Introduction: Gay Porn Right Away

At a all the same more physical invariable it is also 20 years since I enrolled as a PhD swotter, researching the iconography of gay porn, funded by way of the British Arts and Humanities Research Board and inspired before the work of scholars such as Waugh and Dyer (1985, updated blog post 2002). This was the crux at which my unpractical shoot fittingly began and a probing trajectory was plotted that has led to the brochure, this year, of my own paper, Gay Obscenity: Representations of Sexuality and gay0day Masculinity (Mercer 2016). Porn matters as a cultural phenomenon, and it especially matters to gay men. It mattered in the 1960s when Joe Dallesandro appeared nude in the pages of Physique Telling, it mattered in the 1980s sufficiently suitable Waugh to urge a case destined for its interpretation, it mattered in the 1990s in the middle of the AIDS calamity and it matters now.