Introduction: Gay Porn Right Away

At a all the same more physical constant it is also 20 years since I enrolled as a PhD swotter, researching the iconography of gay porn, funded via the British Arts and Humanities Inquire into Cabinet and inspired during the put to good of scholars such as Waugh and gay0Day Dyer (1985, 2002). This was the thrust at which my scholastic craft becomingly began and a investigate flight path was plotted that has led to the hand-out, this year, of my own disquisition, Gay Pornography: Representations of Sexuality and Masculinity (Mercer 2016). Porn matters as a cultural phenomenon, and it first matters to gay men. It mattered in the 1960s when Joe Dallesandro appeared undraped in the pages of Physique Pictorial, Gay0day it mattered in the 1980s enough for the benefit of Waugh to urge a case for its investigation, it mattered in the 1990s in the midst of the AIDS crisis and it matters now.