ABSTRACT
In Chapter 8, the author argues that gay men’s pornography presents Black and white sexuality as necessarily separate spaces, through performance bifurcation and racial essentialism; that is, it positions Black and white men’s gendered racial characteristics as mutually exclusive and innate. The performances of Black and white men in gay porn diverge starkly by race, particularly in terms of sexual desirability. These divergences dichotomize Black and white gay identities by emphasizing or deemphasizing racial visibility. One of the clearest traditions through which gay men’s pornography bifurcates Black and white masculinity is by making Black men’s genitals hypervisible. Through such discourses, gay pornography works to solidify a perspective of irreconcilable difference between Black and white men. Moreover, this dichotomization essentializes Blackness and whiteness by linking race with long-standing gender archetypes regarding sexual behavior. For instance, Black men are almost always penetrating partners (“tops”) while white men are penetrated (“bottoms”), a setup that mimics the gendered assumptions of agency in heterosexual relationships. Furthermore, pornographic performances, and evaluations of these performances, have racially distinct focuses. Producers and consumers of gay porn are much more attentive to technique, occupation, hairiness, and age in non-ebony versus ebony videos. In this way, it seems that whiteness allows for more variation in pornographic norms. Whatever the activity, white commenters assign blanket sexual characteristics to participants of color based on preexisting ideas about the sexual behaviors supposedly endemic to their racial communities. Though femininity was frowned upon in non-ebony porn, it is expressly condemned in sex between Black men because, the author argues, it disrupts the continual attempt to de-gay sex between Black men, in preservation of the “dark phallus” and “missing link” fantasies.
