Gay Pornography: Representations of Sexuality and Masculinity by John Mercer

Author:John Mercer [Mercer, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Sociology
ISBN: 9781780765181
Google: a342DwAAQBAJ
Amazon: B07PCHLTX5
Goodreads: 32902379
Publisher: I.B.Tauris
Published: 2017-03-29T22:00:00+00:00

The ‘Fooled’ Straight Man

An alternative, though increasingly common, trope that has become an especially distinctive feature of web-based gay pornography, and one that I have written about previously (Mercer, 2011), is one in which the straight man is fooled, compromised and derided in one way or another. Whilst the ‘new jock’ performs an unrestricted and uninhibited sexuality, material that presents the figure of the foolish straight man in gay porn constructs a straight masculinity that is rather brittle and unstable; the unreconstituted (and therefore often provincial, arcane and unsophisticated) straight man is subjected, as noted in the first chapter, to mockery, humiliation and even in some cases contempt. Whilst saturated masculinity is associated with play and fluidity, it should also be seen as a phenomenon that carries with it anxiety and ambivalence.

So in the case of the website Bait Bus, the narrative conceit is that a rapacious straight man is picked up on the street on the promise of sex with a buxom, female porn performer. The straight ‘trade’ is blindfolded and the female is substituted for by a gay male whom the duped straight is then persuaded to fuck for money (the so-called bait-and-switch tactic). Once the straight has performed his duties, he is unceremoniously dumped by the side of the road without payment and sometimes without his clothes.21 Similarly, Ungloryhole uses the device of a fake booth set up in a sex shop where yet more horny straight men can be persuaded to be filmed receiving oral sex from a female through a glory hole. The ‘girl’ on the other side of the glory hole is always replaced with a male performer, and through an innovative use of split screen, we are encouraged to be simultaneously aroused and amused by the spectacle of the straight man’s enjoyment of fellatio (based in part on his own supposed fantasy of the girl on the other side of the wall) whilst he is ‘obliviously’ receiving oral sex from a man.22 The Casting Room, with the strapline ‘Thousands of men want to become models. Would YOU take advantage of them?’, uses the audition scenario discussed in the previous chapter as a setting to make explicit use of the implicitly exploitative nature of the power dynamics in such settings. Here men who have aspirations to become models in heterosexual porn are interviewed about their sexual histories and then instructed to display themselves in a variety of compromising, homoerotic positions, revealing their anuses and so on.23 Sites such as Fraternity X eroticise the homoerotic overtones of the hazing rituals that are associated with membership of American university fraternity houses.24 Here initiates are ‘humiliated’ by performing sex acts for the benefit of fraternity members and, as in the case of Ungloryhole, this and other comparable sites create a sexual atmosphere of voyeuristic desire and ‘gross-out’ dark humour. However, by far the most extreme examples of this discourse of humiliation are to be found in sites such as the notorious Straighthell, now rebranded as Breeder Fuckers (produced by the same team as The Casting Room).

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