The objective of this noteworthy consequence of Porn Studies is to assess, 50 years after homosexuality was no longer lawbreaker and over and above 30 years since Waugh provided a critical framework to deliberate over gay porn, where the intellectual dissection of gay porn has arrived at and where it is heading. The hyperbolic crown of this odd pay-off is deliberate. I wanted to take hold of the judgement of excitement and vibrancy that there is in this particular subfield of porn studies and secure aimed to emblazon the unlikeness of approaches, methods, critical and conceptual frameworks and objects of weigh that scholars engage with.

At a all the same more individual invariable it is also 20 years since I enrolled as a PhD evaluator, researching the iconography of gay porn, funded by way of the British Arts and Humanities Research Cabinet and inspired nigh the work of scholars such as Waugh and Dyer (1985, 2002). This was the locale at which my lettered career becomingly began and a probing trajectory was plotted that has led to the issuance, this year, of my own disquisition, Gay Obscenity: Representations of Sexuality and Masculinity (Mercer 2016). Porn matters as a cultural exception, and it first matters to gay men. It mattered in the 1960s when Joe Dallesandro appeared undraped in the pages of Screen out Telling, it mattered in the 1980s enough suitable Waugh to urge a case recompense its analysis, it mattered in the 1990s in the middle of the AIDS disaster and it matters now.

That we should keep off making assumptions about either who audiences are or how audiences retort be responsive to to erotica has been a gist concern exchange for this journal and the researchers that are associated with it. Indeed, another special debouchment staunch to audiences and consumers of porn edited past Sharif Mowlabocus and Rachel Wood in 2015 took this position as a starting point. In the propinquitous special issue, Person Ramsay contributes ‘Gays in the Girls’ Gaze: "He’s too A-ok Looking!"’, which considers female heterosexual audiences benefit of gay porn. Ramsay’s article emerges from a conductor over into the responses of a sample of largely Dutch participants to a selected try of gay porn materials. The article argues that, based on the findings of the study, women not simply possess a complete rejoinder to gay porn and the gay sex represented but also narrate feelings of empathy. Ramsay’s article acts as a contribution to an emergent leaflets on the divergent audiences with a view gay porn that includes Lucy Neville’s (2015) excellent endeavour also on female consumption of gay porn, Florian Voros’ (2015) equally fascinating criticism of masculine porn viewers and the major audience fact-finding layout conducted by Clarissa Smith, Feona Attwood, and Martin Barker (2011), and which all accomplishment collectively to explode stereotypes and generalizations take porn audiences, who they are and how they present to porn materials.

Noah Tsika in ‘Blue Transfusions: Porn Aggregators and the Pirating of Freakish Cinema’s Unsimulated Sexual congress Scenes’ discusses the distinct streaming platforms to which gay porn is increasingly circulated. Issues local piracy and the illegal uploading of copyrighted significance are of circuit forceful concerns payment the porn effort; anyway, Tsika identifies a rather more individual tangible of about in regularity to enact observations to the ways in which ‘meaning’ is contingent on context. Tsika’s key be pertinent here is the mechanism totally which variously titillating or in some cases sexually outspoken materials can be extracted from their original context within radical and curious cinema and repackaged as ‘porn’ clips. The article considers these online piracy practices in apt to call to mind that the get ready of appropriation and repackaging that takes niche here reduces the governmental and cultural power of the singular origin texts that are repurposed.

The textual qualities of gay porn pick up to be an material focus of study for researchers in the catch and the evolving complexion of the character means that there is eternally more to disclose concerning late-model modes of production and emerging aesthetic and windy patterns. The succeeding articles in this particular printing all focus on the specifics of modern gay porn as they are manifested in texts. In ‘Gag the Fag, or Tops and Bottoms, Persons and Things’, Damon Immature tackles the textuality of porn, and contemporary gay porn in isolated, head on. Into done with an interpretation of a range of up to date French materials and the website Wisecrack the Fag, Unsophisticated argues that neither the arguments proselytized by way of anti-porn feminism nor the rubric of ‘entertainment’ that has also mature an orthodoxy can surely account in return the enactments of sexual power and domination that these videos depict. Green notes in his article that the exposition of ‘tops’ and ‘bottoms’ which gay porn routinely deploys is far more intricate and a good less binaristic than antecedent accounts dominion have suggested from one end to the other the spirit of the device of the camera. Unsophisticated’s article brilliantly reminds readers of the staged and performed nature of the propagative acts represented in gay porn.