Tape Condition: Degraded

Tape Condition: degraded Cait McKinney and Hazel Meyer Play, Rewind, Repeat: Queer Porn Archives and the Digital Afterlives of VHS By Cait McKinney and Hazel Meyer We are sitting beside each other in these tapes and their digital after- rewind the tape, which sounds a small AV room on mismatched, lives.1 Still, in practice, we aren’t like an existential problem but is rickety desk chairs, watching old always sure that what we’re watch- actually a preservation measure: porn. It’s three pm in the middle ing is of use to anyone. It’s an old rewinding a tape every few years of July in Toronto but this room is argument at this archives and the lubricates the tape and cassette overly air-conditioned, as archives ad-hoc solution seems to be, if we heads, preventing the ribbon, which often are. Metal shelving stacked aren’t sure what to do with all this dries out over time, from breaking. with acid-free document boxes is porn, let’s just keep collecting it. Digital files don’t need lube but crammed into the room at angles they also dispense with the plastic that make moving around inele- The tapes come in through indi- cassettes, cardboard sleeves, and gant. The boxes are filled with the vidual donations from community mylar ribbon that make up some of Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives members who drop off their old the porney-ness of porn from this (CLGA’s) moving image collection, porn. The first tape we watch, era. At the end of Close Shave 2 we mostly VHS tapes, about 3,000 in Close Shave 2 (1990) by RAY ZOR get the satisfaction of updating the total, roughly 800 of which are porn. productions, is a compilation of “Rewound On” date in the com- hair-related sex acts featuring men puter catalog: “7/12/2014,” then the The porn is what brought us here; in southern California who look like tape goes back in its box and we we’re working on an exhibition the less attractive 90210 cast mem- continue watching. about the archives’ porn collection bers—think Ian Ziering’s “Steve.” and the problem of digitization— They’re shaving each other’s balls, Without ever saying it out loud what will happen to all this sex mostly in public bathroom stalls. to each other, we seem to have on tape as the archives begins its We played the tape because we embarked on a search for a fantasy transition into a 21st-century digital thought it might be some perfect VHS tape that most certainly does repository? In principal we believe fantasy scene in which earnest, not exist. Our Dream Tape is ut- these tapes are worth saving. They newly awakened lesbians give each terly unlike the tapes that actually record queer strategies of pleasure other their First Gay Haircuts, may- make up this collection, which and survival that activist archives be in a locker room after basketball is a pretty homogenous archive like the CLGA had the forethought practice. But it is not that thing, not of mostly white, gay men’s porn to keep. As Laura Kipnis argues, even close. from the 1980s and 90s, primarily “pornography grabs us and doesn’t commercially produced in the U.S. let go,” in part “because it’s in- Still, we watch the whole tape We keep hoping to find the kink tensely and relentlessly about us”; through to the end, but on fast- (there is some), the home-made this porn collection is the work of forward so the hair is shorn at (there is less), or anything made by a heterogeneous “us”—local queer eight-times the original record- or depicting women, performers communities past, present and ing speed. Our goal is to get to of colour, or trans people (there future—who might speak through the end of the tape so we can is almost none). All this watching, rewinding, and hunting is research something, or maybe do both at Bearchell was a lesbian feminist academy, Bearchell’s argument for Hazel Meyer, Tape Condition: for Tape Condition: degraded, the same time. We would really like who wore a lot of oversized plaid, collecting porn seems prescient. degraded (Raiders/Arse), 2015, an exhibition about porn and VHS some of our Dream Tapes to be had a gap in her front teeth that LGBTQ community archives are ink on paper, 15x21cm. tape at the archives. We want to part of the exhibition, but so far the was probably perfect for whistling, some of the only organizations that invite the public to consider porn- search isn’t going well. kept her hair short, and would have actively collected porn (the on-tape’s status as a vital record of eventually retire to a homestead CLGA’s collection is notably strong) LGBTQ subcultures at a crossroads Guiding us on our search is the fig- in Western Canada’s idyllic Gulf and these collections are incompa- as community archives digitize ure of Chris Bearchell (1952–2007), Islands. She was also kinky, into s/m rable primary source repositories their collections, seeking preser- a long-time Canadian porn advo- and all kinds of other things good for researchers, thanks in part, to vation and improving access. What cate, writer, intersectional feminist, lesbian-feminists weren’t sup- progressive amateur archivists and happens to the boxes and boxes of and archives staff member who posed to like in the 1980s. Bearchell advocates like Bearchell.5 porn as materials of more obvious managed to straddle the often- staked out her ideological territory “archival value”—materials like oral conflicting worlds of feminism and squarely on the pro-sex side of the What united all Bearchell’s activism, histories—jump to the front of the gay liberation. She is our diamond. anti-porn debates. At the archives, whether for sex workers, fags, or digitization queue? As porn scholar Every time we talk to someone she’s said to have advocated for leather dykes—was a commitment Walter Kendrick argues, “porn” about our interest in protecting the construction of a never-real- to carving out and protecting as a genre does not exist without and honouring porn at the archives ized false-wall in the 1980s, behind spaces for sexual expression—in- archival sensibilities that classify by taking its digital future serious- which all the porn could be kept cluding print, magnetic tape, and obscene materials, separating ly, they ask us if we know about hidden from frequent police raids. celluloid. In 1983 she wrote, “Many them from everything else.2 In other Bearchell. The stories about her are dykes, including those who call the email, Cait writes, “gotta find is planning a new digitization room words, porn is unthinkable outside legendary. She was a lead orga- In the 1990s, when the CLGA con- ourselves feminists, are compulsive this in the CLGA spank bank.” To us that will replace the current A/V archival classification methods, and nizer of anti-police protests after sidered de-accessioning a lot of the rule-breakers. We take women to the revelation that Bearchell made room. For Tape Condition: de- digital interfaces are often where Toronto’s 1981 bathhouse raids, porn collection to deal with space beaches, or find them there, and dykey, do-it-yourself sex tapes is graded we imagine a DIY, digital these classifications take shape or creating the slogan “No More Shit!” limitations, Bearchell insisted it be head for the dunes. Or take bar- a huge discovery. We search the transfer station aimed at communi- get revisited. that emblazons buttons and other kept because it was the respon- room tricks to bathroom cubicles CLGA’s moving images catalogue ty access and fabricated to create Canadian anti-censorship activist sibility of an archives of sexuality for quickies. We reject Playboy les- to no avail, then we ask CLGA “good enough” digital copies of Tape Condition: degraded takes ephemera. Toward the end of the to ensure access to records that bianism because it isn’t hot enough expert-on-everything Alan Miller if tapes. We need just three pieces of the form of an immersive installa- protest, Bearchell is said to have document that sexuality—records and get out our polaroids instead.”6 he’s seen these tapes, but he hasn’t. consumer grade equipment: a VCR, tion in the archives’ gallery space. jumped on the hood of a parked that often fit the devalued genre And so we keep looking and our an analog-to-digital video conver- A working digital transfer station car, leading the crowd in chanting of porn. Porn archives, argues porn If only she had taken out her Dream Tape grows into a bigger and sion dongle with USB output, and a is situated in a kind of pervy, quasi the phrase that would politicize studies scholar Tim Dean, preserve camcorder. bigger absence. computer. rec-room. In the grant proposals Toronto’s newly visible queer “traces of nonnormative pleasures,” we wrote to fund the show, we community on the cusp of the AIDS facilitating “not only the tracking As we continue to research and Right now digitization at the Digitization is not a magic-bullet promised that the space would crisis. but also the reactivation of these imagine Tape Condition: degraded, archives is focused on creating solution to the space and preserva- “conjure the unique feeling of an pleasures.3 Like T-shirts, buttons, we’re guided by one big question: Internet-ready versions of oral his- tion challenges facing community activist community archive, warm We search out anything we can find and protest signs, sexual minorities what would Bearchell do with a tory tapes that document materials archives.

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