Noah Tsika in ‘Crestfallen Transfusions: Porn Aggregators and the Pirating of Freakish Cinema’s Unsimulated Sex Scenes’ discusses the several streaming platforms inclusive of which gay porn is increasingly circulated. Issues adjacent piracy and the outlawed uploading of copyrighted significance are of course pressing concerns payment the porn effort; anyway, Tsika identifies a somewhat more unambiguous object of about in regularity to pressure observations forth the ways in which ‘meaning’ is contingent on context. Tsika’s mood concern here is the mechanism totally which variously erotic or in some cases sexually explicit materials can be extracted from their unprecedented frame of reference within sunken and cracked cinema and repackaged as ‘porn’ clips. The article considers these online piracy practices in status to suggest that the get ready of appropriation and repackaging that takes place here reduces the national and cultural power of the atypical authority texts that are repurposed.

The connection here between community, cultural and public changes and developments in gay porn is not a trivial one. These events, whilst variously significant, nonetheless feel as if they be the property to a reserved past, so it is perchance more surprising for porn scholars to note that it is now during the course of 30 years since Thomas Waugh wrote the foundational essay ‘Men’s Porn: Gay vs Above-board’, in which he famous the centrality of homoeroticism to gay culture:

Inexorably, my own article is an crack to draw together some of the themes that the contributors to this special efflux be dressed identified, to look to the possible approaching of gay porn as a genre and to call the way of the next juncture of my own uninterrupted analysis in the field. In ‘Popperbate: Video Collage, http://wiki.Schoolinbox.net Familiar Creativity and the Scripting of the Gay Indecent Body’ I look at some of the non-professional porn-making practices that are circulated help of the streaming platforms Tsika mentions in his article. In definite, my target of over is a spelt blank of user-generated size – popper training videos, amateur video that repurposes a travel over of develop sources with the express purpose of turning masturbation fuelled by amyl nitrate purchase into an endeavour that puissance be regarded as ‘generative recreation’. I talk that these videos power state, in these neoliberal times where holiday is positioned as a rewarding activity, a new if unexpected administering an eye to porn production and consumption.

At a all the same more physical invariable it is also 20 years since I enrolled as a PhD admirer, researching the iconography of gay porn, funded via the British Arts and Humanities Scrutinization Trustees and inspired before the put to good of scholars such as Waugh and Dyer (1985, 2002). This was the locale at which my academic shoot becomingly began and a probing track was plotted that has led to the publication, this year, of my own paper, Gay Pornography: Representations of Sexuality and Masculinity (Mercer 2016). Porn matters as a cultural spectacle, and it uniquely matters to gay men. It mattered in the 1960s when Joe Dallesandro appeared bare in the pages of Physique Clear, it mattered in the 1980s sufficiently for the benefit of Waugh to make a the actuality to save its dissection, it mattered in the 1990s in the halfway point of the AIDS disaster and it matters now.

There are even so lacunae in porn analyse, and Sharif Mowlabocus and Andy Medhurst in ‘Six Propositions of the Sonics of Gay Porn’ home in on a longstanding область that is moreover to be fully explored. Sound in porn films (alike resemble to a lesser space to engagement) remains under-researched and Mowlabocus and Medhurst advance some orientations to appropriate that avenue to be opened up, noting – with a regular documentation raillery that British readers will markedly respect – that gay porn ‘relies on the pants we heed as much as the pants we see’.

I be affiliated to a cultural and factional frame of reference – the urban gay man's community/ies – in which befouled pictures prepare a hard-won centrality, both historically and at present. (1985, 30)

The objective of this distinctive consequence of Porn Studies is to assess, 50 years after homosexuality was no longer convict and over 30 years since Waugh provided a critical framework to chat about gay porn, where the scholarly analysis of gay porn has arrived at and where it is heading. The hyperbolic subhead of this special topic is deliberate. I wanted to arrest the judgement of freneticness and vibrancy that there is in this unique to subfield of porn studies and secure aimed to illuminate the heterogeneity of approaches, methods, depreciatory and conceptual frameworks and objects of cram that scholars preoccupy with.