Dr Joseph Brennan, an international academic authority on the topic, has authored the first updatable entry on gay pornography for Oxford Research Encyclopedias—an invitation-only initiative of Oxford University Press.
Oxford Research Encyclopedias provide long-form overview articles written, peer-reviewed, and edited by leading scholars. With summaries now available on an ever-growing range of topics across 25 encyclopedias, the project is designed to help students and researchers identify what’s trustworthy, what’s up-to-date, and what’s accurate in an age when overabundance of information, and misinformation, can make this difficult. In addition to being written and peer reviewed by certified experts, articles are regularly updated by experts to ensure content reflects new insights.
«Being invited to write the first survey on gay pornography for the Oxford project has been a career-defining honour for me», Dr Brennan said. «I am delighted to take part in a movement that through the nomination and involvement of recognised topic experts and rigorous peer review, and backed by Oxford University Press, meets the challenges students, researchers, and the interested public face today when seeking informed, unbiased, and trustworthy information. Nowhere is such a project more vital or timely than on topics as culturally loaded and historically underrepresented, even suppressed, as gay pornography—or simply, gay porn. The study of gay porn overcame erasure and underrepresentation in the literature to thrive today as a vibrant subfield of porn studies, with its impact keenly felt in the wider humanities and social sciences as well—something that its inclusion in Oxford Research Encyclopedias and selection as a featured article is testament to».
Commercial, moving-image (initially, American) hardcore all-male pornography, otherwise known as gay pornography or gay porn, emerged in the 1970s when, for the first time, many of the cultural inhibitions and legal restrictions on explicit gay sexual content were swept away with the current of a sexual revolution—prompted in large part by the 1969 Stonewall riots. Straight varieties of hardcore pornography also entered mainstream American culture around this time, yet the gay variety came as part of a wider, gay sexual subcultural explosion of explicit homosexual representation and with a social history and narrative activism that laboured against a violent past and historical-present precedence for hidden- ness, prejudice, and criminalisation.
The entry, titled «Gay Pornography», acknowledges foundational essays from the 1980s— together with the contributions of academic journal thematic issues in the 2000s and 2010s—that helped shape, inspire, and move the gay porn studies subfield away from pathological perspectives and toward the critical mass of scholarship it enjoys today. The survey adopts a structure and method specifically designed by Dr Brennan to facilitate future updates. Written with the aim to be accessible for all interested in the topic (career scholars and those new to the topic akin), Dr Brennan uses thrusts and bulges as organisational categories, sorting scholarship on gay porn into eminent and emerging concerns across three key areas: text, industry, and audience dimensions of the topic, with scope to be updated.
«Through this dynamic survey I draw out eminent and emerging themes from across the literature», Dr Brennan said. «Crucially, allowance for future updates is built into its structure and method. Key themes can be added to this Oxford survey as new priorities emerge, and it can be expanded, or shifted even, with the ebb and flow of the gay porn studies’ agenda: should thrusts come to bulge or bulges lose impetus».
Additionally, «bareback» (the on-screen abandonment of the condom) and «gay-for-pay» (a gay-sex-strictly-for-remuneration fantasy and career construction/identity) are marked out for separate consideration in the survey as two profoundly dominant (and uniquely gay-aligned) conditions to which much of the subfield’s (relatively) recent flourishing can be attributed.
On the significance of this survey, Dr Brennan said: «I wrote this survey to capture something of gay porn now, with due acknowledgment to history, and because it was designed to be updated: the study of gay porn’s future, it is hoped, seems not only assured in the pages and online portals of Oxford University Press, but may be accounted for in subsequent updates as well».
