Steve Susoyev

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From Physique Pictoral to Pornhub, Jeffrey Escoffier’s New Book Charts The Way

This book about pornography—with 28 pages of endnotes, a colon in the title, and a $173 price tag on the hardcover edition—unapologetically identifies itself as an academic tome. Flipping through its charts and statistics, we might hear our own inner voice grumbling, Even queer fuckfilms have succumbed to the graphs of social scientists.

But, as with pornography itself, first impressions can be misleading. Sex, Society, and the Making of Pornography, at $28 for the eBook, is enlightening and even affordable. Its author, Jeffrey Escoffier, a founder of OutLook and director of Out/Write, a professor who has taught at Berkeley, Rutgers, and The New School and is now a researcher at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, avoids pedantry. His graphs, viewed in close focus, give us a rich view of the upheaval in global culture that has taken place since the nudist and bodybuilding magazines like Physique Pictorial, passed furtively from hand-to-hand among closeted men in the 1950s, giving way to Tom of Finland and the abundantly stuffed crotches of his models, and all that has followed since. 

“Perversions” and “Scripts” 

Escoffier’s book recounts an engaging history that culminates, after millennia, in the mainstreaming of modern hard-core porn—meaning, in his very specific definition, sexual imagery, particularly in videos, of explicit depictions of intercourse, including oral copulation. Escoffier notes that sex researchers of the 1920s, whose focus was primarily on married heterosexual couples, broke ground that later was deeply plowed by Alfred Kinsey, who began in the 1940s publishing the results of surveys that included homosexual feelings, fantasies, and behavior. He doesn’t mention Magnus “Max” Hirschfeld, the German doctor whose Institute for Sex Research, founded in 1919 in Berlin, was the first association in the modern world to promote homosexual and transgender rights. 

The author employs the words “perverse” and “perversion” in a way that might be off-putting to an LGBTQ audience. But he is openly gay himself, and no prude, and uses these words in context as a social scientist and historian. Escoffier is known, among many other things, for his earlier studies of “gay for pay” film actors wh6ose heterosexual orientation does not impede their sexual performance with men. He has examined with particular interest what he calls “the social conditions that enable heterosexually-identified men to turn in credible sexual performances in gay pornographic videos.”

Like “perversion,” the word “script” has a special meaning for Escoffier, who devotes most of the book’s attention to films featuring sex between men, and treats pornography as a vast screen on which all of our fantasies are projected. He writes boldly, “Sexual scripts are necessary at every stage of production and are the reason that people watch porn.” 

Such a broad assertion concerning people’s interest in porn risks neglecting the developments we see in amateur, do-it-yourself fuckbuddy videos, in which guys who obviously like and are attracted to each other are having fun—not posing or “performing” together. Amateur videos may prove to be a more reliable measure of what people want than statistical analyses of commercial video sales. Joe Gage, creator of rough-trade classics beginning with Kansas City Trucking Co. in 1976, commented in a 2007 Butt Magazine interview, when asked if he liked the work of other directors, “I like amateur porn the best, because it’s real. It’s real sex.”

Do-it-yourself

As is so often the case, LGBTQ people were at the forefront of a social upheaval that soon paid benefits to the entire world. Remember “Chat Rooms”? Maybe you don’t, but if you use any form of social media you are an heir to the slow, noisy, dial-up services that began in the early 1980s, patronized by gay men eager to hook up in a new, virtual way. Personal use of the Internet exploded as men learned to cruise without having to look their best—and, as the technology evolved and allowed them to share photos and videos, to create a new species of pornography. This new generation of do-it-yourself porn embraces various body types, ages, and racial groupings—not as fetish categories for commercial-porn keyword clicks, but as real-life guys doing what comes naturally.

Escoffier refers to the video audience as “spectators,” reinforcing the understanding of porn as a creation tightly controlled by producers who believe they know what the porn-consuming public wants. He nods to Pornhub as the world’s largest distributor of porn and notes that “video pornography on the Internet is not only a hugely popular form of entertainment, but also a body of knowledge about sex that is both a form of sex education as well as a self-help guide”—the modern pillow book. What he doesn’t mention is that the early growth of Pornhub was driven largely by non-commercial, amateur, DIY videos making Pornhub and other amateur sites like XHamster and @ment4us wildly profitable.

From the 1970s through the end of the last century, commercial studios refined and professionalized their product, catering to increasing numbers of fetishes, “perversions,” and interests, in slickly produced, high-quality, keyword-driven commodities. Long gone are the original black-and-white “Old Reliable” films of the early 1970s, which featured snarly, rough-trade types masturbating on camera, often on a familiar worn-out couch, chewing cigars and, occasionally, flipping off the viewer. Meanwhile, technology has allowed fuckbuddies to make quality video recordings of themselves and to post their videos online for anyone to enjoy. The production values are not as impressive, but the intimacy more than compensates.

The Object of Knowledge

But even this erudite observation is subject to reexamination: In a section near the end of Escoffier’s book, perhaps to atone for the statistics and graphs in earlier chapters, he quotes from reviews written by film critics who have had the opportunity to hire their favorite porn actors for live, in-the-room-together, sex. A film scholar studying PornHub and OnlyFans is likely to be able to find his favorites on RentMen. An enterprising performer/escort uses his recognized profile name everywhere, and posts his travel schedule months in advance.

These explicit reviews end the book on a good-humored note: “He was not Rick Gonzales the porn star… he was Rick Gonzales my LOVER for two hours and he just made love  to me.”

Andrew Holleran, in his 2015 essay “Notes on Porn,” commented that the occasional moment “when two men do make contact is more powerful than all the anonymous pistonlike fucking of ordinary porn films.” The three-page essay was one of the most often cited items ever to appear in the Gay and Lesbian Review Worldwide. Concerning the illusion furthered by porn that the viewer is, in Plato’s terms, experiencing “the object of knowledge,” Holleran wrote, “…you are as alone after sex with someone in a porn film as you were when you began. Depending on your age or temperament or circumstances, this may be a good or a bad thing.”

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Book Review: ‘Some Hell’ by Patrick Nathan

Many of us have sighed, shrugged, and explained to a well-meaning friend, “Oh, thanks for the recommendation, but I’m kind of done with fiction. I’ve gotten into reading [aviation history / comparative religion / cookbooks / insert nonfiction genre of interest].”

“But,” the friend insists, “it’s a debut LGBT coming-of-age novel!” That’s when we excuse ourselves to use the restroom, and climb out the window.

I’ll confess that I probably would not have chosen to read Some Hell, much less embraced this opportunity to review it, if I had not been familiar with the author’s nonfiction. Patrick Nathan is a thoughtful and provocative essayist, critic and interviewer whose work is reminiscent of Daniel Mendelsohn’s in Mendelsohn’s most generous moments. On the eighteenth anniversary of the 1999 massacre at Columbine High School, Full Stop carried Nathan’s essay “What Happens Next,” in which he addressed with incisive passion the National Rifle Association’s dominion over U.S. politicians. He suggested that we, the indolent consumers of reality-TV-style reportage, are complicit in the dozens of ensuing massacres. Among Nathan’s most multi-layered work is the 2016 personal essay “Parenthesis,” published at wordsinlight.org, concerning his grandfather’s obsession with his one-of-a-kind career—fashioning human dummies of wax and wood that were destined to be vaporized in U.S. government nuclear tests during the Cold War. In December, at the site Literary Hub, Nathan eloquently took on the Trump presidency: “Aside from expressing genuine compassion or indicating a shred of intelligence, there’s nothing the president can say, at this point, that should shock anyone.”

Some Hell is a character-inspired novel whose plot, when one reads recitations of its events, sounds as if it could overwhelm its characters. Accordingly, I find myself avoiding, more than usual, spoilers that might give away the story. The characters hold their own through the book’s many surprises. The writing is compelling, the characters heartbreakingly believable, and, although their circumstances can sound astonishing when described out of context, they are very much like the circumstances that have challenged, tempered, hardened, and sustained me and people I love.

“Coming-of-age novel,” the label generally being applied to the book in publicity materials and press reports, unfortunately will constrain readers’ expectations. Yes, Some Hell tells the story of an American middle-schooler. His name is Colin, and when we encounter him he is dealing with the universal pains of adolescence. He experiences familiar hardships including a crush on his best friend, sibling adversities, and a less-than-nurturing school environment. But many of Colin’s challenges are far from predictable, and his ways of dealing with those challenges even less so. He is a boy with a rich interior life, and the novel is driven by his growing alertness to the worlds around him and within him. His age places him squarely in Young Adult fiction territory, but the widely acknowledged if unwritten rules of that genre—particularly those governing explicit sex, underage sex, and kinky sex—disqualify him. Some Hell declines to conform to the rules of any established literary category.

Wisely, Nathan chose to give us a close view of Colin without writing in first person. We do not watch the world exclusively from Colin’s point of view; his mother, Diane, also maintains an active interior life to which we have access. When we are inside Colin’s head, we are not trapped with pubescent cynicism or petulance. We find room to understand, particularly when he does not, the difference between his posturing and his yearnings. His fantasies animate him even as he recognizes that he is using them to fuel denial: he approaches a pathologically isolated family member and we learn that for Colin, “It was easy to pretend he was rescuing stolen plans or launch code, and he slunk along the wall to avoid unseen trip wires. You couldn’t sneak up on the evil anarchist by strolling out in the open.”

Shifts in point of view can be jarring in the hands of an awkward novice. Nathan is skillful and very conscious of what he is doing when he concludes a chapter in Colin’s point of view with the single paragraph: “She could protect him.” The following chapter’s opening paragraph, “She couldn’t protect him,” launches a dark passage in Diane’s point of view. When Colin’s and Diane’s perspectives intersect, we read episodes that reveal the complexity of their relationship: “Why hadn’t he understood, until now, that when she waltzed around the house, reached for things like a ballet dancer, sang half of what she said, and closed her eyes with each deep breath, his mother was at her most depressed?”

Colin watches himself, sometimes with great skepticism, and learns more than he wants to know. Probably his greatest lesson is the universal one that each of us must learn from personal experience: that hell is our own creation. Like most of us, Colin tries to believe the surrounding culture’s platitudes about self-knowledge being a tool of growth and a step toward actualization, or at least a pivot away from despair. But the more intimately Colin comes to know himself, the more excruciating the torment he can customize for himself. Without asking us to suspend disbelief, Nathan has made bold decisions that push Colin’s hell to the borders of magical realism.

Nathan writes beautifully, without sentimentality. When we think a maudlin moment may have arrived, he yanks our chain: “His prayers sounded like questions, lilting up at the end as though God might simply pat him on the head. There was too much to worry about, his worry itself a growing thing—an infected organ inflamed and toxic.”

Notably absent from the book is any attempt to entertain the reader with humor. If we laugh, we laugh with wry recognition. Diane visits a therapist who is comically out of his depth—while she speaks of profound trauma, he compulsively clicks a pen, which he hovers over a note pad, and makes awkward, inappropriate jokes. “Just put down the fucking pen and listen to me, she wanted to say.” But she returns for follow-up sessions and laughs at herself for feeling that an ineffectual rookie therapist is just about right for her. Her son recalls a compassionate gesture from a schoolmate and we read, “Colin remembered her eyes, how they darted away and came back to him like fish hovering around a hook.” The image is funny in a jarring way, but many readers will remember agonizing during adolescence—With these feelings toward other people, am I a predator?—and relate to the inability of a person asking such questions to accept comfort.

Nathan introduces the effects of private, internal catastrophe with a detailed account of the devastation caused by a 1960 Chilean earthquake—still the most powerful seismic event ever recorded. This unsettling image would make its point even if it appeared as a random reference to generic cataclysm. But in his painstaking way, Nathan soon lets us know that one of Colin’s enduring memories, from his kindergarten days, is of televised images of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami that killed over 230,000 people in fourteen countries. The boy studies earthquakes to better understand the inner turmoil he deals with each day. In his magically realistic style, Nathan returns to the theme long after the reader has set it aside it as a dramatic metaphor.

More clearly than anything else I have encountered, Some Hell shows a person growing into the eroticized experience of punishment, fear, humiliation, and even pain. In Justine and One Hundred Twenty Days of Sodom, the foundation texts of S&M, which fell into my lap when I was about Colin’s age, the Marquis de Sade wrote entirely from the point of view of the dom. He never revealed what’s in it for the sub, except the gratification of knowing that the dom has been satisfied. At 15, I shelved this among the many mysteries that would reconcile themselves to my understanding as I grew older. When I re-read de Sade a few decades later, the mystery remained intact. Edmund White, in his 2006 memoir My Lives, plunged into this territory in 356 overwhelmingly explicit pages. Nathan takes us deeply into this private space, credibly and with empathy, and weaves the essentials into a few well-placed, to-the-point paragraphs—“…stories on the Internet that could waste an afternoon. What boys were for, he was learning from these stories: kidnapping, controlling, shaming, binding, tormenting, enslaving, and, in the end, rewarding.”

In similarly taboo territory for a Young Adult novel, a teacher grooms a young student for a sexual relationship. The boy haltingly accepts the grooming because he is lonely, curious, and horny, and reflects that the teacher “wasn’t dangerous. Here was a man who could tell you everything, if you knew how to ask. He could show you everything.” The chilling nature of these developments reveals itself in the boy’s rumination on what he “made” the teacher do, as if his youthful curiosity rendered him a perpetrator.

By the way, in case it’s not too late, please do not read anything about Some Hell outside of this review—not even the liner notes! The tagline on the publisher’s website promises “A wrenching and layered debut novel about a [spoiler] teen’s coming of age in the aftermath of [enormous spoiler.]” For me, this kind of advance material made reading the book’s early chapters difficult; instead of settling in with the narrator’s voice and becoming acquainted with the characters, I found myself waiting for a very specific, very big event.

Once I had encountered that event, I went back and re-started the book at page one. This constitutes high praise from a reader who often claims, “I’m kind of done with fiction.”

 

Some Hell
By Patrick Nathan
Graywolf Press
Paperback, 9781555977986, 296 pp.
February 2018

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Book Review: ‘Beijing Comrades’ by Bei Tong

Beijing Comrades is a beautifully written love story that features characters who are fully developed, complex, and believably human. (A reviewer must sometimes be forgiven for coming straight to the point.) The book is remarkable for this realistically rendered romance, its explicit sexual encounters, and the elaborate, heartbreaking power-plays between the characters. Handong Chen, a powerful businessman in late-1980s China, and Lan Yu, the bright but naïve architecture student whom Handong tries to control like a concubine, remind us of people we have known. We feast on a rich slice of Chinese culture while watching these men grow over a ten-year period. And we submit to the suspenseful drama of political upheaval surrounding the 1989 Tian’anmen Square massacre, which plays a vital role in the love story.

A beautiful tale, well told, can be sabotaged if it arrives in the reader’s life embedded in a book that the world considers socially, politically, and culturally “important.” How many of us have avoided writers like Colm Tóibín or Virginia Woolf because of their reputations as—Yawn!—“important authors,” only to stumble eventually across wonderfully accessible books like The Story of the Night or Mrs. Dalloway?

Thus, I have been determined to introduce this review with what is truly important to me—that Beijing Comrades is a good read, an inspiring and tender but unpredictable love story, rendered very gracefully into English. But now I must acknowledge that this—the only English translation since the book’s original 1998 online publication, a feature film adaptation, and two print editions—does indeed happen to be an “important” publishing event. Beijing Comrades is both a valuable piece of global gay history and a political phenomenon.

With the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, the Chinese Communist Party adopted the Soviet template and treated homosexuality as a symptom of bourgeois decadence. Gay people were harshly punished during the 1960s national purge of the Cultural Revolution. Vaguely defined “hooliganism,” laws employed biblical-sounding condemnations of same-sex acts and equated them with prostitution. These laws were repealed in 1997, but many LGBT people in China continue to live in fear of blackmail and ruin. Ancestor-worship officially ended in China in 1949, together with the abolition of institutional religion. But ancient tradition, which continues to dictate that a child’s primary duty is to provide heirs, embitters many families against their gay offspring, and causes them grief for these children—who, according to the tradition, will grow old with no one to care for them.

Gore Vidal admonished us to remember that “sex is politics,” and Beijing Comrades starkly brings home this simple dynamic. Handong and Lan Yu must navigate the treacherous waters where money and love crash on the rocks of a society newly acknowledging the realities of wealth and inequality.

Handong’s exalted social position tragically blinds him to the possibility of loving another man in any way that isn’t primarily physical, emotionally exploitative, and founded on financial inequality. Lan Yu, his young lover, is determined to maintain his autonomy and self-respect, and must resist the older man’s attempts to buy his love, even as his own love for Handong deepens.

Handong narrates the book, and thus controls how we see him. He is a man accustomed to carefully managing his relationships and everything else he touches. He lets us see his control begin to crack, when his love for Lan Yu surprises and even frightens him, and our understanding of his panic catches us off guard. Unlike most control freaks in literature, he earns our empathy. In Lolita, Humbert’s self-awareness appalls us. Here, Handong’s gives us sad hope. He describes to us how he ridiculed Lan Yu’s political fervor, then agonized over the fate of the students at Tian’anmen.

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The Chinese government continues today to suppress any mention, online or in print, of the events of June 4, 1989, when troops opened fire on unarmed student pro-democracy demonstrators. By official tally, the soldiers killed 291 demonstrators—but, according to observers, as many as 3,000 people died. Beijing Comrades covers the Tian’anmen massacre in personal detail. What first caught the attention of the West were televised images of young people erecting a 30-foot statue from styrofoam and plaster—the “Goddess of Democracy,” who bore a striking resemblance to the Statue of Liberty. We watched those students camped in Beijing’s central square, and in horror, on live television, we saw them being beaten and shot. The TV broadcasts abruptly stopped. In those days before the internet and camera phones, reporters used fax machines to send reports to worldwide news organizations. We learned that the bodies of the martyred students were piled together, soaked with gasoline, and burned.

Among the many things we take for granted in an open society is the freedom to pursue notoriety. When an author publishes under a pseudonym, our Western drive for recognition is confused. Why does someone go to the trouble of writing a book only to put an assumed name on it?

The author’s pen-name, Bei Tong, is a shortened version of “Beijing Tongzhi”—incorporating the word for “comrade” that roughly translates as “same aspiration” and, increasingly, is used to mean “gay,” in the way that we in the U.S. use “family” to make the same implication. Whoever the real Bei Tong may be, he or she is not playing coy like Stephen King and other successful Western writers who launch fresh franchises under their pen names. Beijing Comrades may be a collaborative effort, the work of a collective called “Queer Comrades,” whose website announces that it is “China’s only non-profit LGBT webcast.” The website of the book’s English-language publisher, The Feminist Press at City University of New York, explains that “the pseudonymous author’s real-world identity has been a subject of debate since the story was first published on a gay Chinese website over a decade ago.”

The book’s title, like the author’s pen-name, works as code. In the way that “Boston Marriage” and “Fellow Traveler” have long held special meanings for select U.S. readers, meanings obscure to the uninitiated, “Beijing Comrades” refers to an understanding of “homosexual lovers” in contemporary Chinese culture.

The book’s translator, Scott E. Myers, traces in his introductory note the twists and turns of Beijing Comrade’s online Chinese-language edition, the two subsequent Chinese print editions, and the 2001 film Lan Yu, which was based on the online edition of the book and honored at China’s first LGBTQ film festival. Rather than settle on a single edition of the book for his translation, Myers carefully culled material from the original online manuscript, with its raw sexuality, while drawing on the maturity of the characters that he found in the two print versions, from which the author had removed some explicit sex scenes possibly in the hope of winning government approval for publication. Finally, he included new material that the author submitted to him only for the English-language edition—presumably through email, because Myers claims not to know whether Bei Tong is a man or a woman. For this reader, the translator’s devotion was well worth his considerable effort.

The book, then, is a record of social upheaval and evolution, and Myers shows us its vital place in Chinese culture and history. But let us not forget that if the book were poorly written, and told the story of unbelievable characters engaged in inconceivable endeavors, it would be tedious to read, however “important” a role it might play in the history of LGBT rights in China. Instead, it is a book from which we can learn much about Chinese culture even while we identify with its human themes. The book educates us, certainly, but it also entertains, moves, and thrills us.

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In an erudite afterword, professor Petrus Liu of Singapore’s Yale-NUS College analyzes the book’s “cultural politics” and its role in defining an entire generation. He considers Beijing Comrades, with its “complex cultural fantasy of the separability of human connectedness (gay or straight) from economic entanglements,” a “refreshing work that covers uncharted territory in Chinese queer writing.”

Analyzes of this sort surely will help guarantee that Beijing Comrades will be read and discussed, and even taught in cross-cultural queer studies courses, years from now. But the universal themes, and the deeply personal rendering of the story, endear the characters to us in ways quite distinct from the book’s importance as a monument of literature and queer theory.

– See more at: http://www.lambdaliterary.org/reviews/03/13/beijing-comrades-by-bei-tong/#sthash.JyKZYCOu.dpuf