The In-Between: Erotica and Porn
The question of how to define pornography, or how to distinguish it from art (or “erotica”), is as old as porn itself and probably goes back as far as the prehistoric cave drawings of our ancestors. Which, incidentally, have been found to include bisexual, homosexual, and even transexual representations, as well as orgies and other sexual configurations their descendants today might not expect! What isn’t exactly known is how common or generally accepted such representations were. Was there a line that separated the “tasteful” cave paintings from the more “lurid” or “depraved” ones? Was there an “art cave” that you could take the kids to, and an NSFW “porn cave”, the equivalent of the back room of a magazine store whose entrance involved a certain amount of guilt or shame?
I kid, but what is it exactly that differentiates something considered pornographic, and therefore somehow taboo or even forbidden, from something that is more accepted or tolerated in, shall we say, “polite society?” As a queer punk who started using pornography as a political strategy in the 1980s, it’s a question I’ve been asked countless times.
Wilhelm von Gloeden in 1891
As this is Queer Majority’s Cinema issue, let’s consider what constitutes pornography in photographic and film terms. The pioneering German photographer Baron Wilhelm Von Gloeden, who shot portraits of local Sicilian boys at the end of the 19th century in the town of Taormina, straddled the line between art and pornography. He employed what has been termed “the Grecian excuse,” posing his adolescent, nude subjects in togas and laurels alongside Greek columns or other signifiers of antiquity to lend the photo a certain artistic legitimacy reminiscent of classical art. Von Gloeden also shot landscapes and more chaste female subjects. But he became (in)famous for his homoerotic photographs of pubescent boys who were sometimes engaged in innocent physical contact with one another, but who were also, arguably, often semi-hard. These more “sexually suggestive” photos, however, were more or less illicit and traded among friends or sold “under the counter.” Von Gloeden became an international sensation, attracting celebrities from the dancer Isadora Duncan to the socialite and writer Gabrielle D’Annunzio, to Oscar Wilde - essentially inventing modern sex tourism along the way.
Von Gloeden’s Roman cousin, Guglielmo Pluschow, a trailblazer in photography from whom Von Gloeden undoubtedly learned some of his techniques, had a model and, probably, lover named Vincenzo Galdi. Galdi also became a well-known “erotic” photographer, infamous for showing the odd erect penis in his work. In 1902, Pluschow was charged with “solicitation to prostitution” and “seduction of minors” and was sentenced to eight months in jail. There is some evidence to suggest that Galdi was also arrested and sentenced for “outraging public morals” with the salacious photographs he was selling more brazenly than von Gloeden. A line was already being drawn between art photography, exemplified by von Gloeden’s somewhat more restrained classicism (his more taboo work was shared discreetly), and “porn”, as seen in Galdi’s more licentious and boldly disseminated work which included some sexual contact between subjects and more tumescent members. Sadly, although von Gloeden’s work was marginally more temperate than Galdi’s and therefore “art”, a large portion of it was later destroyed by the Italian Fascisti, who weren’t attuned to such fine distinctions, and the photographer died in poverty.
It’s interesting to note that when the Los Angeles police department raided the homes of actors Paul Reubens, also known as Pee-wee Herman, and Jeffrey Jones in 2002 under suspicion of the possession of “child porn”, the only evidence they found was “vintage erotica”, including the work of von Gloeden. As NBC reported at the time:
“Reubens acknowledges possessing a massive collection of what he calls "vintage erotica,” films and muscle magazines with titles like: "Boy Nudist" and "Shame Dame," as well as some photographic studies of teen nudes. But he says that what the city attorney's office views as pornography, he considers art.”
Today, a simple Google image search for von Gloeden nudes delivers these kinds of pictures within seconds, but a generation ago, this was enough to completely derail Reuben’s career.
The line between art and pornography is something I’ve been grappling with since I began making films in the late 80s. When actor Tony Ward, who starred in my 1996 movie Hustler White, a film some critics and viewers believed to be pornographic, was asked by reporters what distinguishes art from pornography, he always had the same glib answer: the lighting! But he did have a point. It’s often purely a question of aesthetics that separates the two categories — the more formally mediated, tasteful depiction of sex focused on the beauty of the human form on the one hand, and the direct sexual pleasure on the other.
I’ve heard other people boil down the difference to something more ineffable, in effect saying “I don’t know how to define pornography, but I know it when I see it!” Such a conveniently ambiguous sentiment, first utilized by US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, is often echoed by moral arbiters such as police and customs officials. The word that people with perhaps more delicate — or prudish — sensibilities often pull out to condemn the pornographic is “prurient”, defined as “having or encouraging an excessive interest in sexual matters.” In today’s climate, there are those who think that even non-explicit sex scenes should be excised from modern popular narrative films as if sex weren’t a significant part of life, or an appetite every bit as natural as thirst or hunger. More’s the pity!
In my early days as a filmmaker and photographer, I quickly learned that work with explicit sexual content could have potentially severe consequences. I recently spoke about my experiences for Doesn’t Exist magazine:
“I first left Toronto, where I am from, because I was having bad experiences with the labs. When I began to make my films, the labs where I processed my films would see explicit sex and they would actually call the cops. Once when I was trying to get a blow-up of No Skin off My Ass (1991) from super 8 to 16mm […] I had quite a good relationship with the lab owner but he claimed that he was obligated to report it to the police if he ever saw ‘pornographic material.’ The police came and they watched the film and they wanted me to cut three scenes from the original negative, which were characterized as ‘bondage and discipline’, ‘nudity with violence’, and ‘sucking of toes.’ But then the lab owner told me about this and he said, ‘Well, I’m going to put the negative down here on the counter and I have to go make a phone call. If it’s not here when I come back, I guess there’s nothing I can do about it.’ So, he let me escape, basically.”
The cops were also called when I was having my increasingly “pornographic” photographs developed at a lab in Toronto. That’s when I figured it would be a good time to get out of town for a while, so I moved to Los Angeles for a year and made Hustler White. But the problem persisted when I returned home and started working as a photographer for a bunch of New York porn magazines — Honcho, Playguy, Inches, and Mandate.
My photographs for the “porn magazines” consisted primarily of “guys with hard-ons”, but, taking my cue from the likes of von Gloeden, I usually (but not always) tried to add some sort of angle to the picture — some unexpected or unusual prop or narrative element — to give it an additional layer of both meaning and distance. What I quickly figured out was that I could take a photograph of a nude male with an erection and sell it to a porn magazine, then take the exact same photograph, have it handsomely mounted, and sell it in an art gallery for a considerably larger amount of money. The only difference was the context and the presentation. I guess you could say I'm primarily an artist, but an artist whose work has thus far been very much about transgressing the line that separates art from pornography.
For me, quite often this line has had to do with economics. After my first three films in the early ’90s (No Skin Off My Ass, Super 8 1/2, and Hustler White), my producer Jürgen Brüning and I gained a reputation as pornographers, even though we thought we were just making sexually explicit art films. But when you gain that reputation, you are regarded with a certain amount of moral judgment, skepticism, and even contempt. I tried to get larger-budgeted, non-pornographic films financed, but my reputation followed me like a foul odor, and people assumed anything I’d make from that point on would necessarily be pornographic. It also didn’t help, especially back then, that I was a flamboyant homosexual punk who himself had performed blowjobs and been anally penetrated on the big screen.
But I felt compelled to continue making feature films, so I segued into “legitimate pornography.” Brüning started the first-ever porn company in Berlin, Cazzo Film, and my next four films were all at least partially financed by his and other porn companies. For Skin Flick (1999), The Raspberry Reich (2004), and L.A. Zombie (2010), we made softcore and hardcore versions, released under different titles and with different distributors. The softcore versions, which always maintained at least a few brief moments of hardcore, explicit sex, became sensations on the (non-gay) international film festival circuit, and even got some theatrical distribution. The hardcore versions had long, uninterrupted scenes of full-on graphic sex, and were consumed strictly as porn. You might say it was the best of both worlds!
These days I am loath to draw much of a distinction between art and porn. All I know is, I have always been considered too pornographic for the art world and too artsy for the porn world. (Someone once told me I had a bad reputation in the porn world for this very reason, which was actually a source of pride for me!) But with my work, I do things no “real” pornographer would ever do, such as making people conscious of the mechanics of sexual representation and themselves as spectators of porn.
As the character Big Mother, a lesbian separatist revolutionary, says in my movie The Misandrists (2017), “Pornography is an act of insurrection against the dominant order. It expresses a principle inherently hostile to the regulations of society.” Like Big Mother, I not only try to act politically within a porn context, but I also wield porn as a weapon against the sexually repressive dominant culture and cinema.
At times, mainstream cinema or TV may appear to become more sexually provocative, even borderline pornographic, but it always remains, essentially, sexually conservative. (Those are mostly prosthetic penises that big-name actors are using in hyped shows like Euphoria.) True full-frontal nudity, and especially penetrative sex, are still lines that are rarely crossed. If you break those taboos in a non-porn or art film, it is most often presented, not as something pleasurable and sexy, but as something grotesque, weird, and problematic. Explicit, penetrative sex, especially anal, is always consigned to the porn world where it can be viewed privately with a certain amount of shame and then swept under the carpet. It’s regrettable that people can no longer go to porn cinemas and watch sex communally. It really takes all the fun (and subversion) out of it. There’s nothing particularly political about onanistically jerking off by yourself to porn in front of your computer in the privacy of your own home; watching it publicly with a crowd of strangers makes a much stronger statement!
In general, whether it is consumed privately or publicly, I believe pornography acts as a kind of collective unconscious in which we’re all able to work out our sexual fantasies, no matter how dark or politically incorrect. There’s also so much “amateur” and non-industry porn available now that is all about healthy sexual self-expression. In this sense, the Internet has truly democratized porn, allowing people of all genders to represent themselves without worrying about certain established and outmoded ideas of the ideal body or what constitutes the perfect sexual act. At the same time, I’m well aware that pornography can involve exploitation, particularly of women who do not have enough agency in the process. But that’s why it’s crucial for artists and alternative pornographers to function as a counterweight to this tendency by making sure to work only with companies that take ethical considerations very seriously.
I still believe in the idea of a homosexual identity based on non-conformity and difference, as opposed to assimilation and domestication. In that sense, gay porn is for me, now more than ever, one of the last bastions of sexual radicalism and unapologetic, extreme, homosexual representation. I express solidarity with pornographers and explicitly identify as one myself. I started using gay pornographic imagery very early on as a kind of political tool to challenge and provoke people who are intolerant or hostile toward homosexuality. Strangely, I'm not really that interested in pornography per se; I'm more intrigued by what you can do with it as an ideological weapon. I don't think porn has been mainstreamed as much as the media says it has. Even if most people view it in secret, it remains relatively taboo, and therefore it still has the potential to be used in politically subversive ways.
Whichever way you slice it, pornography, if it isn’t art, is very much like it. It's a creative medium, a mediation of reality made by photographers and filmmakers that happens to be generally focused on explicit sexuality. Pornography can be good or bad. When used pejoratively, something that is “pornographic” is offensive, in a bad way. You could say that the way in which mass media exploits images of violence and war is, in a sense, pornographic. “Porn” can also signify an indulgence in something non-sexual, as in “food porn,” or an exploitation of some non-sexual phenomenon, like “real estate porn” or “poverty porn.” Porn can be extravagant, decadent, transgressive, shocking, and, of course, hot. So it's clear that the definition of pornography is both subjective and mutable.
Going forward, I hope to continue working as a pornographer, making films for porn companies — or at least working with very graphic sexual content — as well as producing cinema made in a more non-explicit “industry style” that can be viewed by a wider audience. Not very many filmmakers are allowed to work on both sides of that fence, and I feel lucky that I’ve earned that privilege.
I’m only interested in doing narrative porn, and porn with what might be considered political content. My porn films are very much influenced by 70s pornography, specifically the great gay avant-garde porn filmmakers like Wakefield Poole, Peter de Rome, Fred Halstead, Peter Berlin, and others who were actually making films to be viewed and marketed as porn. At the time, what they were making was intentionally pornographic, but now it’s considered avant-garde work that can also be appreciated as art. Of course, not all porn has to have “artistic merit”, as the gatekeepers call it, and sometimes you just want to watch some filthy, down-and-dirty porn that makes art seem like a distant memory.
But I hate to tell you, it’s probably still art!
Published July 1, 2024
Published in Issue XII: Cinema
