I'm always finding interesting stuff a couple years after it's posted . . .
http://www.buzzfeed.com/connerhabib/why-are-we-afraid-to-talk-about-gay-porn#.gp1YaB88w
Why Are We Afraid To Talk About Gay Porn?
After I was invited by a student group at Corning Community College to give a talk on sex and culture, my presentation was canceled when the school’s president found out that I do porn. This is exactly why we need to have more candid conversations about sex, porn and American culture.
Conner Habib
BuzzFeed Contributor
posted on Mar. 20, 2013, at 6:11 p.m.
Corning, New York.
Find it on the map: it hovers just above the Pennsylvania border, a long ways
away from the two closest places you’ve heard of, Syracuse and Rochester. Like
the small town I grew up in, it’s all alone.
Two months ago, I was
approached by a curious and thoughtful group of students from Corning Community
College. The students, including members of the school’s LGBT organization,
invited me to speak at the school as part of their upcoming sex-positive
community event, Sex Week. Other events during Sex Week include a Q&A about
sex toys, and a discussion about pleasure and communication by members of
Planned Parenthood and the Rape Crisis center.
In small towns like
Corning, the loneliness that LGBT people can feel — for lack of community,
peers, and resources — can sometimes be transformed into determination. When
people from small towns feel like the discussions they want to have are absent,
they work to create them. Their town and school, the students told me, needed
more open discussions about sex, about LGBT issues, so they were going to make
it happen.
I agreed to be a part
of it, and administrators signed my speaker’s contract shortly
thereafter.
Last week, I was
informed by Corning Community College Vice President and Dean of Student
Development, Don Heins, that the school’s president, Katherine Douglas, had
singled out my talk and decided to cancel it, against student wishes. They
agreed to honor the contract (which they’d signed off on and which contained a
cancellation fee), but they were worried that the talk would be “controversial.”
I wasn’t scheduled to speak about porn, but to talk more broadly on sex and
culture. The reason I was banned was because she’d changed her mind after
discovering that I was not, as she’d thought, an educator who used to be in
porn, but rather a university instructor before I started appearing in adult
films.
I was told she
stated, emphatically and more than once, that pornography cannot and should not
be linked to LGBT rights.
When I communicated
with frustrated students, I told them that I’d consider coming anyway and that I
could work on finding another venue if they were interested. Then I was informed
that administrators contacted a local hotel and local businesses to make sure I
wouldn’t be coming to town, that a student was pulled aside and told not to give
direct comments to the press, that the president wanted to schedule her own talk
to tell students about why she canceled my appearance, and that if I were to
appear in the town of Corning, students were not to attend my
lecture.
In an miniature echo
of pornography’s place in culture, where millions of people watch and want
pornography but are told not to want it, not to watch it, the students and
community — particularly the LGBT community, which was singled out in the
president’s reasoning — were told not to want or hear a discussion that they’d
asked for. The school had undone the work and determination of the LGBT
community. What could be left but loneliness? I started to hear from and receive
emails about students — in the LGBT community and otherwise — expressing their
frustrations, and saying they felt threatened and intimidated by the
administration.
So — are porn and
LGBT rights connected?
It is precisely the
small towns and conservative or isolated areas of our world that expose how
intertwined they are.
Where I grew up, just
outside of Allentown, PA, I watched, right through my adolescence into adulthood
and early college years, while straight people paired off and experienced sex.
They were able to engage with a basic aspect of human life that seemed
unavailable and distant to me. Unlike today, there was no discussion about gay
marriage, nor were there many gay characters on TV. But even if there had been,
neither would have rounded out my experience as a man with homosexual feelings
because so many of those feelings were — unsurprisingly for a young man —
sexual. Gay sex was a lonely venture. It wasn’t easy to find, and was only
mentioned in slurs and the butt of jokes. “Cocksucker” and “butt fucker” were
insults; stand-ins for “faggot.”
Whether I bought it
from the adult video store or, later, downloaded it, gay porn helped me
encounter positive images of gay men enjoying the act of sex. Gay porn was a
window into gay sexuality that was free of shame and guilt, and revealed a
different world where sex wasn’t a lonely prospect, confined to the shadows or
just my imagination.
This same concern is
amplified in places where homosexuality is criminalized or even punishable by
death.
As a porn performer
of Arab descent, I’ve received hundreds of emails from men in Middle Eastern
countries expressing gratitude and relief for my having portrayed gay sex in a
positive light on camera. When a gay man lives somewhere where his identity is
threatened, it’s clear how sex - including pornography - and sexuality are
intertwined. His sexual imagination, which is criminalized, matches the sexual
images of gay pornography (which are also criminalized). Since acting out his
imagination through sex would be to risk his life, the access to the images is
safer. The images, created by gay men wherever it’s legal to create them,
provide empowerment and diminish alienation.
As a young gay man,
porn stars became heroes of mine, joining authors, punk rock musicians, and
leftist political thinkers, because they lived as I wanted to. Without them, I
would have only had a partial picture of my life - a thinking and creative one,
perhaps - but one that ignored my sexual thoughts and imagination which were
constantly activated and in motion.
To deny the
importance of images of gay sex while pretending to affirm gay rights, as
Katherine Douglas does, is a luxury, and it’s dangerous one. It’s the equivalent
of cheering on a powerless gay neighbor in a 1990s sitcom, or to say, “I don’t
care what anyone does in the privacy of his own home, but don’t bring it out
into public.” In other words, it’s not an effort to understand gay men as whole
human beings but to merely establish sexless caricatures of them to feel
comfortable about.
Evidence for the link
between gay rights and gay porn can be found in the broader acceptance of
pornography in gay culture. Many gay porn stars lend their support to LGBT
charities and causes. And when gay sex was heavily legislated against, gay porn
stars by definition broke the law to express sexual freedom and defend their
sexuality.
That said, I must
also express here that I don’t expect allies to understand gay pornography, its
link to LGBT movement, or my involvement with it automatically, or as quickly as
some gay men do. When Don Heins called me and stated that Katherine Douglass
canceled the talk because she had concerns about the controversial subject on
campus, I told him that I understood those concerns. They are serious and real
concerns - if they weren’t, I’d have no need to give talks, after all. I have
similar and additional concerns in my own life: How will having done porn
intersect with my other interests? How can I pursue porn and speak openly about
sex without making other people feel alienated? What have I noticed about the
porn industry that I find supportive of or a hinderance to freedom —
particularly for LGBT communities?
As of the writing of
this article, I’m scheduled to speak at the Southeast Steuben Library in Corning
on March 21st, at an event not endorsed by or related to the school. If that
venue is somehow blocked, I’ll speak in someone’s house. Because the question
here isn’t whether or not we have concerns, but whether or not we have the
courage to address them.
Porn, a form that has
been with us for thousands of years and which deeply intertwines with all
cultures, deserves deep and serious thinking, not off-the-cuff dismissal and a
silencing of public discussion.
This is especially
true when it comes to how porn relates to gay men’s lives. To be an ally to gay
men, and by extension the LGBT movement, doesn’t only mean being comfortable
with gay men’s sexual orientation, it also means being comfortable with their
orientation to sex. This is why, when someone claims to be an ally of gay men,
pornography exposes – just as surely as it exposes naked bodies — where they
really stand.
1 comment:
It is late for a response to this, and I apologize for that. Yet it seems so important to me, that I shall now, if I may indeed. First if all, Bravo, Conner! A highly intelligent, and courageous being you are! There has been an attempt to control Humankind since Christianity began. Yet, texts also show that approximately one and a half centuries before Jesus, this terrible thought started showing its very ugly face. Let it be said that this has absolutely nothing to do with Jesus! Nothing. There is Christ, and there is "Christianity". Both can be extremely different. I applaud Conner all the more that he is of Arabic descent. Where I was born, I had many such bros. They had nothing, but absolutely nothing, in common with the Iran or Taliban monsters: one cannot be less truly Arabic in the spirit and soul, than those devils are. This can be verified by opening one history book. When did the Muslim Thought ever persecute given groups of human beings, exactly? Perfect, not: anything humans create is never perfect, yet is always, and at every moment, perfect-ible. Pornography is as old as humankind, of course. It is on the oldest Indian temples, for example. Conner states extraoardinarily important things, and shows it clearly with this lady's reaction: one is so pro-"gay", one is sooo open, and liberal! But when it comes to sex, one is not so liberal, anymore... a genteel discourse is then offered, which, fortunately, doesn't really fully convince anyone! Porn and sex are a fundamental human right. This, has to be said. Anyone who disputes this is, at best, puritanical, but not necessarily badly intended. Or... they can be. My own family is the very worst I have ever seen, anywhere. Horrible, beyond anything a person with an imperfect family can even imagine! My teen years were a nightmare, they hated my sexual sensubility to a degree I have never seen in anyone else. Of course, I was told I was being... "protected". Does this ring a bell? For this reason, when, in the 1980's, I saw this diabolical (Yes!) thought come in under the so "good" pretexts, I KNEW. And by the way! I never felt good about this little aseptized "gay" word. Never! Two days ago I finally got it: you bros and ladies check now the philosophical notion of "gay knowledge". Basically, "Even though terrible things happen in the world, I can be happy. It is not my concern, is it???. Conner is a Bro, he seems to smell a rat too. We are so well accepted now, so "gay", so "acceptable", well, we even "marry", ah how... GQ indeed! I am all for marriage for love if this is two persons'desire! But this is not what I am talking about: what I am talking about is this "neutralization", and "normalization". This essence of our Energy, being made "gay knowledge", de-tached, dis-tanced, separated? Who, dis-tanced and de-tached, a long, long time ago... You see, the reaction of the O so pro gay lady, does not seem so very liberal to me. Such severity!!! Of course well argumented, and with the right words! John Milton: :Fearless Unfeared He [it could be She too] Slept"... Let's be who we are. In Joy, in Love. Not de-tached.
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