Unpacking Queer Politics by Sheila Jeffreys

Author:Sheila Jeffreys
Language: eng
Format: epub

When his 'personal sexual abilities began to wane’ (p. 181), he developed quite a radical critique of the gay male sex culture that had made of him an icon: ‘The gay male community is mostly based on/revolves around sex’ (p. 182). When he first had difficulties getting the required erections, he found he had ‘an emotional impotence’ too, which meant he didn’t know ‘how to relate to someone in an intimate way without fucking’ (p. 187). He had to learn this, and in his last years wanted nothing so much as to be cuddled. He realized that his fabled promiscuity had often been about being ‘more than a little bit desperate to be liked’ (p. 191).

The transformation of his attitude to sex was stimulated by hearing Signorile speak about his book Life Outside. He ‘realized that [Signorile] was putting down on paper - and putting out there for thousands to read - lots of the same thoughts that I’d been thinking, but hiding’ (p. 193). He considered that after he came out as gay, he ‘swallowed the party line... and made myself over into a sex machine’ (p. 193). As a ‘sex professional’, his body had to be in a constant state of arousal. He writes of a lover in his last years making him ‘feel like a blow-up doll’, and how he came to hate the kind of sex this man demanded: ‘The roll on, get off, roll off kind’ (p. 198). O’Hara’s story lends itself to being read as one of sexual abuse and the harm it does to the victim’s sense of self and health, but O’Hara’s fans are unlikely to read it that way, because that would be detumescent.

There are similarities in the story of Cal Culver, another porn star dead from AIDS-related conditions. In the foreword to his biography, Jerry Douglas writes ‘that Cal was as sexually driven as any individual I’ve ever known’ (Edmonson 1998: p. viii). As with O’Hara, his teenage youthful promiscuity, in which he serviced men in subordinate roles, stemmed from a desire to please: ‘It was a surefire way for Cal to gain approval. It was so easy to make a person happy’ (p. 15). In his cruising activities, he played the role of ‘bottom’ too. A man used to seeing him cruising said he was surprised to see him as a model: ‘It was such a shock when I was used to seeing him on his hands and knees, taking it up both ends’ (p. 32).

He went into prostitution when sacked from a teaching job and unable to pay his rent. Like most porn models, he remained in prostitution as his main job throughout his short life. He became very famous for an early 1970s film entitled Boys in the Sand, in which he played a character called Casey Donovan. His biographer waxes lyrical about the film, saying that it ‘almost single-handedly managed to legitimize gay hard-core... On the day that Boys premiered, gay chic was born’ (p. 2).

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