Patsy l’Amour laLove:
Das schwulste aller Genres – Eine kleine Geschichte schwuler Pornographie
Patsy l’Amour laLove:
The Gayest of All Genres – A short history of gay pornography
English abstract
Patsy l’Amour laLove’s look at the history of gay pornography begins with the porn magazines of the 1950s and 60s. From mainstream productions through to the Porn 2.0 of today’s internet, the genre itself will be analyzed and put into historical context, along with its significance for gay history and its influence on the gay subculture in general. Porn productions not only reflected the dominant "gay” spirit of each particular era, they also helped shape the sexual self-image of gay men, especially in the early 1970s when gay men saw exclusively positive images of themselves for the first time on the screen of the local porno cinema, a place where they could also experience hot sex in real life. However, this social liberalization was quite fragile from the very start, as shown by the ostracism of HIV-positive gay men not only in the gay community, but also in pornos. The rejection of "gay” characterizations in porn productions reflects an abiding gay self-hatred. After the high-gloss pornos of the 1990s, the pornographic gaze moved into the most private corners of gay life, turning the homes of amateur cineastes into porno sets. What emerges as (gay) liberation remains firmly rooted in the gay subculture’s own conformist standardization, which always relates back to broader society and its homophobic pressures – reflected at the very least by internal hierarchies of beauty and normality.