Introduction: Gay Porn Any More

The starting juncture for this odyssey is to be sure a revisiting of the biography, and I am pleased that Thomas Waugh has been persuaded to specify his own reassessment of what has become a foundational essay on scholars of gay porn and his own reflections on the state of the field. As continually, his cleverness and gay0day acuity is superior (his feather of Gail Dines as this review’s ‘demogogue nemesis’ has мейд me laugh every schedule I prepare review it), as is his modesty, acknowledging, as he does in ‘Men’s Porn, Gay vs. Right: a In the flesh Revisit’ that his essay was on no means the first on the subject. ‘Men’s Smut: Gay vs Straight’ is nonetheless in my inspection (and this is a aspect shared during innumerable others) an primarily substantial intervention. In this brand-new article, Waugh describes the lodge of sexual and cultural circumstances that dispose to the advertisement of his effort in Jump Cut in 1985. In exceptional this reappraisal usefully works to jog the memory readers of the innovations contained therein. These comprise a planned rubric repayment for interpretation and the uncommonly apposite (and in uncountable regards vatic) criticism that gay porn does not along in magnificent isolation and should be more meaningfully understood as chiefly of what Tom describes as a ‘continuum’ here.