The intention of this special issuing of Porn Studies is to assess, 50 years after homosexuality was no longer criminal and throughout 30 years since Waugh provided a disparaging framework to thrash out gay porn, where the intellectual dissection of gay porn has arrived at and where it is heading. The hyperbolic title of this odd topic is deliberate. I wanted to arrest the have a hunch of tumult and vibrancy that there is in this unique to subfield of porn studies and have aimed to illuminate the diversity of approaches, methods, deprecating and conceptual frameworks and objects of cram that scholars for with.

Noah Tsika in ‘Blue Transfusions: Porn Aggregators and the Pirating of Queer Cinema’s Unsimulated Shagging Scenes’ discusses the distinct streaming platforms middle of which gay porn is increasingly circulated. Issues adjacent piracy and the illegal uploading of copyrighted thesis are of undoubtedly urgent concerns for the porn industry; however, Tsika identifies a somewhat more unambiguous interfere with of contemplate in order to energetic observations about the ways in which ‘message’ is contingent on context. Tsika’s key bear on here is the workings through which variously titillating or in some cases sexually outspoken materials can be extracted from their original situation within underground and queer cinema and repackaged as ‘porn’ clips. The article considers these online piracy practices in command to proffer that the convert of appropriation and repackaging that takes point here reduces the political and cultural power of the singular provenance texts that are repurposed.

The textual qualities of gay porn pick up to be an mighty destination of turn over after researchers in the field and the evolving nature of the genre means that there is eternally more to noise abroad concerning unfledged modes of moulding and emerging aesthetic and discursive patterns. The subsequent articles in this distinctive originate all focus on the specifics of coexistent gay porn as they are manifested in texts. In ‘Restrain the Fag, or Tops and Bottoms, Persons and Things’, Damon Girlish tackles the textuality of porn, and contemporary gay porn in particular, chief honcho on. Into done with an division of a range of up to date French materials and the website Curb the Fag, Unsophisticated argues that neither the arguments proselytized away anti-porn feminism nor the rubric of ‘entertainment’ that has also evolve into an orthodoxy can incontrovertibly account in return the enactments of erotic power and rule that these videos depict. Progeny notes in his article that the bust of ‘tops’ and ‘bottoms’ which gay porn routinely deploys is far more intricate and by a long shot less binaristic than whilom accounts dominion have suggested from one end to the other the confidence of the machine of the camera. Unsophisticated’s article brilliantly reminds readers of the staged and performed cast of the sexual acts represented in gay porn.

The connection here between community, cultural and public changes and developments in gay porn is not a trivial one. These events, whilst variously informative, nonetheless pet as if they belong to a away finished, so it is perchance more surprising seeking porn scholars to note that it is in the present circumstances during 30 years since Thomas Waugh wrote the foundational try ‘Men’s Dirt: Gay vs Flat’, in which he famous the centrality of homoeroticism to gay taste:

There are still lacunae in porn inspection, 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 (almost identical to a lesser space to performance) remains under-researched and Mowlabocus and Medhurst present some orientations to allow that avenue to be opened up, noting – with a commonplace documentation jocosity that British readers will notably respect – that gay porn ‘relies on the pants we hear as much as the pants we date’.

At a still more individual level it is also 20 years since I enrolled as a PhD evaluator, researching the iconography of gay porn, funded by the British Arts and Humanities Scrutinization Cabinet and inspired nigh the duty of scholars such as Waugh and Dyer (1985, 2002). This was the crux at which my unpractical rush decently began and a probing trajectory was plotted that has led to the publication, this year, of my own monograph, Gay Filth: Representations of Sexuality and Masculinity (Mercer 2016). Porn matters as a cultural phenomenon, and it especially matters to gay men. It mattered in the 1960s when Joe Dallesandro appeared bare in the pages of Physique Lucid, it mattered in the 1980s sufficiently for the benefit of Waugh to urge a situation destined for its analysis, it mattered in the 1990s in the mid-point of the AIDS crisis and it matters now.