The three long-form articles in this issue address various modes of gay porn production. While it remains important to study the textual qualities of porn in all its varieties, the three researchers here move beyond the perhaps usual foci of actions, narrative and performance towards the ways in which modes of production have impact on the aesthetic and discursive configurations used to differentiate brands.
A recent op-ed on X-Biz.com declared ‘Bareback is Obsolete’, an impassioned plea which suggested that the ‘raw’ thrills of condom-less pornography were now ineffectual as a marketing ploy or strategy of distinction when almost all gay porn studios have moved to bareback. Furthermore, the author argued, the era of effective STI testing and the advent of PrEP renders those illicit thrills redundant, while the need to promote messages of safer sex remains critical. The broader story of the turn to bareback is explored in Craig Tollini’s essay ‘How Two Holdouts went Bareback: CockyBoys and Men.com’s Initial Transition to Producing Videos Without Condoms’. Tollini traces the processes of going condomless for two studios, and reflects on the changes to their marketing strategies as they attempt to strategize their capitulation to the dominant trend of bareback and market expectations for ‘authenticity’.
Change is also a theme in Charlie Sarson’s article, and specifically the incorporation of hook-up app technologies into pornographic presentations on SketchySex.com. In ‘“The Neighbourhood Cums: Ding Dong! Dick’s Here!”: SketchySex and the Online/Offline Cultures of Group Sex Between Gay Men’, Sarson is interested in the ways the studio positions itself as an extension of gay cruising and hook-up culture rather than part of the ‘porn biz’. This strategy of distinction enables the studio to present its group sex scenes as ‘real’ and enabled through digital technologies. Fascinating in this account is the blurring of the lines between online and offline encounters and the ways in which sexual scripts oscillate across the digital divide. Sarson seeks to explore the relationships between the representations of app-facilitated encounters as premised on quick, anonymous fucking and the ways in which digital platforms have been criticized for undermining community and intimacy amongst gay men.
‘Scripting sex’ takes many forms. Pornography is often assumed to play a role in normalizing forms of body-shaming, presenting viewers with the perfect bodies with which to compare their own, and it is well documented that, for many men, the appearance and size of the penis has been a source of anxieties. Lehman explored culture’s ‘careful regulation’ of the penis in a 2007 essay, noting how humour, medicine and art regulated the small, normative and aesthetic penis while pornography delineated the ‘desirable big dick’ (Lehman 2007, 111). Joseph Brennan moves beyond the pornographic trope of the big dick to focus on an atypical penis and audience reactions to it. Rick McCoy – a retired gay-for-pay performer with a congenital penis abnormality (hypospadias) – is the case study to explore more than 500 comments posted to gay porn review site Way Big (waybig.com). Analysis of the commentary demonstrates viewer expectations of ‘the-penis-in-porn’, the different ways in which the penis is both just a body part and a symbol of masculine power in pornography. By focusing on those expectations and McCoy’s ‘failure’ to live up to them, Brennan’s argument adds to commentaries about the role of gay porn in gay male identity formation. Certainly the responses Brennan explores here suggest that the place of penile abnormality in gay porn, where penises are under particular scrutiny, is particularly complex; not simply a matter of rejection/revulsion or of curiosity, but instead difference is read across multiple registers and modes of response.
It is not uncommon for an academic journal to publish an obituary in recognition of the significant achievement or ground-breaking work of a specific scholar. The forum for this edition follows in this time-honoured tradition to instead offer reflections on the sad passing of Tumblr as a space for the discussion and exploration of sexualities. Of course Tumblr has not ‘died’; however, its controversial ban on adult content introduced in late 2018 with much protestFootnote1 has effectively destroyed the space for exploration of sexuality and identity that the platform once was. As Stephen Molldrem has noted elsewhere, these policy changes point to a new and progressively restrictive online environment that not only curtails sex-positive discussion but might be understood as a ‘deplatforming of sex’.Footnote2
The first piece in Tumblr RIP is ‘Desi Dick’ by Gary Paramathan. Writing from the perspective of a Sri Lankan, Tamil, man, Paramathan discusses the difference that Tumblr made in his erotic life by providing a space where images of brown-skinned South Asian men were shared and their bodies celebrated. The category of ‘desi dick’ (desi meaning ‘local’) has had a profound and liberating influence on many Tumblr users, offering representations of ethnically specific bodies that continue to be largely invisible in commercial porn.
In ‘Tumblr Tributes and Community’, James Ward discusses the ways in which fan practices have worked on Tumblr to develop communities of shared interests. In Ward’s case, establishing a blog dedicated to the career of Hillary Scott that over time became an exhaustive archive of her performances attracting more than 19,000 followers. Ward notes that this kind of archival practices and the communities that are attached to them were one of the great strengths of Tumblr as a platform. He also notes with regret that we should all feel that although he was able to preserve a back-up of his blog, in his case, as in all others, the wealth of feedback and comment from followers is now lost, not only to Ward as a fan and collector but also to a wider scholarly community.
Paul Byron in ‘How Could You Write Your Name Below That? The Queer Life and Death of Tumblr’ writes as a zine creator who draws parallels between Tumblr and zines as spaces that can be used to express a queer identity or sensibility and as a researcher who has investigated the ways in which Tumblr has become imbricated in the lives of young queer people in Australia. Byron’s piece focuses on the responses to the unintentionally ironic announcement of the ban on adult content, signed by CEO Jeff O’Onofrio, describing ‘a better more positive Tumblr’. Needless to say Tumblr users saw these moves very differently, as Byron notes. Fundamentally, Byron’s contribution indicates the value of ‘Tumblr’s role as a safe communal space for expressions of self, sexuality, gender, and more’, elegantly summed up in his piece by the expression ‘being private in public’.
In a piece that complements and expands on Byron’s contribution, Jacob Engelberg and Gary Needham in ‘Purging the Queer Archive: Tumblr’s Counterhegemonic Pornographies’ pay attention to the ways in which algorithms were used to remove content that was determined to be pornographic from the platform. Whilst the notorious and risible ‘female presenting nipples’ was considered meme-worthy from its inception,Footnote3 the consequences of the changes, rather than comic, have been ostensibly negative and far-reaching. Engelberg and Needham point to the queer politics and aesthetics that Tumblr had enabled to flourish and the results of the ban which indicate a much less progressive future and one in which queer visibility can be seen as constantly under threat. As they note, ‘the difficult lesson we have learned from Tumblr’s porn purge is that algorithms can be utilized for sex-negative, censorious, and queerphobic protocols’.
Director and founder of Four Chambers,Footnote4 Vex Ashley discusses the place that Tumblr has had in the development of her own sexual identity and her creative career. In ‘Tumblr Porn Eulogy’ Ashley argues, like Stephen Molldrem, that rather than a flourishing of spaces for creative and sexual freedom, ‘as our lives move increasingly online, spaces that are safe for sex are becoming smaller and smaller’ and increasingly controlled and policed by corporations for profit. The elegiac tone of Ashley’s piece echoes the sense of loss and a consistent call to resist incremental infringements on personal and sexual freedom of expression that is so eloquent across all of these forum pieces.
Finally, in ‘Playground in Memoriam: Missing the Pleasures of NSFW Tumblr’ Katrin Tiidenberg reprises her keynote address at the Sexual Cultures conference in Turku in June 2019. Katrin discusses the experiences and expressions of loss, betrayal and nostalgia in her research participants’ love-letter-like reactions to Tumblr’s NSFW purge and the moments of viscerally missing one or another aspect of their Tumblr experience during the consequent months. This analysis traces what the users felt was special about NSFW Tumblr, focusing on pleasure as important in and of itself, and as a precursor of an ethico-political stance.