Pornographesis: Sex, Media and Gay Culture by John Paul Stadler Graduate Program in Literature Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ N. Katherine Hayles, Advisor ___________________________ Robyn Wiegman ___________________________ Priscilla Wald ___________________________ Anne Garréta ___________________________ Antonio Viego Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate Program in Literature in the Graduate School of Duke University 2018 i v ABSTRACT Pornographesis: Sex, Media and Gay Culture by John Paul Stadler Graduate Program in Literature Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ N. Katherine Hayles, Advisor ___________________________ Robyn Wiegman ___________________________ Priscilla Wald ___________________________ Anne Garréta ___________________________ Antonio Viego An abstract of a dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate Program in Literature in the Graduate School of Duke University 2018 i v Copyright by John Paul Stadler 2018 Abstract How does gay pornography inscribe gay identity, and what might that inscription reveal? Pornographesis asks how gay pornography has come to organize the feelings, desires, pleasures, memories, attachments, and identifications of the male homosexual subject. LGBTQ scholarship tends to forego a rigorous study of gay erotic media altogether in favor of less sexualized, more recuperable objects. As a result, the representational histories and media cultures of gay pornography remain largely obscured from contemporary discourse. This dissertation examines regimes of gay pornography that make visible its shifting contours. Unlike other studies that take pornography as their subject, mine does not aim to reduce pornography’s meaning to monolithic postures of either pleasure or harm, but rather locates the possibility for vexed in-betweens, discontinuities, and ruptures. The central question of Pornographesis is not just how gay pornography inscribes gay identity, but how that inscription changes over time and according to circumstance. Across four sequential eras, I examine notable shifts in the narrative structures, cultural position, and reception practices of gay pornography. I link these shifts to changes in media, from 8 and 16mm film to video, print, telephonic, theatrical, and digital technologies. Situated as an Americanist project, Pornographesis engages the historical materialism, media shifts, and narrative dynamisms that attend its development from iv the 1960s to today. Following Laura Kipnis’s notion that pornography is one of culture’s honored sites for working through social problems, I approach gay pornography as an engagement with the “problem” that homosexuality has been thought to constitute. In each era, gay pornography inscribes identity around a different set of relations to produce figures that range from necessarily clandestine, to defiantly perverse; from obsessively technophilic, to exploitatively entrepreneurial. Moreover, each era reveals the many and changing demands that the producers and viewers alike place on pornography: that it be beautiful, liberated, narrative, risky, safe, carnal, political, elegiac, honest, authentic, masculine, interactive, and so forth. As such, this dissertation argues that there is not just one uniform gay pornographic culture, but many. The mercurial quality of gay pornography delivers not just pleasure, but critical intervention in political crises, alternate imaginings of social structures, and valuable contestation of the rigid demands of heteronormative masculinity. Pornographesis makes the case that the study of gay male pornography is not merely instructive, but is in fact crucial for comprehending modern gay identity. v Contents Abstract ......................................................................................................................................... iv List of Figures ............................................................................................................................. viii Preface ............................................................................................................................................. x 1. Introduction: Inscribing Gay Pornography ........................................................................... 1 1.1 Pornographesis .................................................................................................................. 1 1.2 A Counterpornography, a Counterhistory.................................................................... 8 1.3 Beyond Exceptionalism .................................................................................................. 14 1.4 Media Inscriptions of Pornography ............................................................................. 30 1.5 Chapter Outlines ............................................................................................................. 34 2. The Spatial Erotics of Gay Porno Chic .................................................................................. 52 2.1 Open All Night ................................................................................................................ 52 2.2 Space: The First Frontier................................................................................................. 60 2.3 The Architectonics of Masculinity ................................................................................ 74 2.4 Cinema’s Invisible Homosexual ................................................................................... 80 2.5 Bijou................................................................................................................................... 85 2.6 Underground ................................................................................................................. 105 3. How To Have Pornography in an Epidemic ..................................................................... 117 3.1 PreLewd .......................................................................................................................... 117 3.2 Plagueboy and the AIDS Photograph ........................................................................ 119 3.3 Cultural Transmissions ................................................................................................ 132 vi 3.4 Erotic Mourning and Remembrance .......................................................................... 144 3.5 Mediation and the State ............................................................................................... 164 3.6 (Tear)Jerking: Melodrama Meets Pornography ........................................................ 169 4. “Just Give Us Honest Dick”: Gay Video Dreams of Cybersex ........................................ 175 4.1 The Irretrievable Internet Archive .............................................................................. 175 4.2 Video Killed the Narrative Drive: or, How Gay Pornography Lost Its Aura ...... 186 4.3 Cyberpornic Cyberpanic .............................................................................................. 197 4.4 Technical Ecstasy ........................................................................................................... 211 4.5 Processing the Cybersex Dream .................................................................................. 220 4.6 Archival Plenitude, Archival Paucity ......................................................................... 229 5. Dire Straights, or the Indeterminacy of Sexual Identity in Amateur Gay-for-Pay ...... 234 5.1 The Recession meets Web 2.0 ...................................................................................... 234 5.2 Tyra Banks’s Disbelief .................................................................................................. 238 5.3 Deciphering the Gay-for-Pay Genre ........................................................................... 242 5.4 Heterosexual Logics: Competition, Misdirection, Open-mindedness .................. 255 5.5 (Re)Mediating Heterosexuality: Online Interactions and Paratexts ...................... 270 5.6 Dialectics of Indeterminacy ......................................................................................... 279 6. Conclusion: The Queer Heart of Porn Studies .................................................................. 283 6.1 Remapping Disciplinary Boundaries ......................................................................... 283 Bibliography ............................................................................................................................... 298 Biography .................................................................................................................................... 319 vii List of Figures Figure 1: One of the purported homosexuals in Boys Beware is on the prowl. ................... 80 Figure 2: Unnamed protagonist Bill Harrison walks down the street in Bijou. .................. 88 Figure 3: The Mercedes driver cruises the streets. .................................................................. 92 Figure 4: The distracted Mercedes driver hits the woman crossing the street in Bijou. .... 94 Figure 5: Harrison wanders through the surreal landscape inside the Bijou. .................... 98 Figure 6: The mysterious space of the Bijou,