The dynamic of gay male porn is different from heterosexual porn because it is not about revealing sexual difference. Is the dynamic of gay male porn significantly different from straight and lesbian porn because it doesn’t involve women? It carried more value it was more a place where people would go to form that community. The fun of gay and lesbian pornography is that it complicates these givens even more.ĭoes queer porn have any historical import?įrom the start of the explosion of pornography in moving images, which is to say from the early ’70s, homosexual pornography was not only widely seen in the emerging gay community, it was more important to gays than heterosexual porn was to the straight community. Feminism is very good at pointing out the power dynamics of looks in films, but it is less good at considering the power and the pleasure. Though there is a larger framework of patriarchal power that operates in both, the masochist and the exhibitionist do have power within that larger framework. First of all, even in heterosexual instances, the theory of the male gaze assumes that the one who is gazed upon - the woman - cannot in turn find a subtle kind of power in being looked at. That whole way of thinking about the power of the male gaze, which was an important breakthrough for thinking about heterosexual film in general in its day, is pretty clunky when you add pleasure into the mix, and especially so when we turn to gay and lesbian looks and desires. Ultimately, isn’t the male gaze about power? I’m looking at you. There is also a very different aesthetic in gay pornorgraphy: The men tend to be more beautiful and narcissistic, the films are often more playful and artful, and from the very beginning there was less plot, more fantasy and sex. Gay and lesbian porn has that quality of reciprocity in the sex acts as well: The roles of penetrator and penetrated shift positions change. It’s not always perfectly reciprocal, but it has that potentiality for reciprocity which straight porn, geared to the man boffing the woman and the woman exhibiting a sometimes very fake-looking ecstasy, rarely has. I look at you and you look at me and it goes back and forth. More importantly - and this is something interesting I appreciate in both gay porn and lesbian porn - you get these reciprocal, cruising looks. But in gay male porn there aren’t any women to be objectified.
Man was seen as the subject, woman as the object of the gaze. One of the first ways feminist critics began to look at heterosexual pornography was to identify the problem of a “male gaze” at an objectified woman. And this is why it is unfortunate that so many of the debates around pornography from the very beginning assumed that it was only heterosexual. In this week’s conversation, Williams discusses her long-running interest in cinematic “body genres” - among them horror films, melodramas, and pornography - that aim to move the viewer “in often quite literal ways.” She also explores the distinctive imperatives of gay porn (both male and female), and discusses the many ways in which it can’t be truly said that “a kiss is just a kiss.”ĭoes queer porn differ from straight porn? Williams described the nature of academic porn analysis, focusing on changes in the field since the late ’80s in the primary context of heterosexual porn. Pornography, she maintains, is no longer “hidden away” but has incrementally become more visible - first in the early 1970s, when it began to show up on movie-theater screens, and on into the present day, where it comes into the home via videocassettes, DVDs, and the Internet. Williams, a pioneer in the field of academic pornography research, spoke about the pervasiveness of moving-image pornography and the accompanying change in the public’s attitude toward that cinematic genre. 30 issue we published the first part of an interview with Linda Williams, professor of rhetoric and film studies and former director of the campus Program in Film Studies.
Kissing, once the sex act for all occasions, is today's foreplay and afterplay, says film-studies professor Linda Williams.įor Linda Williams, screen kisses of the past were less lascivious than today’s, but far more interesting.