Too Dark, Too Hairy, Too Much!": Representations of Arab Men And

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"Too Dark, Too Hairy, Too Much!"1: Representations of Arab Men and "Arabness" in Contemporary Gay Male Pornography

EVANGELOS TZIALLAS

A THESIS SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES

IN PARTIAL FULLFULMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS

FOR THE DEGREE OF

MASTER OF ARTS

GRADUATE PROGRAM IN FILM STUDIES

YORK UNIVERSITY

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1*1 Canada Abstract

This project explores the changing representation of Arab men and "Arabness" in

contemporary gay male pornography, before and after 9/11, investigating how evolving

ideologies, social movements and technologies influence these racial constructions. The paper takes an in depth look at several European and American films and studios, as well

as the emerging "do it yourself XTube culture, analyzing how the cultural specificity of

each text or production site influences how they both appropriate Orientalist tropes, while

simultaneously deconstructing their own racial constructions. Although many of these texts traffic in conservative and racist cliches, I argue that via parody and performativity these sexual moving image texts also allow for interesting, if ambivalent, moments of resistance.

IV Acknowledgements

First and foremost I must thank my Supervisor John Greyson for his endless dedication. He went above and beyond what was required and showed a self-less passion and interest in both this project and my short career at York. My time at York would not have been nearly as fruitful, productive or successful without his insight, intelligence, and zen-like tenacity to both criticized, support and guide. I am eternally grateful for the honour to have worked with him on such an important and foundational project.

To my readers Brenda Longfellow and Sharon Hiyashi for their support, encouragement and intellectual challenges which really forced me to address inherent flaws in the project, thereby, strengthening the thesis as a whole.

The Film and Video department's amazing Graduate Program Director Michael Zryd.

To my copy editors Michael Keill and Tyler Rooney for their quick responses and eloquent alterations.

To my external committee for the lively debate and engaging questions.

To my friends and sister for helping me find my way through the density of this project with humour and open arms.

And to my mom, who encouraged me to keep moving forward and pushing through even when I wanted to give up.

v Table of Contents

Page# Content i Title Page ii Copyright Page iii Certificate Page iv Abstract v Acknowledgements vi Table of Contents

1 Introduction) Histories, Fantasies and Resistance

17 Chapter 1) Orientalism: Histories, Fantasies, And Evolutions

36 Chapter 2) European Gay Arab Porn: Orientalism, Poverty, Ethnography

62 Chapter 3) American Gay "Arab" Porn: Re-inscription, Revision,

Resistance

87 Chapter 4) The Democratized Sexual Image: Regress and Progress

99 Conclusion) Blogs, the Internet and the Future of Porn Studies

104 Works Cited

110 Endnotes

vi Introduction: Histories, Fantasies and Resistance

The title for my project was inspired by the title of an online gay porn blog which attempted to assess the desirability of new gay porn actor Huessein. Huessein broke into the scene as a Raging Stallion exclusive and shot to fame when he starred in Chris

Ward's 2005 award wining film Arabesque. In this particular piece, the author found

Huessein's stardom a bit perplexing as his physical presentation seems to be excessive

for his liking. For Nightcharm, Huessein was simply too masculine, too ethnic, too hairy... and yet too irresistible. It is that very last word, "irresistible," which alters the discourse of his piece, and epitomizes the focal point of this thesis. This project is about the modern manifestation of the West's sexual desire for Arab men. The author writes:

The name is surely intended to capitalize on — now how shall we put this without causing riots, bloodshed and the storming of embassies throughout Europe — the hair-trigger horniness of guys coming from a certain backward-looking culture where women are hidden in plain sight, casual sex can be punished by beheadings in public squares, and where the nights are full of young men and boys contemplating an enormous, empty sky full of stars. As well as each other. Yes, men coming from puritanical, anti-sex cultures are often on a hair-trigger — furiously horny, furiously masculine, and just plain furious. We need look no further than our shores to figure that out. (Nightcharm, Oct 27, 2006)

This small paragraph manages to succinctly summarize some the most pertinent Western attitudes that this project studies, including the association between Arabs and violence, the inherent sexualization of this racialized violence, the attraction to that which disgusts us, the appeal to and transformation of Orientalism, and popular gay fantasies of hyper- masculinity.

1 Huessien's body becomes a site for the projection of white Western fantasies and anxieties about "The Middle East". Terms and phrases such as "backward-looking" are mixed with the belief that Muslim men are somehow awesomely sex-deprived in comparison to the over-sexed West (a perceptual switch from the construction of the East as over-sexed and bad, to the East as undersexed and bad), and that "they" only need half a second to be overcome with a sexual aggression and excitement equal to a force of nature. Within this short paragraph the author even manages to inject a bit of classical

Orientalism, invoking the image of a homosocial gathering out in the desert's wilderness,

"contemplating an enormous, empty sky full of stars. As well as each other".

In contrast, let us now turn to a similar paragraph, written a full century earlier by

T. E. Lawrence:

.. .Our youths began indifferently to slake one another's few needs in their own clean bodies—a cold convenience that, by comparison, seemed sexless and even pure. Later, some began to justify this sterile process, and swore that friends quivering together in the yielding sand with intimate hot limbs in supreme embrace, found there hidden in the darkness a sensual co-efficient of the mental passion which was welding our souls and spirits in one flaming effort. Several, thirsting to punish appetites they could not wholly prevent, took a savage pride in degrading the body, and offered themselves fiercely in any habit which promised physical pain or filth (14).

The above quote was taken from T.E Lawrence's opus travelogue The Seven Pillars of

Wisdom and is an excellent example of how Western culture has historically exoticized and sexualized Eastern cultures, particularly Arab, Persian and Berber cultures. The highly sexualized and homoerotic language foregrounds some of the project's central themes and highlights how romanticized and eroticized depictions of Middle Eastern culture have often been produced from a white, male's personal perspective. Despite 2 Lawrence's authorial position, his work was received as journalism, a literary documentary about the Middle East and its Arab civilians.

Edward Said used the term orientalism to refer to the tendency for Westerners to read fiction, especially European travelogues, and academic works by Europeans about the Middle East, as authentic facts, rather than biased opinions. In the beginning to his groundbreaking book Orientalism, Said states:

Taking the late eighteenth century as very roughly defined starting point Orientalism can be discussed and analyzed as the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient—dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it: in short, Orientalism as a Western style of dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient (1994,3).

Orientalism according to Said was not a purposeful project undertaken by the

Europeans, but rather an "area studies" academic inquiry into European ideas, beliefs and writings of, and about, the Middle East. Said's project criticized 19l and 20l century

European and American literary and political writings in order to expose their professed

"truths" as racist and inaccurate. Said argued that the West saw itself as superior and the

East as inferior, and it is this presupposition which formed an uneven colonial/imperial relationship between the West (Europe/Occident) and East (Arab and Muslim nations/Orient).

His groundbreaking book and future work has, in recent years, come under criticism for its polemic interpretations, over-zealous condemnations, and reliance on structuralist binaries, particularly the East/West divide. As Jose Munoz has argued, "the totalizing implications of Said's theory have, over the last decade, been critiqued by

3 many scholars. Bhabha, in [sic] perhaps the most famous of these challenges to Said's

analysis of Orientalism. ..(175)". Thus, it is important to recognize Said's Orientalism as part of an evolving critical thought constantly undergoing evaluation and revision. Derek

Hopwood's 1999 study inverted the critical gaze by looking at books and writings from

Muslims who traveled to Europe and criticized European culture for being "decadent"

and "perverse." Hop wood argued that the attitudes held by Arabs about Europeans were

similar when Arab visitors, generally scholars or the wealthy elite, went to Europe or

even America. Many Arab writers saw the West as decadent, overly sexual, materialistic,

and vapid.1

I draw on Edward Said's concept of Orientalism, as many of the contemporary

pornographic texts I assess display Orientalist tropes. However, part of this project is to

look at how polarizing systems of thought are undergoing transformation, in part due to

emergent information technologies which transpose traditional divisions. Information

technology is continually integrating the world, slowly eroding geographic and culturally

defined borders, such as "East" and "West", hybridizing what were once considered

antithetical identities. Focusing on the quote above, Lawrence is not only watching; he is

monitoring and judging the behaviour around him, positioning himself as a Kantian

"Master" and those he watches as the "Slave". Yet this relationship is problematized. He

refers to the youths as "our," rather than "their", deteriorating the boundary between

Master and Slave. He watches them and watches himself, rupturing the clean divide.

Known as "going native", this cultural appropriation is both an over identification with

and fetishization of the "other". It is a process with decidedly sexual overtones and an 4 integral part of Said's concept of Orientalism. As Arjun Appadurai deliberated the paradoxical and contradictory relationships globalization has forged in relation to the nation-state and identity politics, I argue that contemporary gay Arab porn articulates

these contradictions and paradoxes, accenting the instability of these boundaries.

This project is partially about the evolution of Orientalism in distinct social and political contexts, but it is also a project about fantasy, gay fantasy to be exact, and the moving image pornographic construction of gay fantasy, specifically the fantasy of

"Arabness" and the fetishization of Arab and "Arab" men. Contemporary gay Arab porn

is rooted in Orientalist ideology and fantasy. Fantasy sustains Orientalism, but fantasy is

only one part of the complex system that has produced these numerous gay pornographic

texts. It is important to contextualize these racialized representations in relation to gay

history, culture, identity and fantasy, film and porn studies, media and information

technology, as well as specific political, post-colonial, and anti-racist historical and

cultural frameworks.

During the initial research phase of my graduate thesis project, I quickly realized

that gay porn blogs were dedicating considerable amounts of attention to films depicting

"Arabness" or featuring men coded as Arab'. Further research indicated that many of the

web blogs I frequented were American-based, and many of the films they discussed were

either American productions, or recent European imports into America. I hastily

concluded that as a result of the September 11* attacks, a newly developed fascination

with the Arab world and the Arab body was created and was being translated into never

before seen gay pornographic fantasy; further research revealed that this was only partly 5 true. It is true that American gay pornographic productions featuring Arab performers and settings were new; however, these texts were preceded by European based on-line and studio productions.

Many of the literary texts, which post-colonial critics have focused on, were embedded with sexual innuendo and featured open accounts of sexual encounters. Much of what Said, and many of his critics and contemporaries, such as Joseph Massad and

Jaspir Puar, have focused their attention on, are the copious levels of sexual over and undertones dispersed throughout Orientalist literature and later cinema. With all the discussion about eroticism and sex in Orientalist literature and cinema, I was surprised that critics such as Said, Massad, and Puar fail to even mention the most graphic sexual representations available: pornography. Much criticism is geared towards examining mainstream popular media representations, but in comparison, a virtually microscopic amount of academic research has studied these "culturally fringe", yet just as widespread and popular, sexual works. This is a gap my project attempts to help fill.

Extensive amounts of research have been produced on the canonical Orientalist works, including the queer orientated literary texts of Burton, Burroughs, Bowles and

Lawrence, and so my intention is not to reiterate this research, but rather use it to provide a historical foundation to study these contemporary sexual representations. Many of the films I will discuss display Orientalist tropes, but the representations vary, as the time and location of production re-shape their representations to reflect their specific socio-cultural context. This is to say that there is a slowly evolving disjuncture between queer-centered

Orientalist literary texts and modern gay pornographic films, as the contemporary 6 pornographic texts are a negotiation between the historical relationship between Western

Europe and America with key North African and Middle and Far Eastern countries, and the modern manifestation and consequences of these relationships.

Maxime Cervulle and Royce Mahawatte have already produced scholarly works studying modern gay pornography featuring Arabs. Their research, however has focused exclusively on European productions, specifically the French on-line studio

Citebeur.com, and Jean Daniel Cadinot's Harem (1984). Although my work revisits these productions, my intention is to look at how they negotiate their representations, allowing for alternative readings. Although I commend them for their groundbreaking work, I disagree with their entirely negative assessment of Citebeur. Their criticism fails to consider how the videos this online studio produces play with the concept of "Arab".

Cervulle and Mahawatte inherently respond to these racial representations and categories as though are stable and infallible. A major part of my thesis is dedicated to delineating how each of these pornographic texts/production sites inherently deconstruct their own racial constructions.

This thesis breaks new ground by looking at how newly produced American films situate themselves within a post-9/11 framework, arguing that through gestures of performativity, pastiche, and parody, these works attempt to destabilize historically- rooted Orientalized visions of the exotic East. I continue to address conflicting pornographic images by surveying some key self-authored amateur porn videos on the popular website XTube.

7 I am choosing to focus on five main films and, or, production sites of gay Arab porn. This list is not meant to exhaust the field, but provide a diverse survey, taking into consideration geography (America, France, Germany) and modes of productions

(narrative/studio, non-narrative, amateur-professional, self-made amateur). The texts/studios I focus on are:

1) 1984's classic Orientalist film Harem by Jean Daniel Cadinot.

2) Citebeur.com, an on-line, French based studio featuring Arab youths performing in "ghettoized" urban settings.

3) Men of ZIP, a German based "amateur" studio which films non-professional (supposedly) Turkish and Arab men on location in Turkey and other Arab countries.

4) The big budget, American-based studio Raging Stallion pictures and their high profile and elaborate, although significantly fewer, star-driven films Arabesque (2005), and Collin O'Neal's World of Men: Lebanon (2006).

5) Finally, I look at how Arab men are using the democratizing tools of new digital technologies at their disposal to resist, yet integrate themselves into the global sexual discourse, by appropriating the filmic apparatus and filming and projecting themselves on XTube, rather than having someone else film them. Thus, some Arab men have chosen to objectify and represent themselves, creating a pseudo auteurist counter-porn.

Each of these texts play with traditional Orientalist discourses by appropriating, embracing, altering and at times rejecting Westernized sexual visions of the Arab body and Middle Eastern culture. I have chosen these specific films or studios because I feel they cover a broad range of representations. Although part of this project is to look at the many contradictory representations of (homo)sexualized Arab men, it is also a project dedicated to recognizing pornography as a complex and plural genre. There are many

8 types of pornography and there are many methods for representing the sexualized body. I wanted to provide readers with a range of pornographic and racial representations to demonstrate methods of production influence and contextualize each other's representations. Also, I picked these specific texts because they have been written discussed by both queer academia and internet gay porn blogs.

Before moving on to the first chapter, I feel it is important to present and clarify five of the key terms which shape the overall project and recur throughout the course of this thesis:

1. East and West

The East/West divide is a Eurocentric divide dating from colonialism, which placed the newly emerging "Europe" at the centre of the map, and located other nations/regions as peripheral in relation to this "West". In the succeeding centuries, despite much global, cultural, and economic integration, historically defined imaginary boundaries, such as the West and the East, remain strongly entrenched in the popular consciousness. Post-9/11 American media made it very clear that the West was "Us" and the East was "Them". Part of this project is to break down this binary, and many of the texts I examine exhibit this eroding boundary. However, I want to confirm that I do use these terms, especially when discussing the historical relationship between Europe,

America and various Arab-Muslim nations. When I use these terms, I do so partly because the content I deal with was created to exploit the sexual logic of this geographic and cultural boundary. As my assessment progresses, I slowly begin to break down this 9 divide, as the films themselves situate themselves within the paradox of the East/West divide. That is to say that many of the texts participate in, and represent, the transnational direction the world is moving in, while also problematically relying on rigid nationalism and nationalist stereotypes. These texts and their relationship to nation and location are complex, and part of this project is to situate and delineate their inherent

contradictions, but to also commend some for their recognition of the changing global landscape.

2. Arab

One outgrowth of the East/West binary is the legacy of all-inclusive racial labels, which reduce multiple ethnic and cultural identities to one single monolithic representation. The category "Arab" is particularly problematic as it is consistently misused to group the entire Arab world together, silencing specific histories, practices

and identities. This term becomes even more volatile considering how many ethnically

"Arab" individuals live outside what is commonly referred to "the Arab world". Part of this project then, is to explore the historical construction of the term "Arab" as a remnant

of 19l century Orientalist ideology. For instance, there is the tendency to conflate and

confuse Arab with Muslim, despite the fact that "Arabs" make up less than lA of the

world's 1.4 billion Muslims. It should be noted that the term "Arab" actually refers to

people who speak the Arabic language, not a particular ethnicity, culture or nationality.

Similar to my use of East and West, I use the term Arab as a self-conscious, and

self-critical cultural label, partially because these cinematic texts were created with the 10 European/Arab divide in mind. As my study moves on to contemporary texts, I replace

Arab with "Arab" to signify a recognizable shift in racial identity politics. Introducing quotations is vital, especially when looking at the American produced pornographic films which emphasize race as a constructed performance and the self-made XTube videos which hybridize the body. For example, Francois Sagat is a French born, ethnically

Romanian gay porn "bottom", whose career skyrocketed after starring in Wesh Cousin! 5

(2005), a Citebeur poduction, playing an inner city Arab thief. His performance in Wesh

Cousin! 5 got him an invitation to play an "Arab" in Chris Ward's Arabesque, which led to his next role in Collin O'Neal's Lebanon, playing a non-Arab tourist in Lebanon.

Sagat's personae are multiple and overlapping, and in an increasingly globalized world, his ability to remold his identity provides him with an interesting sexual currency and cultural value, granting him a very unique form of agency. The "truth" of his ethnicity is not necessarily the most important part of his persona, but rather the way he and others, are able to believably manipulate it for financial gain. On his Wikipedia entry, Sagat is

"French-Lebanese" while other sources state something differently.4 Both of these identities exist in a seemingly unproblematic continuum. I discuss Sagat and other porn stars in further detail in chapter's 2 and 3, looking specifically at how their bodies are both sites of anxiety and resistance to conservative racial constructions, and noting how, in certain films, the term "Arab" is undergoing revision, moving away from specifically

Orientalized constructions, and more towards (troubled) expressions of transnational hybridity.

11 3. Fantasy

The term fantasy is a highly unstable idea, rooted primarily in Freudian psychoanalysis. It is popularly conceptualized as an individual's inner desires. What constitutes fantasy is in and of itself a question beyond the scope of this project, and is only further problematized when attempting to define fantasy in relation to pornography.

Because fantasy is generally associated with the imagination, and since the imagination is only accessible through representation, and since representing something actualizes that which is only an idea, the boundary between unreal/fantasy and real/representation becomes highly unstable. When I use the term fantasy, I do so from a less strictly psychoanalytic tradition, (be it Freudian, Lacanian, or Laplanchian), and more so from a generic perspective. In this instance, the term fantasy refers to a collection of personal desires which are historically, culturally and individually shaped and motivated. Gay men have their own individual fantasies to be sure, yet there are obvious cultural tendencies which can, and do, shape gay male fantasies.

In addition, this project is about the recreation of fantasy in moving image gay pornography. Inevitably, this medium (and the technologies which produce and disseminate this medium), must partially liberate and partially limit fantasy. Since fantasy is popularly considered a free-flowing, unbridled system of impulses, and film, in contrast, is considered a highly organized series of linear sounds and images, merging these two seemingly opposed systems creates inconsistencies requiring negotiations.6 I think Brett Farmer says it best in his book Spectacular Passions, when he states,

"Spectatorship is defined in fantasy theory as a site of continuous interaction between the 12 potential fantasmatic scenarios signaled by the text and the shifting psychosocial frames

inhabited by the individual spectator" (60). For the purpose of this project, it is useful to

conceptualize fantasy as a mediation between psychoanalysis and phenomenology, an

abrasive, yet interesting, blend of mind and body, text and audience.

4. Performance

Judith Butler's groundbreaking book, Gender Trouble, dared to argue that gender

was a performance, a culturally prescribed act, whereby subjects appropriate, or are

forced to appropriate, certain traits, styles, mannerisms, etc. and unconsciously perform

them as something deemed "natural" to, and in correspondence with, their biological sex.

Although Butler's ideas have been criticized (even she revisited her polemic stance in her book Bodies That Matter), her notion of gender being a "performance" remains vital and

has branched out to other socio-cultural cohorts, such as sexuality and race. With respect

to my thesis, I use Butler's notions of "performativity" and apply them to racial

discourses. In a sense, I argue that what these films invariably demonstrate is that race is

ideologically constructed and then performed as a series of culturally defined gestures

and symbols. In the case of gay Arab porn, many of the bodies are defined as "Arab" by

either their surroundings, costumes, skin colour, or simply the label "Arab". These bodies, sometimes technically "Arab", and just as often "not-Arab" or "mixed-race",

(obviously all overdetermined and unstable categories) and their representations

interrogate their own limits as they attempt to sell themselves as authentic. Some texts

are more overt in their willingness and desire to actively play and engage with the viewer 13 in their performance of racial discourses. However, all the texts, whether intentionally or unintentionally, deconstruct their own representations as inauthentic performances by way of camp or self-refiexivity.

What this project does is look at a small and specific group of pornographic films and situates them within their larger cultural, historical and sexual contexts. The purpose of this study then, is to study a specific instance of how globalization is changing racial and sexual identities via transnationalism and the democratized digital image. These diverse contemporary pornographic texts play with historically rooted racial and sexual tropes, yet simultaneously resist them, creating ambivalent and problematic representations. My goal here is to identify common threads throughout the various films

I study, and detail how each category uniquely represents its material to its audience. All of these films are marked in some way by Orientalist traditions, yet each category modernizes this vision, as they are inevitably being influenced by post- 911 contemporary discourses, particularly globalization, the "War on Terror," queer activism and film/media technology.

5. Gay Arab Porn

The taxonomy used to differentiate gay pornography, let alone pornography as a whole, is unstable in and of itself. Common divisions found in video stores categorize

DVDs according to production houses (Falcon, Hot House, Raging Stallion, etc.), or by action (soft-core, blowjobs, anal, fisting, urine, foot fetish, etc.), or by race, (Black,

Latino, Asian, etc.), and although less popular in videos, a popular online method of 14 grouping is by costume/uniform (military, police, fraternity). All of these categories however overlap with each other, with racial categories usually being tied to certain identities and spaces. As an example, videos categorized as "Black" do not simply feature Black performers, but invoke a racist/fetishisic vision of Black male masculinity, associating Black men with a certain identity (thug, gang member) and space (ghetto).

As an additional example, although studios have a general corporate/artistic vision, many gay porn studios produce a variety of films within their respective creative parameters.

As an example, Raging Stallion is known for their muscular, hairy, tattooed performers, but the studio also produces a large amount of "fetish" pictures (fisting, urine, bondage), and even introduces some of these actions into their "mainstream" pictures. While searching through his Adam Film World 1991 Directory: Gay Adult Video, John Burger compiled a list of popular themes. He found the majority of films focused on

"stereotypically heterosexual male sites and role" including "athletes (71 videos), construction workers (27), cops (19), cowboys (15), detectives (5)...students (30), surfers

(9), and uniforms (25)" (38). There are numerous ways to categories pornographic videos, however that complex discussion lies outside to scope of this particular project.

What I wanted to demonstrate was that all of these categories are interdependent as race can entail space, and space can entail dress, and dress entail fetish, and so forth. With respect to my use of the phrase "gay Arab porn," I use it to refer to gay pornography which explicitly fetishizes "Arabs" and, or, "Arabness". As I will demonstrate, the spaces and costumes differ throughout all of these videos, but regardless of these

15 discrepancies, there are culturally specific reasons for these formulations, placing race as the central tying element to these videos.

Pornographic texts are complex in their own way, as their production and consumption differ significantly from literary and cinematic works. The same approach we take in deconstructing literary and non-pornographic cinematic texts will not suffice, as those cultural products are formally, narratively and aesthetically distinct from pornography, and aim to achieve different goals. Pornography's complexity is not about nuanced textual intricacies, as the text is generally simpler than its non-pornographic counterpart, but its status as a cultural sexual barometer. There are, of course, multiple and contradictory potential readings of pornography, and my intention in this work is to inspect the border between these readings, attempting to circumvent absolute prescriptions. These texts tell us what we find sexy now and, in the case of my study, what these texts say is that Arab men and "Arabness" are, once again, very sexy.

Because of pornography's close association with fantasy, these contemporary pornographic texts act as a gateway to the collective queer social unconscious. As

Burger argued in the conclusion of his book One Handed Histories, "The study of gay male video pornography and its subsequent off-shoots.. .allows access to a deeper understanding of the sexual, social, cultural and psychic realties of the various gay communities, past and present" (104). This study hopes to shed light on how gay identities, fantasies, communities and sexualities have developed over the last two decades, and how these texts constantly negotiate a deeply entrenched past with the present, and unknown, but potential, future. 16 Chapter 1: Orientalism: Histories, Fantasies, And Evolutions

"From the beginning of the nineteenth century until the end of World War II, France and Britain dominated the Orient and Orientalism; since World War II, America has dominated the Orient, and approaches it as France and Britain once did. Out of that closeness, whose dynamic is enormously productive even if it always demonstrates the comparatively greater strength of the Occident (British, French, or American), comes the large body of texts I call Orientalist." (Said, 1994, 4).

In this chapter, I attempt to delineate the complex framework which sustains

contemporary gay Arab pornography, by looking at some of the major supporting

characteristics of gay fantasy, racial fetishism, and key historical and contemporary geo political events. My investigation attempts to interrogate the legacy and present-day reality of Orientalist thought, examining why this ideology formed, and how it continues to inscribe a dichotomizing mentality between East and West.

Much has already been written on the literary Orientalist canon, and for the purpose of this study, it is not my intention to revisit these view points. Modern gay porn

is more influenced more by received Orientalist cliches, rather than by any specific literary texts. In contrast, because of its blatant appropriation of cliches, Hollywood

cinema's Orientalist history has definitely helped in partially inscribing a visual ideology

of representation. Lawrence of Arabia (1962) (the film, as well as novel) had a definite

impact on early American visions of the Middle East, inspired, of course by its major predecessor, The Sheik (1926).

Because gay Arab porn comprises many complex, separate discourses ("gay"

"Arab" "porn"), it is pertinent to understand how these fields have evolved independently

of each other, in order to understand how their interaction contributes to the pornographic 17 films' representations. We must also look at the various other factors, such as the regulation of sexuality, travel as a predecessor to transnationalism, and colonialism, surveillance, and social activism as they are all equally important shapers of the images in modern gay Arab porn. I would like to begin by looking at some of the important events and interactions which would eventually produce the colonial relationship of West to East, exploring how this history motivated and influenced 19 century Orientalist writings.

One of the first and foremost clashes between "West" and "East" occurred between the Ancient Greek and Persian armies in 480 BC, which was followed by the

"invading Arab and Berber armies [(who)] crossed from North Africa to Spain in 710"

(Hopwood, 9). These violent collisions founded the beginnings of a primitive bartering system which slowly matured into a massive trading system between various "Old

World" continental regions. It would not be until the Crusades when Christendom and

Islam met violently for the first time, and it was this significant clash that opened the gateway for further religious clashes. These clashes and commercial roots would eventually evolve into colonialism, and as Hopwood has argued: "the Crusades opened many means of contact between Europeans and Middle Easterners which were later to provide material for European exotic literature, novels, poems and songs." (Hopwood,

12). Orientalism was an artistic and epistemological byproduct of violence, economics and later, colonialism.

Europe and Christendom proper has had a long history of constructing itself in opposition to the East. This began with Western Europe rejecting the Byzantium Empire, 18 which it perceived as being "corrupted" by Oriental influences. Prior to the Renaissance,

Western Europe was a sparse and under-populated region. The Renaissance "brought with it a weakening of the authority of the church and a decline in the religious fervor that has helped fuel hostility to Islam. Gradually, 'Christendom' as a unifying principle and form of identity became less powerful, and the more geographic and nominally more secular nation of 'Europe' gradually came to the fore." (Lockman, 39) Modernism via the Enlightenment was when Western Europe re-introduced the Byzantium Empire, specifically Greece, into the European imagination, solidifying a white-border.

By re-introducing the Byzantium Empire, Europe was able to form its own identity by appropriating Ancient Greek culture and ideology. Lockman has argued that

"to adequately understand the development of Western Christian images of Islam, it is helpful to go even further back in time, to ancient Greece and Rome, and there begin to explore the origins and evolution of the idea of a 'Europe' and 'West' often deemed essentially different from an 'East'" (8). The nation-state as a force of modernity was circumscribed by outside influence as it was properly attributed to "European" knowledge and history. In a sense, Ancient Greece and Rome were perceived as developing an early sense of "national unity" and it was this perspective of "unity" amongst the ancient civilizations which stood as a model for the modern nation state.

Enlightenment thinkers modeled nouveau "Europe" after their ancestors not necessarily because they were right, but because they were "really white". As Lockman has pointed out:

19 Western Europe drew heavily on Arab-Muslim culture [which] would be largely forgotten or obscured when, during the Renaissance and after, European thinkers and scholars began to denigrate medieval learning and culture and instead claimed a more or less unbroken cultural continuity between ancient Greece (now seen as the source of the quasi-secular humanism which many Renaissance thinkers espoused) and their own times. (33)

In rejecting Arab influences, Europe was able to position itself as the superior region, placing the Middle East in a position of submission. Modern Western philosophy ushered Europe into its secular "evangelical" age, spreading modernity throughout the world via colonialism and imperialism. The British elite believed "Victorian ideas were too large to be contained within a small island - too large and too universal... [and] felt that the rest of humanity should be offered the benefits of British rule, justice and progress" (Hopwood, 53). Under the guise of social progress, Britain took control over the land, rivers, and resources of those they colonized; similar rhetoric would repeat this invasion cum liberation post-9/11. As Reinhard Shulze has argued, "the missionary aim was no longer Christianization, but modernization. The tradition/modernity dichotomy was born. For Europeans, the birth date could be said to coincide with the date of the

French embankment in Alexandria in Egypt, the 1st July, 1798" (Shulze, 190). It is during 19th century colonialism and imperialism when Orientalist discourse, as it is known today, took shape.

Orientalist writings and ideology cannot be divorced from their economic circumstances as, "Orientalism derives from a particular closeness experienced between

Britain and France and the Orient" (Said, 1994, 4). Colonial and imperial conquest created the necessary interaction between Europe and the Middle East, and it is this

20 exploitative and uneven interaction, founded upon commercial gain, which reverberated throughout Orientalist literature. Academics, philosophers, and politicians were quite direct and vocal about their perceived superiority. Orientalist literature in turn translated these ideals into indirect and subdued "exoticism". The British and the French produced the greatest and most endearing Orientalist works, and:

coined, used and integrated certain ideas about sexual behaviour in the Middle East into the European mind, ideas which have become part of the overall European attitude towards Asia and Africa, an attitude in which sex played a large role. Sexual attitudes influenced imperial attitudes, and imperial relationships were at the root of racism and were embedded into Victorian approach to the world in general (Hopwood, 51).

Not only did colonialism influence sexual attitudes, but sexual desire may very well have influenced colonialism. For Said, Orientalist thought is re-articulated European ideology, with the same perspective, iconography and narrative being refashioned throughout the literary canon. When searching for common associations, Said focused on the "style, figures of speech, setting, narrative devices, [and] historical and social circumstances" of the texts, highlighting how their subtext follows similar ideological trajectories. Said argued that Europe perceived the East as "irrational, depraved (fallen) childlike,

'different'" while seeing themselves as "rational, virtuous, mature, 'normal'" with this ideological dichotomy creating "Westerners and 'Orientals'" in which "the former dominate; the latter must be dominated" (1994, 39-40).

Clearly inspired by Kant's Master/Slave dialectic, Said's interpretation of

East/West relations is curiously similar to the heterosexual/homosexual divide. In discussing the evolution of these terms, Katz noted that:

21 Kraft-Ebbing's use of the word heterosexual to mean a normal different-sex eroticism marked in discourse a first historic shift away from the centuries-old procreative norm.. .His heterosexual and homosexual offered the modern world two different sex-differentiated eroticisms, one normal and good, one abnormal and bad, a division which would come to dominate our 20* century vision of the sexual universe (28).

When the homosexual was invented, a binary was established, making the heterosexual correct and the homosexual a perversion, an oddity. The invention of the "the homosexual" and the shift in power discourses was tracked by Foucault in his groundbreaking study The History of Sexuality Vol. 1, where he delineated the process from "unnatural act" to "mental disease". Said argued that, "the Orient becomes a living tableau of queerness." Here, queer stands for odd, but it is odd that queer here can mean both "gay" and odd. Orientalism was not only a political and cultural ideology used to dominate and exploit North Africa and East and Central Asia, but a system of thought heavily embedded with strong sexual underpinnings, both heterosexual and homosexual.

Western Europe's colonial relationship with key geographical regions in Northern

Africa and the Orient has, like the social construction of homosexuality, been perceived and represented through engendered symbolism. The West penetrated the Middle East's borders, making Europe masculine, dominate, powerful, and rendering the Middle East as the penetrated, and therefore weak, feminine, and controllable. These gendered associations found their way into Orientalist literature, whereby political ideology was projected onto the Arab body. Women, young boys, and even grown men became embodied analogies for colonialism and Orientalism, their penetrated bodies symbolizing

22 the West penetrating the East's borders. These bodies desired and enjoyed their violation, insinuating the Middle East enjoyed being colonized.

Nineteenth century Orientalist literature was geared toward heterosexual encounters, with suggested or explicit homosexual experiences gaining prevalence in the

20th century. Burton's infamous unexpurgated translation of The Book of The Thousand

Nights and a Night (1885), along with its Terminal essay, which laid out a theory of homosexuality based on the dubious geography of the "Sotadic Zone". The "Sotadic

Zone" was system of interconnected regions where pedastry dominated and was tolerated. These regions included North America, Indo-China, Indonesia, as well as the

Southern, Northern and Eastern rim of the Mediterranean. T.E Lawrence's Seven

Pillars of Wisdom (1922) is perhaps the most famous 20 century queer-leaning

Orientalist work, but other important texts include Genet's Prisoner of Love (1986),

Gide's L Tmmoralist (1902), Bowles The Sheltering Sky (1949), and Burroughs' Naked

Lunch (1959). I say "queer-leaning" as their representations are either ubiquitous, or have been appropriated by queer historians as seminal homoerotic works by queer identified/"discovered" authors, or by closeted/potentially homosexual writers. Each of these texts use the Orient in different ways, but ultimately see it as a queer space. Two distinct fantasies proliferate in these queer spaces; the older European dominates the young Arab boy; or the European male is dominated by the hyper-masculine Arab man.

T.E Lawrence for example, encompasses both realms of these queer Orientalist fantasies, by recounting in romantic detail his live-in relationship with 16-year old Selim Ahmed, and masochistically enjoying his brutal whipping by dominating Arab captors. 23 Burroughs' Naked Lunch is a fictional narrative inspired by his time spent in

Tangiers, rather than an autobiographical travelogue. Burroughs offer a unique vision of the Middle East by juxtaposing homophobic and homoerotic energies as competing fantasies. The Middle East is no longer exotic and knowable, but a "Disputed Zone," a potentially dangerous space undergoing transformation. This new space, although still littered with Arab men waiting to be used as sexual currency, is now infected with anxiety and conflict. The protagonist is so terrified of his own sexual desires that he needs to imagine himself as a secret agent, and his typewriter, symbolizing a gateway into his inner desires, as a bug/alien hybrid with a talking asshole. Genet's Prisoner of

Love takes readers to an actual disputed zone, the Palestinian refugee camp of Shatila in the aftermath of the 1982 massacre. For Genet, the Middle East was both a sexual and violent space.

While 19l century travelogues purported a singular vision, 20l century queer- centred texts both adhere to the Orientalist traditions of their heterosexual counterparts, while modernizing various Arab spaces and reconfiguring their fantastical properties.

The Orient was seen as an unregulated, liberated space where Europeans and Americans could escape repressive Christendom, a space where men went to discover themselves, both spiritually and sexually. It was an exotic land, filled with deserts, colourful tapestries and garments, licentious and lascivious sexual practices, and over-sexed Arabs seeking constant sexual gratification. The same settings such as the desert and bazaar, with the same hot colours, such as red, orange, and yellow, and the same Arab object of desire, with an interchangeable name, would re-emerge in each text, showcasing the Orient as a passionate space, oozing with sex and exoticism. These projections are obviously reactive formations in opposition to the writers' repressive home cultures. If the Middle East was sexual, passionate and exotic, then Europe was bland, passionless, and mundane. These texts are about how Europeans perceived themselves and their own culture rather than the multiple Arab/Muslim cultures they encountered.

These texts were solicited and interpreted as non-fiction, not fiction, "confessing" and speaking the "truth" of, and on behalf of, the Middle East. Said argued that, "the

Orient is watched...the European, whose sensibility tours the Orient, is a watcher" (1994,

103). What Said was suggesting was that the Europeans did (whether soldier or writer), was survey. Surveillance is from the French "watching from above", and from their position of superiority, watching was one of their primary concerns. By surveying the

Middle East, European writers such as Lawrence, Flaubert, and Nerval attempted to discover a normal pattern of behaviour. Travelogue literature was received by the

European consumer as a "documentary", a secret confession of the region. Because of these "secret confessions," many Western European (and American) gay men would leave their increasingly hostile and regulated nation-states for the Middle East; the

Eastern land's licentiousness created a haven for same-sex interaction. Popular queer

(armchair and actual) tourists include the writers discussed above (Lawrence, Bowles,

Burroughs), as well as Oscar Wilde, Andre Gide, Truman Capote and Allen Ginsburg.

Gay men would head to the Middle East in order to discover their "inner" self, and to allow this hidden self to be liberated.

25 Looking specifically at gay culture, self-surveillance has been a common practice amongst gay men since the invention of the homosexual. As same-sex acts were transformed into a disease, and then into an "identity", certain behaviours and characteristics were discovered or determined as abnormal, and, therefore became indicators of one's "homosexual" disease/identity. Not only does the state monitor and study the homosexual's behavior for moments where he may reveal "himself through a slip of the tongue or improper bodily movement, but the homosexual monitors and regulates his own behaviour, based primarily on his spatial surroundings.9 For many, the

Orient was a space of freedom, a space where the homosexual could reveal himself and reverse the surveillance gaze onto another. Referring to Andre Gide's famous 1902 novel

L 'immoraliste, Massad argues that it is a "prominent example of the new Western fiction of homosexual self-discovery in the Orient." (11) Surveillance is ingrained into the queer psyche and was exported to the Middle East, putting the Arab and the Arab space under the queer gaze. As Markwell and Waitt argue:

Many homosexual Westerners expected to find some kind of sexual paradise in the Muslim world. More specifically, it is the homoeroticism of Orientalism within the Western imagined geography of the east that has fueled the work of homosexual writers, artists, photographers, and tourists (50-51)

Surveying the Middle East transformed it into a mythical space. Pedestrian homosocial practices ignited the Western gay European male's imagination, as tropes associated with the enclosed, segregated and institutionalized Western homosocial space were sublimated into the Orient. Kosofsky-Sedwick was right when she pointed out how Lawrence

26 associated the Arab space with homosociality, transforming Arab culture into one pulsating with sexual energy. She argues that:

He has moved from intensely charged but apparently unfulfilling binds with Englishmen, to bonds with Arab men that had, for political reasons, far more space fantasy.. .Many passages in The Seven Pillars are devoted to charting the alien but to him compelling geography of male homosociality in the Arab culture (195).

Her use of the word "charted" suggests surveillance; surveillance of the space and of the behaviours in that space. To chart is to map, to record that which is stable, for easy maneuvering; it is a way to find yourself in different, unknown spaces. Surveying reporting created a library of knowledge, knowledge which was spread to others "in the know". This knowledge spurred a massive queer sexual migration to the Arab world, especially Morocco.

Orientalism is a historical version of, and major motivator for, modern "gay travel" and must be understood as a "travel fantasy." As Tom Waugh has noted, "All northern sexuality, homo or hetero, is quickened by the dream of Elsewhere and the

Other, the Exotic and most often the Oriental" (1996; 149). One need only look at contemporary gay pornography to see that travel to exotic locales for gay sex is still a popular fantasy among gay men. Indeed, many films set in "other" spaces hyperbolize them as sources of true freedom. Locations are generally outdoors, in natural or pastoral settings, suggesting escape from the "all-seeing-eye." Movies such as Greek Holidays

(2004), Hammam (2005) and The Isle of Men (2001) narrate the foreignness of these nationalized spaces, framing them as passionate gay Utopias. These spaces have obviously undergone transformation over the last two centuries due in large part to travel, 27 migration and global integration. Sexuality and sexual practices in Muslim and Christian

societies have evolved over the past two centuries, as have concepts of "West" and

"East". In the introduction to their anthology, Murray and Roscoe argue that:

The contrast between 'Western' and 'Islamic' homosexualities is not so much one of visibility versus invisibility or modern freedom versus traditional repression, but of containment versus elaboration, of single pattern of homosexuality defined and delimited by institutions and discourses closely linked to the modern nation- state versus the variety, distribution, and longevity of same-sex patterns in Islamic societies (6).

What Murray and Roscoe's assessment of diverging sexual practices affirms is

that cultural and sexual practices exist, but not as starkly divisive systems. There is both

segregation and integration between East and West, between homosexual and heterosexual.

In the final part of this chapter, I wish to look at some of the key events which have changed and shaped political relationships between "West" and "East", and how

these changes have impacted on sexual and racial discourses. The First World War

dissolved the Ottoman Empire, fragmenting it into Turkey and numerous other nation-

states. After the Second World War, England and France divested their status as colonial powers, and America eventually became the world's new global power. The

independence of previously English-held colonial states such as Iraq and Palestine, along with the French/ Spanish-held states of Algeria and Morocco, and the creation of Israel,

further transformed East/West relations. As de-colonization spread throughout North

Africa and the Middle East, national liberation struggles and anti-Western sentiments

sparked heated political activism, which was predictably labeled terrorism by the west.

28 This would alter 19 century Western perceptions of the "Middle East" as docile and feminine, evolving into dominant modern stereotypes of a violent and masculine "Arab

World".

Meanwhile, the end of the Second World War brought about many changes to

American sexual culture, laying the foundation for what would become gay liberation activism in the late 1960s and 1970s. Tom Waugh observes that "World War II provided.. .the emergence of gay identities and networks," and that, "a whole generation of (presumably horny) young men [were] uprooted from family and social pressures and socialized within a same-sex institution" , thus laying the ground work for urban gay ghettos and queer activism. The increasing popularity and circulation of salaciousness

"muscle magazines" and "wrestling films" in the 1950s and 1960s are indicative of this bubbling sexual, and increasingly political, energy (1996; 210, 214). However, during this period of social and institutional change, the oppressive McCarthy era was just as responsible for shaping gay relationships, networks and fantasies. Raz Yousef has argued that:

homophobia and nationalist ideology are closely intertwined. The ability of the homosexual, like the spy, to 'pass' produces anxiety for heterosexuals...about the undetected pervasiveness of sexuality and the subversive activities of the enemy within. For this reason, the homosexual/spy must be identified, made visible, marked, tracked and regulated (133).

"The homosexual" was vulnerable to blackmail and, therefore, needed to be discovered and neutralized so that the enemy could not get to him first. The homosexual was seen as a national "traitor". True to the spirit of gay fantasy, scenarios of coercion, blackmail and violence were translated into hot literary pornography for gay male consumption.10 29 I highlight this period of gay history for three particular reasons. Firstly, it locates

fantasy within a political and cultural spectrum. Secondly it foreshadows how the rhetoric about "communism" would be recycled 50 years later to describe "Muslim terrorists", and thirdly, it highlights how 1960s and 1970s liberal activism, and their focus on visibility, would be used by Islamists as a polarizing cultural divide between the East

and the West. In 19th and early 20th century discourses, the West located sexual perversity in the East. Now the East is transforming same-sex relations into a Western disease, something brought into "the East" by "the West". Homosexuality was now a virus that needed to be contained, and this would be done by rejecting "Westernism" and adhering to a strict Muslim-national doctrine. Many post-colonial states chose Islam as a way to heal colonialism's destruction. Islam became the definitive signifier of that which is "not Europe". The need to adhere to something that was not influenced by Western culture is understandable as many post-colonial Muslim nations regressed into theocracies, with homosexuality becoming the ultimate symbol of Western decadence.

Social secularism and liberalism were influential forces, but neo-liberal capitalism and, in particular, Western interests in Middle Eastern oil, were just as responsible for the changing relationship between many key Arab nations, and the industrialized West. As wealthy Western nations, such as America, rapidly urbanized and continued to industrialize, their dependence on oil simply intensified their relationship with, and investment in, key oil rich Middle Eastern countries. It was also during this period when major events intensified Arab nationalism, events such as the creation of Israel and the

30 numerous wars between Israel and surrounding Arab nations, the Iranian crisis, and the

OPEC induced oil crisis in the 1970s. As Cleveland argues:

Some Western writers have characterized Islamists as fanatics or backward- looking reactionaries. This is an inaccurate portrayal of the movement and of the majority of the people who are sympathetic to it. The driving force behind the Islamic resurgence was not a rejection of change; rather, it was a rejection of the Middle East's dependence on Western and other alien models of development. ..the Western experience in which church and state became separated and society became generally secular was posited as the only viable path to true modernity. But to many Muslims who reflected on the course of their modern history, this path had not only been forced on them, it had failed them. (441)

Islamism was and continues to be a challenge to Western actions and attitudes. However,

as Barber discussed in his book, Jihad vs. McWorld, globalization would challenge both

Eastern segregation and Western encroachment. Muslims would continue to immigrate to Europe and the Americas, opening spaces in urban spheres for the consumption of various Middle Eastern cultural products, including food, music, and cinema, slowly bridging the East/West divide. Some Islamist nations, although upholding conservative

Muslim dogma and practices, imported American goods, thereby (perhaps unknowingly) importing icons of Western culture and allowing them to merge with their staunchly nationalist visions. Although globalization would allow for fluidity, it would also

aggravate extreme fractions. As Naomi Klein discussed in her polemic anti-capitalist book The Shock Doctrine, globalization can also be as an indirect form of colonialism.

She argues that globalization is not a naturally occurring economic phenomenon, but a

Western conceived and enforced financial system, inspired by Milton Friedman's belief

in a completely deregulated market. Instead of face-to-face combat, wealthy-elite nations

31 could buy out nations, or overthrow unfriendly governments and instill hand-picked regimes or juntas.

The World Trade Centre attacks epitomize how globalization can create both the animosity needed for reactionary violence, and the complex global network necessary to carry out those same destructive actions. The Post-9/11 politics of Bush et al would attempt to exploit the East/West divide ("you're either with us or against us"), however as shock and fear subsided, a large and continuously growing dialogue about Islam, oil, terrorism, globalization and human rights would attempt to counteract the revived

Orientalist view of the Middle East as backwards and in need of Western rationalism, progress and liberation.

In the 1970s an imaginative shift occurred, where the perception of the Muslim world transformed from an exotic, far away, desolate and impotent space into a violent, dangerous, and all-too-near space, filled with irrational masses of fanatics. In his book

Covering Islam, Said argued that, "frequent caricatures of Muslims as oil suppliers, as terrorists, and more recently, as bloodthirsty mobs," have replaced the "faintly outlined stereotype" of the Arabs as a "camel-riding nomad" in classical Orientalist discourse

(1997, 6; 1994, 285). Said also noted how Western media sources obsessively represented Arabs and/or Muslims as rioting masses, suggesting that all Arabs are the same and that all Arabs are irrationally enraged; Arabs are rarely portrayed as individual citizens. The 1970s was a pivotal decade for transforming Orientalist representations of

Arabs from something ineffectual, to hyper-effectual. As Said argued, "Fundamentalism equals Islam equals everything-we-must-now-fight-against, as we did with communism during the Cold War" (1997, xix). The Middle East was no longer something controllable; it was uncontrollable and, therefore, needed to be re-controlled and contained. This rhetoric was subdued by the waning Cold War; however, during the

Bush era and especially post-911, the Arab terrorist replaced the communist as public enemy number one. With the communist and homosexual already ideologically associated, underlying sexual perversity would be easily transferred over to the terrorist.

According to Puar, "(Homo)sexual deviancy is always already attached to the terrorist body," doubly inscribing the need for surveillance and regulation onto his body (99).

Gay culture and identity became, and continues to be, a volatile political issue in many Muslim nations. In his polemic book, Desiring Arabs, Joseph Massad equates the

Western-defined identity of "the homosexual" as an example of the West's continual enforcement of incongruent ideology onto Eastern practices. In Massad's own words: "I will argue that it is the very discourse of the Gay International, which both produces homosexuals, as well as gays and lesbians, where they do not exist, and represses same- sex desires and practices that refuse to be assimilated into its epistemology" (163). For

Massed, "Gay International" is an umbrella term used to define Western based gay and lesbian organizations who promote tolerance for gays and lesbians. Massad's main objection is not the promotion of tolerance for same-sex practices, but the promotion of the Western defined identity of "gay" which, according to Massad, causes more harm to gays and lesbians in the Middle East than good. Predating Ahmadinejad's proclamation,

"We don't have homosexuals like in your country" (although claims have been made that he was misinterpreted and what he said was that there are not many homosexuals in 33 1 ^

Iran) , Massad attacks Western identity politics, arguing that the more "Gay

International" forces this "identity" onto the Middle East, the more reactionary and homophobic the Middle East becomes towards homosexual activity. He writes, "The press and conservative Islamists soon began to call for explicit laws criminalizing same-

sex practice. The Gay International and its activities are largely responsible for the intensity of this repressive campaign" (184). For Massad, Gay International and Western

sexual liberalism created a sex-negative discourse, equating homosexuality with venereal

disease. Homosexuality, as mentioned before, became a "virus" brought into the East by the West, a product of Western decadence and liberalism.

Massad's views have been severely criticized, and although there is simply not

enough space here to go through the many flaws with his argument, it should be noted that his engagement with identity politics, while reinforcing an extremely rigid perception

of the East/West divide, is a valid criticism, as many other critics have discussed the

difference between homosexual activity and homosexual identities in and between Arab

and Muslim nations and Western nations. Khaled El-Rouayheb's book, Before

Homosexuality, looks at Islamic poetry and literature from 1500-1800 in order to demonstrate that, "Arab-Islamic culture on the eve of modernity lacked the concept of

'homosexuality'" as this was a Western creation (1). This is not to say that same-sex

desire and acts did not occur, or were not represented, but that the identity itself did not

exist. As Western culture (was forced via activism to become) liberalized, Muslim culture responded by becoming more conservative, despite the famous Medieval queer poetry of Abu Nawas and Rumi remaining staples of mainstream Islamic culture. It is 34 during this period that contemporary Western perceptions of the Middle East as homophobic, heteronormative, sex-deprived, and excessively masculine were formed.

In this chapter, I attempted to map out a broad foundational historical, cultural and theoretical framework for Arab gay porn. Despite it's status as a modern niche form of erotic entertainment, Arab gay porn shares this common historical and theoretical background, and requires an in-depth analysis of how each film variously branches off from these shared discourses into alternative, more socio-culturally specific re-visions.

Each of these texts emerge from the history I have just outlined. Of course, this small chapter is just a sketch, a composite summary of multiple, complex arguments, and can by no stand as any definitive history. I simply wished to outline what I felt were key ideologies and events which inspired the specific textual representations that I'll explore in the following three chapters.

35 Chapter 2) European Gay Arab Porn: Orientalism, Poverty, Ethnography

In this chapter I perform close textual analyses of several popular European gay

Arab porn films, beginning with the Jean Daniel Cadinot's classic Harem, continuing with the online based production studio Citebeur.com and concluding with ZIP productions. As pornographic studio earnings are difficult to ascertain, I partially made my choice for these texts based on what has already been academically written about, what gay porn blogs have focused their attention on and the resulting dialogue that the blogs inspired. Each film/ production studio represents their subjects in a unique way, both invoking and modifying classical Orientalist tropes, as each production represents manifestations of Europe's colonial past. Harem follows the traditional Orientalist travelogue narrative of the white Westerner, cruising for gay sex in Morocco, while the

Citebeur texts focus their representations on inner city immigrants from former colonies .

These latter texts are unabashed about sexualizing the large Franco-Arab working class, while in the process re-inscribing French nationalist ideology as white, middle-class and ethnically "French". Even as a legal French citizen, the Arab male is still situated and sexualized as "other".

I then conclude this chapter by looking at ZIP productions, an online company specializing in ethnographic pornography. In the ZIP films, the white male is no longer present in front of the lens, but hides behind the apparatus, transforming the text from the more typical ficionalized travelogue, into an ethnographic re-discovery of the "other" in their "natural habitat". Before moving into a detailed discussion of these texts, I begin

36 the chapter by looking at some of the major social and technological changes responsible for these evolving representations.

Social changes brought about by 1960s and 1970s activism were being reflected in mainstream and independent cinema, even as explicit images of hardcore penetrative sex were also slowly reaching the silver screen. Attitudes towards sex and sexual practices were undergoing conceptual and practical changes thanks in large part to feminist and queer activism, as well as birth control advancements. The once underground network of queer graphic illustrations (Tom of Finland) and erotic photography (Wade, Piet), and highly homoerotic, though non-explicit, public sexual materials such as muscle magazines and wrestling films (Physique Pictorial), were being replaced by publicly available explicit images of hardcore gay sex.14 Predating the heterosexual breakout pornographic film Deep Throat (1972) by a year was Wakefield

Poole's gay porn opus Boys in the Sand (1971). Gay pornography poached the heteronormative film screen, unabashedly placing gay sexuality within the predominately heterosexual cinematic frame. Gay porn was for a long time gay cinema, as positive representations of gay men outside of gay pornography were few and far between.

Although gay pornography valorized bodies, spaces, and themes which outside their pornographic context were, and still are, threatening and repressive, their sexually explicit reinterpretations challenged and subverted their homophobic authority. In his study of gay pornography, Burger argued that these films appropriate heterosexist spaces and identities, transforming gay pornography into activist texts (21).I5 Although I appreciate his enthusiasm, I would argue that although these texts dared to visualize the 37 taboo of same-sex desire, their liberationist potentials are partly truncated by their

obsessive fetishization of oppression. Early gay porn cinema valorized three traits:

heterosexuality, masculinity, and oppression. Gay pornography has consistently situated

gay fantasy within this trinity.16

In addition to social and cultural changes, technological advancements played an

active role in shaping both the porn industry, and the fantasies they would produce.

Three major technological advancements would change pornography's formalism and

reception: video tape and cameras, the VCR, and the Internet. Video tape and cameras

would allow for cheap and easy production, prepping the market for "amateur' videos.

The VCR would allow individuals to consume these images in the privacy of their own

homes rather than having to make their way to public cinemas. The VCR would further

technologize sex as individuals gained the ability to rewind and repeat moments and

movements, to pause when they wanted, and skip over what they wished.17 The Internet

would further deregulate pornography, transforming into a virtual and digitized playground available for consumption to anyone with a phone/cable line. Production, but, more importantly distribution, was open to anyone with a DV recorder. AIDS was a

culturally specific revelation which would change how pornography was produced, and how viewers perceived the fantasies being represented. AIDS had a particularly unique

effect on gay fantasy, as many gay communities were being ravaged by the disease.

Pornography became the safe alternative to physical sex; watching sex became more desirable than having sex.

38 Gay and lesbian organizations in the 1990s used the power of visual culture to redefine heterosexist assumptions and representations, prioritizing images of gays and lesbians as ordinary people, counteracting the stereotypes of AIDS victim or child molester. Part of the strategy was to appeal to straight moderates by counteracting the extreme right's smear tactics. As a result, many of the self-representations offered to the mainstream by the gay/lesbian community were pedantic reformulations of heterosexual symbolic order. Popular examples include Will and Grace, The Wedding Banquet and In

&Out.

As new and varied representations entered the market, pornography became a battleground, competing for its evolving audience's dollars. Pornographic representations began to cater to multiple tastes. In some respects, pornography challenged the newly developing gay mainstream establishment by remaining politically incorrect, allowing the closet, the underground and the homosocial to flourish. In many other respects, pornography began to change its image, both legitimizing and sanitizing itself in an attempt to lure the young urban professional and his disposable income.

Pornographic production changed as the internet decentralized distribution, allowing a multitude of representations to make their way into the market. Consumers could now consume a variety of images, from a variety of places, including texts once previously unattainable. As an example, Harem was released in France in 1984, and although available on-line for years, it was re-released in the United Stated on DVD in

2005 (re-named Sex Bazaar). Harem was the first hardcore gay Arab pornographic film publicly released, and this landmark status provides us with a textbook opportunity to 39 investigate how a gay Arab porn film negotiates Orientalism and gay fantasy. In turn, we can study how this film translates these tropes into pornographic moving images, bridging the gap between older literary conventions and representations, and current cultural ideologies of contemporary gay pornography.

Because this project is partially about the evolution of Orientalist representations, and partially about the evolution of gay fantasy and culture, dissecting and understanding this premier text lays the foundation for the remainder of this project. This film was produced and released at a critical juncture in both East/West relations and gay culture, and what this film offers is a unique view and mediation of the interaction between these discourses.

Harem is an overly romanticized cultural product which actively references classic Orientalist tropes, re-envisioning the Arab space as a fantasy slowly being lost. It is important to question why this particular film was made during the mid 1980s, and why it envisioned the East as a partially revived, exotic sexual fantasy space. As AIDS tore through many gay communities in America and with the "moral majority" fighting to oppress gays and lesbians, the desire to escape during the 1980s was strong. In France however, the much more likely explanation is the lingering memory of the still recent anti-colonial Algerian war, which had ended 20 years earlier, and Moroccan independence, achieved less violently 5 year earlier.

As previously discussed, Morocco was, for people "in the know," the gay Mecca, and as the 1980s progressed, conservative governments cracked down on homosexual prostitution and public behaviour.18 Harem negotiates classic Oriental visions of 40 Morocco, with its modern reality. It is important to frame Harem as a modern day

revisionist fantasy specific to French colonialism and its complex relationship with

Morocco.

The film's premise follows a classic trajectory, a white European man searching

for same-sex action in the North Africa. The film is essentially about "a young white

Frenchman traveling across Morocco [who] is initiated into same-sex activity by the

locals" (Cervulle, 2008, 175), continuing the French Orientalist tradition of the

Frenchman going to exotic North Africa to "sexually liberate" himself. Mimicking past

novels, Harem's protagonist enters the exotic North African space to explore and

discover both the "truth" of the space and its people, and via this exploration, he

simultaneously explores and discovers himself. Harem purposely repeats the Orientalist narratives of Flaubert {Notes du Voyage) and Nerval (Voyage en Orient), while

integrating the high-art Moroccan novels of Burroughs and Bowles, and Genet and

Gide's explicit queerness.

Cadinot himself is a famous gay pornographic film director, considered by many

as one of the genre's few "auteurs". His style began with reformatory tales of butch

young criminals, purposely invoking Genet, and moved on to exotic/international locales,

diverse ethnic bodies, lushly saturated colours, and diffused lighting creating "emotional"

spaces. Given France's long colonial relationship with North Africa, it's not surprising

that Cadinot would make a film about Morocco, and present it as a travelogue. Part of

Cadinot's auteurist sensibility is his "ethnographic" gaze. Maxime Cervulle has observed

that Harem became "a cornerstone of gay male erotic production in France that led the 41 way for a whole subgenre of 'ethnic porn,'" (175).19 Being one of Cadinot's first ethnographic films, it seems that he was inspired by the titilation involved in fetishizing

"other" spaces and bodies. Cadinot continued to make occasional Orientalist fantasy pieces throughout his career, including Chaleurs (1987,) Hammam (2004), Plaisirs

D 'Orient (2005), and Nomades (2005). Cadinot's signature ethnographic romanticism remained consistent throughout his Orientalist pieces, with all of his narratives told from the point of view of a single white French protagonist or group of white Frenchmen.

They are always doing the looking, never being the ones being looked at.

In Harem Cadinot focuses his attention on Orientalized spaces, such as the bazaar and the bathhouse, while re-fitting them into a modern paradigm. Cadinot intercuts scenes of the French protagonist on location in Morocco exploring the public space, and sex scenes filmed on private sets. The bazaar, which is shot on location, is presented as a maze-like space; it is cramped, narrow, sprawling, and uniform. The editing stitches the space together as a never ending claustrophobic tunnel. The maze-like layout of the bazaar is purposefully filmed to emphasize privacy, suggesting numerous "hidden" private and semi-private spaces. Cadinot is sure to shoot facades with prominent traditional Orientalist symbols such as rugs and Islamic flags, which are draped on wires above the pedestrians' heads, along with colourful clothing, brass plates, and ceramics.

The bazaar is extremely cramped , with all objects merging into one massive pseudo

"public veil". I argue that Cadinot purposely shot the Moroccan market to emphasize how this "public veil" allows for these private same-sex acts to occur. In comparing the mise-en-scene, Cadinot meticulously recreates the bazaar's excessiveness in his studio's 42 controlled interior scenes. In the interior scenes, the protagonist need only move the

objects aside, or maneuver around the draped fabrics to find sex. Even the bathhouse, which was the staple of Middle East homosociality and homosexuality, has now been placed within a nondescript building, a space unrecognized immediately by Western

eyes.

Harem reverses the traditional narrative of the white European male as the

dominating penetrator top, and the Arab male, generally a youth, as the submissive bottom. This role reversal exemplifies how modern gay culture is altering Orientalist tropes, merging them with modern discourses, something Lawrence's Seven Pillars of

Wisdom coyly advocated. This is very much in sync with gay liberation's unapologetic desire to be penetrated and dominated by "power-tops."20 In Harem, when the "white-

Westerner" is present in front of the lens, the Arab performs as a rough dominator; when the Westerner is absent; the representation is not as polarizing, as Arab performers play both top and bottom. As Cervulle has argued, "Both homosexuality and sexual passivity become implicitly linked to whiteness, thereby conflating the sexually active position taken by Arab men with the privileges of heterosexuality" (175). Rather than associating the Arab body as something controllable and feminine, the films reinterpret the Arab body as masculine and heterosexual, once again articulating a shift in Orientalist fantasy

scenarios.

The protagonist's second sexual encounter is quite rough in nature. The Arab is the dominating heterosexual who grabs a hold of the protagonist's head and guides/forces him to perform fellatio. The Arab man then pulls the protagonist's pants down, bends 43 him over the table and begins to anally penetrate him. The sex sequence consists of a rhythmically edited balance between close-up penetration shots, and medium-long body shots. The somewhat gentler and slower penetrative rhythm in the close-up shots are juxtaposed to the much quicker and more rough thrusting movements in the medium-long shots, forming a desynchronized relationship. In the medium-long shots, the Arab man generally has his hands around the protagonist's neck, or is pulling his hair, or head back, and slathering his tongue on the protagonist's face. The Arab men in Harem are always in control of the white body, reversing historical representations. As Cervulle has argued,

"the heterosexuality of the actors serves mainly to construct a fantasy character that is racially stable and coherent" (forthcoming, 3). Heterosexuality is now a determining

"racial" characteristic of the Arab body.

Harem suggests that the repressive nature of Arab space produces insatiable, over-sexed bodies. The Arab space once signified sexual tolerance; now it is a repressive space, segregating sex to the private sphere. Throughout Harem, all of the actors are simply waiting around (in portioned off private spaces) for any possible opportunity to engage in gay sex. After the protagonist's first sexual encounter, the Arab man trades places with his Black North African friend, who is already sporting an erection, to anally penetrate the French man, who simply remains bent over the table, legs spread and buttocks tilted upwards. A few sequences later, the protagonist walks in on a Black

North African man receiving oral sex from another white male inside an enclosed space, created by a curtain comprised of hanged clothing. As the other white male passes through the hanged clothing to leave, the protagonist enters the space while removing his 44 pants and instantly heads towards the Moroccan man's still erect penis. In Cadinot's vision of Morocco, gay sex waits behind every veil which segregates the public from the private.

While the Frenchman previously penetrated the Arab land, space and rectum, the

Arab male now penetrates the French rectum, symbolizing resistance. The rectum can be thought of as a metaphorical space, a personal and political space of anxiety and pleasure. Anal penetration becomes an analogy for reverse colonialism; the body of the white male symbolizing the French border. As Cervulle has argued, "Being fucked by

Arab men might represent 'our consensual revenge on Western colonization', the ultimate gay challenge to the legacies of racism and imperialism" (175). The fucking in this film can be thought of as a metaphor for the political reversal of French-Arab relations. It is not my intention to over determine or essentialize the role penetration plays. The belief that being fucked somehow automatically puts you in an inferior role or degrades you is exacerbated. However, it is worth pointing out that in this film, when the white male protagonist is present, only he is penetrated and never penetrates, and only he performs oral sex, never receiving. This submissive desire to pleasure the other can be seen as a sexual allegory for immigration, with France slowly submitting to its colonial past.

The film's ending is ambiguous, as the white protagonist dons a white Sheik-like costume, laying in the arms of his Arab lover. This could be read as threatening, with the

Muslim world culturally and physically colonizing the colonizer. It can also be read as emancipating, as the Westerner becomes an expatriate finding happiness and refuge in a 45 more accepting space and culture. Regardless, Harem's conclusion articulates how the

East/West dichotomy is being diffused as the world becomes more globally integrated.

Cadinot's romantic visions would however be replaced by the online power house

Citebeur studio, and its harsh reinterpretations of European Orientalist fantasy in relation to France's colonial legacy.

Citebeur is a Paris-based studio, specializing in producing porn that sexualizes working-class Arab youths, shooting them in stereotypical "ghetto" spaces such as alleyways, warehouses, and rundown apartment buildings. Following many decades of immigration from Frances ex-colonies, France is now home to the largest Muslim minority outside the Muslim world. In Citebeur's films, the viewer is offered a vision of colonial consequences. These are texts which simultaneously illustrate the exploitation and impoverishment of one group for the benefit of an other, while demonstrating how the oppressed is fetishized by the oppressor. Common Orientalist fantasy spaces, such as the bazaar and palace, have been replaced by the graffitied warehouse or alleyway. Years of marginalization and racism have produced a large group of working class French-born

Arabs , now transformed into the latest pornographic fantasy. Arab archetypes, such as the sheik and slave-boy, have been replaced by the hoodlum and gangster.

When comparing Citebeur with Harem, what we see is a disjuncture, a disjuncture brought about by removing the Arab from "his" space. Cervulle has argued that in

Citebeur and other French produced contemporary gay Arab porn, "The local exploration of economically deprived banlieues replaces colonial sexual tourism abroad" (1).

Orientalism was about colonialism; Citebeur is about post-colonialism. The Arab was 46 exploited in "his" land ; now he is exploited in France. He was contained in his Arab

space; now he is contained in his ethnic ghetto. The Arab is now in the West, but not part

of the West; he remains the "other". As Royce Mahawatte has argued, "In the Studio

Beurs series, this otherness is projected through three social distinctions: the Arab, the

working class, and, most importantly perhaps, through masculinity" (133). The Arab is

dangerous, threatening, masculine and homophobic, but his body and new space remain

exotic via abjection.

Fetishizing the lower class has been a popular gay fantasy throughout the 20th

century beginning with literary pornography and continuing with moving image pornography.22 One need only look at 20l century erotic still and moving images to see how Arab men are being molded into this fantasy. During the 20 century, the lower

class was associated with masculinity and homophobia, and the middle and upper class with femininity and sexual "decadence". The working class used their bodies to make their living, while the middle and upper class used their bodies for leisure. The working class body has now become the idealized gay male body, but rather than sculpting this body through manual labour, it is molded by the middle and upper class at the gym. The working class body is no longer a sign of work, but of leisure. One need only look at contemporary gay porn to see "working class" spaces, such as the farm, construction site, military, mechanic's garage or saloon being sexualized. With respect to Citebeur, the

Arab body is no longer "Orientalized," but ghettoized. As Mahawatte has argued, "The inference is that these are the kind of men who are socially dangerous, from a forbidden part of town and sexually masculine. They are part of an underclass—this association emphasizes the men's foreignness and their sexual allure" (132). It is an unemployed, or criminal body, designed to illicit both fear and desire.

With the Arab body now ghettoized, similarities between the representation of

Arab men in the Citebeur films and Black men in American gay porn are perhaps not surprising. Arabs in France, like Blacks in America, have been historically disadvantaged and oppressed by their white counterparts, and over time this disparity has only increased and become more visible. Most American porn featuring African

American men frame the Black male body as something ghetto and heterosexual. In

America, the "mandigo man" of the seventies has been continued by the thug stereotype of the nineties. This thug fantasy reigns supreme as very little mainstream gay porn features Black actors. Black men in porn, like Arab men, are relegated to their ethnic ghetto. As Frantz Fanon has argued, "One is no longer aware of the Negro, but only of a penis: the Negro is eclipsed. He is turned into a penis. He is a penis" (177). If the Black man is penis, then "his" ghetto space is hyper-sexual. Similar to Arab men, the

"mandigo/thug" fantasy constructs the Black male as a hyper-sexual and hyper-virile sex machine, always ready and willing to fuck. The Black male is well endowed, reducing him to his genitals, turning him into an object which is only good for sexual labour. The

Black man, like the Arab, is good at fucking and does it often. Although the proliferation of pornography on the internet has opened up new possibilities for Black male representations in gay porn, as Black-on-Black gay male porn has increasingly featured flexible role performances, the overwhelming majority of porn, especially studio produced porn, still represents the Black male as a "thug." 48 Since Citebeur is an online studio, extra diegetic information, such as the design and layout of the website, is part of the overall fantasy package, as it is designed to entice potential clients and sell the product and, as such, must be taken into consideration when looking at the Citebeur films. Upon entering the website, a large image of topless, masculine, built men, wearing chains, baseball caps and low-riding jeans, are placed in the foreground with a series of high-rise towers in the background, all of which envelop a cartoon image of a pit-bull. The men are dressed in what is popularly perceived as

"ghetto fashion," with the numerous high-rise towers suggesting a slum, or project. Upon entering the site, potential subscribers are titillated by a series of preview stills, advertising potential film purchases, directors, and models. Guests soon discover that

Citebeur is part of a larger porn network, whose brother sites include Universblack,

Bolatino, GayArabClub, BeurX, and BeurOnline.

The website is being integrated into traditional American fantasies of Latinos and

Blacks as ghettoized gangsters. Ortiz has argued that gay porn "presents the

Chicano/Latino man in terms of the homeboy or street-smart and tough urban resident,

[which is] an image of the Chicano/Latino that is widely circulated in the dominant media" (9). The association between popular American media representations of Latinos and Blacks, are similar to the popular images of Arabs in France.2 The Arab is no longer in a desert or palace or crowed market, but the inner city. He no longer wears robes or tunics, but "bling-bling" chains, backwards caps and leather jackets. Traditional Middle

Eastern music has also been replaced by the deep throbbing bass of hip-hop music, or the ambient noise of city life. Instead of riding camels, owning quant shops, or taking a 49 steam in the bathhouse, these men play-fight with each other in run-down, abject, graffitied buildings.

One of the largest discrepancies between Cadinot's films and those produced for

Citebeur, is that the Citebeur videos are not narrative, but non-narrative. Narrative porn is more akin to fantasy, with non-narrative and amateur being associated with documentary. I say Citebeur is non-narrative rather than amateur because the videos use and promote models/actors, not amateurs. Amateur means non-professional; these men are professionals, their sex scenes are choreographed (whether the audience recognizes it or not). The difference between narrative and non-narrative is that non-narrative lacks a cohesive story line, script, and extending scenes with dialogue or non-sexual action which foreground the sex scenes to come. Linda Williams has discussed how pornography and the musical genre have similar narrational patterns, as the musical features prolonged musical numbers preceded and followed by plot/dialogue.24 The plot/dialogue is important, but the musical numbers make the film a musical. They are the selling point; they are what people desire. Porn can be thought of in the same realm as the dialogue scenes which precede and follow the sex scenes create a basic narrative which integrates the sex into a specific fantasy. Non-narrative porn is like narrative porn with the narrative cut out; music videos are to the musical, what non-narrative porn is to narrative porn. With the narrative gone, these films have the tendency to been seen as pseudo-documentaries, showing the true nature of sex. Despite featuring professional actors, the lack of narrative suggests a lack of direction. In narrative porn, the line between documentary and fantasy is blurred because narrative is the fantasy and sex is 50 the documentary. When combining the two together, pornography becomes an almost

indecipherable genre, with the condom generally being the sign of fraudulence.25 The

sex is real, but the pleasure (most likely) is not. In non-narrative porn however, the lack

of narrative reduces "fantasy" and increases "documentary". Quoting Adam Gay Film &

Video Directory 2008 's review of Wassaup Bro! 5 , the reviewer writes:

This fifth entry in a French produced amateur series focuses on that country's large Middle Eastern ethnic population. Interestingly, they're all portrayed as criminals, burglars and rapists. It even includes an "Arabian Idol" vignette, which appears to be a contest about who's the best at wearing a terrorist balaclava and brandishing deadly weapons. Seriously. They're not being ironic. (166)

Stereotypical representations of Arabs as terrorists or criminals are sexualized and

fetishized. The Citebeur films merge popular French media images of Beurs as ghetto

and violent and then exploit digital aesthetics to say, "hey look, this is how Arabs really

fuck!" Blurring the news-media with pornography transforms the voyeuristic/scopophilic

filmic gaze into an act of surveillance. Referring back to the same review, the author

states, "The low-budget production suits the material; a handheld camera and single

spotlight give it a convincing 'like you're really there' feel" (166). As David Lyon has

argued, "Scopophilia, while it may start out innocently enough as the love of looking, is

all too easily perverted into an obsessive and controlling gaze that objectifies the image under observation" (51). Unlike narrative porn where the characters are unaware of our gaze, here the actors are not only aware of our gazes, but they interact with the gaze.

What the spectator does is monitor their bodies to ensure that what they see is exactly the behaviour they expect to see. Viewers watch in order to ensure that the behaviour they witness fits their paradigm. The Beurs are not performing for an audience, they are 51 "being themselves" in front of a camera. By placing cameras in these lower class spaces, the authorial panopticon surveils both the public and privates spaces of these bad neighborhoods. The intended (gay white male) gaze is aligned with the heterosexual, patriarchal apparatus, the very same apparatus which continues to oppress gay sexuality.

In this instance, it is the oppressed's opportunity to refract the panoptic gaze onto those even more disadvantaged, the lower class and the ethnic other. The heteronormativized, or as Puar would say "homonationalized" gay man is no longer as big a threat as the growing number of the ethnic poor.

Although my criticism thus far has been quite negative, I wish to look at some of the ways in which these texts potentially destabilize and deconstruct themselves, and how they signify shifting racial epistemologies as they actively engage with global discourses.

As previously mentioned, Citebeur has modeled itself after American ethnic "thug" porn.

Gay Beur porn has appropriated American cultural signifiers, such as hip-hop music, low-riding jeans, and graffiti, and integrated them into French culture. This appropriation of American hip-hop culture references a class specific form of American youth culture, namely lower class culture, and/or the unemployed gangster. Despite trying to construct the Arab as other, conversely suggesting that a French specific form of cultural nationalism exists beyond the frame, the integration of American culture inherently bridges this French/non-French dichotomy. These texts are internet based, and are aware of themselves as part of a globally integrated culture. Although responding to contemporary French racial developments, Citebeur has packaged itself as a currency that is culturally and sexually translated by, and sold to, other markets. The films' 52 transnational effect is further articulated by the bodies' indecipherability. In some of the videos, the actors wear ski masks over their faces, leaving only their bodies visible. The body itself does not, and cannot signify "Arab" as it could easily signify "White" or

"Latino". I'm in no way suggesting that facial visibility would confirm the body as

"Arab" or "not Arab". Many videos are said to feature "Arab on Arab" or "French on

Arab" actors, despite the fact the actors' ethnic backgrounds cannot be determined by their faces or bodies. These videos then, are partially about performing race, and along with race, their criminality, their outlaw status". Referring back to Wesh Cousin! 5, the final sequence features two masked actors wearing ski masks, "forcing" two unmasked men into performing oral and anal sex. The masked individuals are meant to read as

"Arab", however, there is nothing about their bodies that would or does distinguish them as "Arab". The two unmasked men may very well be "Arab" themselves, thereby, confusing/reversing viewer expectations. Although presenting overtly racist fantasies, and exploiting and sexualizing real social ills, the Citebeur videos also manage to breakdown their own constructions, opening up a space for potential resistance.

I now wish to look at the German based amateur studio Men of ZIP and compare their representations of self-defined "amateur" porn, to Citebeur's "non-narrative" porn.

Taken directly from www.zip-production.com, the website advertises itself as one which

"specializes in hot and hung turkish [sic] and arab [sic] ameteur [sic] men". According to the website, all the models were cast "on the streets or thru [sic] friends" and that "most of these men are straight and have never before been seen in a porn production".

Continuing on with the web site's "free tour", one is informed that production teams 53 "have been traveling to many different cities in Turkey and Northern Africa and were fascinated by the beauty and masculinity of the men you see on the street". To alleviate possible anxieties over labour exploitation, the website assures us that we "will see that they really had fun...". Continuing the transformation of the Arab into a European

"mandigo man", the web sites ensures us that their "models are very well endowed and that they are proud to show off their beauty". By referring to their beauty, the author reconstitutes it as a less threatening, more aesthetic body. These bodies then are an

alternative to the butch, commanding "Arab" bodies in the Citebeur videos. The web site reminds us that "Turkish and Arab men are said to be very open to men2men [sic] sex"

and by playing up the popular fantasy of the "straight" male enjoying the occasional gay romp, the web site tells us that "the models didn't mind jacking off with their best friend or fucking another guy. Actually, they really enjoyed the action". What this website, and its films offer, are "true" visions of Turks and Arabs; they are ethnographic films as much as they are a pornographic films.

The difference between Citebeur and ZIP is how they represent the men's

"nationality". Both studios feature Arab men, but ZIP productions (if we take them at the word) are about "real" Arab and Turkish men and their homophobic, repressive homelands, not "fake" Arab men and their "improper" spaces. The "Arabs" in the

Citebeur videos are second and third generation French citizens, but the men in the ZIP films are current citizens of Morocco and Turkey; they are, therefore, the "real deal". By

appealing to racial authenticity, the studio puts forth a conservative, nationalist agenda.

"Real" Arabs must be born, raised and kept within his proper geographic space, 54 generational Arabs are not real "Arabs". Their appeal to "racial realness" aligns the film with ethnographic traditions since "both pornography and ethnography promise something they cannot deliver: the ultimate pleasure of knowing the Other" (Hansen,

Needham, Nichols, 225). The film makers do not oscillate between pornography and ethnography, they collapse the two into each other, intertwining sexuality and knowledge.28 By removing narrative and the visual presence of the outsider discovering this space, these texts are able to exploit the documentary's claim to knowledge and truth as a way to sell sex. Ethnography purports to show its viewer the "true nature" of its subject by capturing them in their natural environment. By transforming into pseudo- documentaries, these films expose the true sexual nature of North African and Turkish men. In his study of "Oriental" pictoral pornography, Todd Smith has noted that,

"pornography and ethnography must convince the viewer not only that an action actually took place, but it would have transpired with or without the spectator" (18). This is the basis for amateur porn and Orientalism. Even if the writer/camera/ camcorder was not present, these events would still have happened, and would have happened exactly like this; these Arabs would have fucked like this.

Unlike Citebeur which conditions the body into a niche representation, something that is a specifically local phenomenon, the ZIP films appear universal as they film the

"average" Arab or Turk in their homeland. The available lighting, the grainy quality of the image, the shaky mobile frame, the average clothing, the actor's non-sculpted body and the lack of music suggests "authenticity". They are mundane; that is what makes them "amateur". Although all of these are aesthetic choices, their affiliation to the 55 everyday hides their construction, positing the image as more than just documentary or voyeurism, but surveillance. Like the Citebuer videos however, the men are aware of the camera and the viewer watches for potential moments of performance. Viewers monitor the men's behaviours for split moments of "abnormal" behaviour. In these instances, monitoring needs to be limited to the image proper, for Cante and Restivo have argued that sound is "where, after all, we continue to look for the "femininities" we assume to have been relocated elsewhere after self-consciousness puts the kibosh, on both the

'encoding' and decoding' ends, on limp-wristed preformatted 'embodiment...'" (221).

Spectators monitor their voice, their body movements, and their surroundings in order to ensure ourselves of the images' fidelity.

For Citebeur, "Beurs" are raised and cultured as French, but are still marked as different. They do not belong in France, as they are abject and spread abjectness throughout France; the videos are proof. The opening and closing montage sequences of abject industrial and residential spaces, rather than the Louvre or Champs Elysees, ensures viewers that Beurs are not French. Citebeur is not a disavowal of France per se, but rather a fetishization of a particular French abject reality with its own erotic appeal.

The opening and closing sequences in the ZIP films are mobile shots, generally shot from a moving motorcycle or car, featuring desert landscapes, mountain ranges, signs in

Arabic, mosques and random images of urban life in various North African cities. The film maker is actively foregrounding the space, ensuring we are aware that we are "in" the Middle East, and that these men are "real" Arabs or Turks. These texts are modern day Orientalist travelogues, expressed in moving images rather than printed words. The 56 European is going to tour the Middle East, watch, and record the 'natural" behaviour transpiring in the private domestic sphere. The juxtaposition of the outdoor public shots and the indoor private sex sequences inadvertently asks viewers to believe these two spaces are one and the same. Viewers are asked to believe that the sex sequences really took place in the Middle East.

Germany's history with Turkey is the mitigating factor for the ZIP films, as they are cultural byproduct of Germany's Uberfremdung (over-foreignization), whereby

Germany, in the 1960s and 1970s, imported Turkish labourers for cheap, who then upon completing their tasks were expected to return back to where they belong.30 Germany has a large working class Turkish population which, like the large Muslim/Arab minority in France, has at times challenged German nationalist ideology, and as at times been the target of neo Nazi attacks. Turkish minorities are enmeshed in the country's very contradictory racial history. The ZIP films are not interested in investigating the cultural differences between Arab and Turk, and actively conflate the two ethnicities to sell themselves. Rather than engaging with this racial minority (the Beur films may be classist and culturally insensitive, but there is at least interaction), this studio decides to leave the country and go back to the "other's" homeland to "learn about them".

These films are part of an ethnographic panopticism31, an articulation of the

Westernized surveillance gaze which seeks to "rediscover" and control the Arab body and the Orient. By placing the gaze in an "authentic" Middle Eastern space, the same-sex taboo heightens the films' sexual allure. With the Arab or Turk no longer in the liberated

Western space, his nude body is re-nationalized as Eastern. By re-nationalizing the body 57 and rediscovering it in its excessively sexually repressed space, the nude body is again transformed into a forbidden object.

In the ZIP films, sexual contact only occurs in private, rather than public spaces.

Arabs no longer have gay sex in bazaars or in deserts, as the increasing regulation of

"decadent Western sexuality" has turned gay sex into a secret which must remain hidden

from the public. When watching these films the feeling of secrecy is palpable, and this

feeling is used to sell the films as "real". An atmosphere of secrecy is only aided by the

general lack of dialogue or vocal expressions of pleasure. Unlike the Citebeur videos

which have the actors giving directions throughout or voicing their pleasure, these films

emphasize silence as if to ensure that none of the neighbors hear, ensuring they are not

"discovered". These men are sold as "straight", feeding into the classic and popular "gay

for pay" fantasy. The "gay for pay" fantasy is heightened by incorporating the

contemporary perception of the Middle East as homophobic. Dominant Western media

construct nudity and homosexuality in the Middle East as extremely taboo. In some

nations they are, in fact, illegal (Iran, Saudi Arabia) and part of the videos' allure is both

seeing these taboos being broken, and the suggestion of potential danger. As Linda

Williams has argued, "Eroticism in pornography thus depends on the continued

awareness of the taboo" and so "prohibitions thus often provide an element of fear that

enhances desire" (2004, 275). The film makers exploit the West's perception of the

Middle East as homophobic, embedding the pleasures of "danger" into the sexual fantasy.

Our perception of the Middle East as homophobic and sexually repressive is

hyperbolized, as sexuality, both gay and straight, has simply evolved into a discourse of 58 stricter dichotomies of public and private. In the West, gay men and women are given more freedom to their body as private and public objects. Simply put, gay men and women have more public freedom in the West. This is not to say that the Muslim world is backwards, but that the West has simply secularized and curtailed the power of

Christianity. Although our perceptions of the Middle East are skewed, the publicity and visibility of the nude Muslim body and, in particular, gay body, is virtually non-existent.

Although it may be the intention of the filmmakers to exploit the Arab body for profit, we must be careful not to fall into the habit of always seeing pornography as producing victims, and, sex as always negative. What stands out about these films are the models' bodies. They are not built, waxed, tweezed or tanned; they are run-of-the-mill ordinary.

Despite these bodies being partially influenced by the amateur production model, it is the act of picking these bodies which signify "ordinariness" that counter hegemonic models of sexual representation. Even in amateur porn featuring "white" actors, their bodies mimic those of narrative/studio pornography. Although "white" men in gay porn signify masculinity via their bodies (and the costumes they wear and spaces they fuck in), and although the Arab body in gay porn comes to signify masculinity via its "ethnicity," at a minimum, these men dare to sexualize a body which counters the Western ideal. Most importantly, these films dare to show Arab men sucking cock and getting fucked. They not only put their bodies on display but return the camera's gaze, challenging the viewer's perception. These films dare to challenge Western perceptions of Muslim homophobia as they allow viewers to see the male body and face, receiving and expressing pleasure. Although these deconstructive potentials are inherent within the 59 texts, and although the actors retain a form of agency, the white-male's control over the surveillance apparatus still makes it an outsider looking in. It is like looking at fish in a fishbowl; the fish can do what they want in the fishbowl, as long as they remain in that fishbowl, and as long as we can watch them, industry "standard".)

In discussing Paris Is Burning, a documentary about Harlem drag balls circa the late 1980s, Judith Butler negotiates bell hooks' belief that since Jennie Livingston is a white woman, her gaze "does not oppose the way hegemonic whiteness 'represents' blackness, [assuming] an imperial overseeing position" partly due to Livingston's visual absence from the film (1993; 134). Butler goes on to say that 'hooks is right to argue that within this culture the ethnographic conceit of a neutral gaze will always be a white gaze, an unmarked gaze, one which passes its own perspective off as the omniscient, one which presumes.. .no perspective at all" (136). This criticism can be applied to the ZIP productions. The film maker's white gaze lies hidden, as does the power associated with his gaze, a byproduct of controlling the apparatus, fulfilling the terms of classic colonial exchange. The filmmakers ensure the body is seen as it is expected to be seen. In the final chapter I will investigate how appropriating the apparatus changes the ideological subtext and visual representations of the Arab body. With respect to the ZIP films, I will suggest that although the gaze may dictate the body, in allowing their bodies to be objectified, the Arab body makes a stance on its (homo)sexuality, stating "yes we are here".

60 In this chapter, I focused specifically on European productions as they were both the first gay Arab porn representations available on the market and because they have also been the focus of academic criticism. My intention in this chapter was to map out how both different methods and locations of production produce different racial representations. Beginning with the earliest representation, Harem, I wanted to show how the film, despite drawing heavily on Orientalist tropes, also showed signs of modern cultural influence. Twenty five years later, French produced representations would be radically different from their predecessors. Rather than narrative travelogues of white

Frenchmen searching Morocco for gay sex, the Citebeur films showed the consequences of French colonialism and Arab immigration. Citebeur exploits and sexualizes a large group of working poor minorities, selling racist and classist visions of masculinity, danger and abjection. ZIP productions change the mode of presentation, thereby changing the representations. Adhering to an "amateur" aesthetic, these films sell

"authentic" ethno-pornographies. Ensuring viewers that all the men in front of the lens are "really Arab" and that all the films are shot on location in Turkey or other "Middle

Eastern" countries, these films attempt the capture the "secret" gay lives of Arab and

Muslim men. Despite these negative attributes, I also argue that these films simultaneously breakdown racial boundaries by deconstructing the Arab body as a unified sign.

61 Chapter 3) American Gay "Arab" Porn: Reinscription, Revision, Resistance

In the previous chapter I focused my attention exclusively on European productions

because of Europe's historical relationship with the Arab world and because the first gay

Arab porn produced outside of Europe was Raging Stallion's Arabesque, released in

2005. Although America may have already imported these sexualized images,

Arabesque was the first film to be shot in America by a major American gay porn studio

for American audiences. This film was followed by Ward's Mirage (2006), Arabian Fist

(2006), and also Collin O'Neal's Collin O'Neal's World of Men: Lebanon. For the

purpose of this study I will only discuss Arabesque and Lebanon. I argue that these

representations are in response to the intensified relationship between America and "The

Middle East". Although these texts respond to the American media's obsessive focus on

the Middle East, the Muslim religion, and Arab culture, I argue that we should see these

texts as progressive and think of them as part of liberal culture's attempt to counter right-

wing extremists' views on Arabs, Muslims and Middle Eastern culture. In the previous

chapter I discussed three different categories of sexual presentation: narrative, non-

narrative, and amateur. The American produced films are constructed as narratives, yet

incorporate non-narrative and amateur components. The film Arabesque is a revision of

Cadinot's Harem, except the director, Chris Ward, uses and plays with historical

cinematic representations of "Arabs" and" Arabness" as a way of critiquing racial

identity politics. O'Neal's Lebanon is a pseudo-travelogue, interweaving narrative and

amateur styles, presenting a unique vision of its subjects. It is a hybrid text responding

to, and poaching from, on-line pornography's formal presentation and style. In 62 acknowledging that the on-line community is a global one, O'Neal engages with Lebanon as a modern, transnational space which is a part of global culture. By presenting multiple ethnicities within this space, and by not attempting to define these bodies as "raced" bodies, O'Neal's film, as well as Ward's Arabesque, open these spaces and bodies up for revision, re-interpretation and resistance. In both of these films, race is presented as both social constructions and performances.

Before looking at how these two films engage with racial performativity and transnationalism, they must be situated within a specific cultural and production context.

Both of these films are part of the mainstream gay pornographic studio system, a system which models itself after the classical Hollywood system. Each studio produces a unique vision for their racial landscape, targeting a specific niche or fetish, and each studio has its own "contract players". The films' formal and aesthetic qualities must also be taken into consideration when discussing studio productions. Their scale and production values must be recognized as something determined by the system, determined for the system's economic survival. The studio system must compete with the amateur and online productions; therefore, they must produce specifically different sexual visions to compete in the ever-growing market.33 Most importantly however, we must situate these films within an America post-9/11 context.

On September 11th, 2001, the World Trade Centre attacks solidified an already tense relationship between America and Western Europe, and key Muslim nations in the

Middle and Far East. These relationships would eventually be crystallized as sexual fantasies. America did not claim war on a specific or group of countries. It claimed war 63 on "Terror", a blanket term which was broadened from radical Muslim terrorists, to all

Muslims. The reactionary attempt to keep 18l and 19' century notions of West/white and "other" entrenched in dichotomous terms was epitomized by George W. Bush's infamous phrase, "You're either with us, or against us". Videos of the collapsing Twin

Towers were played in a loop alongside the images the Al-Qaeda members responsible for the attacks. The juxtaposition equated Islam with Terrorism. The Al-Qaeda members' faces were not referenced as part of an elite, rogue group. Their faces were templates which were meant to signify "Muslim proper," thereby inciting and directing anger towards all Muslims. On the popular gay porn blog site, Gaypornblog.com, Mike

Stabile recognized that Raging Stallion is capitalizing on this new cultural and political relationship, believing that, "with our military and cultural focus on Iraq, it's not surprising that Americans fetishize Arab men. But it is surprising that—short of Abu

Ghraib—no one's shot an Arab gay porn. Until now" (July, 26, 2005). It is obvious that

Mr. Stabile is wrong, and that indeed Arab gay porn has existed for decades, but his observation that America has not produced a gay Arab porn prior to Arabesque is correct.

As Mahawatte has argued:

Since the attacks on the World Trade Centre on 11 September 2001, and following the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the already-fraught relationship between the West and Islam has reached crisis point. These tensions have found their way into pornographic texts (129).

America's subsequent "War on Terror" was part of globalization's neo-colonialism/neo- imperialism. These films are sexual byproducts of that relationship. I do not believe

Stabile connects the Abu Ghraib photos to Arabesque because he thinks they are

64 pornography, I believe his association emphasizes America's newly discovered sexual fetish with the Arab male. The Abu Ghraib photos are part of, albeit a much more sinister perspective of this relationship. The Abu Ghraib images were seen as sadistic interpretations of amateur porn, or as Katrien Jacobs has suggested, as "warporn," "a blurring of abuse and war mythologies as Sadean fiction" (116). However, Errol Morris'

Standard Operating Procedure (2008) would dare to suggest that there is a large discrepancy between text and subtext. Although the images appear to be a mixture of cruel performances for the camera and acts of cruelty caught unbeknownst to the perpetrators, his documentary demonstrates that images are far more complex in nature.

Many of the images were meant to evidence abuse, and sadly, the daily lives of both the detainees and guards at the Abu Ghraib prison. Morris attempted to re-contextualize some of the premiere images discussing how the snapshots misrepresent the situation they portray. Most importantly, Morris broke away from the "torture or porn" debate and treated the images as complex snippets of a larger narrative.

The flip side of these American military produced "amateur" images are the big budget, glossy, American studio films, which sell cliched Orientalist representations, while simultaneously engaging with these tropes in a playful manner, thereby mocking the very some stereotypes they use to sell themselves. Ward envisions Arabesque as a cheeky reinterpretation of classical Hollywood's Orientalism. In Arabesque's DVD

"making of featurette, he states that he wanted to create a "1920s Hollywood version of

Morocco". The film is a self-conscious re-construction of Western sexualized racist fantasy. Ward's intention is to reformulate and revive this fantasy, as a fantasy. 65 Ward intertextually splices sequences from The Sheik (1921) and Son of the Sheik

(1926) into Arabesque's narrative to both emphasize the film's purposeful inaccuracies and the West's sexual obsession with the Arab. By actively splicing the past into the present, Ward joins classical and contemporary Orientalist discourse and fantasy. In doing so, he creates a dialectical relationship between these opposing ideologies, fracturing their supposed cohesiveness. By intercutting sequences from The Sheik and

Son of the Sheik into the text, Ward uses classical orientalist fantasies to sell visions of lusty and sexually licentious Arabs, thereby capitalizing on and sexualizing the Arab terrorist. Both Miriam Hansen and Gaylyn Studlar have written extensively on early cinema and specifically on female spectatorship and fanaticism over The Sheik and its star Rudolph Valentino.35 The Sheik itself is infamous for sexualizing rape, insinuating that not only is the Arab male dangerous and perverse, but that women secretly desire and find pleasure through sexual subordination and ravishment. Summarizing Hansen's position, Shohat states, "It is implied that women, while offended by the Arab and

Muslim rapist, actually prefer masterful men like Valentino" (55). Ward references this sexual energy and reconstitutes it for a gay audience. Part of the film's appeal is its suggestion and performance of sexual aggression. The dominating, masculine, and aggressive "Arab" male will "invade" your body and, although you may on the surface persist, deep down you desire this ravishment. Gaylyn Studlar's book In the Realm of

Pleasure, analyzed masochistic subject positioning in six films by Joseph Von Sternberg starring Marlene Dietrich. In her introduction, she writes that her study explores "how the unique intersection of masochism and fantasy raises questions concerning the 66 relationship of masochistic psychic structures of the cinematic process" stating that her premise is "that the psychic processes and pleasures engaged by cinema more closely resemble those of masochism then the sadistic, Oedipal pleasures commonly associated

in psychoanalytic film theory with visual pleasure (5-6)". The Sheik was infamous for placing female spectators in a masochistic position and in this instance it seems Ward wants to place the viewer in a masochistic position, whereby the viewers can lose himself

in the ravishment of the "Arabs" on screen.

Situating this film within a post-9/11 context, Arabesque seems to make a risque political accusation, as, like in Harem, the body symbolizes the national border, a

fantastic project of cliched national attributes. In Harem, the white body was penetrated

in the colonized space, suggesting colonial insurrection. Here however, everyone in the

film is already "Arab", and yet no one in the film is "Arab". The division which once

existed has disappeared as "the Arab" and "the West" have merged together collapsing

the dichotomous "Us/Them".

Arabesque utilizes "Arabness" to partly fetishize masculinity, and the exotic.

Raging Stallion's niche within the gay porn market is the older, hairy, muscular, hyper-

masculine male; this image is meant to counter the young, hairless, lean athleticism of

other studios such as Falcon. In America, the "Arab" male has undergone revision. The

young, lean, and generally hairless body found in the Cadinot films, and to some extent

Citebeur and ZIP films, has been injected with growth hormones. These are not boys.

These are men. By desiring homophobic Arab masculinity, the film doubly marks the

"Arab" body as a threat, transforming it into a site of excessive perversity. These 67 particular "Arab" bodies are, however, marked as excessiveness and their association with camp and parody reconstruct them as sites of potential transgression. By mimicking the stereotypes and infusing them with hardcore gay sex, the film's campy broaching of racial constructions actually laughs at the excessiveness consistently applied to the Arab body and Arab culture.

I now wish to look at some of the key components of Raging Stallion's advertising campaign fox Arabesque. Taken from Raging Stallion's DVD store's website, I argue that Ward uses and merges traditional gay male and Orientalist fantasies to sell images of homophobic, masculine, sexually and now politically threatening Arab bodies to the American/Western gay male consumers. The purpose of these descriptions is to entice the potential viewer into purchasing the film. What these purposeful misrepresentations say, and how they say it, are essential to understanding how Ward pays homage to Orientalist literature and ideology, while gently mocking them. Consider these passages and quotations:

A long time ago, in a far away place.... beneath the shimmering sun of the hot Sahara was a land of fire and flame—a romantic world of forgotten dreams that harken back to a bygone age where men ruled the desert from horseback and found sexual pleasure in their violent lusts and desires. The powerful drumbeat of the Arabian heart drove men into each other's arms, a co-mingling of sweat and passion that filled deep-rooted needs, the result of a lonely existence surrounded by sand and palm. This place is the setting for Arabesque.

We peer into the hustle and bustle of a marketplace where a dozen hot Arabian men, hairy, built, and beautiful... eyeing each other and perhaps wondering about unthinkable thoughts.. .some carrying new guns from the arms merchants others with carpets, some with food..."

Sarib is also a genuine hairy Middle Eastern stud, who fucks like something in heat! 68 But Huessein is still not finished!

Because of this [(bathhouse)] scene, director Chris Ward decided to dedicate Arabesque to Kristen Bjorn and Jean Daniel Cadinot, and the styles of both of these legendary artists can be seen in this scene.

The final set of Arabesque is the dance hall of the palace of a grand Oriental potentate.. .you will ask yourself, is this porn or it this Hollywood?

The first quote's poetic content and style is a clear reference to the flowery language and prose found in classical Orientalist texts. Phrases such as "a land of fire and flames,"

"violent lusts and desires," and "the result of a lonely existence surrounded by sand and palm," are used to mimic literary Orientalist descriptions, whereby the Orient was a passionate place, a space associated with warm colours, dangerous and threatening sexuality, and barren spaces of uncivilized and unregulated existence. One need only compare this first quote I have listed above to T.E Lawrence's quote in the introduction to see how the website's advertisement is explicitly referencing and parodying Orientalist writing. In the second quote, we see the "Arab" men becoming hyper-virile: they are described as hairy and built, mixing modern Arab stereotypes with the old cliches. The men have "unthinkable [(gay)] thoughts," foregrounding Middle Eastern homophobia, as well as "new guns from the arms merchants", injecting terrorist imagery into the fantasy.

Ward further exploits the Orientalist perception of the oversexed Arab male to sell his film. Sarib fucks like he's "in heat", transforming him into something "animalistic" or

"primal", and even after three consecutive fucking scenes in the bazaar, Huessein "still not finished!" as he has two more sex scenes to go, transforming him into some sort of

69 "fucking" energizer bunny who simply keeps going and going and going. Although

Huessein's visual presence is partly due to his physical appearance, as he is what most would consider to be the most "Arab looking", his extra screen time is also meant to pump-up Huessein's star profile. Both Huessein and Raging Stallion used his physical embodiment of cliched or iconic "Arabness" to launch his porn career and turn him into a profitable star. The final quote blurs Hollywood and pornography, referencing the film's narrative and fantasy structure while simultaneously raising its status as something of higher value than porn. Arabesque's "near-Hollywood" status is both an attempt to inflate the text's sale value,36 but it is also a reference to, and parody of, Hollywood's

Orientalist tradition.

Arabesque is also part of a long standing camp tradition in gay porn, where settings and genres, entrenched with homoeroticism, are explicitly and playfully pornographied. As Susan Sontag wrote in her seminal paper Notes on Camp, "The essence of Camp is its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration" (53). Of particular interest to gay pornography, and Arabesque in particular, is her belief that

"Camp taste has an affinity for certain arts rather than others. Clothes, furniture, all the elements of visual decor, for instance, make up a large part of Camp" (55). The 1980s gay porn historical re-creation epic, Centurians of Rome (1982), was an explicit queer re- enactment of Bob Guccione's Caligula. At the time of its production, it was the most expensive gay porn ever produced and was clearly invested in both critiquing, yet

•in appropriating, Hollywood as a model of representation. This tradition continues on to the present day, with not only historical genres, but most genres and/or settings playfully 70 raising gay subtext to pre-text. The insertion of unabashed hardcore gay sex into these spaces becomes a method of sexual interrogation, with a particularly obsessive focus on heterosexually defined, homosocial spaces such as the military or fraternity. Part of

Ward's desire is to situate Arabesque in this long standing tradition, as gay porn and gay culture has consistently used camp as a culturally specific method of criticism and deconstruction.

Moving into closer textual analysis, I wish look at the ambivalent role music and sound play as both a narrative and formal choice in Arabesque. What stands out about

Arabesque is its lack of dialogue. Most narrative porn films have some sort of dialogue that formulates a thin, if cohesive, plot, or story. In Arabesque, the only utterance is either the actors' moans and groans, or the occasional sexual order ("oh yeah, fuck my ass!!"). Rather than using dialogue, Ward contextualizes the sex scenes by intercutting sequences from The Sheik and The Son of Sheik, as well as music. While Arabesque may have intended to mimic early cinema's silence, the music "speaks" on behalf of the characters, thereby rendering them silent and unable to voice themselves. With the characters lacking a voice to speak for themselves or of their desires, the sitar and chime inspired "Middle Eastern" soundtrack supplements their voices. This can be construed as an attempt to take away the "Arab's" voice by supplementing it with a Western constructed visual tableau of cliches. However, it can also be read as an articulation of how same-sex desire is a form of communication, a versatile language that can be spoken without any words via the unspoken history of the closet. The "Arab" may be silent, but his actions speak louder than words. Although the film verbally silences the "Arab", it 71 also demonstrates how gay desire in non-Western spaces is spoken through the body or eyes, an alternative to the Western model of vocally announcing one's "difference".

If the bodies are unable to speak themselves, what then makes these bodies Arab?

It is being surrounded by "Arabness", by Orientalist iconographies which inscribe meaning onto these bodies. It is this discursiveness which drives their racial performance. A famous example of "Arab" racial performance takes place in The Sheik, when Agnes Ayers' character appropriates an Orientalist costume, masquerading as an

"Arab" and enters the Arab space. There is also the famous sequence in The Battle of

Algiers (1966), where the three Arab women appropriate Western dress and penetrate the

European quarters. In these instances the costumes signified race, and in appropriating this hegemonic attire the characters' performed a socially specific interpretation of race.

At one point, three female Algerian urban guerillas of the Front de Liberation Nationale are given the task of placing bombs in key locations in the enclosed European quarters.

The women remove their dress and don miniskirts, make-up and fashionable hair styles and at the border crossing, simply flash a smile and make their way from the Casbah to the European Quarter. The women have appropriated European mannerisms and dress and performed them for the guards, allowing them unfettered access. This critical juncture in the film makes a very strong statement about Eurocentric views on race, as the scene becomes a form of punishment for the Europeans' ignorance. The point of the scene is to demonstrate that there is no physical differentiation between Algerian and

French women.

72 Ward addresses this racial confrontation in Arabesque by emphasizing over-the- top Orientalist settings and costumes. The sex scenes are shot in a bazaar, a steamy bathhouse, and various palaces covered in rugs, pillows, and lit candles. In Arabesque, the costume plays with notions of "passing" and performance; it is racial drag. For Judith

Butler, "acts and gestures, articulated and enacted desires create the illusion of an interior and organizing gender core, an illusion discursively maintained for the purposes of the regulation of sexuality within the obligatory form of reproductive heterosexuality (185-

186)". For Butler then, gender is performance, the appropriation of culturally engendered traits and iconography which shape and determine the body. This criticism can be extrapolated and applied to racial discourse. Racial performativity is not new, as racist portrayal's of Blacks, by whites in blackface has been around for over a century.

Blackface, although racist, manages to deconstruct itself by exposing race as a social construction. Racial performativity would be revisited by Spike Lee in Bamboozled

(2000) and the Wayan's brothers in White Chicks (2004). White Chicks was harshly criticized for the brothers' "inauthentic" look, thereby missing the entire point/joke of the film; the brothers' overly wrought appearance makes them queer, denaturalizing whiteness as natural or unmarked, thereby eliminating power associated with whiteness.

In Arabesque, the bodies are not about passing, but about queering "passing". Despite inscribing "Arabness" onto these bodies, their visual representations hybridize them as sites of both pleasure and anxiety. This is due in part to their congruent and unstable relationship with their surroundings. This confused identification is a wink. Ward is coyly asking, "What is it really that you are masturbating too?" 73 By not announcing their difference, Arabesque foregrounds the body as a performance, destabilizing essentialist racial construction. Refering back to Raging

Stallion's website, it states, "Huessein is back and takes Sarib's ass by storm.. .the camera crew could hardly keep up with the fucking actors as the frenzy really got going, all we could do was stand back and keep the camera rolling". The conceit, of course, is that it is not the director directing them to fuck as such, but their inner "Arabness" being captured on film. Their coupling is less fantasy and more documentary, since all the camera crew "could do was stand back and keep the camera rolling". The actors were not performing sex, but having sex, and the camera was there to simply monitor and record their "Arab" behaviour. Ward is partially constructing the film as ethnographic pornography. Unlike Harem, Arabesque's narrative contains no central white protagonist exploring the exotic Eastern space. The film is not a travelogue but rather, a voyeuristic ethnographic gaze and this sequence is particularly interesting since two diverging messages are being simultaneously communicated. While Ward attempts to sell these bodies as "more Arab" and therefore, more exotic than others, the text itself resists this extra-diegetic contextualization. Ward uses his authority to speak on behalf of the bodies, but the bodies themselves resist this silent voice-over as, their nude flesh integrates them with the diverse ethnic cast, rather than segregate them. The bodies are shaped by their surroundings and costumes, but eventually the costumes are removed, and the setting blurred, or cropped out through close-up framing. The bodies end up speaking for themselves.

74 The film resists essentialism by blending multi-cultured/ethnic nude bodies together, perplexingly, yet playfully, inscribing them all as "Arab" and "not Arab" at the same time. Not a single actor in the film is actually Arab. Raging Stallion purposely misinforms the viewer on their website, and yet, they make no attempt to publicly hide this deceit. In Mike Stabile's gaypornblog.com article, he writes, "the cast is not Arab—

Raging Stallion Exclusive Huessein [sic] is a Turk, and that's as close as it gets—but with a lot of sun and few Latinos and an Indian, Ward gets the gist, at least of 1920's

Hollywood (July 26, 2005). Referring back to Raging Stallion's website, Sarib was described as "a genuine hairy Middle Eastern stud," and when describing Francois Sagat, the website states, "Born in France and living in Paris, Francois is another one of those men with mixed heritage that in part has origins in the Middle East. As a tribute to his heritage, he tattooed a star and crescent on his back...." This misrepresentation contradicts an extra-feature interview on the film's DVD which has Sagat stating he is in fact a French-Slovak.

Matters are further problematized when we take into consideration the performers' racial authenticity as stable foundations to their racialized performance.

Although the film plays with racial performativity, it assumes the performers' race is unified, whole and, therefore, authentic. Sagat is not Arab; he is only performing "Arab"

as he is actually Franco-Slovakian. If his "true" ethnicity were false, there would be no performance since performance requires an antithesis. If Sagat can perform "Arabness," it is only because he has a unified ethnic identity to compare his racial performance

against. Once his ethnicity is destabilized, his performance is problematized; if he is 75 always "performing" his ethnicity, then what is he/how can he perform an "other ethnicity? Is he French? Slovakian? Is the tattoo enough to make him Arab? In an age of massive immigration and cultural/ethnic/racial hybridity, the ability to locate a core racial identity is becoming increasingly more difficult. It is precisely this chameleon-like ability to transform and adapt to one's surroundings that makes Sagat such a unique figure and the performers in Arabesque a unique cast. These men are not performing biology; they are performing culture.

The historic images from The Sheik gain new meaning as they are re- contextualized in this pornographic narrative. The film actively poaches Valentino's

"Arabness," questioning the construction of race in both The Sheik and in Arabesque,

The film's web site states, "Arabesque emerges from the silent films of Rudolph

Valentino, starting in Black and white and quickly turning into a lush, colorful photoplay". The opening sequence uses special effects to blur the grainy, cracked, black and white images of The Sheik to the modern film's setting suggesting that we have somehow gone back into this time and place. By blurring these two epochs and spaces together, Arabesque does not "emerge from", but rather, into, The Sheik. Ward is suggesting that Arabesque is "found footage", images originally cut out from the original

Sheik. Ward is simply editing these images back into the film where they belong, thereby

showing viewers the "entire story". Arabesque then is a revisionist period piece. The

film self-refiexively magnifies racial performativity by placing it within a time period where racial performance was exceptionally popular, critiquing both historical and modern constructions of race. Valentino was not Arab, he simply had to conform to 76 popular/racist visions of what Hollywood's target audience (white Americans) believed an Arab "looked" like. The web site states, "When you see him, he becomes Rudolph

Valentino incarnate. His face, his body, and his giant cock all make you want to scream!" By referencing Valentino and comparing his physical attributes to those in

Arabesque, Ward self-reflexively foregrounds the bodies as hybrid. Ward raises the question: What exactly constitutes being Arab? What does an "Arab" look like? How does an "Arab" act? The actors' ambivalent looks disturb racial essentialism and in discussing how and what skin tones ideologically and culturally signify, Richard Dyer argued that, "Whiteness is only racial when it is 'marked' by the presence of the truly raced, that is, non-white subject" (14). Whiteness, is about the perceived power and superiority that comes with having "white" skin, but this power can only be determined by the presence of a "non-white" subject. In Arabesque, the boundary between white and non-white is blurred, confusing the bodies' inscribed power. In traditional "white" discourse, "body hair is animalistic," signifying the non-white subject as wild, uncivilized, and sexually untamed, while for the white subject, "hairlessness connotes striving above nature" (155). In Arabesque, all the bodies are covered in hair; all the bodies are physically equal.

While Arabesque treats its viewers to a complex narrative which plays with time, history and overt racial performativity, Collin O 'Neal 's World of Men: Lebanon strips away excessive Orientalist theatricality and replaces it with all too familiar documentary travelogue. Lebanon is directed by Collin O'Neal and distributed by Chris Ward's

Raging Stallion Studios and, unlike Arabesque's critique via historical revisionism, 77 O'Neal's film focuses on the present. According to O'Neal, he took a film crew and a group of actors to Lebanon for the shoot, one which wrapped-up just before the beginning of the 2006 war between Hezbollah and Israel. O'Neal offers a different vision of Lebanon, removing the ethereal facade of fantasy, showcasing it as a space of trauma, rebirth, and potential. It is a transitional space struggling to negotiate its past and present. By Western standards, Lebanon is a "liberal" nation due in part to its large

Christian minority. It is seen as a country which has the potential for stability and economic growth; it is a country which can be brought into, and is partially already a part of, the globalized-industrial world order. Lebanon has increasingly received queer academic attention for its "don't ask don't tell" policy regarding sexuality, and for its active, pseudo-underground gay culture. Anthropologist Sofian Merabet recognized

Lebanon's spatial fluidity and argued that "there are different representations -i.e. counter-appropriations-of space" (203). For instance "the appropriations of the cafe or the nightclub whose clientele changes from day to night times, tuning itself into the continuous flow of spatial contestation" (203). Throughout the film, O'Neal, like every other director discussed in this thesis, highlights the importance of space. Even on

Raging Stallion's website, Chris Ward introduces the film by stating that Lebanon is "the first ever major porn movie filmed ENTIRELY on location in the Middle East!" and that

"with Lebanon you get the REAL thing!" Although O'Neal plays with Orientalist traditions and gay fantasy throughout the film, credit should be given to him for recognizing Arab and Muslim culture as sexual in and of its own right. Lebanon is a modern space struggling with internal and external strife and a nation whose identity is 78 undergoing transformation. O'Neal does not want us to fetishize Sheiks, terrorists, or desert dwellers, but modern men.

I would like to begin by inspecting how O'Neal characterizes space, and the role space plays in shaping his vision of Lebanon. In Lebanon, O'Neal merges Cadinot's

Harem and the ZIP production films. Harem's travelogue narrative, along with

ZIP/Citebeur's on-line formalism and appeal to "authenticity" meld together in Lebanon, continuously straddling the amateur/narrative, real/fiction divide. I have already discussed the relationship between gay travel and the Middle East, and that of gay culture, fantasy, and pornography. Lebanon cannot, and does not want to be viewed outside of this paradigm. The film announces its intentions on its DVD cover, featuring two postage stamps on top of the words "World of Men". It should be noted that

Lebanon is part of the "World of Men" series, a series of "sexthnic" travelogues produced by O'Neal.40 In this particular film, O'Neal clearly continues the Orientalist tradition of the "white Westerner" going to the Middle East for gay sex. However, rather then going to "find himself and to use the local population for his gratification, he is going there to interact with the space, to bridge the East/West divide. The film opens with a long take, beginning with a close-up shot of a statue with a Lebanese flag flailing in the background. The camera then zooms back while panning right, revealing a gigantic mosque, a series of low-rise towers, a wall covering a construction site, and stops on what appears to be a shack using the Lebanese flag as a make-shift wall. In the background, there appears to be a middle or upper-class apartment building. The lack of editing suggests unity, rather than fragmentation. This shot intends to link the opening 79 image of the statue with the destroyed building using the Lebanese flag as a visual motif.

Shot as if taken from an amateur's vacation recording, this long take emphasizes the time and place as an authentic experience.

From this opening establishing shot, the film then dissolves to a high angle shot of a police station, zooms back, and then pans left, creating a natural split screen. Half of the screen space belongs to a decrepit building, a building that looks like it was bombed into near ruin, while the other half showcases a series of white painted buildings, and a tranquil street, filled with parked with trees and parked cars. This building is of particular significance, as it is featured on the cover of the DVD; it symbolizes Lebanon.

The image of this bombed building juxtaposed to the serenity of the tree lined streets is eerie. It suggests that not only are these relics of violence commonplace in Lebanon, but that the destructive events they connote are commonplace. As camera zooms into one of the blown out windows and cuts to the interior, the viewers discovers the film's first

"character," Sayid. His serene and relaxed body language is incongruent to the suggested violence surrounding him. In the bottom right corner, a green plant grows in the sunlight, perhaps suggesting new life and growth is possible in this space. Could O'Neal be suggesting that gay sex, or gays in general, can breathe new life into this "gentrified" space? Francois Sagat makes his way up the stairs and the two men cross gazes. In a series of shot-reverse shots, O'Neal emphasizes the men's eyes and bodies and identifies them as mechanisms of sexual communication. Merabet argued that in Beirut, before

"any kind of direct interaction involving speaking, let alone physical contact, takes place, it is up to the ubiquitous exchange of gapes and stares to respectively assess and 80 categorize the potential object of desire" (223). Upon their mutual assessment and agreement, the two men make their way to the final floor and engage first in oral and then in anal sex. What is perhaps one of the most original sex scenes I have personally encountered modern gay porn, takes place in this opening sex scene between Sagat and

Sayid. Sagat uses the exposed wires embedded within the concrete ceiling to hoist and hold himself up while Sayid steadies Sagat by grasping his legs and anally penetrating him. Beyond the performers' amazing acrobatics, by using the space as something more than a shield from the public's gaze, it becomes a character, a third sex partner. Both

Sagat and Sayid end up with patches of dust on their bodies, a sign of the space's participation. This particular space was a private residential space, and by placing the first sex scene here, it suggests that gay sexuality in Lebanon is undergoing a transformation as the politics of visibility and naming change the relationship between public and private.

To ensure the viewer does not associate Lebanon only with warfare, O'Neal showcases a variety of other spaces in order to diversify the West's perception of the

Middle East. The next sequence features a topless man named Marco wearing shorts walking across a beach's boardwalk. Many other topless men are also at the beach, an image that resists the Western perception of the "Arab" male covered in garments from head to toe. It is also highly suspect that there are only men at this particular beach.

The next two sex sequences take place within the private space, the first in what appears to be a living room, and the second in a kitchen. Moving back to the public space, a sequence between O'Neal and Sayid takes place in a rocky outdoor setting. The two men 81 descend from large rocks, become intimate at the base of a small waterfall, and then make their way over to a grass laced, rocky terrain for sex. The final sequence begins with a tracking shot, taken from within a moving car, of the Baalbek Temple complex.

Lebanon's geographical location along the Mediterranean has over the millennia been home to the Phoenician, Greek, Roman, and Ottoman empires; its architecture, culture, and history is a testament to its already trans-national status.

In the final sequence, the three men (O'Neal, Jacko and Sagat) enter the Baalbek temple complex with O'Neal and Jacko meeting amongst the ruins and making their way to a secluded, interior space for some intimate contact, leaving Sagat outdoors, alone, staring into the distance. A cut to a POV close-up shot of the ruins' columns, and then a dissolve to the three men, naked on a couch, touching each other, suggests that this final sex sequence is in fact a fantasy. Although on Raging Stallion's website it states that

"eventually these three stunning men retreat to Jacko's apartment to get to know each other a bit better", there is nothing in the preceding sequence to suggest that. It seems anxiety arose post-production about people not understanding the film's concept as a pseudo travelogue, as Lebanon, like Arabesque, lack both narrative and dialogue.

However, unlike Arabesque's appeal to fantasy, it seems O'Neal's documentary-esque

"narrative" gets lost in silent translation. In Baalbek, Sagat never actually makes contact with the other two men. Placing Sagat in this space, along with the aimless POV gaze which dissolves into the "Orientalized" interior, merges history and fantasy, and suggests a yearning to return to the safety of the Orientalized space of yore. The final sequence is not as grand as Arabesque, but the multi-coloured tapestries covering the space, although 82 cheap in their presentation, complements it as fantasy, as it is Sagat's fantasy and he is

clearly too busy being the "centre" of attention to worry about opulence. If this is a

fantasy sequence, what the viewer is witnessing is the characters' interiority, the

interiority of the gay male Westerner's desire for the Oriental space, a space no longer

existing outside of fantasy. The three bodies all appear to be similar, blurring ethnic

boundaries. All three bodies are always in contact, and usually interconnected via their

genitals. America (O'Neal), The Middle East (Jacko) and Europe (Sagat) interconnect,

symbolizing global culture's transnationalism and specifically, global gay culture.

The hardcore sex is situated within a modern, rather than Orientalist, space and

context, and the ethnically diverse cast configures Lebanon as part of, rather than the

antithesis to, globalization. Diverse, on location settings partially deflect popular media

representations of "the Middle East" or the "Arab world" as wholly different and separate

from the "Western world". It is the diverse cast and their placement within these spaces

which resist reactionary/conservative interpretations of the Arab world as dangerous,

backwards, threatening, Anti-West/American, intolerant, and wildly homophobic. Like

Arabesque, the diverse pairings blur the performers' ethnicity, as their skin tones, body

builds, and body hair do not define or segregate the bodies, but rather unify them.

Looking at the men's costumes, their in jeans, running shoes, t-shirts, tank-tops and Fruit

of the Loom underwear, contextualize their bodies within an economic and cultural

global discourse. Rather than using costume to starkly divide the Lebanese from the non-

Lebanese men, the clothing is meant to equalize their bodies. In the fourth sequence,

Sayid begins the scene wearing a shemagh and later removes it. Halfway through this 83 sequence, Sagat enters the scene wearing a shemagh himself. This cross-racial appropriation of national/ethnic clothing again points to the increasingly transnational nature of the 21st century. Particular and specific signification is undergoing alteration as clothing, skin tones, decor, and spaces are appropriated, and re-contextualized.42 Further indication of the dissolution of rigid racial identities can be found on Lebanon's Raging

Stallion website which categorizes the film under "Europeans," rather than "Arab" or

"Middle East." The generally conservative and restrictive taxonomy of pornographic categories, i.e. Black, uncut cock, fetish, uniform, twink, bear, etc., is also undergoing revision as the internet increasingly provides plural and hybrid representations which challenge hegemonic cultural production industries (something which will be discussed in the final chapter in more detail).

It would be incorrect to suggest that O'Neal and Raging Stallion are not trying to capitalize on the perceived taboo nature of homosexuality in the Middle East and the fetishization of the Arab "buck/stud". The film's third sequence begins with Martin attempting to get a kiss from Samir. Samir, being the "heterosexual Arab" that he is, is not interested in romance, but fucking. Raging Stallion's website describes Samir as,

"Definitely a hot, rough Arab MAN with a face to kill. This guy symbolizes the Arab genetic stock perfectly!" and in describing the sex, the website claims, "Samir then roughly pushes Martin over the counter, pulls his pants down and attacks Martin's pretty, tight ass!" Although this sequence sells the image of the Arab as "rough" and dominating, it is, however, only one of the five sequences and it is part of the diversity of representations the films offers; there's nothing wrong with a good, hard fuck (in my 84 opinion). The film does not essentialize this image, allowing for a plurality of representations, rather than the same representation being continuously repeated.

The most important sequence takes place between Sayid and O'Neal, with Sayid breaking the ultimate taboo by not only allowing himself to be anally penetrated, but enjoying his penetration, allowing his body and face to communicate pleasure as he displays himself riding O'Neal's penis. After exchanging blowjobs, the two men make their way to a rocky patch where Sayid bends over a large rock, and allows O'Neal to penetrate him. This is an important act as receiving oral sex or penetrating another's anus are not near as taboo as being on the receiving end of anal sex. McCormick argues that in Lebanon, there is a "strict adherence to the sexual dichotomy which stresses roles based on the subject's function as 'active' (masculine) or 'passive' (feminine)" (247).

Sayid rebels against his stereotypical role and against the conceptualization of sexuality across an engendered axis. In the first scene, Sayid penetrated Sagat, but now, he demonstrates sexual versatility by being penetrated by O'Neal. Indeed Sayid begins bent over a rock, but slowly, places O'Neal on his back, with Sayid squatting on top, riding

O'Neal's erection, clearly in control, resisting the notion of the "bottom" as passive.

Sayid's body is on display, but rather than the lens objectifying him as someone getting fucked, he responds to the gaze, by being the one who fucks. In this instance, it is not penis violating anus, but rather anus eating penis. He wants us to see him being penetrated, but more importantly, he wants us to se him enjoying this act, taking pleasure from this act in this space. His body's openness compliments the space's openness; both defy shame. When penetrator, he was in a semi-private space, a space which connoted 85 violence, signifying volatility. Here he is penetrated and the space's openness connotes

freedom and liberation. Sayid's act symbolically outs the queer Arab body, allowing it to

be penetrated and put on display for not only the Westerner, but for all to see.

In this chapter I focused on two American produced gay pornographic films

featuring "Arabs" and/or represent Arabness in their films. My intention was to look at

how American produced studio films represented race in comparison to the European

productions. Obviously America's relationship with North Africa, the Middle East and

the Far East differ from Western Europe's. However, European observations and

representations have heavily influenced the American representations, creating unique

transnational cultural products. These cultural relationships are additionally shaped by

the American pornographic studio system, a system which differs significantly, both

aesthetically, financially and culturally from European and/or on-line productions. I

believe that these texts serve to exploit America's volatile relationship with "Muslims" or

"Arabs", while expressly attempting to counter both the very representations they

themselves have created, and those dominating mainstream media discourses. In

Arabesque, director Chris Ward used camp and parody to play with racial constructions

and poke fun at America's visual representations of "Arabs", while Collin O'Neal

hybridizes the travelogue narrative, infusing it with amateur "authenticity", attempting to

showcase Lebanon as something more than the homeland of Hezbollah. As such, I argue

that although pornography as film genre is generally conservative in its representations

(especially studio productions), these text are, or at least attempt to be, part of the left's

attempt to open up a dialogue about racial identities. 86 Chapter 4) The Democratized Sexual Image: Regress and Progress

In this final chapter, I wish to look at some self-authored XTube videos, and discuss how the image, specifically the sexual image, is being transformed by digital technology, the internet and globalization. In the last three chapters I looked how historical relationships between East and West are partly responsible for the multitude and variety of sexual images featuring Arab and, or, "Arab" men. I have then gone on to discuss how the erosion of this geographical and cultural dichotomy, and the subsequent tensions arising from these erosions, are transforming pornographic representations. My thesis has thus far focused on professionally produced pornographic images, and in this chapter I will be looking at amateur produced texts. Throughout the course of this thesis,

I have attempted to demonstrate that as the image democratizes, and as individual nations become globally integrated, pornographic images have opened up a space for potential resistance. Technologies used to both produce and disseminate images of "Arabs" and

"Arabness" have also opened up a network for some of the most progressive and resistant images of Arab men; self-authored sexual images. These videos must be recognized as part of global discourse and are therefore, susceptible to dominant methods of racial and sexual/pornographic representation. The XTube videos are problematic as they potentially liberate the Arab body, and mimic standard commercial pornographic representations and cultural ideology. The XTube videos allow the men to appropriate the same apparatus and use it to break free from Western produced representations.

Studio produced porn allows for conflicting moments of resistance, but I argue true resistance comes from controlling the apparatus and being able to define yourself, rather 87 than having someone else define you. I begin this chapter by looking at some popular visual representations of the Middle East and North Africa in popular media discourses by paying close attention to how representations have shifted from Orientalized exoticism to militarized terrorism. In the last half of this chapter, I compare and contrast these competing images against various self-made XTube videos paying specific attention to how authorship, as well as narcissism and mimicry, define and contextualize these self- authored works. XTube videos provide an eclectic collage of media personifications, combining a variety of both regressive and progressive exhibitions. My intention in this last chapter to is look at the role technology plays in disseminating self authored videos as part of pornography's contribution to global sexual discourse.

Contemporary representations of Arabs and Muslims in Western moving image culture have conflated the two identities and transfixed them on terrorism. In discussing the controversy surrounding the Bruce Willis action film The Siege (1998), Helena

Vanhala writes, "Even when the film was in production, Arab-American organizations criticized it for reinforcing U.S. stereotypes of Muslims and of Islam as a religion of terrorism." In comparison to Hollywood cinema's representations pre-1970, post

"Hollywood Renaissance" representations have moved away from the romanticized depictions in The Shiek, Arabesque or Casablanca (1942), to more militarized and threatening depictions. Liala Kitaeff has written that "in the 1980s and 90s the stereotype of Arab terrorists as genetic "bad guys" rose to prominence in films starring as

Commando (1985) and True Lies (1994). Many in the United States have had only this kind of Arabic image readily at hand."45 Representations of Arabs or Muslims in 88 Hollywood moving image culture have been most prominent in the action genre, with some of the most infamous portrayals found films such as The Siege, True Lies, Rules of

Engagement (2000), Protocol (1984) and television shows such as 2446 or Sleeper Cell47.

Arabs and Muslims in Hollywood cinema are not limited to being terrorists, they can also be sexual "perverts" such as the ultra-feminine Xerxes in 300 (2007), or lascivious misogynists unable to control their sexuality such as in Sahara (1983) or Never Say

Never Again (1983). Other popular portrayals of Arabs in contemporary media include the sexualized North African slaves in the television series Rome, traditional Oriental caricatures such as genies and Sheiks in Aladdin (1992), and religious fanatics or restless, controllable hoards which can be found almost daily on national news programs, from

FOX "News" to BBC World.

The most recent and shocking representations of Arab men would have to be from the leaked Abu Ghraib images. These amateur pictures showed Iraqi detainees from the

Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq being tortured and abused by prison guards and other

American special operatives, as well as the deadly consequences of these

"interrogations". These images are some of the most recent representations to continue the Western tradition of constructing the "other" on their behalf. The men in the images are being forced to perform their own perversity and abjectness for the delight and pleasure of the American soldiers in the photographs and behind the lenses. As discussed throughout this thesis, Arab men have been constructed on behalf of themselves by the

West for centuries, with the Abu Ghraib images revealing the more sinister side of colonialism, imperialism and globalization. 89 Much has been written on the Abu Ghraib photos and contemporary

(mis)representations of Arabs and Muslims in American media and my intention was to provide only a quick sketch of this very large discourse, in order to compare some of the self made sexual images found on XTube. Both the Abu Ghraib images and the XTube videos are byproducts of surveillance culture, a narcissistic culture obsessed with "the self," while pointing to the ubiquity of digital imagining, and the fact that no institution, even highly controlled and managed ones like the American military can not contain their production or dissemination. While the Abu Ghraib images are about the guards forcing the Arab men to perform themselves for their gaze, the XTube videos allow the men to appropriate this technology and sexualize themselves. Even though the Abu Ghraib and

XTube videos are "democratized" images and even though these digital images were created by amateurs, and distributed through the internet rather than privately/corporately owned media distribution networks, each series of images are starkly contrasted. While the Abu Ghraib images present a conservative vision of race and sexual relations, with a clear division between "white" and "not white", preference for masculinity and punishment for femininity, using homosexuality as a form of "torture" and ridicule, the

XTube videos attempt to breakdown these binaries. The men on XTube use the same tools (digital cameras/camcorders, computer) as the guards at Abu Ghraib, reconfiguring the gaze as narcissistic. The men use this website to exhibit their bodies, performing both for themselves and for the other. Rather than having someone author them, the men author themselves. In an attempt to reclaim the Arab body, these men resist conservative interpretations by claiming their bodies as sexual, homosexual and self determining. 90 Defying contemporary images of Arabs as sexually repressed and overly religious, or lascivious and excessive, the monotony of the videos establishes a similar, if limited, mode of sexuality that reunites the Arab and "other" body.

XTube is a Toronto housed, online, pornographic distribution website, specializing in amateur, self-made, sexual videos.49 XTube allows viewers to define their gender (male or female) and then their object choice (male, female, or both), thereby breaking down the gay/straight dichotomy found on most pornographic websites.

XTube's focus on social networking lead to its success as the website allows men to create a virtually global sexual space. The website's basic premise is to mimic both

Youtube's layout and ideology. Youtube's "Broadcast Yourself slogan undergoes sexual translation at XTube, where individuals can broadcast all of themselves. XTube visitors are encouraged to join the website as a member, even though it is a free website, which will then allow them to upload their own videos, comment and rate videos, and interact with other members. In recent years, the website has been commercialized, overrun with pop-up advertisements and XTube "sponsored" videos. These sponsored videos are from online production studios who offer viewers 15 second free trailers as a way to entice viewers into purchasing the full video or joining their company's paid website. In addition, controversy has arose over the website being used as a platform for illegally uploading copyrighted material, with of this pirated clips trying to be passed off as "self-made".50 Although I personally lament the inundation of studio products, many individual members or partners, who originally used the website as a sexual exhibitionist tool, have themselves used this site to turn their pastime into a business. Many of the 91 self-made amateur videos are now samples, or previews of feature length amateur compilation films, which can be purchased via the website for a reasonable price.

Although there are an abundant amount of sponsored videos, most of the videos in the

"best rated" or "most viewed" categories are still self-authored sexual texts, most of which feature individuals masturbating in front of the camera, or couples engaging in oral or anal sex, suggesting that website's primary goal of amateur exhibitionism remains its driving force. Men from all over the world are able to interact with each other, transforming the digital space into a virtual bathhouse. They can put their bodies on display and search for other displayed bodies. Individuals are invited, even encouraged, to voice their opinion, or to contact authors with comments. The cultural, sexual, technological and social ramifications of this website are in and of themselves a worthy study. For the purpose of this paper, I wanted to briefly summarize the site's content, highlighting some of the major tenets for those who are unfamiliar with this website.

XTube's allure stems from the multitude of individuals who both expose themselves and those who want to be exposed to a plethora of sexual characteristics, many of which may otherwise be unavailable. The website features a variety of skin tones, body sizes and shapes, and sexual activities. Mature, overweight Asian men performing oral sex on young, hairless, thin Black men may not be a common site in studio produced gay porn, but there are more than a few of these videos available on

XTube. Not only does it allows individuals to show their body, a body which may not fit into the gay male ideal, but it also allows many different bodies to engage with many other different bodies. This site gives those who are marginalized and unrepresented the 92 opportunity to sexualize themselves and speak publicly about their sexuality. XTube

offers individuals the opportunity to exhibit and objectify themselves free from shame, judgment, and to present their bodies outside a traditional or conservative fetishistic gaze.

Despite these liberating potentials, the mode of searching, although highly innovative in

its "tagging" abilities ("beard", "edging", "moaning", "jeans"), also perpetuates

racialized categories51 based on ethnicity and nationality. There are many representations

on this website, and for the purpose of this thesis I wish to focus solely on "Arab" men

and how these videos, although more progressive in their overall intent (especially in

comparison to the Abu Ghraib images), can really only offer ambivalent representations.

The XTube videos, for all their attempts at removing the power production from

conservative cultural producers, still have the potential to mimic popular discourse,

thereby re-creating themselves in accordance with the very same gaze they wish to

counteract. As Lisa Nakamura has argued, "race and racism don't disappear when bodies

become virtual or electronically mediated" (1677). There is however resistance within

social mimicry as those who are ostracized, fetishized, marginalized or non-existent can

poach "standard" representations, reformulating them as an act of defiance. By typing

the word Arab into the Website's search engine, the viewer is taken to a series of videos,

some featuring the word Arab in the title and some without. Examples include "Big Arab

Cock Jerkoff," "Abdul Fucks Me Good," and "My Cock On Camera." Whether or not

the title expressly identifies the performer in the video as Arab, the viewer is meant to

assume that all the videos in this category feature Arab performers. The assumption is

that these men have chosen to film and upload themselves onto the internet, so there 93 would be no reason to lie about their ethnicity; this is where the texts become complex.

Like Arabesque or Citebeur or any of the other porn films, there is no way to identify the performers' racial authenticity. Just because a video stipulates that the cock being seen is

"Arab", does not mean that it actually is "Arab" (that is, attached to an "Arab" man).

After viewing more than a dozen videos, I realized that all the cocks varied in shape, size, and colour; there was no way to identify them as "Arab". By way of critical analysis, it was at this juncture where I realized the instability of the category "Arab". These videos challenged my own racial assumptions, and it was this indecipherability, via the production's values and the site's standard method of representation that forced me reconsider the project's focus. Part of the difficulty in defining the bodies was due to the performer's face remaining outside the frame, with only his body on display. Although we tend to identify people by their face, there is no reason to believe that facial recognition would conclusively confirm or deny their racial identity. In many instances, the face was purposely cutoff by the edge of the frame, and other times, it was simply a byproduct of the camera's close up shot on the cock. This lack of identity makes these bodies both Arab and "Arab," as the self-made videos are self described as Arab, yet inscribed as "Arab" by the label Arab. Lacking "ethnically determining" clothing, or an

Orientalist space and decor, the word Arab makes the bodies Arab, a label that may be self attached, or attached on their behalf.

The bodies' racial indecipherability makes them counter-hegemonic representations. Somewhere in Lebanon, Cairo, Kabul or Tehran, a 20 something year old has a digital camera or camcorder and is choosing to objectify his own body. This is 94 not to say that all or any of the individuals are Arab or living in the Arab world, but that the tools for these self representations are available to almost anyone who can afford to purchase them. In these videos, the men resist Western prescribed religiosity as ultra- conservative, body-shy purists, by choosing to objectify their bodies. These videos are no different than those made by anyone else since many of the videos found on XTube are of unidentifiable men masturbating in front of the camera. Some of the "Arab" men chose to wear a shemag, masking their identity, and placing only their body on display.

However, there also many non-Arab identified men who wear ski masks to make their bodies unidentifiable as well. As Munoz argued, "The postcolonial hybrid is a subject whose identity practices are structured around an ambivalent relationship to the signs of empire and the signs of the 'native', a subject who occupies a space between the West and the rest" (164). By stylistically matching the various other representations, the performers use the digital medium's formal qualities to blend themselves into the global sexual discourse. Unlike ZIP productions which force their performers to be "Arab", as auteurs of their own image, their autoethnographic performance negotiates their racial relationship within global sexual discourse.

There is an antithesis to this potential liberation because these texts also replicate dominant methods of sexual representations. User "akbarBrighton" has 7 self shot videos, with all seven of the videos having him masturbating in front of the camera. A video of his entitled Full body with fleshlight has the camera positioned directly above his body looking directly downwards. The mise-en-scene is bare: a white towel on (what appears to be) a brown bed sheet, and what I assume is "akbarBrighton" wearing a hat/facemask combination, concealing his identity. This video is similar to showing off my bod where a man who I assume is the same user, sits in a chair, wearing a bandana

around his face, masturbating in front of the camera. In both these instances the performers conceal their identity, but in the case of akbarBrighton, rather than placing his

face outside the frame, he makes the conscientious decision to place his face within the

frame, concealing it in a way which replicates images of Arabs in mainstream media. It is a faceless body, mimicking the numerous images of "Arab" terrorists who conceal their

faces behind bandanas or masks. Other examples include videos by user "slutarab", who has named some of his videos arab military boy fuck me and sucking military arab cocok

[sic]. In arab military boy fuck me, the video begins with, I assume, "slutarab" placing

the video in position. He subsequently moves from behind the camera and positions himself on the floor on all four limbs, as the "military Arab" (signified by his military

camouflaged jacket) appears to fuck him. Although it soon becomes apparent at 1:41 that

"slutarab" is not being penetrated and that the video is being faked, I question the need to militarize the penetrator. These representations, although self-authored, indicate how

images have the ability to shape how we perceive ourselves. The gaze which watches, records, and punishes gays, Arabs, and gay Arabs, is subverted. In pornography, it seems

the digital image's hybrid relationship to truth opens up a space whereby the marginalized, neglected and silenced subject can resist hegemonic representations and

speak. Porn challenges mainstream visions of Arabs, because porn is a marginalized

cultural text, just as Arabs are marginalized within mainstream Western media representations and political/cultural discourses. 96 Perhaps the most destabilizing element of these videos is not the label they use to solicit their bodies, but rather whose gaze they are attempting to attract. Much of this project has focussed on the label "Arab" and how the raced body is performed. In many of the texts I've looked at, definitions of race have either been purposely or inadvertently questioned. The case of the XTube videos, their potential for deceit is their greatest

source of resistance. Although the digital image inherently points the potential of fraudulence and falsification, certain traits, such as racial labels, are not scrutinized to the same degree as other visual manifestations. Because the label "Arab" is self applied, there is no reason to question the legitimacy of this label. Unlike Harem or Arabesque which makes the bodies "Arab" by situating them in "Arab" spaces and covering them in

"Arab" clothing, these videos are not about "Arabness" or "being Arab." The fact that there is no way of confirming the label "Arab" epitomizes the changing trajectory of racial categories. What is "Arab"? That which is "Arab" is that which in some way is labeled "Arab". Each video requires the viewer to trust the self applied, culturally

charged label. The viewer may very well be searching for "Arabs" as a away to indulge their racially specific fantasies, but the texts manage to deconstruct their own

categorization. Because XTube is a global site website, there is no "intended viewer".

With all of the other texts I have looked at, the intended consumer was (presumably) a white, Western, (and excluding the Abu Ghraib photos) gay male. With respect to these online texts, they are not fashioned to be sold to any particular demographic. They are

extremely narcissistic and mostly designed to appease the individual making the video. I

cannot, and do not, assume the viewer searching for "Arabs" on XTube is a gay white 97 male. Many of these videos feature men masturbating and could easily be categorized as eliciting a female heterosexual gaze (it is even possible that these videos are intended for a female gaze and simply re-categorized for gay male consumption). Since this website is globally orientated, the intended gaze may very well be for that of another Arab individual, transforming the website into a more sexually forward dating website. Maybe a Japanese man living in South Africa is searching for these videos. The possibilities are endless, and it is because of all of these endless possibilities that space for resistance is created. What makes these men Arab? Only the label which transcribes performance onto their bodies. Who consumes these images? Anyone.

98 Conclusion: Blogs, the Internet and the Future of Porn Studies

I began this project with a discussion of Huessein, and I now return to him again.

What the NightCharm blog entry, Too Dark, Too Hairy, Too Much, demonstrated, was

the anxiety surrounding Huessein as a complex figure in contemporary gay sexual

discourse. He is the anti-thesis of the stereotypical white, athletic, hairless, gay porn body, and yet his background as a German-born Turk highlights the discrepancy between body, race and nation. Why isn't he considered German? It is not his excessive

masculinity that is the issue, but rather his racial difference.

This blog entry also points out that despite the anxiety and disgust he elicits, there

is an underlying sexual attractiveness to this aversion. The "Arab" is attractive because he is disgusting. The racism of this entry matches perfectly the same ideological attitudes

that the texts I have inspected appeal to. Although the texts may at times offer nuanced,

complex and potentially resistant representations, I cannot ignore the fact that the

sentiments this blogger professes are the all-too-common beliefs which these videos both

cater to and perpetuate. The target market may very well be people like the author of this blog. Nevertheless, despite this racism inherent in the appeal to a potential target

audience, I have also suggested that the texts themselves are contradictory, plural, not

necessarily deterministic, and as part of a globalized economy of desire, can be consumed by different individuals for different reasons.

A discussion on another popular gay porn blog highlights how these videos are part of the globally integrated market and subject to scrutiny from diverse viewpoints. In

a May 41 , 2008 posting on gaypornblog.com entitled "Gay Sex Mystery: Are Arabian 99 Tales Jihad or Jamon?" Mike Stabile discusses how Alexander Pictures, a popular gay porn studio based in Brazil has been producing copious amounts of gay porn featuring

"Arab" men. He questions the actors' authenticity, asking people to comment on the actors perceived ethnicity, backing up his doubts about their 'looks' by invoking the neo-Orientalist belief that "Arabia isn't too keen on homosex" ~ in other words, 'real'

Arab men wouldn't be so comfortable performing gay sex, invoking an unspoken corollary — and equally racist stereotype ~ that Brazillian men are all too comfortable with gay sex. On May 4, 2008 at 11:04 PM, a user names "utsy" writes "its very obvious as ALL Arabian men are circumcised pretty much, I live in France and the arab community is huge there , so I m telling you all these guys are latinos in disguise (you can tell bytheir face too if you're used to being with middle eastern guys )" (original spelling preserved throughout). Utsy's belief that "ALL" Arab men are circumcised is understandable, as circumcision is a common cultural practice in Muslim culture, but his attempt to differentiate "Arab" and "non-Arab" is the porn world's all-too-common version of racial profiling, which is only heightened by his concept of the actors' bodies dressed in "disguise." In responding to "utsy", user "Priooonce" writes on May 5, 2008 at 8:52 AM that: "Gay porn for all of its transgressions is as conservative as a Republican when it comes to race". Upset by the discussion, it seems Collin O'Neal himself

(although there is no way to verify this, as this entire discussion on authenticity and labels demonstrates) posted a quick blog on May 9th, 2008 at 5:54 PM, where he states that

"Dressing Brazilians up in 'Arab' clothing just looks stupid and definitively unauthentic

[sic]. Those of us that DO risk our lives to shoot Arabs in their natural environment take 100 great risk to bring porn aficionados a peak at something that does not show up on their computer screen and DVD shelf often". He decides to give readers a geography lesson by informing them that "the word Arab refers to a region/ethnicity and not a religion.

Many misperceive Persians and North Africans as Arabs". Although O'Neal partially uses this communal forum to advertise his film as "truth" and Alexander pictures as

"false", and even though he self-importantly associates himself as a liberal Westerner, risking life and death to bring back images of "real Arab men" to the West, he does highlight how misconceptions about race dominate pornographic discourse and fantasy

(even if he is partly responsible for this continuation, especially since the contemporary usage of "Arab" refers more usefully to language spoken rather than ethnic or regional origin, and incidentally, does include North Africa). The discussion as a whole, however, demonstrates how this misconception is being recognized, and that this recognition has opened up a discussion for reconceptualizing these misconceptions.

What these blogs indicate is that interpretations of pornographic racial discourses are continuing to evolve, and that the internet, digital image, and globally integrated market are all partly responsible for these alterations. My intention here is not to return to reductive and ahistorical discussions of Orientalism, but to highlight how Orientalist discourses are now being incorporated (whether correctly or incorrectly) into discussions about pornography. It is also my intention to highlight how these discussions are taking place on a global scale, and that there are a variety of opinions when it comes to racial representations in pornography, or racial identities in general. Some views are more regressive, reactionary and misinformed, while others are more progressive and nuanced. 101 The internet is an ambivalent global network which allows for a multitude of

representations and ideas to be expressed and critiqued.

My goal was to demonstrate how these texts negotiate their socio-political

histories with their positions in contemporary global discourse. These contemporary

productions reflect how traditional notions of race, desire and nation are being

transformed by forces of globalization and transnationalism, just as democratic methods

of self-production and distribution are collapsing the dichotomous boundaries between

"us" and "them". At the same time, this project opens a gateway for further research

about the internet and the role it plays in changing fixed notions about racial categories in pornographic representations, and in particular, how digital global culture is affecting a multitude of racially-specific pornographic representations.

This project attempted to compose an inquiry into the various representations of

Arab men and "Arabness" in contemporary gay male pornography, by tracking their

evolution from colonialist literature right up to recent representations on the internet.

Representations of Arab men, women, spaces and culture in films, photography,

literature, painting, and operas have been covered extensively by academics, but they

have failed to look at the texts which go beyond veiled eroticism and suggestion, and put

the underlying intentions of Orientalism on pornographic display. My intention was to

simply to explore these texts and fill a gap in academic research. Throughout the

research and writing process, however, I realized that some of these texts play with

notions of Orientalism and gay fantasy in ways which also open up spaces for rethinking

diverse racial identities outside of traditional Orientalist discourses. In particular, by 102 replacing "eroticism" and suggestion with the representation of hardcore fucking, the

dynamics of Orientalism and its critiques are opened for reinterpretation and subversion.

In the first chapter I sought to present a historical foundation, highlighting some

of the major events, ideas and tropes which heavily influenced the various representations

of Arab men in contemporary gay male pornography. The following chapters tried to

demonstrate how these contemporary texts both used and resisted their socio-cultural

histories, arguing that each film or production sites exploited Orientalist/racist tropes,

while simultaneously offering diverging viewpoints. My goal was to demonstrate how

globalization and new networks of communication, such as XTube, are changing racial

discourses, and particularly Orientalist ideology.

Because pornography relies so heavily on the body, and because the body has

chameleon-like capabilities, especially in relation to sexuality and race, these texts offer a unique interpretation of contemporary racial identity politics. This project ends where

the next project will begin; an in-depth investigation of how digital technology

transforms pornographic representations, and how these fantasies reflect the impact of

globalization and the internet on the democratization of the image and of information, are

simultaneously challenging and upholding identity politics and institutionalized

ideologies which are deeply ingrained into the social consciousness.

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109 1 Hop wood performs an in depth analysis of certain key Arab authored texts in his final chapter. It should also be noted that as Lawrence's novel and those before and after him inspired a narrow vision of the "The Middle East", Sayyid Quitb manifesto Milestones (1964) was a foundation text for modern politicization of Islam. 2 Hop wood, chapters 3-5. 3 "Muslim World." Wikipedia. . 4 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francois_Sagat 5 Laura Kipnis's first chapter in Bound and Gagged investigates the blurry boundary between fantasy and reality. 6 Farmer, Brett. Spectacular Passions: Cinema, Fantasy, Gay Male Spectatorship. 7 Said, Orientalism. 8 An on-line copy of Burton's "Terminal Essay" can be found at http ://www. fordham. edu/halsall/p wh/burton-te. html 9 John Greyson's article Security Blankets discusses the impact modern surveillance practices by the police/government on gay culture and gay men in particular. The article in particular highlights how this form of surveillance profiling is very much attuned to space. 10 Harris, Daniel. The Rise and Fall of Gay Culture. Harris has two insightful and entertaining chapters in his book on gay pornography, one focused on literary pornography and one on cinematic pornography. Harris delineates the complexities involved in creating these American pornographic texts and is well worth a read. 11 Bush's "terrorist" rhetoric was very similar to McCarthy's "communist" rhetoric. Both were foreigners that had quietly penetrated the American border, wreaking destruction from within. Both needed to be "detected" and found, (thus the need for surveillance) because they were physically indecipherable from proper citizens. Both were an all-encompassing evil which needed to be stopped at whatever cost. 12 Kinsman looks back at 1950s and 1960s Canadian politics discussing how queer sexuality was seen as anti-nation. Although this association would only last for a brief period, it is yet another example of how surveillance would be used to "detect" homosexual persons, as homosexuals were, like communists, perceived as anti-nationalists out to silently destroy the nation form within the border via recruiting, etc. 13 Find Source 14 Waugh, Thomas. Hard To Imagine. 15 For Burger, masturbating to gay porn is a form of protest. He writes, "Each [cum shot] is a hot juicy was metaphorically flying in the collective face of those who would attempt to further oppress the advancing gay communities, and clogging the synapses of their dominant memory" (105). 16 Hocquiheim seminal work deconstructs Freud's assessment of gay male fantasy and sexuality, and many others including Weeks, Waugh, and Bersani have produced groundbreaking works which locate gay fantasy as both a psychic and cultural compromise. 17 John Champagne has an interesting chapter in his book The Ethics of Marginality where he discuss how moving image pornography's formal qualities partially determine the fantasy. Clearly influenced by Metzian philosophy, it is not a cock, but this particular cock, of this particular size, colour and shape, being shot form this particular angle. Champagne partially removes spectatorial agency, suggesting the text construction supersedes this authority. 18 Markwell and Waltt. Gay Tourism. 19 Cadinot shares his auteurist status with other genre catalysts such as Kristen Bjorn and Lucas Kazan. Both Bjorn and Cadinot are famous for their ethnographic gazes with their films being shot in everywhere from Australia, French-Canada, Brazil, Cuba, Dominican Republic, North Africa, and all over Europe, and Kazan focus his attention primarily on Italy and the Mediterranean. Their films are famous for placing the "appropriate" raced body in the "appropriate" raced space. As an example, Bjorn's French Canadian film Call of the Wild (1992), exploited "Canadian archetypes" such as "lumberjacks, hunters and "Royal Mounties,'" and "when not in the forest, the Canadian archetypes [were] having sex in rustic cabins,

110 usually in front of a fireplace" (Westcott, 193). These two directors in particular made exoticizing and fetishizing otherness a central part of their auteurist vision. 20 In his chapter on literary pornography, Harris discusses how the "power top" gave birth to the power bottom. He argues the that the power bottom was no longer a passive flower, but an insatiable cock eater. 21 For an in depth discussion of anal anxiety see Leo Bersani's Is the Rectum a Grave? Bersani argues that the anus, especially in the era of AIDS, intensified male anxiety over being penetrated as this erogenous zone now signified "death". 22 See Daniel Harris' chapters on literary and filmic porn, as well as John Burger's third chapter. 23 Burleigh, Marc. "Paris Griped By Serious New Riots". Mail & Guardian. . 24 Hardcore, chapter 5 delves into this comparison 25 Much controversy has emerged over the image and use of the condom in pornography, with many studios claiming that they are losing viewers as the condom "reminds" viewers that what they are watching is "fake" and not "real". The condom destroys the fantasy because viewers are forced to confront the image of the body as a real body, a body which can get AIDS or pregnant, etc. In narrative studio porn then, the condom makes the narrative a pseudo documentary. However, interesting enough, the condom is less problematic in amateur or non-narrative porn because these particular texts are read as more "authentic" and so viewers are more likely to associate these images with themselves and their sexual practices, thereby not creating a fissure in the fantasy!! 26 Although Citebeur is an online based studio and all its videos are crafted independently, the company releases "compilation videos". The studio will take 5 or 6 separate mini-films and combine them together into one package, generally revolving around a certain theme. The theme in this film is Arab hooligan aggression. 27 The label Latino is itself problematic as it encompasses a wide range of nations, cultures, races and ethnicities. Much of what is said with respect to racial performativity can be applied to the ethnic label "Latino" as well. Indeed the gay porn studio Alexander pictures, a Brazilian based studio, has spawned many "Arab" porn films using Latino/Brazilian actors, re-inscribing their "tanned" skin, selling it as "Arab" rather than "Latino". 28 For a lively comparison between ethnographic documentary and pornographic practices see Hansen, Needham and Nichols "Pornography, Ethnography, and the Discourses of Power". Needless to say the 1991 publication needs to be read in context as it is almost 20 decades old. Pornography and academic and cultural attitudes towards pornography have vastly changed. 29 The "truth" of one's sexuality is a fantasy element which gay pornography has exploited. Many gay porn narratives utilize the "straight guy who is really gay," as well as the gay-for-pay scenario ad nauseam, due in part to gay activist's promotion of the closet containing interior "truth". With respect to gay identity, the relationship between "truth" and "desire" becomes problematic and this elision is best demonstrated in new online gay pornographic texts. Two popular on-line websites, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, and Next Door Hookups, advertise "straight" men having sex with women, but designed with the gay male spectator in mind. Essentially, the camera focuses on the rhythmic thrusting of the male, fragmenting the woman's body, focusing mostly on her pelvic region, turning her into little more than stump with a hole. These films are about seeing the straight men in "his natural habitat". Changing the "gay-for-pay" phenomenon, we now have straight porn for gay men. Like Citebeur and its affiliated web- ring, Next Door Hookups is part of a larger gay porn network, which features sites such as Next Door Male, Next Door Buddies, Stroke That Dick and Cody Cummings, and Queer Eye is produced by Jake Cruise, ofjakecruise.com, a popular gay porn website. Indeed the "gay-for-pay" phenomenon questioned how "intended desire" constructed notions of sexuality and sexual identity, and questioned why this additional extra-diegetic information mattered, and how it helped shape gay fantasy. In fact, controversy arouse when Chi Chi Larue introduced the gay porn world to "straight-for-pay," as popular gay porn star Blake Riley had sex with two women in the film Shifting Gears. Not only do we have "gay" men having sex with women, but now we have gay porn that does not even feature any gay sex! The boundary between 111 heteronormative and heterosexual, like the boundary between East and West is becoming more fluid. Extra-diegetic information plays an important role in Arab gay porn as well, as many of the performers oscillate between being sexually curious, to gay-for-pay, to "gay". As an example, many videos feature Arab men masturbating to both still and moving image heterosexual porn. The fantasy is heightened by our "knowledge" of their "real" intent. 30 Steger, Manfred. Globalization: A Very Short Introduction. 31 Hansen et. al. 212. 32 Ibid. 223. 33 Focusing momentarily on XTube.com , one of the most popular amateur porn sites on the internet, everyday individuals are invited to simply post videos of themselves masturbating or having sex. The exhibitionism of the website cannot be denied, as the individuals are not paid to post videos, and do not make money from posting videos, they post the videos because they want to be watched. Despite its low production values, bad lighting, blurry shots, bad editing, and low resolution, these videos have used their aesthetics to promote their "realness", and have become so popular that not only are they replacing narrative pornography, but narrative pornography is in some cases appropriating certain elements to reference amateur pornography. A popular example occurs in Lucas Entertainment's Encounters: The Heat of the Moment, where two "straight" dorm roommates engage in secret gay sex in incredibly dark lighting. This particular sequence is poaching and re-inscribing XTube's amateur aesthetics, as the set is lit with only a desk lamp, with the traditional intercutting of close-up shots of penetration being absent, as the camera's distance emphasizes both the motion, and unification, of the bodies, rather than their fragmentation. 34 See Errol Morris and Philip Gourevitch interview with Sabrina Harman in The New Yorker March 24 2008 issue. 35 See Hansen's Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film. 6 It is what Linda Williams referred to in her 1996 epilogue as "yuppie porn". I argue though, that its production is partially a byproduct of the gay porn studio system which has its own awards system, a system which, like Hollywood, it uses to maintain credibility, power and centrality, all to ensure a system which will continue to bring in money despite other media forces, such on-line/amateur/non-narrative porn. 37 Wikipedia page < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centurians_of Rome>. 38 See conclusion. 39. 40 Interestingly Lebanon is the only film which sells the country rather than the city. Other titles include East Berlin, Edinburgh, Sao Paulo, and Miami. A larger study on this series is in order, but as an interesting note, East Berlin features two "Arab-German" performers suggesting that although these texts appeal to "nationalist" visions, they also offer visions of "nationalism" being transformed by globalization. 41 Sofiat discusses how beaches in Beirut are notorious cruising grounds at night. Maybe this is one of those beaches? An example how "ethnic specific" significations, such as dress, can be improperly appropriated is the controversy which arose when Rachel Ray wore a red and white shemagh in a Country Time commercial. Conservative pundit, Michelle Malik, saw Ray supporting "Muslim terrorism"42, Ray saw a popular fashion accessory. 43 Penetration is a huge issue in queer discourse, and has a long standing presence in sexual, especially homosexual, discourses. Dover's Greek Homosexuality was the first to recognize the inherent homophobia of Ancient Greece, and its intense patriarchal regulation. "Top" vs. "Bottom" politics is still a big issue in the gay community, and especially in the gay porn industry. 44 http://ejumpcut.org/currentissue/Siege/index.html 45 http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc46.2003/kitaeff.threeKings/index.html Rima Abdelkader discusses season 6's portrayals of Arabs as terrorist and the overall 9/11 infused political nature of the FOX produced series, .

112 Christian Blauvelt has written an insightful article in Jump Cut on the plethora of representations of Arabs in Hollywood. 48 For a more detailed discussion please see, Giroux, Eisenman, Rajiva, Blauvelt, Vanhala and Kitaeff. 49 For the purpose of this study, I will be focusing solely on gay content. 50 See O'Brien's "We Can Name That Bel Ami Movie in Two Strokes" < http://gay.fleshbot.com/5204788/we-can-name-that-bel-ami-movie-in-two-strokes>. 51 Just as an interesting note, Canada yields only 4 pages worth of videos, while Arab yields 13. 52 The anxiety over authenticity is now inherent in pornographic discourse, a by product of digital culture. Linda Williams famously argued that the cum shot was truth and proof, the evidence of the man's pleasure, the articulation of his inner desire being satisfied. Williams' assertion was about narrative progression, an explicit visualization of male pleasure, a sign which evidenced "real" pleasure. The cum shot in contemporary pornography has undergone ideological shifts as contemporary porn viewers however are now fully aware that images, especially digital images, can be faked. A popular gay porn blog (gay.fleshbot.com) showcases discussions which attempt to disseminate whether certain amateur video cum shots from XTube.com were real or fake (XTube 's Believe It Or Not, Vol. I and Vol.2). Bloggers are then invited to post their opinions, scrutinizing every detail, from the penis' hardness, to whether or not the rhythm of the ejaculation follows "standard time intervals", to the colour and transparency of the semen. People are aware that images can be faked, even something which 30 years ago was heralded as the sign of ultimate truth. If the cum shot can be faked, then the necessary pleasure associated with the cum shot can also be faked. As Williams discussed, female pleasure and the female body was elusive as it could not conclusively prove its pleasure. This anxiety of the digitized image fraudulence is partially a truncation of male sexual authority. We know the digital image can lie, and so therefore our identification with the digital image is always a mixture of pleasure and anxiety, certainty and uncertainty.

113