microblogging Tumblr sites that trait pornographic cheerful which he sees as acting as a instal of a distinctively ‘gay’ and thereby consciously revolutionary gay culture.

The bearing here between public, cultural and public changes and developments in gay porn is not a trivial one. These events, whilst variously meritorious, nonetheless climate as if they be the property to a off gone, so it is perchance more surprising for porn scholars to note that it is now over 30 years since Thomas Waugh wrote the foundational essay ‘Men’s Smut: Gay vs Flat’, in which he noted the centrality of homoeroticism to gay culture:

There are pacific lacunae in porn experimentation, and Sharif Mowlabocus and Andy Medhurst in ‘Six Propositions of the Sonics of Gay Obscenity’ recognize empathize with a longstanding area that is moreover to be fully explored. Shape in porn films (compare favourably with to a lesser extent to bringing off) remains under-researched and Mowlabocus and Medhurst offer some orientations to allow that avenue to be opened up, noting – with a regular wholesome raillery that British readers will-power markedly understand – that gay porn ‘relies on the pants we heed as much as the pants we bring’.

At the last moment, my own article is an crack to draw together some of the themes that the contributors to this determined efflux entertain identified, to look to the admissible tomorrow's of gay porn as a variety and to call the supervision of the next present of my own progressive research in the field. In ‘Popperbate: Video Collage, Familiar Creativity and the Scripting of the Gay Licentious Body’ I look at some of the non-professional porn-making practices that are circulated with the aid the streaming platforms Tsika mentions in his article. In particular, my item of study is a spelt form of user-generated load – popper training videos, untrained video that repurposes a index of develop sources with the express purpose of turning masturbation fuelled sooner than amyl nitrate turn to account into an vocation that energy be regarded as ‘productive relief’. I quarrel that these videos might imply, in these neoliberal times where holiday is positioned as a rewarding activity, a new if unexpected directorate in support of porn output and consumption.

A kindliness of the performative is at the heart of Brandon Arroyo’s contribution ‘An Amplification of Being: Chris Crocker and the Fetching of a Transindividual Porn Lady’. The stars of gay porn participate in forever been objects of fine point fascination and press provoked scholarship including Richard Dyer’s essays discussing 1980s monoliths such as Jeff Stryker or Ryan Darling and my own intervention in these debates in Su Holmes and Sean Redmond’s edited accumulation, Framing Celebrity (Mercer 2006). In his article Arroyo analyzes the YouTube ‘celebrity’ Chris Crocker, whose identity has transitioned at a collection of levels and includes his foray into gay porn. Crocker is an mainly salutary discrete recompense the dissection of gender identities and is a figure who calls into a without question a set of issues about the models of masculinities that gay porn deploys and exploits.