PART 5: THE FANTASY

Whether or not you are aware of it, porn is cinema. It’s that part of cinema that Hollywood leaves out. While the big Hollywood studios are making donuts, pornographers make donut holes. The industry of explicit gay porn began underground through the creation of little stories that were loaded up with sex to fill the void that the Hayes Code forced the motion picture industry to create. Some of those stories were borrowed from Hollywood in the form of gay-themed parodies. The practice still exists today, though mostly in the form of lampooned titles if not the actual content.

I believe porn is a unique form of motion picture art. Not only can it tell a story, it can also tap into people’s most secret fantasies and fulfill the viewer in a way no regular motion picture can. Porn also gives us a look at life as it is, as it was, and as it could be. Right now, however, our industry is making documentaries – or more accurately, "dickumentaries". We’re simply videotaping pieces of our sex lives and showing them to the public. And by doing so we’ve allowed the fantasy to wither out of the fantasy business.

Fantasy is as important to successful porn as milk is to cheese. Portrayals of fantasies personalize the sex and create richer sexual scenarios for the viewer to enjoy. It’s not enough to show just the sex act. People enjoy watching how we get there. It’s what we as humans do every waking moment. When we see a person we think is sexually attractive, we begin building a fantasy in our heads about how we will meet him and how we will seduce him into our beds. Or in a public bathroom. Or by the pool side. Or in the bottom of a submarine. Or in the back of a semi… Our minds are always creating rich scenarios. The traditional role of porn has been to inspire the viewer; to enrich his portfolio of fantasies, and to present creative ways in which a seduction can occur. But dickumentaries only serve to portray the act of sex itself, making the only aspect of fantasy in the mind of the viewer the fantasy of being with the performers he sees onscreen. If someone can come up with richer and more complete fantasies in his head, why the hell would he want to buy the fantasy-bereft porn that’s currently out on the market?

I also believe porn allows us to diffuse stress and anger in a non-violent manner. Just as we substitute ourselves for players in a porn scene to heighten our fantasies and get us off, so can we also substitute someone we are angry with and mentally put them into the video. In our minds we can give them the fucking they deserve, and receive satisfaction in return without having to act on it in real life. But if the actors are already naked or fucking when the scene begins the viewer has to fill in the fantasy that we left out. Some people just aren’t that inherently creative. And we shouldn’t be making our audiences work that hard.

If a person can connect with something in a fantasy video, it has a deeper significance to him. If he can’t, he’s just an outsider watching people have sex. Porn can allow people to experience fantasies they don’t even know they have. It can inspire, teach, and entertain. It has all of these potential ingredients that we could explore, but instead we give our audiences junk food.

At some level I think pornographers are filmmakers at heart or we would never pick up a camera. We have stories we want to tell; rich fantasies we want to share. So why are we collectively not doing that? Why are we cheapening our medium with an endless supply of throw-away porn? I dare say the answer is because many in our field are more interested in turning a quick buck than creating something that contains meaning, substance, and the fine art of fantasy. Certainly it is easier to point a camera at men who are already naked and on the verge of engaging in sex. But just as all cats are gray in the dark, these types of porn scenarios are barely identifiable from one studio to the next, aside from the general choice of models that each studio specializes in.

In the beginning of bareback video, the audience was largely composed of gay men over 30 who identified as barebackers. That is no longer true. Today’s audience is broad and includes adult gay and bisexual men of all ages and types, closeted or openly gay, some who engage in unprotected sex, and some who do not. Of course, with such a wide audience there is a correspondingly wide range of fantasies just waiting to be tapped (and capitalized on). I am interested in seeing who will make the move to restore fantasy into the business of making bareback porn. Any takers?

Next up: New Directions

PART 4: THE MASS CONSUMER AND CRITICAL MASS

erhaps one of the most important things to come of Michael McKey’s efforts and the efforts of the first small handful of bareback video producers was the identification of a market previously thought not to exist. Mainstream gay video studios cried out that bareback videos were tantamount to snuff videos and wouldn’t have a lasting popularity. How wrong they were. So wrong, in fact, that porn maven Chi Chi La Rue, who has taken a very public stand against the making of bareback videos, bought up all of the Catalina pre-condom content and has been re-releasing it on DVD in order to get a share of the raw sex revenue. Other companies, such as Falcon and The French Connection and Bijou have done similarly, dusting off 30 year old titles in order to squeeze out as much cash as they can from material they previously considered "old hat". Yes, there is a market for bareback porn. A HUGE market. And apparently the money made from it isn’t dirty enough to keep the more politically correct mainstream gayporn studio heads from wanting to touch it.

It is not only the established porn studios who recognize the marketability of bareback porn. In the last 5 years, dozens of new small independent studios have cropped up – some of them producing exclusively bareback content, some producing occasional bareback content, and some of them creating bareback-only labels under their parent company. And using the McKey model of minimalism, they have been pumping out a landfill’s worth of rubberless dreck. It’s quite astounding, actually.

As if that wasn’t enough to satisfy the porn-watching public, the new grade of affordable high tech toys like HD camcorders flooding the marketplace coupled with the availability of venues such as Xtube has made it possible for rank amateurs to churn out a proliferation of rather awful amateur porn. Whereas the previous 175 years of photography provided limitations that hindered the home consumer from making the pornographic equivalent of bathtub gin, the new medium offers little to no restrictions. It’s become an open market.

Just how wide technology has opened the door to home-grown porno was made evident in 2008 when an 18 year old boy at a Wisconsin high school posed as a girl on Facebook and enticed 35 of his male schoolmates age 13 to 19 to send him naked photos of themselves. Armed with digital cameras and cellphone cams, those horny young bastards all did as asked and dropped trou to click away at their juvenile equipment. And then using the current technology they transmitted these illicit (and illegal) images to the fellow who requested them.

There’s more to this story… the fellow who conducted the ruse, whose name is Anthony Stancl, then reportedly used the photos that he received to blackmail some of the boys into having gay sex with him. And bless his heart he got caught. And arrested. What the DA in the case doesn’t seem willing to acknowledge is that a scenario like this never would have happened if those kids hadn’t had digital imaging devices given to them by their parents in the first place. Let’s face it. You hand a guy an instant camera and sooner or later he will take a picture of his penis with it.

Then, he’ll take a picture of someone else’s and try to score a profit off of it. It’s human nature.

Well, anyway, so now there is a proliferation of porn flooding the marketplace… most of it bad. And an ever-increasing amount of it is bad bareback porn. While many perhaps see the enormous quantity of available porn as a good thing, too much of something is rarely ever good. Except where chocolate is concerned. There can never be too much chocolate.

To illustrate this point, think about money for a moment. (Mmm… money!). The more currency the Treasury puts into circulation the less value our money has. The same can be said of porn. I’ve noticed that the more porn a company cranks out (with only a few notable exceptions) the less there is worth watching. The reason is because the part that makes pornography work best – creativity - is thrown out in the process of chasing after the quick and easy money. Sure, a studio might come out with an original or semi-original idea, and that’s great. But in most cases by the time they have released 4 or 5 volumes of that same concept, the freshness of the idea has gone stale.

Something else that we lose in this deluge of content being produced is one of the original icons of pornography: the porn star. In porn’s golden years there were names that were as big if not bigger than the studios that produced them. And the public identified with them. Stars like Jack Wrangler and Casey Donovan, Kip Noll and Roger became porn idols. The studios made and promoted them much as Hollywood made and promoted their box-office draws. When bareback porn first hit the scene, a new kind of pornstar came into being – the silent pornstar. Men the likes of Steve "Titpig" Hurley, Steve Wiley, Ray Butler, and Will West became the genre’s representative stars, though not one of them (except perhaps Ray Butler) uttered so much as a word throughout their performances. As bareback porn began to become more prevalent and studios looked for new meat to exploit, the concept of the bareback pornstar faded.

The current tactic of porn studios seems to be to expose the flesh of as many individuals as possible, pay them, and be done with them. This is creating a culture of disposable performers giving disposable performances, and ultimately result in a barely navigable ocean of disposable porn. Out of the hundreds of bareback "performers" that have been marketed in the last few years, there are perhaps only a few bright stars who have emerged. Dawson, Brad McGuire, Jesse O’Toole, Drew Peters, Chris Neal, TJ Jordan, and Lito Cruz are the only performers I can think of who really qualify as "stars" of the genre. A few others, such as Sean Storm and Josh Weston, are crossovers who worked for mainstream studios and brought their established star power with them. The rest, sad to say, are part of an endless parade of faces, dicks, and asses whose names and performances are almost immediately forgotten. It is as if today’s bareback porn is mimicking the pre-AIDS gay culture of the 70’s with all of its random tricking and disposable anonymous sex.

When porn becomes disposable, it becomes junk food. It no longer nourishes the soul. And thus people crave more and more of it in order to feed some need that is not being met. So we have to keep putting more of it out there to satisfy the lack of nourishment we’ve created. It’s kind of a vicious cycle. And trust me… audiences are tiring of this junk porn diet.

There is too much lame, redundant porn in today’s market and the effect it is having is an overall watering down of the genre. Bareback videos used to be bold, controversial, and captivating. But for the most part, this is no longer true. Our industry needs a shot in the arm to keep from becoming so passe that the return on your investment of time, money, and talent doesn’t wither away.

In the next installment: The Importance of Fantasy to the Fantasy Business.

PART 3B: CHANGES IN THE AGE OF AQUARIUS

The 1960’s and 70’s saw a relaxing of what was deemed obscene. To meet the needs of a public whose attitudes and tastes were changing, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) adopted a film rating system to replace the Hays Motion Picture Production Code, thereby opening up doors previously closed to filmmakers and allowing them to produce content that had long been forbidden under the heavy hand of the censorship bureau. Simultaneously, some old movie houses that had lost audiences to television began exhibiting the new films that had been given an X rating. Pornographers had finally found themselves being granted permission to film sex. And they were offered venues in which they could exhibit their films, along with distributors and theatre managers who were anxious for content.

Advances in technology had already made it possible for high-end consumer-grade 16mm movie cameras to incorporate sound on film. Eventually Super 8mm cameras would also record sound, but still most film processing labs would refuse to return films that contained nudity or sexual content, thereby keeping all home movie-makers on the righteous path to moral decency. However pornographers knew where they could get their content processed and have it screened, and this gave the industry the exclusivity it needed to finally become successful. Studios remained loyal to the 16mm format for filming and theatrical screening, and released their movies in the 8mm and Super 8 format for the ever-growing home audience, thereby achieving something Hollywood would only later fully embrace: the simultaneous penetration of both home and theatre audiences.

With the new rating system, new venues to exhibit their films, new public attitudes toward sex coupled with a hunger for more explicit content, and new technology at hand, gay pornographers took on the role of independent filmmakers and went wild producing movies that told stories in the course of which a lot of explicit sex took place. Grass-roots gay porn studios found the ability to reach their audience at long last, and several became the production powerhouses of gay sexual content. Companies with names like Falcon, Mustang, Nova, Laguna Pacific, Colt, and Magnum Griffin became household words throughout the gay culture. Some directors, like William Higgins, Joe Gage, and Fred Halsted became legendary almost overnight. A new breed of performer exploded into being (literally): the Porn Star. Never before had anyone been considered a "star" in pornography, but the gay porn studios of the 70’s made sexual superstars of Al Parker, Jack Wrangler, Kip Noll, Buster, ‘Leo (Ford) and Lance’, Richard Locke, Dick Fisk, Eric Ryan, Clint Lockner, Bruno, Giorgio Canali (aka Rocco Rizzoli), and many others.

And just when the industry thought things couldn’t get any better along came the videocam. As the 80’s rolled in, 16mm film quickly lost favor to video. With video the pornographer could eliminate the long-term cost of the film lab by investing up-front capital in video equipment. The camera equipment was big and bulky compared to the 16mm cameras, but the images it produced were sharper and the colors more true most of the time. The poor little film splicer, a staple of film editing for decades, gave up its ubiquitous status to the big bulky editing machine and duplicating machines. Despite the initial inconvenience, pretty much everyone in the business found the switchover from film to video to be a worthwhile investment. Video proved to be more error-proof (it couldn’t accidentally be ruined by exposure to light), convenient, cost-efficient, and user friendly. It also opened the door to more artistic editing techniques.

On the home front, video proved to be much more convenient than projecting movies. Video eliminated the need for a projector, a screen, and a darkened room to enjoy. And the popularity of porn on video helped make the VHS system the popular choice in the US over the Betamax. Newer gay porn companies, the likes of HIS, Vivid, Huge, and Jocks began showing up on the scene. A burgeoning interest in ethnic performers brought about the creation of specialty studios like Altomar and others. Videotape made the production of porn more achievable to the masses than it had ever been. But video also crippled the XXX Theatre business severely as porn videos found a greater success on the small screens in video arcades and at home.

Through the 90’s the nature of video changed. Cameras went from using VHS cassettes to 8mm video cassettes to mini DV cassettes. The size of the cameras got smaller and more lightweight, and the prices of equipment came down. Digital media did away with the need for editing equipment as the home computer could now handle the job. Suddenly everything changed. Digital technology found its way into the hands of the general population. Anyone with a modest budget could now film, edit, upload, and distribute porn from his own home – his own bedroom – and distribute it to millions of people through the internet without being restricted by the Comstock Act. More ambitious amateurs set up little porn studios in their spare rooms, garages, and basements, or wired webcams in every room of their house. Others found ways to put their content on DVDs and market them to a sex-hungry public. And most of them came into it because they saw how easy it could be to try to get a piece of the porn pie.

Faced with less control over the regulation and distribution of adult content, the US government played its hand at creating a new roadblock: the 2257 record-keeping law. Initially devised as a means of putting an end to child pornography and the exploitation of minors, the laws which were adopted under Clinton were again revisited and reworked under the Bush administration in a conservative effort to seriously wound the industry as a whole. Billed as a ramping-up of child exploitation protections, the 2257 revisions created by former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales were a thinly cloaked attack on adult entertainment and did not do anything new to protect children. The law is still being challenged in court for its unconstitutional provisions at the behest of the Free Speech Coalition.

Even with the 2257 laws as they stand, the industry is still growing. New studios are cropping up everywhere in the US and abroad. With all of the changes that technology has brought to pornography, the hardest part in making porn these days is, perhaps, finding the performers.

Once upon a time, pornography was the domain of the most daring photographers of their day, a handful of individuals who had the vision to create intimate images of the naked human body – images that had the power to stimulate some, seriously offend others, and result in a jail sentence simply for having been taken. And while technology has pushed the art along and given it exposure to whole new realms and greater audiences, technology has also brought with it a menace, commonly known as the mass consumer.

Up next: A Critical Mass of Mass Consumerism.