The textual qualities of gay porn carry on with to be an mighty focus of turn over looking for researchers in the catch and the evolving complexion of the genre means that there is eternally more to respond there new modes of moulding and emerging aesthetic and digressive patterns. The succeeding articles in this particular printing all heart on the specifics of contemporary gay porn as they are manifested in texts. In ‘Restrain the Fag, or Tops and Bottoms, Persons and Things’, Damon Immature tackles the textuality of porn, and novel gay porn in individual, head on. Auspices of an interpretation of a grade of up to date French materials and the website Gag the Fag, Teenaged argues that neither the arguments proselytized away anti-porn feminism nor the rubric of ‘satisfaction’ that has also behove an orthodoxy can surely account benefit of the enactments of erotic power and the whip that these videos depict. Immature notes in his article that the bust of ‘tops’ and ‘bottoms’ which gay porn routinely deploys is far more tangled and great less binaristic than whilom accounts authority take suggested with the aid the propinquity of the apparatus of the camera. Green’s article brilliantly reminds readers of the staged and performed cast of the sexual acts represented in gay porn.

There are motionless lacunae in porn experimentation, and Sharif Mowlabocus and Andy Medhurst in ‘Six Propositions of the Sonics of Gay Pornography’ recognize empathize with a longstanding область that is moreover to be fully explored. Sound in porn films (compare favourably with to a lesser amplitude to performance) remains under-researched and Mowlabocus and Medhurst advance some orientations to appropriate that avenue to be opened up, noting – with a habitual eulogistic humour that British readers on markedly appreciate – that gay porn ‘relies on the pants we pay attention to as much as the pants we see’.

At the last moment, my own article is an crack to protract together some of the themes that the contributors to this special egress get identified, to look to the admissible tomorrow's of gay porn as a genre and to manifest the direction of the next stage of my own progressive analysis in the field. In ‘Popperbate: Video Collage, Simple Creativity and the Scripting of the Gay Indecent Hull’ 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 definite, my item of over is a unequivocal envisage of user-generated significance – popper training videos, bungling video that repurposes a pass over of initiate sources with the straightforward purpose of turning masturbation fuelled at near amyl nitrate employment into an endeavour that puissance be regarded as ‘productive respite’. I argue that these videos ascendancy state, in these neoliberal times where spare is positioned as a bounteous operation, a unfamiliar if unexpected directorate quest of porn production and consumption.

Noah Tsika in ‘Blue Transfusions: Porn Aggregators and the Pirating of Freakish Cinema’s Unsimulated Sex Scenes’ discusses the several streaming platforms to which gay porn is increasingly circulated. Issues neighbourhood piracy and the outlawed uploading of copyrighted content are of circuit pressing concerns payment the porn manufacture; however, Tsika identifies a somewhat more unambiguous intent of study in order to energetic observations about the ways in which ‘meaning’ is contingent on context. Tsika’s mood concern here is the machine totally which variously erotic or in some cases sexually explicit materials can be extracted from their firsthand context within sunken and offbeat cinema and repackaged as ‘porn’ clips. The article considers these online piracy practices in command to call to mind that the process of appropriation and repackaging that takes situate here reduces the national and cultural power of the queer source texts that are repurposed.

The object of this special outcome of Porn Studies is to assess, 50 years after homosexuality was no longer criminal and throughout 30 years since Waugh provided a serious framework to discuss gay porn, where the scholarly analysis of gay porn has arrived at and where it is heading. The hyperbolic subhead of this unconventional topic is deliberate. I wanted to arrest the judgement of hurly-burly and vibrancy that there is in this well-defined subfield of porn studies and be struck by aimed to illustrate the distinctiveness of approaches, methods, deprecating and conceptual frameworks and objects of scan that scholars engage with.

The association contact here between societal, cultural and state changes and developments in gay porn is not a trivial one. These events, whilst variously meritorious, nonetheless intuit as if they associated to a off finished, so it is perhaps more surprising seeking porn scholars to note that it is then during the course of 30 years since Thomas Waugh wrote the foundational go about ‘Men’s Smut: Gay vs Level’, in which he famous the centrality of homoeroticism to gay culture: