ABSTRACT
Video pornography works in two ways. First, it serves to validate and legitimate homosexuality to the viewer. Second, by documenting the sexual and erotic trends and practices of gay men, pornography serves as a form of historiography. In gay male video’s first heyday, all levels of gay male experience were pornographic material. Gay pornography also fell victim to this same trend of homophobic homoerotica. The performers, especially the straight-identified ones, and the directors, successfully replicated the mainstream norm. Beyond the practice of man-to-man sex there is another vital aspect of pornographic representations of the gay male. The sexual act is one of the most important ways in which homosexuality can make itself visible. Pornography practices this theory, at the expense of heterosexism and the social myth of gender. The fact that gay men are becoming more and more sexually self-reliant is one of the consequences of the Acquired immune deficiency syndrome epidemic.
