Sex for Sale~Prostitution, Pornography and the Sex Industry (15 page)

Safer sex standards were also established in the industry during the 1990s.

In 1988, condom usage began to appear in gay videos, but only sporadically.22

However, because of growing AIDS activism, by the early 1990s most actors consistently used condoms in anal sex scenes (although not in oral sex). The gay adult industry was far ahead of heterosexual pornography in this regard.

Only in 1998 did the straight industry begin to consider condom usage instead of relying on periodic HIV testing, and then only in response to several performers’ seroconversions. Even today, condoms are not standard practice in straight porn.

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Plot and acting have rarely played an important role in video pornography. However, increased production values sometimes included a greater emphasis on style. For example,
The Other Side of Aspen 3
(1995) contained an unusual scene that exemplified the new stylishness of gay videos. Two men had sex in a car in a scene filmed in near-darkness without bright lights or explicit close-ups. The realism of the dark, cramped quarters and quick, frantic copulation lent a stylish sense of voyeurism to the video. Similarly, the 1997 GEVA and GayVN Video of the Year awards went to
Naked Highway
, an on-the-road story that borrowed from sources as diverse as Jack Kerouac,
Thelma and Louise
, and
Easy Rider
. It used flashbacks, sophisticated camera angles, and stylized editing to create a video with a clear narrative and a distinctive esthetic.

What caused the changes in style and content in the latter half of the video era? I would argue that, in this case, art imitated life: changes in video porn reflected a changing gay identity. As the AIDS crisis brought together divergent parts of gay culture, the rise of queer radicalism brought a renewed openness to diversity and a recognition of the value of difference. One of the tenets of the late 1980s and early 1990s radical group Queer Nation was the recognition of diversity within the gay community. The increasing consciousness of diversity seemed to be reflected in the new range of ages, ethnicities, and physical types within porn in the 1990s.

A sort of mini-sexual revolution took place as well. During the late 1980s and 1990s, sex and sexual orientation were scrutinized from new perspectives by a diverse range of scholars. Camille Paglia’s ideas about the sexualized nature of western culture23 received extensive media attention. And the popular columnist Susie Bright launched a lively media campaign against sexual repression. In articles and books24 she promoted the open enjoyment of pornography, sex toys, and kinky sex, and discouraged and ridiculed sexual stereotyping of any kind. Pat Califia issued collections of her own question-and-answer columns25 in which she, a butch lesbian, forthrightly answered the technical and emotional sex questions of America’s gay men. These popular authors were part of a new sexual liberation that celebrated diversity, openness, and sexual pleasure. This new attitude was reflected in the loosening of conventions in video porn.

Changes in the medium itself echoed the recent changes in content as the digital era got underway in the new century. Titan Men had experimented with offering an interactive CD-ROM with their 1998 VHS release
Redwood
.

In the late 1990s, a new digital medium, the DVD, became available. During the opening years of the 2000s, the DVD medium, with its improved resolution, compact size, and computer compatibility quickly came to replace
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the videocassette as the medium of choice for home viewers. By 2005, many porn studios had ceased making videocassettes in favor of DVDs.

The Internet was already an important part of the gay porn world at the end of the video era; most studios maintained extensive websites, and many performers—especially those who also escorted—had home pages. During the digital era, increased online connection speeds and faster computer processors made the Internet an ever more desirable venue for pornography. By the end of the decade, the important studios had expanded their web presence—

offering pictures, streaming video, and downloads—to the point that Falcon expected Internet revenues to exceed wholesale in 2007.26 Entirely new studios also emerged with products that were exclusively available as subscription services on the web.27

The Internet was the perfect medium for the expansion of highly specialized porn appealing to “niche” markets. Longtime straight-porn performer Nina Hartley has maintained that the development of such niche market videos was the most dramatic new development in adult films of the 1990s.28 Gay videos joined in the straight industry’s boom in niche videos, which included such specialized genres as amateur, wrestling, transsexual, bondage, and others. For example, Altomar Productions created videos featuring men from their mid-forties up through their seventies. This company also produced a line of fetish videos focusing on uncircumcised men and foreskin.29 The very popular amateur genre started as pornographic home movies on videotape. Their unflinching realism was the attraction, and they went from being “mom-and-pop” operations to having widespread professional distribution. Because these products appealed to small, specific audiences, access was a problem during the video era. However, the low overhead of porn websites relative to traditional studios, plus the ability to reach a much larger population because of virtually universal access to the Internet, made it easier and more profitable to create porn for extremely specialized tastes. While major studios continued to produce certain specialized products (leather, fisting), much of the niche market moved to the Internet in the 2000s.

In fact, the Internet soon became major competition to the established studios. A number of websites such as RandyBlue.com. ActiveDuty.com, and SeanCody.com built on the earlier development of amateur and “gonzo” porn (which broke down the “fourth wall” between the filmmaker and subject) and gave it broad-based appeal. The new websites took nonprofessionals and made them Internet stars. Performers were frequently billed as straight, and initially masturbation was the primary act depicted. Over time, these sites focused increasingly on hardcore action as they hired more gay performers—and as
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their straight performers discovered just how far they could go for the right price. Gonzo-style interviews with the performers often preceded the action.

Some of the traditional studios produced DVDs along similar lines, but using better production values, even as the quality of the Internet-based porn improved (some even broadcasting in high definition). The result is that boundaries between amateur and professional have become so blurred that the content is sometimes indistinguishable.

Probably the most important (and most controversial) development in gay porn during the digital era has been the meteoric rise of another niche market to the status of a major force: “bareback” videos, in which no condoms are used. Condomless sex began to reappear occasionally in gay life during the late 1990s, after the development of new HIV medications made AIDS seem less serious to a small segment of the gay population, and as those already infected saw little reason to use condoms with each other. Bareback videos began to appear in 1997 when a new producer of amateur fetish porn, Dick Wadd, filmed
NYPD
, a fetish video that was only incidentally bareback.30 Another company, Treasure Island Media, followed the subsequent year. In the early years of the digital era, bareback proliferated with many more companies arriving on the scene. Taking their cue from amateur and gonzo, bareback videos rarely had plots or elaborate sets, but instead focused on intense, highly physical sex. As the genre developed, bareback began to fetishize semen, showing ejaculations in the mouth and anus and “cum-swapping” (the transfer of semen from one person’s mouth or anus to another’s). In most cases the performers were assumed to be HIV positive, but in 2003
Rolling Stone
published a controversial article about “bug chasers”: men who consciously sought out seroconversion through unprotected sex.31 Although later shown to have vastly exaggerated the numbers, the publicity further tainted the bareback industry as it became associated with the self-destructive philosophy of bug chasing.

During the mid-2000s, American companies were joined by an array of European bareback producers such as Eurocreme. These studios focused on slim, extremely youthful performers (in contrast to the older casts of U.S.

bareback brands) and were produced in countries from Hungary to Sweden.

Unlike their American counterparts, they relied on periodic testing for their performers, just as did most of the straight industry.

The popularity and growth of the bareback genre has created intense debate. Some viewers see any unprotected sex as a symbol of the AIDS epidemic as a whole, and find the videos repugnant. Others fear that these videos romanticize and encourage such practices in men’s private lives. A documented case of transmission on a bareback set in England32 has lent credence to the idea
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that in the European scene, young naive men are being coerced or cajoled into taking risks they do not really understand. Still others take a libertarian perspective and argue that any sex is a calculated risk, and that consenting adults should be able to make their own decisions about limits and responsibilities.

The annual GayVN Awards for porn eliminated bareback videos for nomina-tion beginning in 2004. Considering the ongoing popularity of bareback and the continuing menace of AIDS, this promises to be a long-term debate.

Stylistically, the proliferation of truly amateur porn on the Internet has also resulted in something of an ironic devolution for gay video. Sites such as XTube made it possible for anyone to share homemade porn. The short length and poor quality of these videos was reminiscent of the grainy, short loops of the pre-Stonewall and early film era. It remains to be seen if the gritty realism and endless variety of XTube and similar sites will actually replace studio porn.

TH E G AY V I D E O I N D U STRY

Video pornography’s explosion in popularity in the 1990s (with the production of 50–70 videos a month)33 included the birth of a complex, interactive subculture of industry players and fans: an array of celebrity directors such as drag queen Chi Chi LaRue and John Rutherford (who has a college degree in film production); influential critics such as Mickey Skee, who has written a variety of books on the industry as well as a constant stream of reviews; a variety of industry magazines and websites; and a vast number of popular performers who made profitable appearances as featured strip acts in gay clubs. Some also worked as professional escorts (the commonly used euphemism for male prostitutes).

Among the many directors of the 1990s, Chi Chi LaRue (perhaps the heir apparent to the incomparable drag queen Divine) was a prolific director who worked for many of the major studios. Originally from Minnesota, LaRue appeared on the porn scene in the late 1980s and quickly rose to
auteur
status while amassing a prolific and respectable body of work. LaRue freely incorporated drag into his public persona, appearing with his considerable retinue of buff performers as the emcee during their club dates. LaRue gained remarkable influence as one of the few directors who consistently worked with a variety of the top gay porn production companies. Establishing his own production company in the early 2000s, during the first decade of the new millennium LaRue gradually purchased several other studios and became the ultimate gay porn magnate. In interviews, some performers have credited him with creating a new respect and consideration for actors on the set34 that seems
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to have extended beyond his own productions. Not coincidentally, Chi Chi came on the scene in the late 1980s, as major changes were taking place in the industry.35

Gay print pornography focused on the stars of videos, but so did the rest of the gay media. Popular gay men’s magazines such as
Genre
featured interviews with gay performers such as Ken Ryker.36 Another popular gay magazine,
Out
, featured several articles on the porn industry,37 as has its rival,
The Advocate.
Many local gay periodicals also ran video review columns during the 1990s, usually humorous and tongue in cheek. The gay porn industry even developed its own awards shows, which were reported on in the numerous industry magazines such as
Starz
and
Skinflicks
. The two most prominent among these shows were the
Gay Video Guide’s
Gay Erotic Video Awards (GEVA, from 1992 to 1998) and the Gay Adult Video News Awards (GayVN, from 1986 to the present), sponsored by the adult film industry’s primary professional publication,
Adult Video News
.38 The GEVA prizes were chosen by video critics and a celebrity panel; the GayVN awards by an international panel of gay judges.39 As a mark of its increasing prominence, the 2007

GayVN awards show was a spectacle held in the Castro Theater in San Francisco and hosted by comedian Kathy Griffin, and featured prominently on her reality TV show (see Figure 3.1).