Introduction: Gay Porn Any More

The starting point for this odyssey is naturally a revisiting of the biography, and I am charmed that Thomas Waugh has been persuaded to provide his own reassessment of what has become a foundational dissertation on scholars of gay porn and gay porn his own reflections on the status of the field. As many times, his common sense and acuity is splendid (his feather of Gail Dines as this memoir’s ‘demogogue nemesis’ has made me laugh every in good time I have decipher it), as is his modesty, acknowledging, as he does in ‘Men’s Pornography, Gay0day Gay vs. Decent: a Personal Revisit’ that his bash at was past no means the first on the subject. ‘Men’s Smut: Gay vs Unambiguous’ is nonetheless in my view (and this is a aspect shared during numberless others) an especially important intervention. In this supplemental article, Waugh describes the lay down of sexual and cultural circumstances that lead to the publication of his strive in Ignore Grieve in 1985. In exceptional this reappraisal usefully works to prompt readers of the innovations contained therein. These include a systematic rubric for analysis and the uncommonly apposite (and in many regards prophetic) criticism that gay porn does not exist in luxurious isolation and should be more meaningfully arranged as say of what Tom describes as a ‘continuum’ here.