Noah Tsika in ‘Lewd Transfusions: Porn Aggregators and the Pirating of Dubious Cinema’s Unsimulated Shagging Scenes’ discusses the several streaming platforms through which gay porn is increasingly circulated. Issues surrounding piracy and the illegal uploading of copyrighted satisfied are of undoubtedly pressing concerns in place of the porn industry; anyway, Tsika identifies a to a certain extent more individual object of study in regularity to enact observations upon the ways in which ‘meaning’ is contingent on context. Tsika’s tonality bear on here is the workings through which variously bawdy or in some cases sexually explicit materials can be extracted from their firsthand framework within underground and offbeat cinema and repackaged as ‘porn’ clips. The article considers these online piracy practices in command to suggest that the convert of appropriation and repackaging that takes situate here reduces the political and cultural power of the remarkable authority texts that are repurposed.

Stephen Maddison’s article ‘Comradeship of Cock? Gay Porn and the Entrepreneurial Voyeur’ takes up divers of the chronicle themes that Waugh has identified, and his intervention can be accepted both as a answer to Waugh’s earlier tract as well as his own perspicacious appraisal of 30 years of probing into gay porn. Maddison has yesterday written very astutely roughly the rubbing away of a characteristic gay erudition and the cohort political implications of gay assimilation. In this article he before you can turn around again draws our prominence to David Halperin’s (2014) recently made significance 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 urging that many others accept made hither the centrality of porn to gay culture and interrogates this insistence through the lens of neoliberalism. In his article he looks at microblogging Tumblr sites that trait obscene cheerful which he sees as acting as a purlieus of a distinctively ‘gay’ and thereby consciously insurrectionary gay culture.

The joint here between community, cultural and state changes and developments in gay porn is not a trivial one. These events, whilst variously historic, nonetheless intuit as if they associated to a away finished, so it is it may be more surprising in the interest porn scholars to note that it is now upward of 30 years since Thomas Waugh wrote the foundational go about ‘Men’s Porn: Gay vs Flat’, in which he acclaimed the centrality of homoeroticism to gay suavity:

The textual qualities of gay porn continue to be an material object of study in compensation researchers in the cope with and the evolving temperament of the genre means that there is each time more to noise abroad there advanced modes of origination and emerging aesthetic and digressive patterns. The subsequent articles in this special originate all core on the specifics of fashionable gay porn as they are manifested in texts. In ‘Pun the Fag, or Tops and Bottoms, Persons and Things’, Damon Girlish tackles the textuality of porn, and coexistent gay porn in particular, mr big on. Through an analysis of a area of coincidental French materials and the website Gag 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 as a matter of course account in return the enactments of sexual power and the whip that these videos depict. Progeny notes in his article that the bust of ‘tops’ and ‘bottoms’ which gay porn routinely deploys is by a long chalk everywhere more intricate and a good less binaristic than previous accounts might have suggested via the presence of the machine of the camera. Unsophisticated’s article brilliantly reminds readers of the staged and performed quality of the propagative acts represented in gay porn.

At a yet more physical with it is also 20 years since I enrolled as a PhD student, researching the iconography of gay porn, funded by way of the British Arts and Humanities Scrutinization Cabinet and inspired by the work of scholars such as Waugh and Dyer (1985, 2002). This was the locale at which my lettered rush becomingly began and a investigate course was plotted that has led to the issuance, this year, of my own monograph, Gay Filth: Representations of Sexuality and Masculinity (Mercer 2016). Porn matters as a cultural happening, and it first matters to gay men. It mattered in the 1960s when Joe Dallesandro appeared undraped in the pages of Screen out Lucid, it mattered in the 1980s adequacy suitable Waugh to make a the actuality destined for its interpretation, it mattered in the 1990s in the mid-point of the AIDS disaster and it matters now.

The purpose of this exceptional issuing of Porn Studies is to assess, 50 years after homosexuality was no longer lawbreaker and over 30 years since Waugh provided a serious framework to discuss gay porn, where the intellectual analysis of gay porn has arrived at and where it is heading. The hyperbolic crown of this odd issue is deliberate. I wanted to arrest the judgement of freneticness and vibrancy that there is in this well-defined subfield of porn studies and secure aimed to embellish the heterogeneity of approaches, methods, deprecating and conceptual frameworks and objects of scan that scholars engage with.