Disgusting, dumb, depressing: affective encounters with heterosexuality in gay pornography

ABSTRACT

This article investigates the affective encounters between heterosexuality and homosexuality within gay pornography. Looking at three examples – Fraternity X’s Trump Pump, Men.Com’s Fuck the Phony, and Icon Male’s The Therapist – affective resonances of disgust, amusement, and sadness (respectively) are uncovered. Academic writing on straightness in gay pornography has often emphasized either its oppressive effects or its subversive effects. While these three case studies are widely different in tone, style, and content, they all incorporate a more ambivalent affective relationship between gayness and the heteromasculine power represented by straight men than previously discussed. All three films mix the erotic adoration of straight men with derision and mockery, allowing heteromasculinity to remain an object of desire while still maintaining an affirmative gay identity.

KEYWORDS:

• Affect
• gay pornography
• heterosexuality
• homosexuality
• masculinity

Introduction

What affects arise from pornography? The obvious answer would include arousal and sexual interest. Yet pornography also includes a host of other affective responses, such as curiosity, apathy, disgust, surprise, shame, and more (Paasonen 2011). While engaging in a research project regarding the motif of straight men in gay pornography, I encountered scenes that resonated not only with arousal, but also with disgust, humour, and sadness. All of these affects initially seem to be counterproductive for a pornography film attempting to arouse its viewers. We tend not to associate disgust, humour, or sadness with ‘sexiness’. Ahmed (2014) discusses disgust, for example, as a ‘pulling away’ from its object, opposite to desire’s ‘pulling towards’. Melancholy’s harsh reflective depths seem antithetical to pornography’s instrumental aesthetic of ideal pleasure (Maes 2020). Comedy’s reliance on surprise, self-consciousness, and instability also seems to clash with the seriousness and ‘realness’ of pornography’s attempts to arouse and create intimacy with its viewers (Martin 2006).

However, despite the seeming incongruity of these emotions with sexual arousal, we do find them appearing in pornography. This article will examine the function and shape of these affects within gay pornography, specifically as they relate to the motif of heterosexual men. Within gay pornography, we find many repeating erotic characters, themes, and subgenres: from BDSM to romantic plots, from stepsiblings to businessmen. One prominent recurring stock figure appearing in many types of gay pornography from its beginning is the heterosexual man who finds himself having sex with other men, being either convinced, coerced, compensated, or just curious. The various narratives that feature these characters and their sexual encounters are rife with different affective resonances. Different pornographic websites and films focus on different narrative contexts for the straight man motif, and therefore highlight various affective dynamics. Importantly, this article does not focus on the pornographic performers’ sexual self-identification but, instead, on heterosexuality as a central narrative component (although, of course, the lines between the two are often blurred).

This article will examine the affective dimension of the encounter between straightness and gayness within gay male pornography through three examples from three different professional commercial gay pornography websites which feature heterosexual characters: Fraternity X, Men.Com,¹ and Icon Male. The latter two are some of the most visited gay pornography websites,² while Fraternity X is less popular yet still has a significant online presence. The sites are very different in their format and style: Fraternity X features a ‘found footage’ documentary style and a similar conceit in all its clips of hazing practices in an anonymous fraternity from Arizona; Men.Com mainly produces short narrative features with a light-hearted tone; and Icon Male often includes full feature films tying together several sex scenes under a common theme or connecting plot, often with a more serious tone. These three websites were chosen for their diverse styles and affective affordances, and within each section one prominent affect within one website will be analyzed through a case study of one film or scene from the site that prominently features heterosexual characters. As this is an in-depth analysis of three case studies, it is not representative of the entirety of gay pornographic content. There are many other different sites and scenes that include heterosexual characters, which might offer up different affective dynamics than those presented here, but these three sites represent three widely different strands of commercial gay pornographic production. The article will show that despite these disparate styles, particular affective dynamics underline all three case studies.

Much of the discourse on pornography in general, and gay pornography in particular, takes the form of a polarized debate between those who regard it as essentially repressive and those who assert its subversive or liberatory potential. An affective perspective can resist the grip of this dichotomy and offer a more complex and nuanced understanding of the encounter between gayness and straightness as it is imagined in gay male pornography. This dynamic within gay pornography can give us some insight into the broader social dynamics of homosexuality’s relationship with heteromasculinity and its ambivalent, ambiguous erotic desire for it.

Affect and pornography

Paasonen has extensively argued for the incorporation of an affective perspective into pornography studies, defining affect as ‘sensation and intensities of feeling and their circulation' (2011, 22). She points out that pornography includes more than its hotly debated ideological representations of sexuality, gender, body, or violence – pornography moves its viewers as they are interested, excited, disgusted, and confused, as they feel the grab of pornographic images and the ‘carnal resonance’ of pornography’s various intensities in their uncontrollable visceral encounters with it (Paasonen 2011). This affective perspective has been used to explore topics such as the creation of pornographic spaces (Arroyo 2016); the creation, curation, and meaning of pornographic archives (Kyrölä and Paasonen 2016); the public images of pornography performers (Arroyo 2017; Wang 2021); and the labour of amateur web pornography (Paasonen 2010). This wide range of applications of Paasonen’s work has for the most part not focused on the contents of pornographic films themselves, nor has it touched on the affective tensions between heterosexuality and homosexuality.

Ahmed’s (2014) theory of emotion emphasizes the relationality and sociality of emotions and is exceptionally useful for understanding the connection between affect and boundary work, such as the one between gay and straight. Ahmed intentionally uses the word ‘emotion’ over ‘affect’ to emphasize the cognitive aspect of assigning value to objects in addition to the sensory and corporeal dimensions of feeling that are considered part of ‘affect’. Moreover, Ahmed is critical regarding the attempt to formulate a clear distinction between the two terms (Schmitz and Ahmed 2014), and her work is crucial for scholars of affect like Paasonen, despite the difference in terminology.

According to Ahmed, emotions are relational in the sense that they involve certain orientations towards and reactions to the object of emotion. Feelings rely on histories of previous impressions of an object or other objects close to it, feelings may stick to or slide over objects, and thus the object of feeling always simultaneously shapes and is shaped by emotions. Emotions are social in their role of creating boundaries. According to Ahmed:

emotions create the very effect of the surfaces and boundaries that allow us to distinguish an inside and an outside in the first place. […] it is through emotions, or how we respond to objects and others, that surfaces or boundaries are made: the ‘I’ and the ‘we’ are shaped by, and even take the shape of, contact with others. (2014, 10)

Paasonen (2014) presents three analytical layers of working with affect in pornography studies. Firstly, theorizing the ‘broad dynamics of attachment, intensity and intimacy related to the genre’ (Paasonen 2014, 138) within images and encounters between bodies. Secondly, looking at the rhetorical elements in which certain affective intensities are expressed through language. Thirdly, reflecting on the movement of the author’s body and their own sensations. This article will focus mostly on the first layer of theorization but will dip into the other two layers at times as well. Taken together, Ahmed’s and Paasonen’s work provides the basis for analyzing the boundaries created by pornographic affects.

There exists a long-standing debate regarding the social implications and functions of the recurring stock character of the straight man in gay pornography. While this debate is ideological, it has a strong affective dimension: the claims themselves focus on the emotional effects on the viewers and the affective contents of the films, while the rhetoric of the discussion itself is hued with different affective tones. The focus on straight men in gay pornography has been described by some critics as devastating to gay liberation and gay people’s self-esteem (Kendall 1993, 2004; Simpson 1994; Gilreath 2012), and by others as potentially playful and affirming of homosexuality (Fejes 2002; Mercer 2017).

The arguments themselves unavoidably touch upon affective elements – as they describe the affective implications of self-hatred on one side and self-affirmation on the other. Both are occupied with the emotional harms or benefits for the viewer. Kendall (1993) goes so far as to connect gay pornography with domestic abuse and murder due to its ideological glorification of homophobic masculinity. Gilreath claims that the sexual hierarchy between gay and straight men in gay pornography makes is connected to ‘our civil inferiority’ (2012, 175). On the other hand, commentators like Mercer (2017) refer to the presentation of masculinity and heterosexuality as rife with playfulness and flexibility. For example, Ward analyzes gay hazing pornography as highlighting ‘the fluid and performative construction of white heterosexual masculinity’ (2015, 181) and as focusing on heterosexual men’s vulnerability as much as it focuses on their virility.

Even more prominently, the rhetoric of this polemic is also rife with affective hyperbole. The title of Gilreath’s chapter is ‘Pornography/Death’ (2012, 169), and its sub-chapters include ‘Archetypal Oppression’ and ‘Sacrificial Victim’. Authors on the other side of the gay pornography debate describe pornography’s possibilities as ‘utopic’, for example Fejes’ conception of an ‘affirmative utopia’ (2002, 107) and Cover’s (2018) description of heterosexual men’s webcamming practices as playful and potentially queering and complicating heterosexuality.

Clearly, this theoretical and ethical discussion is not solely a matter of analytical disagreement as it carries a heavy affective weight. Utilizing an affective framework of analysis might help complicate this often-dichotomous debate and help gain a deeper insight into the meanings and functions of the representation of heterosexuality in gay pornography.

Fraternity X: disgust

The videos on Fraternity X are all set within a fictional anonymous fraternity in Arizona and all feature hazing-themed abuse between various frat members. The videos are shot from a first-person ‘talking camera’ point-of-view. Trump Pump (2018) shows a scene from the eponymous fraternity, as a group of men wearing red ‘Make America Great Again’ hats question another man about his opinion on Trump. He says he does not like Trump because ‘he’s a fucking sexist and he doesn’t like gays’, and one of the men responds ‘what’s wrong with that? Nobody likes gays. What are you gay or something?’. He replies that he is bisexual, which is received as ‘he wants some dick’. The pro-Trump group proceeds to take turns penetrating the man orally and anally, and he does not resist or express dissatisfaction, oscillating between indifferent resignation and mild enthusiasm. The group shouts comments and chants such as ‘Fuck Him!’, ‘USA! USA! USA!’, ‘Make his ass great again’, and ‘Prepare for eight years of this shit because he’s coming back for a second election’, all in southern-USA accents. The scene ends with the group chanting ‘Trump’ to the camera, and aggressively asking the man who he will vote for now, and he defeatedly whispers ‘Trump’.

This scene evokes disgust in two ways – physical disgust and moral disgust. Firstly, there is the physical disgust, often characteristic of gonzo pornography and its ‘realistic’ emphasis on the viscera of sex and ‘rough’ acts (Zecca 2017). Spit and semen are heavily featured, as well as staple gonzo acts such as deep-throating, spit-roasting, and ass-to-mouth. The stretching of orifices and intermingling of bodily fluids is deeply connected to feelings of disgust, as their in-between status of inside and outside makes them especially abject (Douglas 2003; Kristeva 2010). Specifically, semen has a unique centrality in pornography. Semen is both a ‘gross’ and contaminating bodily fluid but is also a central index of carnal pleasure (Williams 1989; Beggan 2020), as well as fetishized as a symbol of control and catharsis (Moore and Weissbein 2010).

For gay pornography in particular, semen is also historically connected to the risk of HIV transmission, so practices like internal ejaculation in the anus (‘creampie’) carry an extra layer of taboo and transgression (Lee 2014; Mowlabocus, Harbottle, and Witzel 2014), with the risk of infection and carrying the ‘gay virus’ also having potential transgressive effects (Morris and Paasonen 2014). Although these meanings may be dulled in the age of PrEP and Truvada, disgust, transgression, and authenticity are intertwined in the gonzo aesthetic of Fraternity X, ‘for what is more real than risk?’ (Brennan 2016, 391).

The scenery of the frat house is also dirty, littered with empty cans and cigarette butts, the floor and furniture dusty and unkempt. The filthy scenery seems to be part of the clip’s exaggerated visceral effect via the imagined surroundings of a stereotypical American frat house, an ‘erotic archetype’ (Brennan 2016, 391) connected to the hyper-masculine world of hazing and humiliation.

Following Paasonen, these intense images and practices, caught in the low-quality handheld camera, simultaneously produce an effect of authenticity and hyperbole. The grit and grime are far from polished images of chiselled actors, as part of a ‘professional amateur’ aesthetic that exacerbates pornography’s commitment to the explicit depiction of ‘real’ sexual pleasure. In contrast with the signs of authenticity, both the characterization of the pornographic actors and the sexual acts themselves are repetitious, prototypical, and hyperbolic. In this case, the ‘straight college frat boy’ is taken to a stereotypical extreme, and the standardly transgressive gonzo sex acts described earlier (Paasonen 2011; Zecca 2017) are heavily featured and often zoomed-in as the screen is filled with leaky orifices and bodily fluids, accompanied with moans and exaggerated comments. In pornography (and gonzo pornography in particular), disgusting images are not simply repulsive but also fascinating in the intensity of its transgression and perceived extremity (Hester 2014).

The oscillation between authenticity and hyperbole is central to the affective experience of pornography: ‘Generic, theatrical, and spectacular depictions of bodily orifices, liquids, and acts in extreme close-up draw viewers closer, while repetitive, exaggerated, and distanced conventions work to push them away again’ (Paasonen 2011, 192). The disgustingly intense images tug and grab the viewer.

In addition to physical disgust, moral disgust is also involved. Firstly, the acts discussed earlier are acts of violence and humiliation that would be considered immoral or illegal in a real-world context. Secondly, despite some attempts by Trump to present himself as a supporter of gay rights and the support of some right-wing gay activists like Milo Yiannopoulos and Lucian Wintrich, his political actions and those of his supporters have made him a figure representing anti-LGBT right-wing politics. Safely assuming that the video is not catering to the niche market of gay Trump supporters, the political statements and homophobic expressions of the perpetrators are ‘supposed’ to be reprehensible. But in the pornographic context, this disgusting homophobic disgust is part of what makes these figures arousing. Similarly to physical disgust, moral disgust is more ambiguous in pornography, and humiliation fantasies induce arousal as much as they evoke objection (Brennan 2016, 2017). Unlike many heterosexual gonzo pornography productions which anonymize the penetrators and centre only on the abused woman (Purcell 2012; Young 2017), here the abusers are as much of an erotic focus as the abused. We are supposed to look at them and hear them. Their insistent homophobia, their violence, and their support of the regressive and aggressive figure of Donald Trump in the midst of his presidency all coalesce to portray them as morally deplorable characters. In a way, this clip (as well as Fraternity X scenes more generally) can be seen as an exaggerated parody of straight men, and more specifically young American homophobic straight men manifested in the figure of the ‘frat boy’. Their violent homophobic disgust is what we find disgusting.

Disgust relies on proximity – ‘an object becomes disgusting through its contact with other objects that have already, as it were, been designated as disgusting’ (Ahmed 2014, 87). The men’s bodies are in contact with the physically disgusting dirt, spit, and semen, as well as the morally disgusting homophobic epithets that they speak, and the morally uncomfortable object of the MAGA hat. Both types of disgust compound each other and exacerbate their disgusting effect, causing the viewer (author included) to recoil. The disgust of Fraternity X’s gonzo style centres the affective intensity of transgression central to much contemporary pornography (Hester 2014). Paasonen writes that ‘the dynamics of disgust give rise to relations between the performers, the viewers, and the pornographic object that is pulled closer and pushed away – that is kept at a distance and yet stubbornly comes close and gets under one’s skin’ (2011, 209). It is precisely this dynamic that we see at work in Trump Pump.

When looking at humiliation fantasies, it would be simplistic to believe that the viewer directly identifies with either the victim or the perpetrator. Fantasy is not necessarily bound to identification at all, and is as much about the scene and its affective resonance as the specific characters inhabiting it (Cowie 1992). Humiliation fantasies like Trump Pump may be seen as a way of converting experiences of shame into experiences of pleasure (Ziv 2019). The scene taps into queer disgust and fear of homophobia in its most recent and blatant incarnation, and repurposes the visual, verbal, and symbolical violence into an instrument of gay sexual pleasure.

There is also, perhaps, something exciting about seeing how homophobic disgust facilitates its supposed object of disgust – sex between men. Moral disgust is further amplified (or perhaps satisfied) by this evidence of hypocrisy. The straight abusers are an ambivalent object of desire – both disgusting and fascinating, infuriating and arousing. The trajectory of the scene from homophobic disgust to the proximity and involvement of sexual coupling and gratification corresponds to the process the viewer undergoes – finding an object of disgust to also inevitably be an object of arousal and sexual release.

Men.Com: amusement

Men.Com’s clip Fuck the Phony (2017) features Brandon, a man whose girlfriend recently passed, who goes to Alex, a supposed medium. Alex clearly manipulates Brandon to have sex with him. He begins by ‘seeing’ the name Tonya, which surprises Brandon as it is his late partner’s name, although Brandon is wearing a T-shirt that says, ‘I Miss Tonya’. Alex then states that something is blocking him from seeing Tonya’s message, and therefore they both must take their pants off. The message is that Tonya wants them to kiss, and in a slip of tongue Alex accidentally calls her ‘Tammy’. Alex follows this with ‘Now she’s saying that she wants you to fuck my asshole till it’s medium’, and Brandon is convinced because she ‘does like puns’. Alex says ‘she must miss you very much, a handsome guy like you’, and quickly corrects himself to ‘she does’. Brandon remains oblivious and they have sex – as the description of the scene on the site reads, ‘anything for Tonya’.³

The premise of this scene is humorous: we see Alex duping Brandon into having sex with him by taking advantage of his naiveté and stupidity. Brandon, the straight man, is the butt of the joke as he does not notice that Alex is clearly faking his ‘channelling’ of Tonya’s spirit. The use of humour is prevalent in other Men.Com videos, for example showing people secretly switching places with sex toys (for example, Ass Swap Part 1 2018) or having sex next to someone without them noticing (for example, Gift for My Girlfriend 2018).

This trope of the straight man as the idiot invokes Halberstam’s (2011) analysis of white male stupidity, pointing out its connection to power, as ‘unknowing’ is often based on the privilege of not needing to know. On the other hand, Halberstam notes that the same stupidity also allows ignorance of judgement. The manipulation of the stupid straight man in pornography films like Fuck the Phony builds upon a humorous stereotype of straight white male ignorance and then sexualizes it. As in Halberstam's analysis of the film Dude Where's My Car, stupidity paves the road to ‘comedic misunderstandings’ and manipulations that place the straight white man in queer predicaments.

Humour has been described as having both unifying and dividing functions, as it can release as well as exacerbate tensions (Meyer 2000). Socially, ‘humor makes group boundaries clearly visible and palpable: he who laughs belongs, he who does not laugh is excluded’ (Kuipers 2006, 10). Unlike the light-hearted jocular ‘goofball masculinity’ present in other depictions of straight men in gay pornography where they are ‘fooling around’ with each other (Mercer 2017; Tollini 2017), Fuck the Phony features more adversarial humour. The viewer is colluding with the character of Alex and laughing at Brandon’s idiocy which allows him to be sexually manipulated by Alex.

The ridicule of straight men and ‘turning the tables’ of the usual power relations between straights and gays contains a streak of rebellious humour subverting social norms, yet this hardly means that this type of humour has subversive effects – ‘The audience, having laughed at authority, becomes all the more aware of authority’s power’ (Billig 2005, 213). The premise of laughing over those who have power acknowledges this power, even as it is mocked as undeserved, contradictory, or destructive. The fantasy of power reversal presented in the video accentuates the disparity between such a fantasy and reality, where violence is often enacted on gay men by straight men.

Fuck the Phony and similar videos are not calls to action, and the power-reversal fantasy is recognizable as such due to its divergence from social reality. Gays find themselves the butt of straight men’s homophobic jokes much more often than the other way around. Yet laughing together at straight men serves precisely to draw lines of inclusion and exclusion. While this may not directly undermine the status quo of power, it does politically function as a form of internal humour that is part of creating a distinct collective gay-male identity (Kutz-Flamenbaum 2014).

Icon Male: sadness

Icon Male’s The Therapist (Noelle 2017) is a feature-length pornography film that revolves around a framing narrative of a psychologist’s sessions with his client. The client discusses his unhappy marriage and his depression. He reveals that he had sex with his workout partner, whose body and demeanour he describes wistfully. He contrasts the workout partner’s light-heartedness with his wife’s ‘shrilling’, and we get to see his memory of the affair. He says that the encounter provided relief, and even helped him have sex with his wife later that evening. The therapist prods for the reasons he wishes to continue his marriage, and whether he is just afraid to date men openly. The client insists that he is not gay.

After he leaves, we see the therapist fantasize about the encounter, replaying the scene almost verbatim but with himself in the place of the client. Meanwhile, in reality, he masturbates alone in his clinic. When the client returns for his next meeting, a similar coupling of scenes occurs: the client recalls how he bailed on date night with his wife to avoid sex with her by pretending to work late. Instead, he went to a restaurant alone and found himself having sex with the server, later returning to have sex with his wife. The client leaves and the therapist once again fantasizes about himself in the client’s position. The film ends with the therapist finishing masturbating to his fantasy and answering a call from his wife, telling her he had a late session and he is heading home, as he looks blankly and misty-eyed at the empty room.

This is a tragic pornographic film. The central tragedy here is that of the closet. While the film is tagged with ‘straight guy’ in Icon Male’s tagging system, it highlights both of its main characters as sadly denying their same-sex urges. For the client, his vehement reaffirmations that he is straight are contrasted not only with his sexual exploits but also with his longing and joyful descriptions of his partners and encounters. This is further contrasted with the bitter way he talks about his wife. The therapist’s position is perhaps even more tragic, as he does not even act on his fantasies, nor does he construct fantasies of his own. He only borrows his client’s stories, turning them into his own fantasies, and his desires remain completely unspoken. In the end, they are both left with repressed desires and unhappy marriages. The gap between the joy and pleasure of the sexual scenes and the dire seriousness surrounding them heightens the sense of tragedy (Batten 2018). Unlike the two scenes discussed earlier where the sexual action is facilitated by force or trickery, The Therapist does not only feature straight men having sex with men, but straight men explicitly expressing homoerotic desire.

The closet narrative may also serve as a transgressive fantasy. Unlike many out gay and bisexual men for whom sex between men is a routine and normalized activity, these are men wanting what they cannot have, men who are lying to their wives about their desires. In this sense, looking at the tragic closeted man reignites gay sex with eroticized transgression.

In a sense, the emotional tone of the tragedy of disavowing homosexuality is melancholic. Freud (1917) understands melancholia as resulting from an unconscious and denied loss that negatively affects one’s own experience of the self. Building on Freud’s theory of melancholia, Butler (1997) suggests that normative masculinity involves a repudiation of homosexuality and incorporation of the disavowed object of desire. While Butler’s theory regards the construction of gender identity as a whole as melancholic, the film does feature a similar dynamic as the men renounce their obvious sexual desires for men as part of maintaining their heterosexuality. Research on heterosexual men who have sex with men shows that various forms of disavowing homosexuality and bisexuality are common in their understanding of their identities and sexual activities, but in The Therapist this renouncement is portrayed as a tragic loss.

This film is rife with what Love (2007b) describes as ‘backwards feeling’: it is filled with queer shame and depression and loss without the promise of redemption, of a happy, out, and normal queer life. Moreover, it does not locate these in a mythological pre-stonewall ‘past’, as obsolete affects that have been forsaken on the way towards the brighter present and future brought forth by gay rights. It presents these feelings in a here and now. This stands in stark contrast to the ‘emotional conformism, romantic fulfillment, and gay cheerfulness [that] constitute the dominant image of gay life in the contemporary moment’ (Love 2007a, 55), far from the image of ‘happy queers’ (Ahmed 2010).

The affective residue of this ‘backwards’ tragedy of denied desires veers between compassion and pity. If within the common narrative ‘the closet places shame and victimage in the past, creating a distance between where we were and where we currently are’ (Goltz 2011, 20), a gay or bisexual viewer may feel that they have been, could have been, or currently are in a similar position to the protagonists. One may feel empathy for this shared suffering, and the sadness of the characters may be contagious for the viewers as they remember their own ‘closeted past’, imagine a less fortunate life trajectory, or identify with the characters’ stuck position. Alternatively (or, perhaps, additionally), the affective and temporal clash between the sad-closeted past and the happy-out present can cause the client and therapist to be seen as pathetic and deluded regarding their desires, insisting on staying in unhappy relationships because of internalized homophobia and lack of courage to own their sexuality. They may be seen as unnecessarily clinging to the ‘darkness’ of the closet when they should be going forward and out, as perhaps the viewer already has or aspires to do.

Discussion

These three affective encounters between straightness and gayness in gay pornography provide strikingly different viewing experiences. Yet despite the dissimilarity between being disgusted by, laughing at, and pitying straight men, and the differing tone of each video, there are some important points of convergence.

In spite of the seeming incongruence between disgust, humour, sadness, and pornography, all of these films somehow tie these affects together with attraction. Specifically, these films present these affects as linked to some form of derision of straight men, and this derision is combined with or even bolsters their desirability. Trump Pump involves moral and physical disgust at the homophobic abuse performed by these overtly stereotypical straight men. Fuck the Phony mocks the straight man’s stupidity. The Therapist indulges in a mix of pity and compassion towards its tragically closeted characters.

Going back to Ahmed’s theory of emotions as drawing boundaries, the differing affects described here all work to create some distance between the straight characters – and perhaps straightness more broadly – and gayness. This distance is not simply neutral but has a hierarchical streak of condescension. The straight man is disgusting, dumb, and depressing. The connection between contempt and arousal is not unique to gay pornography, and there are similarities between the creation of difference between straight and gay men in these films and the way violence functions in straight pornography to emphasize the difference between men and women (Purcell 2012). However, even Purcell, in her extensive analysis of violence in popular heterosexual pornography movies between the 1970s and the 2000s, admits there is some ambiguity in the relationship between the viewers and the women depicted, ‘whether they want the women to enjoy the sexual action or to suffer (or both)’ (2012, 121).

This ambiguity is exacerbated in films like those described here, as the power differential in real life between heterosexual and gay or bisexual men is different to that between heterosexual men and women. Heterosexuality, and heteromasculinity in particular, is still idealized, and the reality of many gay and bisexual men is still rife with violence of various kinds directed at them from the straight world, and straight men in particular. In contrast, the violence and derision of women in straight pornography is an extension rather than a reversal of existing relations of gendered violence. This social context is crucial for understanding the affective dynamics of these films.

In Trump Pump, as the straight frat boys take part in sexual abuse and spout right-wing and homophobic slogans, their gay companion is a victim. In Fuck the Phony, the straight man’s stupidity makes him easy prey to the gay man’s wiles and obvious manipulations. Unlike Trump Pump, Alex’s exploitation of Brandon is not portrayed as disgusting or mean-spirited, but rather as funny. In The Therapist, both protagonists are presented in grim situations, locked in their unhappy marriages. Whether they are seen as closeted gay men or bisexual, as sexually confused, or as straight men miserable in their straightness, they are objects of pity and concern or sympathy at best. While the boundaries between straightness and gayness are the most blurred in this film, the characters’ intermediate position perhaps exacerbates the tragic tone of the video.

These kinds of affective relationships are reminiscent of Fejes’ (2002) idea of gay pornography’s ‘affirmative utopias’ in which ‘the conflict between gay male desire and heterosexual masculinity is explicitly incorporated into the narrative as a basis for subverting and even overturning the domination of heterosexuality’ (Fejes 2002, 108). Gay pornography, which is generally not accessed by straight men, can thus harbour a cathartic collective fantasy where derision of heterosexuality may evoke a powerful feeling of superiority.

The idea that straight men figure as ideals of masculinity and desirability in gay culture has been repeated many times. Halperin (2012) discusses the opposition between the campy gay ‘queen’ and the masculine straight (or straight-passing) ‘trade’, the former desiring the latter. Bersani claims that attraction to masculinity is a constitutive part of gay desire: ‘the logic of homosexual desire includes the potential for a loving identification with the gay man’s enemies’ (2010, 14). Both Bersani and Halperin view this relationship as more complicated than the destructive idolization described by Kendall and Gilreath. Halperin describes the way ‘the camp takes revenge on the beauty for beauty’s power over gay men’ (2012, 207), and Bersani notes how gay sex takes the aforementioned ideal of manliness and positions it as an object of sacrifice – ‘the rectum is the grave in which the masculine ideal […] is buried’ (2010, 29).

Despite the significant changes in attitudes towards homosexuality in recent years, this historical ambivalence to heteromasculinity still echoes in the gay pornography videos described earlier. While straight men are positioned as objects of sexual desire, they are not only that, and this desire is intermingled with mockery, parody, pity, and contempt: ‘Like male homosexuality itself, gay pornography is always in this very ambiguous relationship to male power and privilege, neither fully within it nor fully outside it’ (Dyer 2005, 145). The result is an ambivalent relation to straight men and straightness in general. There is an inherent masochistic quality in an attraction towards those who, by definition, are not attracted to you. The fantasies discussed here feature a desire for heteromasculine power denied to queer men, a yearning towards those masculine ideals that position homosexuality as abject, as embodied by the straight man. On the other hand, there is also rage and hostility towards that same power, as it fuels homophobic violence in everyday life.

This distancing from straightness also rebels, in a way, against the homonormative politics that seek to assimilate into straight society, mimicking its values and practices and attempting to make gay life more respectably straight-acting via marriage, child-rearing, and conventionally masculine gender roles, sometimes trying to politically detach themselves from less ‘respectable' parts of the LGBT community (e.g. by distancing from bisexuals or transgender people). While we cannot ignore the retention of conventional masculinity as an object of desire and the strict beauty ideals reinforced by gay pornography, these films mock the idealization of straight life. This mockery is part of their erotic dynamic no less than the straight men’s ascribed heteromasculinity.

The affective dynamics presented in these films retain the heterosexual man as an object of attraction but humiliate and deride him rather than unequivocally idealizing him. The masochism of wanting someone who does not want you and holds power over you is comingled with a sadistic fantasy of reversing this power structure. This affective ambivalence allows straight men to remain objects of desire while still maintaining an affirmative gay identity. The straight men are affectively distanced from gay men by displaying their vices of stupidity, hatred, grossness, hypocrisy, and pitifulness. This affective distance positions gayness as central and superior, providing some counter to the idealization of heteromasculinity both within gay culture and in the general culture.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 The ‘.Com’ is used as an integral part of the site’s name in press and promotions.

2 See https://str8upgayporn.com/best-gay-porn-2022/.

3 See https://www.men.com/sceneid/3700631/a.