The following is an essay I submitted for publication to the webstie Racialicious.com. I was instructed that if I did not hear back from them within two weeks it was unlikely they were going to accept it for publication. Hear, then, it that essay. If it appears somewhat dated, hopefully you have the previous explanation.)
(Unless otherwise indicated, all links are NSFW.)
The ugliness started, more or less, about two weeks ago. A fan, who goes by the Twitter handle @Puttinitdeep, responded with excitement to gay porn performer Tony Douglas’s tweet that he’d be appearing on a popular adult site called CollegeDudes.com. Tony, who is white, then began a series of exchanges with @Puttinitdeep who, if is avatar is to be believed, is black and that quickly devolved into a tawdry and unapologetically racist affair.
It went viral almost immediately when a blogger who runs a popular site, Men of Porn, posted the exchanges on his blog which prompted almost 200 comments, the majority of them roundly condemning Mr. Douglas’s positions – the pseudo-intellectual kind - many of them fueled by Tony’s periodic responses that sounded as much like they were coming from someone who basked in a level of attention he might not otherwise have had – porn performers truly are a dime a dozen - as well as sounding like someone in the late stages of Thesaurusitis.
“Ignorant, am I? Maybe irresponsible or inept or imprudent I can agree to. I don't have a bachelor's for nothing. I'm slightly bedazzled yet not offended by your compliments. Please, continue.”
Two days later Fleshbot put their stamp of disapproval on it, calling for an all-out hiring freeze on Tony Douglas and his ilk, arguing that one way to end racism in the gay adult entertainment industry is to hold companies accountable for their hiring decisions.
The furor quickly subsided, however, as the notoriously mercurial porn fan base moved onto the next big thing (pun, I suppose) and Mr. Douglas became the latest footnote in a long line of porn starts saying or doing racist things. (Refusing to work with black co-stars anyone?)
But while it would be easy to write this off as example number (insert any number) in the gay porn industry’s almost limitless ability to discriminate against men of color (including tokenism in hiring, all-white casts, playing color to stereotype – blacks, for example as Mandingos, Latinos as gardeners, etc.), I’d rather focus my energies on highlighting two subtler but equally important messages that were sent out, but apparently lost, in the pother.
One was the rather casual remark made by the Men of Porn blogger when he asked in his original post: “Did [Tony Douglas] have a bad experience with Castro at ItsGonnnaHurt.com?” Castro is a black performer with his own website and is known for the particularly *cough* special blessing he has been endowed with. Gone unnoticed was any discussion of how having sex with one black man with a preternaturally large penis could somehow scar someone else for life? I’ve had a lot of bad – even painful - sex in my day but I don’t think the thought ever occurred to me that I might discount an entire race of, say, Asians simply because a few of them just laid their and were indistinguishable from my 800-count, Mayan Gold-colored bed sheets. Is the blogger suggesting that somehow it is Castro’s fault that this innocent white waif was ill-prepared for the man’s treasures? Did the young man – we’re talking about Mr. Douglas now -conveniently ignore the fact that, unless you’ve been living without an Internet connection, just about everyone and their God-fearing cousins know about Castro and his unique gift? Or, could it simply be that Tony Douglas is racist and we don’t really have to look for any further explanation beyond that? So why the cutesy intro?
My issue with Fleshbot, a site devoted to the intersection of sex and technology, is less with the ends than the means. I wrote for Fleshbot for a time and I think the guys over there are a pretty nice lot. They are, by all measures, equal opportunity horn dogs. But in his piece on the episode, Cedric De Wittison in his outrage – the sincerity of which I do not question – ended up giving us a tweet-by-tweet breakdown of each successive comment as if to say: You probably don’t realize how racist this is, but I do and have the sufficient skills to explain it to you. It ends up being less a screed about racism in the gay porn industry and more a patronizing lesson on the issue of race as if it were being taught to us by some visiting scholar who felt the subject of racism in porn was simply to fraught with intellectual landmines for us mere mortals to grasp.
The tweets speak for themselves.
If you’re black you certainly don’t need another step-by-step illustration of just how messed up certain white people can be. If you’re white (and if you can’t piece it together on your own), than no amount of schooling will help, especially on a site devoted to matters of the, well, flesh where such scholarly topics are not the reason people visit your site in the first place.
Which makes me wonder who reads Fleshbot?
But let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater. De Wittison is right to call these companies to task by asking them not to hire Tony Douglas. But I can’t help feel he and others over on Flesbhot are Johnny-come lately’s to the issue of race – racism, actually – and the gay (and straight) gay porn industry. I mean, maybe I’d have less of a hard time actually believing it if, after reviewing a new series from the video-on-demand company, Naked Sword, set in San Francisco called “Golden Gate” (one that fails to have a single man of color in its leading cast, let alone an Asian man), Fleshbot called it, “the future of gay porn!” The future of gay porn? The past more likely.
In 2007, when I was a columnist for Fleshbot, around the time my blog, Men of Color was reaching a peak of sorts, my editor, Johnny d’Addario, who is white, said he wished I’d stop “caviling” about racism in gay porn. I had to look up the word. Technically, it means “to raise irritating and trivial objections.”
I wasn’t sure if he simply trying to show off his vocabulary or he was just one more piece of evidence I could use in my eight-year long struggle to change one of the most blatantly racist organizations around: gay porn. After all, if the editor of one of the most highly trafficked sites didn’t “get” it, how could I hope to change other people’s minds, shout and caviling into the night as I might?
(Coda: In a comment added to the Fleshbot post over this whole kerfuffle, Tony Douglas announced that his contract with FabScout, an agency that finds placement for male adult performers, was cancelled and he is retiring from gay porn. Unfortunately, I suspect, his views will very much remain active.)
© 2012, Victor Hoff. All rights reserved. Menofcolor.blogs.com