Gay pornography
Gay pornography is a form of adult entertainment that features sexual activity between males with the primary goal to sexually arouse its audience. Softcore gay pornography also exists; which at one time constituted the genre, and may be produced as beefcake pornography directed toward heterosexual female, homosexual male, and bisexual audiences of any gender. Although it has also been found that many heterosexual males consume this genre of porn as well due to its appeal in presenting a more visually stimulating or unconventional sexual dynamic, citing the focus on intimacy and male-male attraction as a source of novelty or excitement.
Homoerotic art and artifacts depicting men have a long history, reaching back to many ancient civilizations. Every medium has been used to represent sexual acts between men. In contemporary mass media, this is mostly shared through home videos, cable broadcast and emerging video on demand and wireless markets, as well as online picture sites and gay pulp fiction.
History
Early modern in the United States
has been present in photography and film since their invention. During much of that time, any sexual depiction had to remain underground because of obscenity laws. In particular, gay material might constitute evidence of an illegal act under sodomy laws in many jurisdictions. This is no longer the case in the United States, since such laws were ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 2003 in Lawrence v. Texas.Hardcore pornographic motion pictures were produced relatively early in the history of film. The first known pornographic film appears to have been made in Europe in 1908. The earliest known film to depict hardcore gay sexual activity was the French film Le ménage moderne du Madame Butterfly, produced and released in 1920. Most historians consider the first American stag film to be A Free Ride, produced and released in 1915. In the United States, hardcore gay sexual activity did not make it onto film until 1929's The Surprise of a Knight. Other American examples include A Stiff Game from the early 1930s, which features interracial homosexual acts as part of its plot, and Three Comrades, which features exclusively homosexual activity.
Legal restrictions meant that early hardcore gay pornography was underground and that commercially available gay pornography primarily consisted of pictures of individual men either fully naked or wearing a G-string. Pornography in the 1940s and 1950s focused on athletic men or bodybuilders in statuesque poses. They were generally young, muscular, and with little or no visible body hair. These pictures were sold in physique magazines, also known as beefcake magazines, allowing the reader to pass as a fitness enthusiast.
The Athletic Model Guild, founded by photographer Bob Mizer in 1945 in Los Angeles, was arguably the first studio to commercially produce material specifically for gay men and published the first magazine known as Physique Pictorial in 1951. Tom of Finland drawings are featured in many issues. Mizer produced about a million images, and thousands of films and videos before he died on May 12, 1992. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, the advent of 16 mm film cameras enabled these photographers to produce underground movies of gay sex, male masturbation, or both. Sales of these products were either by mail-order or through more discreet channels. Some of the early gay pornographers would travel around the country selling their photographs and films out of their hotel rooms, with advertising only through word of mouth and magazine ads.
The 1960s were also a period where many underground art-film makers integrated suggestive or overtly gay content in their work. Kenneth Anger's Scorpio Rising, Andy Warhol's Blow Job and My Hustler, or Paul Morrissey's Flesh are examples of experimental films that are known to have influenced further gay pornographic films with their formal qualities and narratives. Also of note is Joe Dallesandro, who acted in hardcore gay pornographic films in his early 20s, posed nude for Francesco Scavullo, Bruce of L.A. and Bob Mizer, and later acted for Warhol in films such as Flesh. Dallesandro was well known to the public. In 1969 Time called him one of the most beautiful people of the 1960s, and he appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine in April 1971. Dallesandro also appeared on the cover of The Smiths' eponymous debut album, ''The Smiths.''
Sexual revolution
During the 1960s, a series of United States Supreme Court rulings created a more liberalized legal environment that allowed the commercialization of pornography. MANual Enterprises, Inc. v. Day was the first decision by the United States Supreme Court which held that magazines consisting largely of photographs of nude or near-nude male models are not obscene within the meaning of § 1461. It was the first case in which the Court engaged in plenary review of a Post Office Department order holding obscene matter "nonmailable." The case is notable for its ruling that photographs of nude men are not obscene, an implication which opened up the U.S. Postal Service to nude male pornographic magazines, especially those catering to gay men.Wakefield Poole's Boys in the Sand, starring Casey Donovan, was the first gay pornographic feature film, along with the works of filmmakers such as Pat Rocco and the Park Theatre, Los Angeles, California,. In fact, it was the first pornographic feature film of any sort. Boys in the Sand opened in a theater in New York City in December 1971 and played to a packed house with record-breaking box office receipts, preceding Deep Throat, the first commercial straight pornography film in America, which opened in June 1972. This success launched gay pornographic film as a popular phenomenon.
The production of gay pornography films expanded during the 1970s. A few studios released films for the growing number of gay adult movie theaters, where men could also have sexual encounters. Often, the films reflected the sexual liberation that gay men were experiencing at the time, depicting the numerous public spaces where men engaged in sex: bathhouses, sex clubs, beaches, etc.
Peter Berlin's 1973 film Nights in Black Leather was the first major pornographic film designed to appeal to the gay leather subculture and drew some mainstream gays into this culture.
The 1960s and 1970s also saw the rise of gay publishing with After Dark and Michael's Thing. During this time many more magazines were founded, including In Touch and Blueboy. ''Playgirl, ostensibly produced for women, was purchased and enjoyed by gay men and feature full frontal nudity.
Gay pornography of the 1950s through the production date of the movie is reviewed, with many excerpts, in Fred Halsted's documentary Erotikus: A History of the Gay Movie.''
1970–1985
From 1970 to 1985, commercial gay pornography was just getting set up to become the large industry that it was to become. Because it was in the fledgling stage, it recruited actors from the only network it had access to: the gay community. Even among members of the gay community, people willing to act in gay porn were hard to come by due to the social stigma and implicated social risk of being publicly out.1980s
The 1980s were a period of transition for gay pornography film. The proliferation of VCRs made pornography videos easily accessible, and, as their prices fell, the market for home videos aimed at adult viewers became more and more lucrative. By the mid-1980s, the standard was to release pornography movies directly on video, which meant the wide disappearance of pornography theaters. Furthermore, video recording being more affordable, a multitude of producers entered the market, making low-budget pornography videos.This shift from watching pornography as a public activity to doing so in private was also influenced by the discovery of HIV and the subsequent AIDS crisis. Public spaces for sex, such as theaters, became less attended when in the early 1980s it became a much riskier behavior. Masturbatory activities in the privacy of the home became a safe sex practice in the midst of this health crisis.
Gay movies of the 1970s had contained some exploration of novel ways to represent the sexual act. In the 1980s, by contrast, all movies seemed to be made under an unwritten set of rules and conventions. Most scenes would start with a few lines of dialogue, have performers engage in foreplay, followed by anal penetration, and ending with a visual climax close-up of ejaculating penises, called a money shot or cum shot. Video technology allowed the recording of longer scenes than did the costly film stock. Scenes were often composed of extended footage of the same act filmed from different shots using multiple cameras. The quality of the picture and sound were often very poor.
Major directors such as Matt Sterling, Eric Peterson, John Travis, and William Higgins set the standard for the models of the decade. The performers they cast were especially young, usually appearing to be around the ages of 22 or 23. Their bodies were slender and hairless, of the "swimmer's build" type, which contrasted with the older, bigger, and hairier man of the 1970s' gay pornography. Performer roles also evolved into the tight divisions of tops and bottoms. The top in anal sex is the penetrating partner, who, in these films, typically has a more muscular body and the larger penis. The bottom, or receiver of anal sex, in the films, is often smaller and sometimes more effeminate. The stars of the decade were almost always tops, while the bottoms were interchangeable
This strict division between tops and bottoms may have reflected a preference by some of the popular directors of the decade to hire heterosexual men for their movies. Heterosexual men who perform gay sex for monetary reasons were considered a rare commodity in the gay sex trade, but the biggest producers of the decade could afford them. Many critics attributed the conventionalization of gay pornography of the 1980s to this trend.