That we should avoid making assumptions almost either who audiences are or how audiences retort be responsive to to filth has been a gist shtick representing this quarterly and the researchers that are associated with it. Exactly, another extraordinary consequence enthusiastic to audiences and consumers of porn edited past Sharif Mowlabocus and Rachel Wood in 2015 took this site as a starting point. In the provide unconventional issue, Customer Ramsay contributes ‘Gays in the Girls’ Over: "He’s too Honourable Looking!"’, which considers female heterosexual audiences benefit of gay porn. Ramsay’s article emerges from a flier study into the responses of a trial of largely Dutch participants to a selected sample of gay porn materials. The article argues that, based on the findings of the look, women not only tease a supportive answer to gay porn and the gay fucking represented but also relate feelings of empathy. Ramsay’s article acts as a contribution to an emergent literature on the varying audiences in behalf of gay porn that includes Lucy Neville’s (2015) prime endeavour also on female consumption of gay porn, Florian Voros’ (2015) equally fascinating criticism of manful porn viewers and the significant audience research occupation conducted not later than Clarissa Smith, Feona Attwood, and Martin Barker (2011), and which all accomplishment collectively to fly apart stereotypes and generalizations about porn audiences, who they are and how they relate to porn materials.

Inexorably, my own article is an undertake to deploy together some of the themes that the contributors to this especial issue entertain identified, to look to the admissible tomorrow's of gay porn as a character and to call the supervision of the next juncture of my own unbroken inquire into in the field. In ‘Popperbate: Video Collage, Familiar Creativity and the Scripting of the Gay Smutty Body’ I look at some of the amateur porn-making practices that are circulated by virtue of the streaming platforms Tsika mentions in his article. In definite, my destination of cramming is a fixed type of user-generated size – popper training videos, amateur video that repurposes a index of initiate sources with the straightforward good of turning masturbation fuelled at near amyl nitrate employment into an activity that energy be regarded as ‘bountiful leisure’. I prevail upon that these videos ascendancy state, in these neoliberal times where spare is positioned as a bounteous pursuit, a new if unexpected directorate for porn creation and consumption.

Noah Tsika in ‘Crestfallen Transfusions: Porn Aggregators and the Pirating of Queer Cinema’s Unsimulated Sex Scenes’ discusses the distinct streaming platforms through which gay porn is increasingly circulated. Issues adjacent piracy and the interdicted uploading of copyrighted content are of undoubtedly forceful concerns payment the porn industry; anyway, Tsika identifies a somewhat more well-defined object of studio in order to enact observations upon the ways in which ‘meaning’ is contingent on context. Tsika’s mood be germane to here is the machine totally which variously titillating or in some cases sexually outspoken materials can be extracted from their master situation within underground and offbeat cinema and repackaged as ‘porn’ clips. The article considers these online piracy practices in status to suggest that the process of appropriation and repackaging that takes situate here reduces the national and cultural power of the atypical provenance texts that are repurposed.

There are motionless lacunae in porn research, and Sharif Mowlabocus and Andy Medhurst in ‘Six Propositions of the Sonics of Gay Dirt’ sort out a longstanding area that is yet to be fully explored. Shape in porn films (alike resemble to a lesser extent to play) remains under-researched and Mowlabocus and Medhurst present some orientations to allow that avenue to be opened up, noting – with a regular wholesome jocosity that British readers resolution particularly understand – that gay porn ‘relies on the pants we find out as much as the pants we imagine’.

At a yet more personal invariable it is also 20 years since I enrolled as a PhD evaluator, researching the iconography of gay porn, funded by the British Arts and Humanities Research Board and inspired during the duty of scholars such as Waugh and Dyer (1985, 2002). This was the thrust at which my unpractical rush properly began and a investigate trajectory was plotted that has led to the issuance, this year, of my own paper, Gay Filth: Representations of Sexuality and Masculinity (Mercer 2016). Porn matters as a cultural phenomenon, and it first matters to gay men. It mattered in the 1960s when Joe Dallesandro appeared undressed in the pages of After Clear, it mattered in the 1980s adequately for the benefit of Waugh to urge a invalid for its dissection, it mattered in the 1990s in the midst of the AIDS calamity and it matters now.