Porno Cultures Podcast

A lot of time is spent on this podcast defending the multitude of roles that pornography plays in people’s lives. We say, it’s not a moral scourge, it’s not an enemy of feminism, it’s not corrupting young minds any more than any other media form. The academic study of pornography was established in a defensive mode, against second-wave anti-porn feminists, against the lies perpetuated by the church, against the forces fighting sex-worker rights. And because of this defensive posture, it’s jarring whenever we see the mainstream media portray pornography in a sensible, non-hysterical, perspective. This is what makes the Netflix documentary Circus of Books such a revelation! Circus of Books tells the story of a gay pornography video and book store in West Hollywood that endured as a staple in this gayborhood through the AIDS crisis and the mainstreaming of gay culture that has willfully abandoned its porn past in favor of getting married and joining the military. In this documentary, pornography, and the community build around this store, is presented as a positive, unifying force where the gay community can indulge their sexual desires without shame But while the store served as a beacon of hope during dark times, the owners weren’t as invested in the erotic potentiality of pornography as their customers. And that’s because the owners of this store are a heterosexual, highly religious, married couple! And while they have no problem with the gay community, their worldview is shaken when their own son struggles to come out as gay to his religious mother. This creates a unique dynamic and tension that brings this documentary to the next level. In this episode, I’m joined by one of the film’s producers, Adam Baran. Adam is an interesting character because most of his work deals with pornography and gay sexuality in a very straightforward and blunt fashion. Within an environment where being a buttoned-up sexless chairman of a Fortune 500 company is considered to be a quote-unquote “victory” for the gay rights movement, Baran insistently positions gay sexuality and pornography as an essential part of what it means to be gay in the contemporary age. Baran has produced music videos, short films, web series, and documentaries emphatically positioning pornography and sexuality at the center of the gay experience. In this episode, we talk about how pornography helped him feel comfortable in his own skin and how writing about his own sex-life online led to bigger opportunities.

Adam’s Twitter

Adam’s articles for the Guardian

Adam’s articles for BUTT Magazine

Adam’s posts with TheSword

Queer | Art | Film talks at the IFC Center

Dirty Boots music video 

Jackpot (2012)

Mattachine: Radical Roots of the Gay Movement”

a history of the zine Straight to Hell 

The Great Cock Hunt

Hunting Season (first season)

Himeros TV

The Lives of Hamilton Fish

Circus of Books

Adam’s 2015 TheSword interview with Karen Mason

“Rachel Mason On Making a Movie About Her Parents’ Porn Shop”

The Secret Museum: Pornography in Modern Culture

ONE Archives

Wrangler: Anatomy of an Icon

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I think it’s fair to say that most academics are guilty of using particular words on their essays and books that are generally understood by all, yet we rarely take the time to flesh out the definition of that word beyond a sentence or two because we’re too eager to make a bigger and flashier point. And when it comes to pornography studies, words and abbreviations like the “money shot,” “BDSM,” “gay-for-pay,” and “bareback” have been a part of the popular vernacular around the genre for so long, that we just utilize these terms based on their face value, and often fail to update or properly contextualize the terms. Pornographic language is so embedded in our discourse, that we don’t often do the work of defining it. Today’s guest—John Mercer—dedicates a large portion of his book doing exactly that, creating a glossary of terms utilized within popular and academic descriptions of gay pornography that give rich historical and culturally specific definitions of terms like “the boy-next-door,” “twink,” “daddy,” “the beautiful boy,” “the ‘fooled’ straight man,” “the international,” “the amateur,” and “the star.” Mercer is a professor at Birmingham City University and today we’re going to talk about his book, Gay Pornography: Representations of Sexuality and Masculinity, published by I.B. Taurus in 2017. What makes this book remarkable is how it works to establish a linguistic foundation for gay pornography studies moving forward. It’s perhaps the best introductory book for anyone looking to contribute to the porn studies cannon. In addition to defining terms, he also explores his concept of “saturated masculinity,” which for him, accounts for the multitude of ways gay pornographic aesthetics signify beyond the gay community, and in fact spread into heterosexual constructions of masculinity as well. Mercer is also one of the primary editors of the journal Porn Studies, and edited a special version of the journal titled “Gay Porn Now,” where he was kind enough to include my essay on Chris Crocker in the issue. In that issue, he wrote about a popular user created genre of poperbate videos, where the creator edits a porn video with music and prompts instructing the viewer to huff poppers at the appropriate moment. It is one of a series of user-generated porn videos that Mercer’s future research will cover extensively. In this episode we talk about how he actually had to travel to over counties to complete his dissertation because hard core gay pornography was still banned in England at the time. We talk about the hypocrisy of the Conservative Party in England when it comes to the issue to freedom, poppers, and gay sex. And he explains why the smell of old beer reminds him of gay porn to this day!

More about John Mercer

John’s website

John’s BFI Star Studies book on Rock Hudson

John’s book Melodrama: Genre, Style, Sensibility

Gay Pornography: Representations of Sexuality and Masculinity  

John’s Masculinity, Sex, and Popular Culture project mascnet.org

Porn Studies special issue, “Gay Porn Now!”

"The Inexplicably Ubiqutous Phenomenon of 'Woods Porn'" 

New York Times’ article “What Teenagers are Learning From Online Porn.”

The Advocate’s article featuring John’s research

The Advocate article referred to in the interview: “7 Thinks to Remember When You Watch Porn.”  

In the interview I mentioned the song “Spring is Busting Out All Over.” What I meant to say was, “June is Busting Out All Over.” My apologies to the ghosts of Rodgers & Hammerstein!

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This episode is a testament to the generosity and the collaborative nature of the pornography studies community. When I was browsing Twitter one day, I saw that a previous guest on the show, Madita Oeming, was going to be at the Berlin Porn Film Festival hosting a live interview with pornography start extraordinaire Jiz Lee! I messaged her immediately and asked if she would be kind enough to record the interview for the podcast, and she agreed to do so. I’ve personally never been to the Festival, so I was very happy to be able to hear what’s going on across the pond and I’m even happier to be able to bring this special exchange to all of you. This podcast wouldn’t exist without Madita and and Jiz’s kindness. The focus of this talk is about how Jiz straddles the divide between pornography and academia. They’re uniquely qualified to address this topic considering that they’re not only one of the biggest queer porn stars in the world, but they’ve also been published in a multitude of academic books and journals. Jiz is the editor of Coming Out Like a Porn Star (ThreeL Media, 2015), a contributor to the Feminist Porn Book (Feminist Press at CUNY, 2013), the co-editor along with Rebecca Sullivan (another former guest on the show) of Porn Studies’ special issue titled “Porn and Labour.” This is a thoughtful and funny interview where Jiz talks about the special privileges afforded to porn performers who engage with academia, the similarities between pirating both pornography and academic articles, and what it’s like to have one of your campus visits covered by Fox News!   

 JizLee.com

Jiz Lee’s Twitter

Coming Out Like a Porn Star

Feminist Porn Book

An excerpt from "Uncategorized: Genderqueer Identity and Performance in Independent and Mainstream Porn" Lee’s contribution to the Feminist Porn Book 

Other writing

“Porn and Labour” issue of the Porn Studies journal co-edited by Jiz Lee and Rebecca Sullivan

Pink Label TV

Transparent

Madita’s work about the fallacy of “porn addiction” mocked in the National Review

Girls Do Porn Case

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In this special addition of the Porno Cultures Podcast, we’re proud to feature an episode of the Films(trips) podcast about the porn-adjacent film Cruising. The Films(trips) podcast features extended discussions about sorely underrated or under-watched films and finally gives them their proper due by hosts Dave Babbitt and Andrew Kannegeisser. The boys were kind enough to invite me on the show to discuss William Friedkin’s highly controversial and misunderstood film Cruising. Cruising is about a gay serial killer who is hunting for victims within New York City’s gay leather clubs in a pre-AIDS Meatpacking District. The film was protested by gay groups while it was being filmed, and has continued to be a point of contention within the contemporary gay community. Some argue that the film portrays a stereotypical and damaging image of the psychologically traumatized gay man—a demeaning cinematic trope throughout history. And the other half of the community values the film for its essential ethnographic portrayal of the actual clubs, people, and cruising methods that have been systematically destroyed due to the AIDS crisis and New York’s gentrification imperative. Friedkin’s insistence on shooting inside leather sex clubs like the Mineshaft and the Ramrod qualify as important documentation of a lost sexual history that is nearly impossible to find in contemporary New York. Additionally, pornographic tropes infuse the movie throughout. You’ll have to listen to the podcast to find out where I stand on all these crucial questions surrounding the film today. I’m so honored that Andrew invited me to be a part of his very funny and in-depth show. It’s a bit of a change of pace from our usual show, but this is an excellent example of how pornography studies can be utilized in readings of non-pornographic films. And Cruising shows just how prevalent pornographic tropes find their way into “mainstream” films. Please be sure to check out Films(trips)’ extensive catalog of shows. They really do a great job of giving forgotten films the attention they deserve!

Pornography is often talked about as this abstract alien “thing” that has no connection to the real-world experience of any “decent” or “good” person. The thinking goes that since pornography is this anti-feminist and morally damaging abstraction, it must originate from a dark place consumed with hate and misogyny. But what if I told you that, in fact, there’s a whole spectrum of pornography dedicated to paying homage to the most cherished children’s stories and beloved horror classics like Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1965), The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr, Hyde (1886), and Dracula (1897)? And how would your opinions of pornographers change if you knew that they loved these books as much as you do? Well, that’s part of the story being told by professor Laura Helen Marks in her book: Alice in Pornoland: Hardcore Encounters with the Victorian Gothic. Unsurprisingly, Laura’s academic background is in English, and this book is a product of her attempt to unite Victorian era gender and sexual politics with contemporary pornographic narratives. While many people don’t consider pornographic narratives too deeply, Laura argues that many pornographic tropes that we are familiar with today, including notions around a loss of innocence, the bisexual erotic undercurrents of Dracula biting both men and women, and the dual personality traits of pornography viewers themselves, originate from Victorian literature. While we often think of pornography as a medium indulging shamelessly in all types of sexual practices, pornography still needs to establish some type of taboo within their narratives for one of their characters to subversively upend sexual norms. Incorporating conventions from Victorian literature within these pornographic narratives provides both the cultural norms—and characters willing to subvert those norms—all within one book! Additionally, the obvious tension within Victorian novels where sexuality is alluded to with metaphor, is finally liberated within pornographic narratives where the underlining sexuality of these books are realized within pornography. Laura’s creative approach to pornography studies has quickly made her one of the most essential voices in contemporary pornography studies. Alice in Pornoland is one of the most unique pornography studies books you’ll ever read because of the ways it makes you rethink both classical literature and pornography itself.

This is a special episode of the Porno Cultures Podcast because it’s our first live episode recorded at Babeland (ironically, another Victorian era reference!) in Seattle Washington. Both Laura and I were in Seattle for the annual Society for Film and Media Studies conference, and I thought that this would be a great opportunity to have a live episode where a bunch of pornography scholars could come together to not only celebrate Laura’s amazing book, but also honor the history of one of the country’s most important sex shops, Babeland!

 Laura Helen Marks’ website

 Laura’s twitter

 “#Following: Laura Helen Marks”

 Laura’s Porn Studies article from Feminist Media Histories

 Laura’s Rialto Report feature on Jeff Stryker

 “Merry XXX-mas: A Brief History of Yuletide Smut”

 “The Duce: Porn, Nostalgia and Late Capitalism”

 Alice in Wonderland: An X-Rated Musical Comedy & Fantasy (1976)

 “Alice in Wonderland (1976): What Really Happened?”

 buy or rent Dracula Erotica (1980)

 Rare photos from Dracula Exotica found by the Rialto Report.

 Shaun Costello’s open letter To Lauran Helen Marks about Dracula Exotica.

 Interview with Vanessa Del Rio

 Dr. Jerkoff and Mr. Hard (1997)

 “Still Alice Director: Escaping a Religious Cult, Making Porn and Celebrating Julianne Moore’s Oscar”

 buy Fuckenstein (2012)

 adultdvdtalk.com

 upcoming events at Babeland in Seattle

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In this episode we explore the wild world of pornographic magazines. Believe it or not, before the popularization of the internet, a great many people had their first and most lasting encounters with pornography via magazines. Magazines were an essential part of pornographic creation and circulation for many decades, and now that they’ve fallen victim to the digital revolution, they’ve only recently been considered as an archival object suited for academic study. In this episode we tackle just a small sliver of pornographic magazine history by talking about a set of magazines addressing queer sexuality. This episode is divided into two sections. The first begins with my conversation with professor Elizabeth Groeneveld. Elizabeth talks to me about her work researching the lesbian pornographic and political commentary magazine On Our Backs. On Our Backs published from 1985 to 1990 and was founded and edited by Susie Bright (we previously talked about Susie in our episode with Lynn Comella). On Our Backs was a sex-positive answer to the feminist anti-pornography magazine Off Our Backs. As one of the only magazines providing lesbian-made pornographic representation for their fellow lesbian readers, the editors surprisingly received a lot of questions from readers about how they were supposed to consume such imagery. After our conversation, Elizabeth goes on to explain in her talk at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies how letters to the editor of On Our Backs reveal confused reactions to the pornographic content of the magazine—regarding both sexual discovery and confusion about whether one can be a “good feminist lesbian” if one is turned on by such imagery. Elizabeth’s research is really fascinating reveals the conflicted nature of pornographic politics.

Our second interview and talk is with Daniel Laurin. Daniel is a PhD student in Cinema Studies at the University of Toronto. His research looks into a group of gay male pornographic magazines from the 1970s and 80s to analyze the marketing of the gay-for-pay performer. The most common assumption about the gay-for-pay porn performer is that they emerged in the wake of the AIDS crisis in the mid-1980s to provide an example of a strong, healthy, and dominant male figure standing in opposition to the sick, weak, and AIDS infected gay image that was dominating media depictions at the time. However, Daniel’s research into these magazines tells a very different story. His archival research proves that in fact, the marketing of—and fascination with—the gay-for-pay performer started in the pages of these pornographic magazines long before the AIDS crisis. Here’s hoping that this is the first of many episodes exploring the dynamic history of pornographic magazines!   

More about Elizabeth Groeneveld 

Making Feminist Media: Third-Wave Magazines on the Cusp of the Digital Age

Book review for Making Feminist Media

 Historical background: On Our Backs and Bad Attitude

 “Sex Wars Revisited”

 Daniel’s Twitter

Daniel’s documentary about gay-for-pay performers

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When we think about the rhetoric around sex workers it’s often easier to hear or read opinions advocating for the abolishment of sex work coming from politicians or “concerned citizens” who are not sex workers, or have never bothered to speak to a sex worker. The degree to which the voices of sex workers are suppressed in mainstream outlets throughout the West speaks to how dangerous their voices are considered. What on earth can sex workers be saying that so many people feel the need to speak for them instead of letting them speak for themselves? Well, that’s one of the primary issues that Nicholas de Villiers looks to solve in Sexography: Sex Work in Documentary (University of Minnesota Press, 2017). Sexography analyzes a series of films centered around interviewing sex workers. These films represent some of the few instances where sex workers are actually allowed to speak for themselves. Of course, these films are not without their own tensions. Many of the films are directed by non-sex workers and some of the portrayals of sex work in these films is quite negative. This is where de Villiers’ dynamic analysis of these films through a queer perspective helps us think about the nature of sex work, the interview, documentary aesthetics, and the concept of “truth” in new and interesting ways. Sexography is an exploration of how we can go about reading for, and exploring the sexual practices of, not only sex workers, but our own ideas about sexuality as well. How can the financial aspects of sex work help us understand the power dynamics of our own sexual relationships? What can sex workers teach us about sex and pornographic literacy? What is the relationship between sex work, pornography, and drag performance? And how can the work of Foucault help us think about the contemporary nature of sexual practice? These are just some of the questions explored in this wide-ranging interview. De Villiers is one of the most interesting and bold queer theorists working today, so you’re not going to want to miss out on his compelling analysis of these films or his thoughts on contemporary sexuality!  

Sexography: Sex Work in Documentary 

L.A. Review of Books review of Sexography

 More work from Nicholas

Opacity and the Closet: Queer Tactics in Foucault, Barthes, and Warhol

Nicholas’ appearance on the Critical Theory podcast discussing Opacity and the Closet

“Afterthoughts on Queer Opacity”

“FBI Seized 23 Tor-hidden Child Porn Sites, Deployed Malware from Them”

“How the FBI Became the World’s Largest Distributor of Child Sex Abuse Imagery”

“Transgender, at War and in Love”

“What Teenagers are Learning from Online Porn”

Paris is Burning (1990)

Love Meetings (1964)

Not Angels But Angles (1994)

Body Without Soul (1996)

Tales of the Night Fairies (2002)

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In this episode we delve into the seedy and exciting world of sexploitation cinema! Oftentimes, pornography studies is so busy working to legitimate hard core texts that we sometimes forget about the wide-world of soft core cinema. Just before the “Golden Age” of theatrically released pornography in the late 1960s, there was almost a decade of sexploitation cinema single-handedly keeping alive a dying studio system that had lost its dominance in light of losing its profits from owning theaters and the invention of the in-home entertainment system knowns as television. Sexploitation movies are a mode of cinema consisting of cheaply financed, quickly made, with B-grade acting adapted to a variety of film genres. There are sexploitation movies that look like film noirs from the 1940s (with nudity), teen beach movies from the 1950s (with nudity), and even sci-fi movies (with nudity)! These movies allowed for a new generation of filmmakers to break into the industry without the heavy burden of having to prove themselves with a big budget or A-list actors. Exploitation cinema is a crucial part of Hollywood history that thankfully has been given the attention it deserves with Elena Gorfinkel’s new book Lewd Looks: American Sexploitation Cinema in the 1960s (University of Minnesota Press, 2017). Elena’s remarkable book is a deep historical and theoretical dive into the legal history, feminist perspective, legal conditions, and critical response to sexploitation films. In this interview we talk about how Kim’s Video in New York City facilitated her interest in sexploitation films, we talk about the Marxist and feminist implications of sexploitation, we consider why film critics of the 1960s were so “bored” watching sexploitation, and we talk about her role as the co-chair of the Adult Film History Special Interest Research Group, which is a part of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. If you’re looking for a primer on the history of sexploitation, you’ve come to the right podcast!

Lewd Looks: American Sexploitation Cinema in the 1960s

Elena’s Twitter

Was '60s Sexploitation Cinema More Than Just Pornography?

Bold! Daring! Shocking! True!: A History of Exploitation Films, 1919-1959

Elena’s Interview with Feminist Media Histories about “Sex and the Materiality of Adult Media”

Fieldnotes: Constance Penley interviewed by Elena Gorfinkel

“The Story of Kim’s Video & Music, Told by its Clerks and Customers”

A Farewell to Kim’s Video

Art Zone: The Wonderfully Weird World of Lisa Petrucci 

Something Weird catalog

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Pat Rocco is a figure that doesn’t fit easily into pornography’s history. Pat started making films featuring nude male characters in soft core situations just before 1971’s Boys in the Sand, and he continued to purposefully occupy a unique middle ground where his work showcasing tame, but explicit, gay nudity coexisted alongside other films documenting the emerging gay rights movement, wholesome gay romance, and queer sexual politics. Pat used his camera as a form of activism highlighting gay men's varied sexual interests as well as their passions surrounding society’s changing attitudes about homosexuality. In this episode, we explore the legacy of Pat Rocco and try to figure out where he belongs within pornography’s history. This show features Matthew Hipps, who’s a PhD student in Film Studies at the University of Iowa, and Bryan Wuest, who is a graduate of UCLA’s PhD program in Cinema and Media Studies. Each of them presented papers about Rocco's films at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference in 2018, so I thought it would be great to have them on to talk about the different ways in which they approach his work. This episode has special resonance considering that Rocco would die just seven months after this recording. Matt considers Rocco's travelogue films where he travels to Brazil and Western Europe with a group of gay men to find out what gay life is like outside of the U.S. And Bryan considers how Rocco’s work should be thought of within the history of gay film production. This episode is intended to both spark interest in a figure that isn’t too well known because of the limited exposure his work as received, and to help us expand our ideas about what pornographic culture can be, and how it can help us delve into modes of political activism that we didn’t know were possible.      

More info about Bryan.

Bryan’s article: “Defining Homosexual Love Stories: Pat Rocco, Categorization, and the Legitimation of Gay Narrative Film.”

UCLA’s articles about:

“Processing the Pat Rocco Collection”

“Pat Rocco Oral History—1983”

“Hey Look Me Over: The Films of Pat Rocco” by Whitney Strub

Pat Rocco’s films:

Pat Rocco Dared trailer

1969 Gay March in Hollywood

Sign of Protest (1970) (a short documentary about the protests surrounding Barney’s Beanery and their “FAGOTS—STAY OUT” sign hanging in their bar.)

Changes (1970)

We Were There (1976)

Harvey Milk’s “Hope” Speech (1978)

Mondo Rocco 

Obituary from ONE Archives 

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In this episode, we’re joined one of the most prolific and accomplished scholars in the field of pornography studies, Susanna Paasonen. She is a professor of media studies at the University of Turku in Finland and has written and edited over eight books covering pornography, sex, internet studies, feminism, and affect. Her newest book is Many Splendored Things: Thinking Sex and Play (MIT Press, 2018), where she explores sex, bodily capacities, appetites, orientations, and connections in terms of play and playfulness. Like many people in the U.S., I discovered her work in 2011 with the publication of Carnal Resonance: Affect and Online Pornography (MIT Press). It has since become a landmark book within pornography studies due to the way it reorients the conversation around pornography from one centered on censorship, feminism, and the quality of sexual representation, to one trying to account for the various—and hard to quantify ways in which—pornography moves us, not only physically (with feelings of both revulsion and extasy), but affectively (where we find ourselves relating to our own bodies, and other’s bodies in new and different ways). While traditional academic methods of reading moving image texts revolve around notions of sexual, gender, or racial identity, affect theory helps to account for the ways in which social identity isn’t just centered within our race or sexuality, but is, in fact, a part of a wider social assemblage, where our various affective interactions with actors within our social networks dramatically influence the ways we relate to, and understand, ourselves. Affect theory accounts for the ways in which our subjectivity is formed not from our inner-selves, but is a relational force interacting with the body from the outside. Of course, the reason why approaching pornography studies from this perspective is so different from traditional methods is because this perspective frees the genre from needing to affirm or legitimate racial or gender uplift. An affective reading of pornography accounts for the politically incorrect ways in which we interact with the genre. Pleasure, disgust, joy, humiliation, and shame are all affective registers that we tap into when engaging with pornography. The accumulation of these feelings are part of the overall resonance that Susanna is trying to account for in her work. In this interview we talk about her first experience finding porn magazines in a damp Finland forest; the difference between the pornography in Finland and the surrounding Nordic countries; why she thinks Silvan Tomkins and Gilles Deleuze actually work well together, and she explains how she became an expert on bareback gay sex!    

Susanna’s website

Susanna’s Twitter

More about the phenomenon of “woods porn.”

Susanna’s interview with pornographer Paul Morris.

More about the films of Jan Soldat.

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Believe it or not, Canada might be the most important country determining what porn you’re watching today! I say that because the most popular porn sites in the world were created, and continue to operate, in Canada. PornHub, YouPorn, RedTube, and Brazzers just to name a few. While Canada has an extensive porn history and shapes the ways in which we consume and distribute porn today, oftentimes it’s overlooked in favor of its flashier cousin in the south known as the San Fernando Valley. This episode looks to change all of that with a panel that was recorded at the 2018 Society for Cinema & Media Studies in Toronto. This panel features a friend of the show, Professor Peter Alilunas talking about the pornographic history of Toronto’s most famous street, Yonge st. He specifically details the history of a theater on that street known as Cinema 2000. It was a screening room showing pornography on VHS starting in 1969! The second presenter is Cait McKinney. She’s a professor in the department of communication studies at California State University at Northridge. And in her talk, she details the history of a long-lost 1984 film titled Slumber Party. The film was made by a group of radical feminist lesbians. Cait also considers the role that lesbian porn played in the feminist porn wars in the 1980s. A topic that is rarely considered. The third paper is presented by Nikola Stepić. He’s a PhD student in Concordia University’s Humanities Department. And his paper covers how gay pornography shot in Montreal’s Gay Village acted as a type of visual tourism for the neighborhood, attracting people from all over the world, helping make Montreal the gay destination is it today. The final paper is by Patrick Keilty. He’s a Professor at the University of Toronto and his presentation covers the short history of Montreal’s emergence as a global porn capital, followed by a theoretical consideration of the digital interface we as viewers are presented with as we’re surfing these various sites emanating from this city. Here is a link for the pictures from each PowerPoint. Be sure to follow along!  

Peter Alilunas: “‘Closed Due to Pressure from the Morality Squad’: The Cinema 2000 and Pornography Regulation in Toronto”

Cait McKinny: “Digitizing Controversies in Toronto’s Lesbian Porn Archives”

Nikola Stepic: “Quebec Exposed: Gay Male Pornography as Virtual Tourism”

Patrick Keilty: “Silicon(e) Valley: Montreal’s Porn Industry”

New York magazine article about the rapid rise of the porn industry in Montreal: “The Geek-Kings of Smut.”

More info about Jon Ronson’s podcast series titled The Butterfly Effect, which details Fabian Thylmann’s role in creating a porn empire in Montreal and more!   

More info about Peter’s book Smutty Little Movies: The Creation and Regulation of Adult Video.

Cait McKinney’s Twitter

Cait’s work with the LGBTQ History Digital Collaboratory

Cait’s No More Pot Lucks article: “Out of the Basement and on to the Internet: Digitizing Oral History Tapes at the Lesbian Herstory Archives.”

Cait’s Drain Mag article: “Can a Computer Remember AIDS?”

Nikola Stepić’s Twitter

Nikola’s HuffPost article on the porntastic movie The Canyons: “Stuck in the Canyons.”

Patrick Keilty’s Twitter

Article about the University of Toronto’s Sexual Representation Collection run by Patrick Keilty

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More info about the host

Canadian Content: The Adult Film Industry & its Canadian Contexts 

In this episode we’re trying something different! This is our first “roundtable” episode featuring four guests. And instead of talking with established scholars in the field, we’re actually talking with four up-and-coming graduate students who will soon be making their mark within pornography studies. As pornography studies grows within academe, it is becoming increasingly possible to build a support network of fellow students that share your interests. And considering how much resistance there still is toward studying pornography, these networks can be a crucial part of one’s survival throughout graduate school. This episode is our small attempt at fostering more supportive networks. In this episode you’ll hear stories about professors urging students not to pursue the study of pornography, and even hear about professors that are openly hostile to students working on this topic. Also, studying pornography within different cultural contexts means that students often have to utilize alternative methodologies, which typical film departments are sometimes ill-equipped to accommodate. Like when your research leads you to branch off into urban history and city-planning, or when you have to use anthropology methods to find out how pornography is thought about within different transnational contexts. These are the type of issues we’ll be talking about with our guests in this episode: John Paul Stadler of Duke University, Darshana Sreedhar Mini of the University of Southern California, Ben Strassfeld from the University of Michigan, and Madita Oeming of Paderborn University in Germany. Each of them has their own compelling story about how they found themselves studying this topic, and harrowing tales about how they’ve endured through the suspicion and anger that is aimed at pornography scholars both within America and outside it. Be sure to keep listening after the interview is over because there’s a little bonus where Madita gives all of us a lesson in German dirty talk. Believe me, you’re not going to want to miss that!

 More info about John’s book PREHISTORIC

John’s Twitter

Madita’s Twitter

Ben’s Twitter

Darshana’s Twitter

Darshana talking about her SCMS Student Writing Award for the essay “The Rise of Soft Porn in Malayalam Cinema and the Precarious Stardom of Shakeela.”

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Professor Lynn Comella joins us to talk about her books New Views on Pornography: Sexuality, Politics, and the Law (co-edited with Shira Tarrant, 2015) and Vibrator Nation: How Feminist Sex-Toy Stores Changed the Business of Pleasure (2017). The reach of Vibrator Nation’s readership has extended beyond the typical academic circles and has resonated with a mainstream audience due to its easy reading style, and because it details a history of feminist sex shops that the public was obviously eager to read about. The history of these shops is a fascinating one and one that has literally changed the ways in which we think about the female orgasm within our post-sexual revolution era. The story of these stores isn’t one of capitalist opportunism, it’s actually a story about revolutionary feminist sexual educators who wanted to spread their sexual knowledge to a starving female public looking for ways to expand their sexual pleasure. In short, our understanding of sexual history would be incomplete without the information contained in this book. Pornography also has a role to play in this history. We talk about how pornography worked its way into these sex shops after owners long resisted their inclusion. And we also talk about the movies produced by the legendary San Francisco sex shop Good Vibrations. This is a history that you’re not going to want to miss!

 Learn more about Lynn on her website.

 Vibrator Nation book review in the New York Times.  

 Lynn’s interview with The Atlantic.  

 Sex Out Loud episode where Tristan Taormino interviews Joani Blank.

 Vibrator Nation Instagram.

 Lynn’s Twitter.

 “Ten Feminist Sex Shops You’re Going to Want to Add to Your Wishlist”

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While porn studies delve into history and theory books in order to legitimize its position within academia, scholars can often times lose track of the most essential voices that offer us an important perspective on the industry, those of the porn performers themselves! In this episode, I talk with gay porn performer Chris Harder. Harder’s journey through the industry is an interesting one mostly due to the fact that he comes from a theater background. He studied theater and queer theory while going to school in North Dakota, so his porn performances reflect a journey of a young man coming to the big city who documents his sexual awakening via his onscreen performances. However, theatrical ambitions were not stifled by his porn career. In this interview, we talk about his one-man show that he wrote and stars in titled: Porn to be a Star. The show is a hilarious romp where he plays various fictional characters that reflect on his journey growing up in the Dakota plains, moving to the big city, and discovering a new side of himself by performing in porn. Harder is also one of the world’s leading boylesque performers. He teaches classes teaching people how to perform for burlesque theater and has traveled the world performing his act. In this interview we talk about how his burlesque work is intertwined with is porn performance, how is sexual inspirations influence his work, and how the queer theory that he learned in school still influences his work to this day. Harder is one of the kindest and funniest personalities in the industry, and I think that comes across well in this interview.  

 More info about Harder’s tour dates can be found here

@HARDERburlesque

New York Times feature about Harder’s burlesque classes

“Let me Entertain You: How I was Banned from Boylesque Because I Work in Porn”

Clips from his one-man show

Harder’s performance at the New York Burlesque Festival

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Zachary Sire is the editor of the essential gay porn blog Str8UpGayPorn. Str8UpGayPorn is the primary news and gossip site of the gay porn industry. If you’re a porn star and you’ve done something naughty, it’s likely to become a headline on the site sooner rather than later. Zachary started out as a features writer for magazines like Unzipped, Men and Freshmen before becoming a blogger for TheSword in 2010. It’s during his tenure at TheSword where he made a name for himself and became perhaps became the industry’s most notable personality who has never taken off his clothing in front of a camera! His humorous wit, coupled with is biting sarcasm, make his takedowns of hypocritical politicians, racist performers, and reckless studio bosses equally funny and informative. In 2013 he left TheSword to start his own blog about the industry, Str8UpGayPorn. Str8UpGayPorn’s layout intentionally mimics (and mocks) one of the internet’s most well-known sites, TheDrudgeReport. And just like Drudge, Str8UpGayPorn emphasizes how the gossip around gay pornography interacts with our wider pop-cultural world by providing links to news stories related to the pornographic focus of the site. By doing this, Zachary makes the intersection of porn and pop culture evident. In this interview we talk about his rise through the industry, he explains how one of his blog posts was taken down as a result of business pressure, the state of racial diversity within the industry, and we recap highlights from the first-ever Str8UpGayPorn Awards, which took place in June of 2017 in New York City. 

Str8UpGayPorn

@ZacharySire 

“Koering Tells Gay Porn Rag That He Opposes Gay Marriage”

“Will Social-Media Pressure Stop the Gay Porn Industry from Hiring Racists?” (Vice, 2016)

Just some of the reasons why Michael Lucas of Lucas Entertainment is so awful!

 The inaugural Str8UpGayPorn Awards

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Ashley West is the host of the most successful porn podcast of them all, The Rialto Report. The Rialto Report explores the history of the “golden age” of porn in the 1960s, 70s & 80s by interviewing the actors, directors, producers, and distributors from that era. The most remarkable aspect of the show is his amazing ability to find these long-lost people, some of whom haven’t spoken publicly in over 40 years! He gets them to not only talk about their time in the industry, but their childhood, their love life, their adventures and their passions outside of porn. In this way, Ashley paints a broad picture of these people’s lives and reveals their human complexity that shows them as typical people rather than as criminal or sadistic smut-peddlers that anti-porn activists make them out to be. In this interview we talk about his childhood growing up in Italy, and how sexploitation and pornographic movies were shown and written about in the same theaters and magazines as mainstream movies. We talk about his first porn crush, his interview style, why he keeps his identity a secret, and his work as a consultant on the HBO show The Duce. We also get into this concerns about the academic work being done on pornography and his worries that academia is being too insulated in terms of not making enough of an effort to get its work out to the public. Ashely has only done two interviews to celebrate The Rialto Report’s 5-year anniversary, so you’re not going to want to miss this rare opportunity to get a behind-the-scenes peek into how the podcast comes together.

The Rialto Report website

Barbara Broadcast (1977)

Ginger Lynn: The Girl Next Door

Al Goldstein’s rant about Donald Trump: An Edifice Complex

More, More, More: The Search for Andrea True

Radley Metzger: 1971

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Professor Rebecca Sullivan joins us to talk about her role as the chair of the steering committee for the Sexuality Studies Association of Canada, and her book on the infamous second-wave feminist anti-porn documentary Not a Love Story: A Film About Pornography (1982). The film is directed by Bonnie Sherr Klein, a feminist filmmaker who was an important part of the National Film Board’s Studio D, a project focused on providing female directors the chance to make their own documentaries. The film is co-directed by stripper/activist Lindalee Tracey. And while the film seemed to have started out with the intention of being a progressive analysis of feminist sexual exploration, it eventually turned into the iconic anti-porn landmark that we know it as today. Over the last couple of decades, the film has been lambasted within porn studies circles due to its uncritical adoption of the views of anti-porn feminists like Susan Griffin and Robin Morgan. Interestingly, pornography/feminist scholar Rebecca Sullivan’s book: Bonnie Sherr Klein’s “Not a Love Story” (2014) is a reparative reading of the film that argues that in fact, the documentary’s importance is in offering a platform for sex workers to speak in their own voice throughout the film. While the film is best remembered for its anti-porn second half, Sullivan’s extensive interviews with Klein herself reveal an original intention to give voice and respect to the marginalized sex worker. And ultimately, Sullivan’s book is a cautionary tale of how a director’s intentions can radically change once the footage is turned over to an editor. This is a bold argument to make considering how much bad will the film has garnered over the years from sex-positive feminists. And in this interview, Professor Sullivan answers all the tough questions we ask regarding her alternative reading of the film. It’s a very enlightening conversation!

You can watch Not a Love Story on YouTube

More info about Bonnie Sherr Klein’s “Not a Love Story”

More info about Rebecca Sullivan

Editorial written by Sullivan titled: “Porn is a Part of Our Culture. Why Shouldn’t Universities Study it?”

“The Evolution of Porn Studies”

Info about Sullivan’s book with Alan McKee: Pornography: Structures, Agency and Performance (2015)

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Professor David Church joins us to talk about his newest book Disposable Passions: Vintage Pornography and the Material Legacies of Adult Cinema (2016). His approach to pornography produced in the age when moving image technology was just emerging to the beginning of the “porno chic” era, is unique in the sense that he writes about how these older texts are consumed, admired, and fetishized within our contemporary mediascape. He does this by analyzing the affective resonance that these texts take on as they circulate via digital platforms today. This is a compelling way to think about porn’s history, and I think it could become a model for the way future historians go about formulating media histories as they are experienced today. In this interview, David talks to us about the role nostalgia plays in our erotic imagination, how our understanding of pornography changes when it transforms from being an object of erotic stimulation to a historical text, and explains cinephilia’s connection to necrophilia.

More information about Disposable Passions can be found here: https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/disposable-passions-9781501307539/

More of Professor Church’s writing can be found here: https://nau.academia.edu/DavidChurch

Some online sites where you can find vintage texts:

http://retrovintageerotica.com/

http://www.theclassicporn.com/

https://www.vintageclassicporn.com/

http://www.porninspector.com/reviews/category/vintage/

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Preservationist and co-founder of the company Vinegar Syndrome Joe Rubin joins us to talk about his restorations of classic sex films. Vinegar Syndrome can be thought of as the “Criterion Collection for porn!” And the quality of their restorations have garnered compliments from their peers who say that their work is better than what has been done on Paramount’s Hitchcock restorations! Joe also has encyclopedic knowledge about of the Golden Age of porn. This is what lead the Quad Cinema in New York City to ask him to program a series of classic sex films for their Erotic City series in the summer of 2017, where films like Bacchanale (1970), Bijou (1972), Both Ways (1975), the documentaries Changes (1970) and Not a Love Story (1981), Double Agent 73 (1974), Naked Came the Stranger (1975), Not Just Another Woman (1973), The Opening of Misty Beethoven (1976), The Private Afternoons of Pamela Mann (1974) and Scoundrels (1982) were screened. This is a wide-ranging interview covering Joe’s fascination with porn at a very early age, how he got into restoration while still in his teens, and why his company’s restorations are better than those VHS copies that you all covet so dearly. Joe fills us in on a lot of behind the scenes stories about a lot of the films screened in the series. And Joe discusses what bothers him most about the way porn studies is practiced by academics.

www.vinegarsyndrome.com

you can find out more about the series here: https://quadcinema.com/program/erotic-city/

New York Times article about Vinegar Syndrome: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/26/movies/smut-refreshed-for-a-new-generation.html?_r=0

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Playwright, educator, and activist Alan Bounville joins us on the podcast to talk about his immersive theater piece Adonis Memories. The show is based on the testimonials of patrons of the infamous gay porn mecca known as the Adonis Theater, located in New York’s Hells Kitchen Neighborhood. It was a gay porn theater at the 51st location from 1975 through 1989. The theater’s legend was cemented within pornographic history because of Jack Deveau’s 1978 film A Night at the Adonis. A film that was shot within the theater. In this interview Alan describes how he put the show together by weaving a multitude of narratives from people who experienced the theater in their own way. We talk about what this era within gay history, and the sexuality explored in this space, means for gay sexuality and civil rights today. And we use Samuel Delany’s 1999 book Times Square Red, Times Square Blue as a guide to help us think through some of these issues.

More info about the theater: http://cinematreasures.org/theaters/4693

A New York Times’ article about the theater’s closing: http://www.nytimes.com/1989/02/12/nyregion/new-york-shuts-2-gay-theaters-as-aids-threats.html

A link to the In Our Words project: http://www.inourwords.org

An article from Alan about how the play came together: http://extendedplay.thecivilians.org/in-our-words-makes-gay-sex-happen-102616/

A New York Times’ article about how Adonis Memories fits within a growing number of plays addressing the gay sexuality of the past: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/03/theater/gay-histories-close-enough-to-touch-but-dont.html?_r=0

More information about Times Square Red, Times Square Blue: https://nyupress.org/books/9780814719206/

More info about Alan’s Into the Light walk: http://imfromdriftwood.com/alan_bounville/ https://www.huffingtonpost.com/patrick-j-hamilton/alan-bounville-into-the-light-walk_b_2639379.html

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