My ex-boyfriend Harvey is an artist and illustrator. One of the first presents he ever gave me was a copy of an illustration he drew for one of the slick porn magazines, Honcho or Inches.

In the picture, a prisoner crouches naked at the feet of a prison guard in thigh-high boots. They both have huge erections.

Underneath the picture, Harvey hand-wrote a loving inscription that cemented our bond. It said:

“Suck my big dick you filthy scumbag.”

I immediately taped this treasure over my desk, where it remains to this day. It turns me on and it makes me laugh.

1. Unlike all the movies and TV shows I watched when I was growing up, pornography depicts a world where everyone is enthusiastically, unapologetically gay. When I came out into a full-blown gay community, as part of the first post-Stonewall generation, that was the most basic, innocent, and liberating aspect of gay porn.

2. I love the fact that everyone is sexually available — no matter what he looks like or what his occupation is. Any character that shows up in pornography — whether poolboy or postman or airline pilot — will end up sucking or getting sucked, fucking or getting fucked. That’s automatically attractive to me. I have little patience with the hard-to-get.

3. In gay porn, most people enjoy having sex.

4. They show everything, every inch of their bodies and every imaginable sex act. In doing so, they defy encrusted psychosocial inhibitions. And that is quite a feat. Let me explain:

In The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense, Anna Freud wrote,

There is in human nature a disposition to repudiate certain instincts, in particular the sexual instincts …

This disposition appears to be a phylogenetic inheritance, a kind of deposit accumulated from acts of repression practiced by many generations, and merely continued, not initiated, by individuals.

I know exactly what she means. No matter how much we love sex and naked bodies — looking at them, licking them, inhabiting them — when we see depictions of sex, something inside goes, “That’s bad! That’s wrong!” No matter if we’ve been a slutty, sacred sex-pig just the night before, we’re still hit with this sort of viewer’s remorse.

One night years ago I was flipping through the cable TV stations in New York and landed on an excerpt of a William Higgins screen test in which a bland, blond, Southern California boy stripped out of his jeans and perched himself on a bed with his butt in the air.

The director’s assistant then efficiently and matter-of-factly shaved the hair around his butthole. Part of me thought, “They shouldn’t be showing this on TV.” That’s the “phylogenetic inheritance” Anna Freud talks about. The other part of me was absolutely riveted.

I love how pornography categorically and systematically rejects mindless obedience to generations of sexual repression.

5. Most het porn I’ve seen completely buys into patriarchal and sexist dynamics. No thinking or erotic ingenuity goes into it. It’s all knee-jerk acceptance of man-on-top groupthink. By contrast, gay porn exhibits a sexual egalitarianism that I prize.

Even when scenes pivot on power struggles, the power dynamic is usually fluid and flexible.

I still remember my amazement — and then joy! — watching a classic porn film called Hothouse starring the studly Jack Wrangler, whose humongous dick was always the object of other guys’ ministrations. But in this one, he leans over like a champ and goes down on someone else.

I love how gay porn demolishes the myth of the Hot Guy: that hot guys can only be serviced and never reciprocate.

6. One of the most under-commented aspects of porn is how it exercises what seems to be a human need for ritual. In his book The Re-Enchantment of Everyday Life, Thomas Moore talks about pornography as a contemporary representation of religious traditions in which certain days are set aside for complete release from all sexual inhibitions and loyalties:

Over half the American populations, according to some studies, engage in extramarital sex, and so one is tempted to conclude that something in the most dedicated people desires sex outside marriage . . .

Pornography often shows a similar interest in group sex, so that sexually explicit magazines echo certain ancient religious practices, and pornography casts its spell as carnival too, a release from the constraints of civilized mores.

I don’t know if that’s true — it could be utter bullshit — but I always like reasonable-sounding arguments that connect sex with spiritual practice.

My friend Keith Hennessy and I had an email exchange about the ubiquity of porn images in gay photo-collage art. I know that Keith looks down on that phenomenon, so I suggested that it was related to religious kitsch:

“It’s just like in Catholic or Hindu societies,” I wrote back to him. “Images of deities are everywhere, often in ridiculous manifestations (those 3-D postcards of Christ on the cross), and the images are unquestioned, in fact, they’re loaded with authority. That’s what pictures of naked men are to queers — objects of worship, almost indiscriminate worship.”

On reflection, I prefer Moore’s analysis of porn images as “spell-binding” rather than simply kitschy. Certainly they’ve helped me get over some dry patches in my career:

In addition to Suck my big dick you filthy scumbag, I keep on my bulletin board: A drawing of a crewcut guy on his back with his legs in the air (V for Victory), displaying his star-like butthole (also by my old boyfriend Harvey.) A color picture from a magazine of a rather blank-faced hunk sporting an impressive boner. When I’ve been stuck on some writing problem these stimulating sights have helped re-energize me (re-enchant me) .

7. Another thing I like about gay porn: it gives me ideas, new ideas about sex practices.

For instance, as a baby fag I was revolted by the very idea of rimming. Lick where someone poops? Ugh! No way! Then I saw a porn film in which a really handsome mustachioed guy so passionately applied his lips to another guy’s butthole that I suddenly made the connection to kissing. Now it’s practically my favorite expression of intimacy.

Time and again, porn has spurred me to recognize what really turns me on. A hard dick doesn’t lie! Reading stylized stories about daddy-boy scenes made me realize how much that dynamic is a part of my erotic imagination.

I guess I’ve learned a lot about myself from responding to taboo stuff like violence, coercion, and masochism. It disturbs me to recognize how much rape scenes turn me on, for instance. (The male rape in the basement of the pawnshop in Pulp Fiction, even the gruesome hotel gangbang in Leaving Las Vegas, I have found, to my surprise, exciting.)

Contrary to the anti-porn pronouncements of feminists like Andrea Dworkin and Catherine McKinnon (who contend, in a curiously Victorian way, that all sex is rape), I believe that gay porn has taught me I don’t have to act on these impulses. I’m glad to know I have violent sexual fantasies. This self-awareness means I’m less likely to act them out unwillingly, or unconsciously, as either perpetrator or victim.

1. I hate the alienated, heartless culture that has grown up around gay porn — the peep shows, the video booths, the phone lines, the personal ads. The reduction of each other to body parts and physical descriptions. Some might say that this emotional disconnect is simply a reflection of the attitude portrayed in porn itself, which leads me to . . . .

2. I hate porn as a guide for real life. Porn is fantasy; it’s not a primer for real sexual encounters.

In porn the people barely say two words to one another before falling into the most intimate sexual encounters. In my experience, that’s rarely a recipe for satisfying sex. To begin with, for the last 25 years we’ve been trying to have sex without spreading diseases: some negotiation around levels of protection is a good idea.

It’s not just health considerations, though. We need to talk to each other about what we like and don’t like, what we want and don’t want in sexual encounters. Emulating the enforced silence of a porn model is absolutely soul-deadening.

3. Just as bad as silence is the macho grunting that passes for verbal communication in porn films. In films, it’s so stylized, it’s laughable. But when the same ridiculous, minimal, poverty-stricken dialogue (“Yehhhh, suck that cock . . . tighten that ass . . . yeah, get your dick off in me”) shows up in a real bedroom, it makes my heart sink. What might have been a torrid sexual encounter becomes an artificial exercise — real people reciting a half-remembered video script.

4. Let’s face it, porn has had a bad influence on sexual etiquette. One of my pet peeves is the lack of after-care in our sexual encounters. In porn, the guys shoot their creamy loads and basically everything is over. Rarely do we see any cuddling, or wiping up, or showering, or making tea, or falling asleep in each other’s arms.

Wham, Bam, without even a Thank You, Sir is now the name of the game. Honestly, I’ve had encounters at the baths where literally less than 60 seconds after squirting, the guy is out the door, and I’m left thinking: what was that all about?

5. I really hate the privileging of certain body types in gay male porn. There’s not nearly enough variety for my taste. Ninety percent of porn features smooth, blond, hairless, shaved skinny boys, aged 20 - 24.

Look around you. How many people do you know who look like that? It pains me to meet otherwise intelligent grown men who have developed severe body shame because they don’t look like the guys in porn films. Hello? That’s why they’re in porn films! That’s why they’re able to make a living by looking gorgeous when they’re in the saddle.

But my selfish reason for disliking this aspect of gay porn is that I’m not at all turned on by those skinny blond boys. I’ve always had a thing for older guys with male-pattern baldness, salt-and-pepper hair, a slight paunch. I guess that’s why I often prefer written porn to visual porn — that way I can eternally be the idealistic young man looking for love from the big hairy gruff-but-loving daddy of my dreams.

 

As a consumer of gay porn, I’m pretty easily satisfied. Harvey’s drawings are proof it doesn’t take much to get me going. I don’t need porn to match my reality (whatever that is), or to live up to my Utopian political expectations, or to solve my self-esteem problems, or anybody else’s.

Porn has nothing to prove to me. The best thing it can do is unleash my rage to live one more day — to suck dick like the filthy scumbag I am.

Is that too much to ask?

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Don Shewey is a Manhattan sex therapist and
a New York Times writer. He recently took part in our
Brokeback Mountain forum.

Also of interest in Nightcharm :
Get a Life, an Inner One by Don Shewey

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