The Problem with Gay Porno
Author: Chuck Forester
May 17, 2010
Let me start with my prejudices. I have three things I look for when I read porno. Does it get me hard? Is it something I hadn’t thought about? Do I want to finish it? Sex is my sport, and I’ve read my fair share of porno over the years. When there’s a hot throbbing tool on more than three of the first pages, I know the story. While most of us live in pretty ordinary circumstances, that doesn’t mean our imagination has to be stunted. Our erotic literature should be infused with it.
My first experience in junior high school was Paar of Arizona advertisements for bikini underwear in the back pages of Esquire magazine. Wausau, Wisconsin in 1956 didn’t have much else. After I came out, I was addicted to the Manhattan Review of Unnatural Acts aka Straight to Hell. There were stories of first sex, truckers at waysides, and the occasional sailor on leave. I’m sure Boyd McDonald added his touches, but the stories were original and short with all the terror and excitement of illegal sex. They were real men having real sex and it fueled countless early jack off sessions lubricated with Vaseline.
I recently read a gay erotica book I liked—a cartoon story of men and some sci-fi freaks with enormous dicks, slippery holes and insatiable appetites. Anyone who can draw the lips of an asshole gripping a fat dick gets my attention. It was something I’d never seen. The artist knew his subjects from the inside and put as much excitement into drawing them as I suspect he puts into his sex with other men.
As a community, we know more about sex than most people and certainly know more about male sex than anyone. We do it. We do it well, and we do it often. We’re the experts. Our pornography should be evidence of that.
Good pornography for me has to have an element of reality. Made up stories are made up stories, and I want flesh and sweat and sometimes the humor that comes from stupid things we do when we have sex. A believable story has a man fumbling around with greasy hands, dropping the bottle of poppers on the new carpet, as well as an urging dick dribbling precum through piss-stained BVDs. I like boys as long as they’re really doing something for the first time. Otherwise, for me their delicious goods are beautiful but not pornographic. I like boys when they turn the tables on men who are trying to show them the ropes (or chains or slings). I like men who sweat and fuck clumsily. For me facial hair is always a turn on and quintessially masculine. Uncut is also hot, and so is sincerity. I know for some that’s counterintuitive, but porno for me is not just entertainment, it’s gay men telling our stories and because most of us have sex on the brain at least 90% of the time our erotic literature tells us and others about who we really are.
Men have been fucking men ever since the first cave man spit on his dick and slid it into another caveman’s dirty ass. Our stories can move around in time. Why not stories of ancient Egyptians fisting each other with olive oil or Norsemen fucking with bear fat? I want to know not only the size of a man’s dick or the depth of his hole, but something about the favela where the guy in Rio grew up or the country house in Sussex where the groomsman fucks the lord or vice versa. I think we’ve run as far as we can with fraternity hazings in torn underwear and hitchhikers picked up by truckers with big tools. A genuine coming out story gets me going. Anything authentic makes me hard. We have to work a little harder to create a body of great gay literature that acknowledges our sexual intelligence as well as our prowess. Henry Miller was full of angst as well as unrelenting lust. The heat in “Women in Love” wasn’t limited to the fireplace when Rupert Birken and Gerald Roddice swear friendship before wrestling naked. These stores have emotional meat. That is the kind of story that turns me on. We’ve moved beyond notes scribbled on t-room stalls and page after page of cum shots. Why not write about everything in our lives and treat stories about our sex lives as great literature? Hard throbbing uncut dicks will always be part of that. So, too, our fascination with male anatomy. But we will not be telling dirty stories; we’ll be writing gay men’s literature with all the sex commensurate with our lives. Or am I just a pig?
