ABSTRACT The often-told Buck Angel bio is that of a female-to-male transsexual who became a ground-breaking and award-winning porn star, documentary producer, sex educator, commentator, dating site host, and entrepreneur. Such a bio is tantalizing and inevitably explains ongoing cultural fascination: Angel has a high public profile and strong following on social media. More interesting than the facts of his bio, however, are his contributions to understanding sexual cultures. Drawing on Angel’s own remarks as well as the many thousand words spilled analyzing them, I explore the relationship between Angel and trans discourse, as well as, more broadly, with contemporary gender and sexuality debates. I begin with a brief discussion of Angel as an ‘expert’, and as a man, and then examine his ‘man with a pussy’ brand. I discuss his contributions to creating the genre of transmasculine porn, and I examine the ways that his bodily display has been interpreted. I explore debates that Angel has become embroiled in, including those around language, biology, and trans children, and I end with a discussion of the tensions around his desire to be an elder to a community which he often exhibits disdain for.

ABSTRACT In 2014, the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University received 3600 contact sheets from Andy Warhol’s Minox 35EL camera, charting the full range of his black-and-white photography from 1976 until his death in 1987. A remarkable subset of the sheets capture explicit gay sexual activity, most shot for Warhol’s late-1970s Torsos and Sex Parts series. I provide a history and visual analysis of these pornographic images, many of which star Warhol’s friend, artist Victor Hugo. Warhol had been interested in ‘sex parts’ since the 1950s, but in Hugo he found his ideal muse and sexual performer. As Warhol’s paid collaborator, Hugo procured men whom Warhol and his studio assistants photographed nude and engaged in sex with Hugo. Scrutinizing gestures visible in the contact sheets, I argue that Hugo was engaged in a competition for artistic authorship and control in these photo shoots: the ‘art’ of gay sex was where Hugo could outshine Warhol.

ABSTRACT Amateur pornography has often been defined negatively in relationship to its professional counterpart; featuring average-looking people, awkward or disengaged performances, and poorly recorded video. This understanding of amateur performance has yet to be reconsidered in light of the mid-2000s industry shift to ‘reality porn,' which boasts professionally-lit scenes shot on clear, high-definition video, and features normatively good-looking performers—performers who are still billed as ‘amateur.' This paper fleshes out current definitions of reality porn, suggesting that in addition to adopting the aesthetics and conventions of reality television, it adopts its promise: that by putting real people in a contrived scenario it can produce a truthful document of a human encounter. Because the believability of this encounter hinges on the understanding that the performers are appearing as themselves, reality porn must establish their ‘real-life’ status via on-camera interviews and behind-the-scenes vignettes.Taking major gay porn studio Sean Cody and one of its star performers Curtis as an example, this paper suggests that the realism of amateur performance is no longer based upon a lack of skill or less-than-ideal looks, but rather constructed within the video itself and across several scenes, creating a serial narrative of sexual exploration and discovery.

ABSTRACT This article investigates a transforming zeitgeist around DIY pornography, which is defined as diverse online pornographies and erotica that are made and distributed by amateurs or independent producers. DIY pornography embraces, according to Attwood, ‘an ethos that extends across new and alternative sexual cultures, subcultural sexualities, kink communities, and the amateur pornographies that are part of a broader contemporary and participatory culture’. Since there has been an upsurge of deepfake porn and other hate media on digital platforms, how can we understand these porn cultures and how are they appropriating the ethos of DIY porn?

ABSTRACT A visionary, if controversial, queer director, Bruce LaBruce is known for his ambiguous films. L.A. Zombie, LaBruce’s second feature-length pornographic zombie film, serves as one such example. The purpose of this article is to investigate the source of this ambiguity. In particular, the article will highlight L.A. Zombie’s ability to depathologize gay men and gay sex whilst simultaneously further pathologizing them. In concluding the article, the implications of this ambiguity will be discussed.

ABSTRACT As this study reports, in times of global health crisis interactions between users on social media platforms such as Pornhub seem to form solidarity links that grow into global digital communities. This article applies quantitative, qualitative, and network analysis to the comments of a sample of 166 videos identified as belonging to the ‘COVID-19 porn genre’. The analysis leads to the quest for a community of practice that builds and negotiates shared meanings and values, and demonstrates forms of complicity and purpose, and forms of recognized hierarchical structure. The study builds under the shadow of a platformization dynamics that drives the whole environment of Pornhub penetrating the social relations between users. The article contributes to a discussion on online communities and, specifically, the possibility of the rise of a global community based on solidarity on porn sites.