Pork to the Future

Steven Ruszczycky (bio)

A review of Florêncio, João. Bareback Porn, Porous Masculinities, Queer Futures: The Ethics of Becoming-Pig Routledge, 2020.

It is difficult to overstate the impact that the HIV/AIDS epidemic has had on gay erotic culture. Whether one experienced life in the bathhouses before its outbreak or came of age in the chastened era of “safe sex” and antiretroviral therapy, for the past forty years HIV has served as the principal risk contouring not only gay men’s pleasures and intimacies but also their politics. However, as João Florêncio argues in his fascinating study Bareback Porn, Porous Masculinities, Queer Futures: The Ethics of Becoming-Pig (2020), the rise of new antiretroviral therapies, which effectively prevent the transmission of HIV between serodiscordant sexual partners, has catalyzed a significant change in that history. Comprising the second entry in Routledge’s new Masculinity, Sex, and Popular Culture series, which explores masculinities at the conjunction of texts and practices, Florêncio’s book provides a sophisticated account of the gay masculinities now proliferating in the bars, backrooms, and pornographies of Europe and North America, an account of erotic practices that echo the relational experiments that characterized gay public sex during the 1970s. While facing significant criticism both from national cultures that prefer their gay men sexlessly monogamous and from gay leaders who view pig sex as self-indulgent backsliding, gay “pig” masculinities, as Florêncio terms them, have enabled forms of queer world-making that harbor a potential for ethical and political transformation. Far from idealistic, Florêncio is in fact well aware that gay pig masculinities are inextricable from a mode of modern biopower that operates at the level not just of bodies and populations but also of hormones and molecules. Still, as he passionately and often convincingly argues, it’s in the pig’s creative use of antiviral drugs, and not in the screeds of Larry Kramer or the white papers of Mayor Pete, that many gay men have found what HIV and the phobic politics it inspired threatened to deny them: a queerer path to the future.

So, what exactly is a pig? A pig is what a pig does, and what a pig does is revel in excess. More precisely, and unlike other subcultural subjectivities that entail the acquisition of appropriate apparel or a particular body shape, one never simply “is” a pig the way one might be a twink or a bear; instead, one engenders gay pig masculinity through erotic practices using those areas of the body most intensely policed by shame and disgust. As Florêncio succinctly puts it: “gay ‘pigs’ ground their masculinity in their holes” (79). Accordingly, the pig’s erotic repertoire includes not only rough fucking and fisting, but also—and perhaps more importantly—the ingestion of recreational drugs and the exchange of body fluids, including piss, shit, and cum. Yet gay pig masculinity isn’t about the egoinflating pleasures of pissing on others, as normative masculinities might have it; instead, it treats such practices as a means of self-augmentation that repeatedly overruns the imaginary boundaries of the body. Pig sex thus exemplifies the flows of Guy Hocquenghem’s deoedipalized “groups,” for which the anus and anal pleasure supplant castration as the privileged metaphor for the production of subjectivity (Hocquenghem 110). Put differently, gay pig masculinities eschew the phallus and its false promise of coherent identity for the disorienting uncertainties of becoming. In that regard, a pig’s work is never done; there’s always another stranger to welcome, another hole to penetrate, and another load to take. It’s in the practice of such a radical openness to the world that Florêncio locates an ethics of porosity that recalls and revitalizes the experiments in erotic relationality conducted among queers during the 1970s. While conditioned by the biopolitical management of HIV, becoming-pig enacts, borrowing from Michel Foucault, an “aesthetic of existence” that makes trouble for processes of normalization and control (qtd. in Florêncio 91).

As one might expect given Florêncio’s background in art history and visual studies, the book’s archive consists primarily of moving-image pornography, yet it distinguishes itself from other works of porn studies by reading those videos in relation to a range of other materials, including Renaissance sculpture, avant-garde photography and video, pornographic novels, and classified ads. In a sense, Florêncio’s approach is as fluid as the subject he investigates, but this makes it exciting. The growth of porn studies as a field out of feminist film and media studies has meant that porn scholars tend to privilege moving images over other kinds of media, yet Florêncio shows that their histories cannot be so easily disentangled. Still, his study is not primarily historical but instead draws heavily on continental theorists, including Hocquenghem, Paul Preciado, and Peter Sloterdijk, whose efforts to think beyond a subject discreetly bound by its material embodiment inform his account of porn-mediated pig masculinities. In that regard, the book has more in common with the kinds of theory-heavy critiques that characterize much of European porn studies, including the work of Susanna Paasonen, Peter Rehberg, and Tim Stüttgen, than with the historical and sociological work more frequently produced by US-based scholars, many of whom, including Heather Berg, Angela Jones, and Mireille Miller-Young, are less interested in porn’s consumption than its production. However, Florêncio’s book also draws occasionally on interviews with subcultural participants and, less frequently, on autoethnographic accounts regarding his interactions with the subculture, and so the book delightfully eludes easy categorization in terms of the differences that may characterize porn studies’ various regionally and disciplinarily bound discourse communities.

While the book’s omnivorous approach to its subject may irritate some readers, I consider it one of its principal virtues, particularly as it regards Florêncio’s analysis of gay pig masculinities as an international phenomenon stretching across North America and many parts of Europe. Much in the same way that scholars continue to privilege moving-image porn, they have also focused their attention on US pornographies and the material conditions informing their production. This is beginning to change for a number of reasons, including that proliferating internet and mobile digital technologies have decentered US-based studios as the primary means through which porn is made and distributed. The journal Porn Studies has also helped to highlight the ways in which porn, as editors Feona Attwood and Clarissa Smith observe, “[refuses] to be contained within strict cultural and social boundaries even if [it is] located within particular geo-economic regions” (5). In both its approach to its subject matter and in drawing on the work of scholars based in North America, Australia, and Europe, Florêncio’s book contributes to the goal that Attwood and Smith identify for their journal, yet it does not exactly herald a transnational turn for the field. For example, it provides little sense of how gay pig masculinities might depend on not only pharmacological mediation but also on the globalizing forces of the internet and the markets that have helped to establish places like Berlin as premier destinations for avant-garde erotic culture. That’s not exactly the question the book sets out to answer, but it’s nonetheless worth asking in order to encourage porn scholars to develop critical frameworks that may better account for the ways porn not only depicts flows but also itself flows—or doesn’t flow—across particular borders.

In highlighting the various ways in which pornographers have represented pig masculinity on screen, Florêncio’s book makes a number of significant interventions. Perhaps the most notable is its effort to displace bareback sex and the attendant risks of HIV transmission as the central problematic of gay porn studies. Of course, it’s possible to find excellent studies of gay pornography that have little to do with the virus, but the bareback subculture and its pornographic representation have dominated the subfield for roughly the past decade, giving rise to monographs, special journal issues, and at least one edited collection on the subject.¹ This focus is indebted to the practice’s inherently controversial status, and also reflects the influence of Tim Dean’s Unlimited Intimacy: Reflections on the Subculture of Barebacking (2009), which challenges the sociological and psychological literature that explained gay men’s deliberate abandonment of condoms in terms of shame or the failures of safer sex activism. In the era of Treatment-as-Prevention (TasP) and Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP), Dean has updated his reading of barebacking to argue that what is now simply called raw sex engenders fantasies of unadulterated communion between subjects that troublingly elide their biopolitical mediation (Dean). Florêncio, by comparison, argues that such claims downplay technology’s potential for queer world-making projects. The difference between the two is a matter of emphasis. Both persons living with HIV and practitioners of pig sex remain vulnerable to intense stigmatization, often within the same communities in which they practice. That point is clearest in a fascinating interview in which a Berlin-based pig describes to Florêncio the mix of pride and shame he feels when exhibiting his anal prolapse during fisting orgies. Still, the crucial point here is that HIV transmission is no longer the principal problem contouring gay men’s lives. Under the current biopolitical regime, dimensions of such erotic practices once overshadowed by HIV can now become available for thinking.

On that point, however, there is at least one subject in the book that feels a little too familiar. Florêncio devotes much space to the work and personality of pornographer Paul Morris, the notorious head of Treasure Island Media. Following Dean’s Unlimited Intimacy, which introduced the pornographer to many academics unfamiliar with his oeuvre, Morris has become an object of fascination in gay porn studies for his studio’s rejection of the safer sex protocols that shaped studio-produced porn for much of the 1980s and 1990s. The commitment to raw sex exemplifies the studio’s renegade ethos, which it proudly proclaims on its website, marketing materials, and varieties of TIM-branded merchandise, including a recently announced line of couture leather and fetish clothing (Adams). Morris is a significant figure in the history of pornography, yet Florêncio turns Morris into a modern-day philosopher who embeds big ideas in his porn for those clever enough to extract them. Morris is smart and charismatic, and he’s also a shrewd entrepreneur. Pig sex may thwart the “capitalisation of identity that [has] come to define neoliberalism” (Florêncio 6–7), but what are we to make of its capture and mediation by an international porn studio? It’s on this question that Preciado’s notion of pharmacopornographic power seems underutilized, insofar as the term diagnoses not just biopower but also “biocapitalism” (Preciado 54). In order to understand the political potentials of gay pig masculinities, then, we need a clearer sense of their relation both to the masculine subjectivity that provides the ground for neoliberal politics and to the mode of capitalism for which pleasure, intoxication, and the production of subjectivity are key elements.

How might porn scholars in general be a bit more piggish about their work? My misgivings about the status accorded to Morris aside, Florêncio’s book can serve as a model, albeit an imperfect one, for the rest of us. Like pig sex, porn draws one’s attention to thresholds, as Attwood and Smith suggest, and it tends to generate the most consternation in those moments when it threatens to overrun the boundaries that contain it and give it stable definition. One of the most basic yet important insights of porn studies is that porn isn’t a single thing; hence, the frequent tendency among porn scholars to speak not of pornography but of pornographies. That pluralization entails a recognition of different forms and histories that may or may not overlap with each other. A further compounding issue, as Anirban K. Baishya and Darshana S. Mini explain, is that the concepts, methods, and histories developed within Euro-American porn studies may require significant modification—when not abandoned altogether—before they can be useful to thinking about the pornography and erotic culture produced elsewhere in the world. Porn scholars’ fascination with US pornographies may be as much a matter of the global hegemony of US culture as of the styles of reasoning that inform Euro-American scholarship. “Translating porn studies for each historical and cultural location,” Baishya and Mini argue, “must start from places of contact and exchange, mutations and borrowings” (8). I sense potential common ground between their description of translation as a mediated, self-reflective, and multi-directional flow of ideas and Florêncio’s ethics of porosity derived from the joyful and sociogenic fluid exchanges of pig sex. If one does it right, then one should not expect to walk away from such exchanges unchanged or uncontaminated by the ideas of others.

On that last point, one of the most interesting yet inchoate points in Florêncio’s book is the extent to which gay pig masculinities are irreducible to the kinds of embodied subjects historically defined as “gay.” Most of the bodies described in Florêncio’s study remain largely codable as cis gay male, yet by my lights one of the book’s most interesting examples of gay pig masculinity appears in Fuck Holes 3 (2015), which stands out as “the first Treasure Island Media production to feature not only cis gay men but also a trans and a cis woman” (79). While a big deal for TIM, queer porn producers have been producing videos that feature a diverse array of bodies for some time, as Florêncio notes, yet the decision not to engage further with that archive seems a missed opportunity. That thought reoccurred to me when reading Florêncio’s subsequent explication of Tom of Finland clones in the Catacombs, the famous San Francisco sex club devoted to fisting. That space, Florêncio observes, “[brought] gay men together and catalyz[ed] forms of intimacy and more or less lasting bonds that cannot be fully captured by the normative discourse of ‘rights’ that has come to dominate LGBTQ+ politics since the 1990s” (134). However, while gay men may have comprised the bulk of the Catacombs’ patrons, butch lesbians and trans men also participated in its erotic culture. The elision of just how un-clonelike the Catacombs could be makes it harder to grasp one of the more crucial points of Florêncio’s analysis: that pig sex and gay pig masculinity are not synonymous with gay men.

One of the more important pornographer-cum-documentarians of that history is not Paul Morris but the writer Patrick Califia. For example, Califia’s short story “Holes” recollects his experience as a butch dyke cruising the Catacombs only to wind up fisting a hunky deaf muscle queen named Jim. The unusual pairing forms the basis for Califia’s meditation on the queer intimacy produced during a night working his fist into Jim’s welcoming asshole. “I was amazed yet again by the power and generosity of an unabashed bottom,” Califia recounts. “I’ve never understood how someone can do that, simply let go and invite me into their psyche and their orifices” (250). At the story’s conclusion, Califia mourns not only the loss of her friend to AIDS but also the loss of the erotic culture that brought the two together: “The Catacombs has been closed for decades. And I find that it is pretty difficult for me to go looking for another grinning, good-natured sex pig to wear for a bracelet” (256). Jim’s death is unredeemable, but erotic pig culture may survive, albeit radically transformed in the ways that Florêncio describes. Yet if one were to find in that history a means to “build a new speculative ethics of co-habitation” (Florêncio 162), then such a project may be best served by devoting time and attention to practices of masculinity that allow very different kinds of subjects to share with one another not only space but also their bodies.² While there are moments when Florêncio’s book feels a little too familiar, there is much to be excited about, including a valuable framework and a useful set of conceptual tools with which to take porn studies and masculinity studies into the next decade.

Steven Ruszczycky is Assistant Professor in the department of English and a member of the Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. He is the author of Vulgar Genres: Gay teaching faculty in the department of Women’s, Gender, and Queer Studies at the California Pornographic Writing and Contemporary Fiction (University of Chicago Press, 2021).

Footnotes

1. For an example of the influence of Dean’s Unlimited Intimacy and a sampling of the current conversation regarding barebacking, see Varghese.

2. In making this suggestion, I’m inspired by the work of the trans theorist Nicholas Clarkson.

Works Cited

• Adams, J. C. “Treasure Island, Spitfire Leather Launch Fetish Clothing Collection.” XBiz.com, 30 Apr. 2021, https://www.xbiz.com/news/258890/treasure-island-spitfireleather-launch-fetish-clothing-collection. Accessed 31 May 2021.
• Attwood, Feona, and Clarissa Smith. “Porn Studies: An Introduction.” Porn Studies, vol. 1, no. 1–2, 2014, pp. 1–6. Taylor & Francis Online. doi:10.1080/23268743.2014.887308. Accessed 31 May 2021.
• Baishya, Anirban K. and Darshana S. Mini. “Translating Porn Studies: Lessons from the Vernacular,” Porn Studies, vol. 7, no. 1, 2020, pp. 2–12. Taylor & Francis Onlinedoi:10.1080/23268743.2019.1632540. Accessed 31 May 2021.
• Califia, Patrick. “Holes.” Hard Men, Alyson Books, 2004, pp. 242–56.
• Clarkson, Nicholas. “Sexing Trans Theory.” National Women’s Studies Association Conference, San Francisco, CA, November 14–17, 2019.
• Dean, Tim. “Mediated Intimacies: Raw Sex, Truvada, and the Biopolitics of Chemoprophylaxis.” Sexualities, vol. 18, no. 1–2, 2015, pp. 224–246, Sage Journals. Accessed 31 May 2021.
• Hocquenghem, Guy. Homosexual Desire. Translated by Daniella Dangoor, Duke UP, 2006.
• Preciado, Paul (Beatriz). Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era. Translated by Bruce Benderson, The Feminist Press, 2013.
• Varghese, Ricky, editor. Raw: PrEP, Pedagogy, and the Politics of Barebacking. U of Regina P, 2019.