Porno Cultures Podcast

A lot of time is spent on this podcast defending the multitude of roles that pornography plays in people’s lives. We say, it’s not a moral scourge, it’s not an enemy of feminism, it’s not corrupting young minds any more than any other media form. The academic study of pornography was established in a defensive mode, against second-wave anti-porn feminists, against the lies perpetuated by the church, against the forces fighting sex-worker rights. And because of this defensive posture, it’s jarring whenever we see the mainstream media portray pornography in a sensible, non-hysterical, perspective. This is what makes the Netflix documentary Circus of Books such a revelation! Circus of Books tells the story of a gay pornography video and book store in West Hollywood that endured as a staple in this gayborhood through the AIDS crisis and the mainstreaming of gay culture that has willfully abandoned its porn past in favor of getting married and joining the military. In this documentary, pornography, and the…

I think it’s fair to say that most academics are guilty of using particular words on their essays and books that are generally understood by all, yet we rarely take the time to flesh out the definition of that word beyond a sentence or two because we’re too eager to make a bigger and flashier point. And when it comes to pornography studies, words and abbreviations like the “money shot,” “BDSM,” “gay-for-pay,” and “bareback” have been a part of the popular vernacular around the genre for so long, that we just utilize these terms based on their face value, and often fail to update or properly contextualize the terms. Pornographic language is so embedded in our discourse, that we don’t often do the work of defining it. Today’s guest—John Mercer—dedicates a large portion of his book doing exactly that, creating a glossary of terms utilized within popular and academic descriptions of gay pornography that give rich historical and culturally specific definitions of terms like “the boy-next-door,” “twink,” “daddy,”…

This episode is a testament to the generosity and the collaborative nature of the pornography studies community. When I was browsing Twitter one day, I saw that a previous guest on the show, Madita Oeming, was going to be at the Berlin Porn Film Festival hosting a live interview with pornography start extraordinaire Jiz Lee! I messaged her immediately and asked if she would be kind enough to record the interview for the podcast, and she agreed to do so. I’ve personally never been to the Festival, so I was very happy to be able to hear what’s going on across the pond and I’m even happier to be able to bring this special exchange to all of you. This podcast wouldn’t exist without Madita and and Jiz’s kindness. The focus of this talk is about how Jiz straddles the divide between pornography and academia. They’re uniquely qualified to address this topic considering that they’re not only one of the biggest queer porn stars in the world, but they’ve also been published in a multitude of academic books and…

In this special addition of the Porno Cultures Podcast, we’re proud to feature an episode of the Films(trips) podcast about the porn-adjacent film Cruising. The Films(trips) podcast features extended discussions about sorely underrated or under-watched films and finally gives them their proper due by hosts Dave Babbitt and Andrew Kannegeisser. The boys were kind enough to invite me on the show to discuss William Friedkin’s highly controversial and misunderstood film Cruising. Cruising is about a gay serial killer who is hunting for victims within New York City’s gay leather clubs in a pre-AIDS Meatpacking District. The film was protested by gay groups while it was being filmed, and has continued to be a point of contention within the contemporary gay community. Some argue that the film portrays a stereotypical and damaging image of the psychologically traumatized gay man—a demeaning cinematic trope throughout history. And the other half of the community values the film for its essential ethnographic…

Pornography is often talked about as this abstract alien “thing” that has no connection to the real-world experience of any “decent” or “good” person. The thinking goes that since pornography is this anti-feminist and morally damaging abstraction, it must originate from a dark place consumed with hate and misogyny. But what if I told you that, in fact, there’s a whole spectrum of pornography dedicated to paying homage to the most cherished children’s stories and beloved horror classics like Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1965), The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr, Hyde (1886), and Dracula (1897)? And how would your opinions of pornographers change if you knew that they loved these books as much as you do? Well, that’s part of the story being told by professor Laura Helen Marks in her book: Alice in Pornoland: Hardcore Encounters with the Victorian Gothic. Unsurprisingly, Laura’s academic background is in English, and this book is a product of her attempt to unite Victorian era gender and sexual politics…

In this episode we explore the wild world of pornographic magazines. Believe it or not, before the popularization of the internet, a great many people had their first and most lasting encounters with pornography via magazines. Magazines were an essential part of pornographic creation and circulation for many decades, and now that they’ve fallen victim to the digital revolution, they’ve only recently been considered as an archival object suited for academic study. In this episode we tackle just a small sliver of pornographic magazine history by talking about a set of magazines addressing queer sexuality. This episode is divided into two sections. The first begins with my conversation with professor Elizabeth Groeneveld. Elizabeth talks to me about her work researching the lesbian pornographic and political commentary magazine On Our Backs. On Our Backs published from 1985 to 1990 and was founded and edited by Susie Bright (we previously talked about Susie in our episode with Lynn Comella). On Our Backs was a…

When we think about the rhetoric around sex workers it’s often easier to hear or read opinions advocating for the abolishment of sex work coming from politicians or “concerned citizens” who are not sex workers, or have never bothered to speak to a sex worker. The degree to which the voices of sex workers are suppressed in mainstream outlets throughout the West speaks to how dangerous their voices are considered. What on earth can sex workers be saying that so many people feel the need to speak for them instead of letting them speak for themselves? Well, that’s one of the primary issues that Nicholas de Villiers looks to solve in Sexography: Sex Work in Documentary (University of Minnesota Press, 2017). Sexography analyzes a series of films centered around interviewing sex workers. These films represent some of the few instances where sex workers are actually allowed to speak for themselves. Of course, these films are not without their own tensions. Many of the films are directed by non-sex workers and some…

In this episode we delve into the seedy and exciting world of sexploitation cinema! Oftentimes, pornography studies is so busy working to legitimate hard core texts that we sometimes forget about the wide-world of soft core cinema. Just before the “Golden Age” of theatrically released pornography in the late 1960s, there was almost a decade of sexploitation cinema single-handedly keeping alive a dying studio system that had lost its dominance in light of losing its profits from owning theaters and the invention of the in-home entertainment system knowns as television. Sexploitation movies are a mode of cinema consisting of cheaply financed, quickly made, with B-grade acting adapted to a variety of film genres. There are sexploitation movies that look like film noirs from the 1940s (with nudity), teen beach movies from the 1950s (with nudity), and even sci-fi movies (with nudity)! These movies allowed for a new generation of filmmakers to break into the industry without the heavy burden of having to prove…

Pat Rocco is a figure that doesn’t fit easily into pornography’s history. Pat started making films featuring nude male characters in soft core situations just before 1971’s Boys in the Sand, and he continued to purposefully occupy a unique middle ground where his work showcasing tame, but explicit, gay nudity coexisted alongside other films documenting the emerging gay rights movement, wholesome gay romance, and queer sexual politics. Pat used his camera as a form of activism highlighting gay men's varied sexual interests as well as their passions surrounding society’s changing attitudes about homosexuality. In this episode, we explore the legacy of Pat Rocco and try to figure out where he belongs within pornography’s history. This show features Matthew Hipps, who’s a PhD student in Film Studies at the University of Iowa, and Bryan Wuest, who is a graduate of UCLA’s PhD program in Cinema and Media Studies. Each of them presented papers about Rocco's films at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies…

In this episode, we’re joined one of the most prolific and accomplished scholars in the field of pornography studies, Susanna Paasonen. She is a professor of media studies at the University of Turku in Finland and has written and edited over eight books covering pornography, sex, internet studies, feminism, and affect. Her newest book is Many Splendored Things: Thinking Sex and Play (MIT Press, 2018), where she explores sex, bodily capacities, appetites, orientations, and connections in terms of play and playfulness. Like many people in the U.S., I discovered her work in 2011 with the publication of Carnal Resonance: Affect and Online Pornography (MIT Press). It has since become a landmark book within pornography studies due to the way it reorients the conversation around pornography from one centered on censorship, feminism, and the quality of sexual representation, to one trying to account for the various—and hard to quantify ways in which—pornography moves us, not only physically (with feelings of both…

Believe it or not, Canada might be the most important country determining what porn you’re watching today! I say that because the most popular porn sites in the world were created, and continue to operate, in Canada. PornHub, YouPorn, RedTube, and Brazzers just to name a few. While Canada has an extensive porn history and shapes the ways in which we consume and distribute porn today, oftentimes it’s overlooked in favor of its flashier cousin in the south known as the San Fernando Valley. This episode looks to change all of that with a panel that was recorded at the 2018 Society for Cinema & Media Studies in Toronto. This panel features a friend of the show, Professor Peter Alilunas talking about the pornographic history of Toronto’s most famous street, Yonge st. He specifically details the history of a theater on that street known as Cinema 2000. It was a screening room showing pornography on VHS starting in 1969! The second presenter is Cait McKinney. She’s a professor in the department of communication…

In this episode we’re trying something different! This is our first “roundtable” episode featuring four guests. And instead of talking with established scholars in the field, we’re actually talking with four up-and-coming graduate students who will soon be making their mark within pornography studies. As pornography studies grows within academe, it is becoming increasingly possible to build a support network of fellow students that share your interests. And considering how much resistance there still is toward studying pornography, these networks can be a crucial part of one’s survival throughout graduate school. This episode is our small attempt at fostering more supportive networks. In this episode you’ll hear stories about professors urging students not to pursue the study of pornography, and even hear about professors that are openly hostile to students working on this topic. Also, studying pornography within different cultural contexts means that students often have to utilize alternative methodologies,…

Professor Lynn Comella joins us to talk about her books New Views on Pornography: Sexuality, Politics, and the Law (co-edited with Shira Tarrant, 2015) and Vibrator Nation: How Feminist Sex-Toy Stores Changed the Business of Pleasure (2017). The reach of Vibrator Nation’s readership has extended beyond the typical academic circles and has resonated with a mainstream audience due to its easy reading style, and because it details a history of feminist sex shops that the public was obviously eager to read about. The history of these shops is a fascinating one and one that has literally changed the ways in which we think about the female orgasm within our post-sexual revolution era. The story of these stores isn’t one of capitalist opportunism, it’s actually a story about revolutionary feminist sexual educators who wanted to spread their sexual knowledge to a starving female public looking for ways to expand their sexual pleasure. In short, our understanding of sexual history would be incomplete without the…

While porn studies delve into history and theory books in order to legitimize its position within academia, scholars can often times lose track of the most essential voices that offer us an important perspective on the industry, those of the porn performers themselves! In this episode, I talk with gay porn performer Chris Harder. Harder’s journey through the industry is an interesting one mostly due to the fact that he comes from a theater background. He studied theater and queer theory while going to school in North Dakota, so his porn performances reflect a journey of a young man coming to the big city who documents his sexual awakening via his onscreen performances. However, theatrical ambitions were not stifled by his porn career. In this interview, we talk about his one-man show that he wrote and stars in titled: Porn to be a Star. The show is a hilarious romp where he plays various fictional characters that reflect on his journey growing up in the Dakota plains, moving to the big city, and discovering…

Zachary Sire is the editor of the essential gay porn blog Str8UpGayPorn. Str8UpGayPorn is the primary news and gossip site of the gay porn industry. If you’re a porn star and you’ve done something naughty, it’s likely to become a headline on the site sooner rather than later. Zachary started out as a features writer for magazines like Unzipped, Men and Freshmen before becoming a blogger for TheSword in 2010. It’s during his tenure at TheSword where he made a name for himself and became perhaps became the industry’s most notable personality who has never taken off his clothing in front of a camera! His humorous wit, coupled with is biting sarcasm, make his takedowns of hypocritical politicians, racist performers, and reckless studio bosses equally funny and informative. In 2013 he left TheSword to start his own blog about the industry, Str8UpGayPorn. Str8UpGayPorn’s layout intentionally mimics (and mocks) one of the internet’s most well-known sites, TheDrudgeReport. And just like Drudge, Str8UpGayPorn…

Ashley West is the host of the most successful porn podcast of them all, The Rialto Report. The Rialto Report explores the history of the “golden age” of porn in the 1960s, 70s & 80s by interviewing the actors, directors, producers, and distributors from that era. The most remarkable aspect of the show is his amazing ability to find these long-lost people, some of whom haven’t spoken publicly in over 40 years! He gets them to not only talk about their time in the industry, but their childhood, their love life, their adventures and their passions outside of porn. In this way, Ashley paints a broad picture of these people’s lives and reveals their human complexity that shows them as typical people rather than as criminal or sadistic smut-peddlers that anti-porn activists make them out to be. In this interview we talk about his childhood growing up in Italy, and how sexploitation and pornographic movies were shown and written about in the same theaters and magazines as mainstream movies. We talk about his first…

Professor Rebecca Sullivan joins us to talk about her role as the chair of the steering committee for the Sexuality Studies Association of Canada, and her book on the infamous second-wave feminist anti-porn documentary Not a Love Story: A Film About Pornography (1982). The film is directed by Bonnie Sherr Klein, a feminist filmmaker who was an important part of the National Film Board’s Studio D, a project focused on providing female directors the chance to make their own documentaries. The film is co-directed by stripper/activist Lindalee Tracey. And while the film seemed to have started out with the intention of being a progressive analysis of feminist sexual exploration, it eventually turned into the iconic anti-porn landmark that we know it as today. Over the last couple of decades, the film has been lambasted within porn studies circles due to its uncritical adoption of the views of anti-porn feminists like Susan Griffin and Robin Morgan. Interestingly, pornography/feminist scholar Rebecca Sullivan’s…

Professor David Church joins us to talk about his newest book Disposable Passions: Vintage Pornography and the Material Legacies of Adult Cinema (2016). His approach to pornography produced in the age when moving image technology was just emerging to the beginning of the “porno chic” era, is unique in the sense that he writes about how these older texts are consumed, admired, and fetishized within our contemporary mediascape. He does this by analyzing the affective resonance that these texts take on as they circulate via digital platforms today. This is a compelling way to think about porn’s history, and I think it could become a model for the way future historians go about formulating media histories as they are experienced today. In this interview, David talks to us about the role nostalgia plays in our erotic imagination, how our understanding of pornography changes when it transforms from being an object of erotic stimulation to a historical text, and explains cinephilia’s connection to necrophilia. More…

Preservationist and co-founder of the company Vinegar Syndrome Joe Rubin joins us to talk about his restorations of classic sex films. Vinegar Syndrome can be thought of as the “Criterion Collection for porn!” And the quality of their restorations have garnered compliments from their peers who say that their work is better than what has been done on Paramount’s Hitchcock restorations! Joe also has encyclopedic knowledge about of the Golden Age of porn. This is what lead the Quad Cinema in New York City to ask him to program a series of classic sex films for their Erotic City series in the summer of 2017, where films like Bacchanale (1970), Bijou (1972), Both Ways (1975), the documentaries Changes (1970) and Not a Love Story (1981), Double Agent 73 (1974), Naked Came the Stranger (1975), Not Just Another Woman (1973), The Opening of Misty Beethoven (1976), The Private Afternoons of Pamela Mann (1974) and Scoundrels (1982) were screened. This is a wide-ranging interview covering Joe’s fascination with porn at…

Playwright, educator, and activist Alan Bounville joins us on the podcast to talk about his immersive theater piece Adonis Memories. The show is based on the testimonials of patrons of the infamous gay porn mecca known as the Adonis Theater, located in New York’s Hells Kitchen Neighborhood. It was a gay porn theater at the 51st location from 1975 through 1989. The theater’s legend was cemented within pornographic history because of Jack Deveau’s 1978 film A Night at the Adonis. A film that was shot within the theater. In this interview Alan describes how he put the show together by weaving a multitude of narratives from people who experienced the theater in their own way. We talk about what this era within gay history, and the sexuality explored in this space, means for gay sexuality and civil rights today. And we use Samuel Delany’s 1999 book Times Square Red, Times Square Blue as a guide to help us think through some of these issues. More info about the theater: http://cinematreasures.org/theaters/4693 A…

Professor Whitney Strub joins us to talk about his books: Perversion for Profit: The Politics of Pornography and the Rise of the New Right (2010), Obscenity Rules: Roth v. United States and the Long Struggle over Sexual Expression (2013), and this co-edited anthology with Carolyn Bronstein titled, Porno Chic and the Sex Wars: American Sexual Representation in the 1970s (2016). We talk about his historical approach to porn studies, New-Right censorship strategies of the post-war era, the important obscenity trials that have formed the obscenity laws that we’re familiar with today, and we talk about how is new edited collection is fighting against our commonly held assumptions of the “Golden Age” of porn in the 1970s. And after the interview, we take you on an audio tour of New Jersey’s last porn theater, the Little Theater. Which opened in Newark in 1929, and has been showing pornography since the 1970s. You don’t want to miss it! Here’s a link to Whitney’s personal website: https://strublog.wordpress.com/ A…

Professor Peter Alilunas joins us to talk about his first book: Smutty Little Movies: The Creation and Regulation of Adult Video (2016). He details the little-known history of adult cinema on video that actually started in the early 1970s! He describes this type of video technology's use in bars, screening rooms and hotels. And he goes into what it took to create this history from the ground up. More information about the book: https://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520291713 Here's a link to his website: https://www.peteralilunas.com/ Here's is a link to the map of NYC video bars that were open as early as 1971!: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1wPcD9xSCxzCfdTJu4nHG12j0W6o&usp=sharing Here's a link to professor Alilunas' ongoing adult film history archive project: https://adultfilmhistoryproject.wordpress.com/ pornocultures.podomatic.com facebook.com/academicsex twitter.com/pornocultures https://concordia.academia.edu/brandrroyo

The Porno Cultures Podcast is the show where we think about pornography rather than just react to it. In this introductory episode host Brandon Arroyo explains how his love of Alfred Hitchcock led to his obsession with cinematic sex. Documents his academic journey that has led to the creation of this podcast. And describes how the show will be different from other podcasts that deal with sex and pornography.