Gay Porn Blog: Porn Again!

In 2002 my best friend and longtime creative partner, Jack, proposed I move back to San Francisco from New York. His suggestion – that we to focus our collective energy in the gay porn industry -– has proved both more challenging and more rewarding than either of us could have imagined.

Jack and I were lucky. Though we were sequestered in a small Connecticut town whose video store hadn’t updated it’s gay porn section since 1992, we did manage to get our paws on some of the true classics of the medium, the work of the greats. Rick Donovan’s topping of Matt Ramsey in The Bigger the Better (see 5/3/04 Movie of the Week for more on this). Jeff Stryker’s foul-mouthed seduction of a rain drenched Mike Henson in In Hot Pursuit. Joey Stefano’s ecstasy-fueled bottoming in French Kiss. Ryan Idol’s testosterone-fueled ass eating (and pounding) in Idol Country. Good stuff.People often say to me, “Porn doesn’t do it for me.” They find porn too bland, too forced or too plastic or too “_____” for them to enjoy. These conscientious objectors cite unrealistic body types, clone-ification and other supposed aesthetic demons of the gay adult underworld. Like someone whose opposition to television betrays his ignorance, this excuse for not watching porn is threadbare and uninventive.

It stuns me, because if they might as well be spouting the rhetoric of the far Right, treating pornography as an undifferentiated cultural product. In fact, this type of thinking has hampered any serious approach to the medium. The variety of men — “real men” in modern anti-porn parlance — has never been greater. You just need to know where to look.

The amount of gay content — the sheer number of films available — has skyrocketed in the past decade. Amateur — once a small sliver of locally traded home films — has swallowed nearly 20 percent of the market. Fetish films as well have found modern distribution channels and flourished. Meanwhile, the big studios have upped the ante considerably — raising production values and experimenting with a wider variety of acts and actors.

It may seem like a pathetic pun, but in all sincerity, it’s an exciting time for the gay porn industry. And Jack and I look forward to editing this fine journal (kudos to Mark Kliem for developing and helping define this site) in the year to come.

— Michael