Salon | Letters to the editor

_______________SNEAK PEEKS: GAY PORN BOOKS BY DANIEL REITZ (12/05/97)

Daniel Reitz's review of three books about gay pornography reveals the usual moralistic posturing and outright misstatement of fact to shore up prissy arguments. I'm no student of porn, but let me have my say, please:
First, his opening statement about "Boogie Nights" is just wrong. The film is "loosely based" on the life of pansexual porn actor John Holmes and he certainly was a (macrophallic) star quite independent of the gender relations Reitz describes. I find this misstatement irritating, since it sets up the predictable (if hiply drawn) diatribe about exploitation and shallowness that follows.
So, may I borrow Reitz's own use of the word "idiocy"?
Amid the idiocy Reitz inflicts upon us to reveal himself only a shade bluer than your average puritan is this astonishing statement: "The porn world is the only industry where you can be famous, lusted after and recognized, yet still be the object of contempt." This would be news to, just for starters, Bill Clinton. This would be news to practically every icon of popular culture.
He finds it "surprising" that Scott O'Hara, a sex revolutionary and provocateur, exhibits "dexterity with language." (Indeed. We all know that too much sex makes you stupid.) He dismisses Joey Stefano's life as "pointless to begin with." Chi Chi LaRue is written off as a ridiculous drag queen. Embarrassingly, he remarks that these three books about gay porn -- books he is reviewing at length -- are not "literature."
By the final sentence Reitz explicitly reveals his puritanical sentiment: "All three books make a case for the argument that when sex is the all-consuming way of life, sometimes there's not much life going on around the sex."
Bullshit. The three books -- like the millions of pornographic self-portraits of average people on the Internet -- demonstrate how natural this form of expression is. Pornography is not pathology. It is neither, in the liberal argument, a symptom of repression nor, in the conservative one, a sign of moral erosion. It is a spontaneous imaging of the erotic imagination, not necessarily artful or "literate," though it can be.
It is a great curiosity to me that gay sexuality's raunchier or more radical expressions have lately come under attack by prissy gay critics. They quite literally assume the roles once held by sensationalistic hetero columnists. I have no idea if Reitz is gay but I suspect so -- and it alarms me that I say so on the basis of his prissiness instead of any open celebration of the ways gay men have kept alive a long tradition of the erotic radical.
-- Cliff Bostock
Atlanta, Ga.
SALON | Dec. 10, 1997

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_______________SNEAK PEEKS: GAY PORN BOOKS BY DANIEL REITZ (12/05/97)
	Daniel Reitz's review of three books about gay pornography reveals the usual moralistic posturing and outright misstatement of fact to shore up prissy arguments. I'm no student of porn, but let me have my say, please: First, his opening statement about "Boogie Nights" is just wrong. The film is "loosely based" on the life of pansexual porn actor John Holmes and he certainly was a (macrophallic) star quite independent of the gender relations Reitz describes. I find this misstatement irritating, since it sets up the predictable (if hiply drawn) diatribe about exploitation and shallowness that follows. So, may I borrow Reitz's own use of the word "idiocy"? Amid the idiocy Reitz inflicts upon us to reveal himself only a shade bluer than your average puritan is this astonishing statement: "The porn world is the only industry where you can be famous, lusted after and recognized, yet still be the object of contempt." This would be news to, just for starters, Bill Clinton. This would be news to practically every icon of popular culture. He finds it "surprising" that Scott O'Hara, a sex revolutionary and provocateur, exhibits "dexterity with language." (Indeed. We all know that too much sex makes you stupid.) He dismisses Joey Stefano's life as "pointless to begin with." Chi Chi LaRue is written off as a ridiculous drag queen. Embarrassingly, he remarks that these three books about gay porn -- books he is reviewing at length -- are not "literature." By the final sentence Reitz explicitly reveals his puritanical sentiment: "All three books make a case for the argument that when sex is the all-consuming way of life, sometimes there's not much life going on around the sex." Bullshit. The three books -- like the millions of pornographic self-portraits of average people on the Internet -- demonstrate how natural this form of expression is. Pornography is not pathology. It is neither, in the liberal argument, a symptom of repression nor, in the conservative one, a sign of moral erosion. It is a spontaneous imaging of the erotic imagination, not necessarily artful or "literate," though it can be. It is a great curiosity to me that gay sexuality's raunchier or more radical expressions have lately come under attack by prissy gay critics. They quite literally assume the roles once held by sensationalistic hetero columnists. I have no idea if Reitz is gay but I suspect so -- and it alarms me that I say so on the basis of his prissiness instead of any open celebration of the ways gay men have kept alive a long tradition of the erotic radical. -- Cliff Bostock Atlanta, Ga. SALON \| Dec. 10, 1997