Gay pornography is the representation of sexual activity among males, with the primary goal of sexual arousal. Although pornography has usually represented the heterosexual orientation of the dominant culture, homosexual explicit material has a long history, reaching back to the Greek Antiquity, if not to prehistory. Practically every medium has been used to represent all-male sexual acts; nowadays, however, the gay porn industry is mostly concentrated in the making of home videos and DVDs, as well as images (still and moving) for viewing on the Internet. Today, gay porn constitutes a disproportionately large part of the pornography industry.[1] It has attracted much less attention from the anti-pornography movement than its straight counterpart

Early modern gay pornography in the United States

Homo eroticism has been present in photography and film since their inventions. During that time, any kind of sexual depiction had to remain underground because of obscenity rules, even more homosexual material that also were the evidence of an illegal act because of sodomy laws in many states. (This is no longer the case in the United States since such laws were ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 2003. See Lawrence v. Texas.)

Because of these restrictions, early gay porn primarily consisted of pictures of individual men either fully naked or wearing a g-string. Early gay porn in the 1940s and 1950s focused on athletic men or body builders in statuesque poses. They were generally young, muscular, and with little or no visible body hair. Those pictures were sold in physique magazines, also known as Beefcake magazines, allowing the reader to pass as a fitness enthusiast. Since most gay men of this time were deeply "in the closet", actual depictions of sexual activity were rare. Although now considered quite tame or soft-core, this type of porn still exists today.

The Athletic Model Guild (AMG) founded by photographer Bob Mizer in 1944 in Los Angeles, California, was maybe the first studio to commercially produce material specifically for gay men. He produced about a million images, and thousands of films and videos before he died on 12 May 1992. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, the advent of 8mm film cameras enabled these photographers to produce underground movies of gay sex. Sales of these products were either through mail-order or through more discreet channels: some of the early gay pornographers would travel around the country selling their photographs and films out of their hotel rooms, with advertising only through word of mouth.

The 1960s were also a period where many underground art film makers integrated suggestive or overtly homosexual content in their work. Kenneth Anger's Scorpio Rising (1963), Andy Warhol's My Hustler (1965), or Paul Morrissey's Flesh (1968) are examples of experimental films that are known to have influenced further gay porn films with their formal qualities and narratives. Joe Dallesandro is probably the most remembered actor and model of the period; his naked beauty has appeared in Warhol's and Morrissey's films, as well as in Mizer's work at the AMG.

Towards the sexual revolution

All through the 1960s, a series of Supreme Court rulings in the USA created a more liberalized legal environment that allowed the commercialization of pornography. Wakefield Poole's Boys in the Sand, starring Casey Donovan, can be considered the first gay porn feature film. It opened in a theater in New York City in December 1971 (and rapidly grossed an impressive profit), preceding the first American commercial straight porn film, Deep Throat, that opened in June 1972. This one's tremendous success definitely launched pornographic film as a popular phenomenon.

The production of gay porn films expanded during the decade. A few studios released films to be shown growing number of gay adult theatres, where men often had sexual encounters. Often, the films were in the image of the sexual liberation that gay men were living at the time, depicting the numerous public spaces where men engaged in sex: bathhouses, sex clubs, beaches, etc. Most of the productions of the decade used a cast of buff and hairy men, which would become a hallmark of the gay erotic aesthetic of the decade.

The seventies also saw the rise of gay publishing. During this time many publications were started including In Touch, Blue Boy, and Playgirl, which, while ostensibly produced for women, were purchased and enjoyed by gay men.

1980s: Videotapes, AIDS, and gay for pay

The 1980s were a period of transition for gay porn film. On one side, the development of video technology would change radically the gay and straight adult industry. The proliferation of VCR made porn videos easily accessible; as the prices of the devices fell during the decade, the market of home videos aimed at adult viewers became more and more lucrative. By the mid-1980s, the standard was to shoot porn movies directly on video, which meant the wide disappearance of porn theaters. Furthermore, video recording being more affordable, a multitude of producers entered the market, making low-budget porn videos in masses.

This shift from gay porn watching as a public activity to a private one can also be attributed to the discovery of the HIV virus and the subsequent AIDS crisis. As in the early 1980s many gay men found out their infection with the deadly HIV virus, the public spaces for sex, like porn theaters, became less attended. Masturbatory activities in the privacy of the home became a safer sex practice in the midst of this health crisis.

If the porn films of the 1970s explored a little bit on how to represent the sexual act, gay movies of the 1980s seemed all to be made under an unwritten set of rules and conventions. Most scenes would start with a few lines, have performers engage in foreplay (fellatio), followed by anal penetration, and ending with the visual climax of the close-up on the ejaculating penises, called “money shot” or “cum shot.” Video technology allowing to record extensively the acts (more than the costly film stock), the scenes were often very long, composed of extended footage of the same shots. The quality of the picture and sound were also often very bad.

Big directors like Matt Sterling, John Travis, and William Higgins set the standard for the models of the decade. The performers were especially young, seemingly never older than twenty-two or twenty-three. Their bodies were slender and hairless, on the “swimmer’s build” type, which contrasted with the older, bigger, and hairier man of seventies’ gay porn. The roles of the performers were also tightly divided in “tops” and “bottoms.” The top is the inserter in anal sex. He typically would have a more muscular body, and the largest penis. The bottom, receiver of anal sex, would be smaller, sometimes more effeminate. The porn stars of the decade were almost always tops, while the bottoms were interchangeable (with the exception of Joey Stefano, one of the most popular star of gay porn’s history, who was more a bottom.) This strict division can also be attributed to the fact that the popular directors of the decade preferred to hire heterosexual men for their movies. Heterosexual men who perform gay sex (commonly called “gay-for-pay”) can be considered a rare commodity in the gay sex trade, which the biggest producers of the decade could afford. Thus the gay for pay actors would “stand on top” of the hierarchy between porn performers. Many critics attributed the conventionalizing of gay porn of the 80s to this trend. Straight men performing gay sex could not render all the passion that ought to be in gay sexual acts. They could only stand still as their co-star would pleasure them. They would only receive fellatio, be active in anal sex, and never engage in kissing or caressing.

1990s: Explosion of the niche market

The gay porn industry diversified consistently in the 1990s. In 1989, director Kristen Bjorn started a porn company which would set a new standard for gay porn producers. Bjorn being a professional photographer, the images in his videos had an outstanding technical quality. Also a former gay porn performer, he directed his models with care, which made the viewers believe in the pleasure these men were having. Other directors had to improve their technical values to keep up with always more demanding viewers.

Another significant change in pornography during this decade is the explosion of the niche market. Many videos started to be made for viewers with specific tastes (amateur, transsexual, bondage, specific ethnic groups, etc.), and this led to a huge diversification of the people involved in porn making and watching.

The gay porn industry grew substantially in popularity during the 1990s, to grow into a complex and interactive subculture. Professional directors (like Chi Chi LaRue and John Rutherford) and performers started to engage in pornography as a career, their work sustained by emerging porn media and influential critics (like Mikey Skee.)

Perspectives for the 21st Century

Today, however, gay pornography has become a highly profitable enterprise, ranging from the "All-American straight-guy" porn of Marine Meat and Sean Cody, to the 'twink' European men of Bel Ami.

Some controversy currently exists between studios that produce condom-less, or bareback videos, such as Treasure Island Media, Hot Desert Knights, Spunk Video, Cobra Video and TipoSesso, and the slicker, mainstream companies, such as Falcon Entertainment, Hot House Entertainment, Lucas Entertainment, and Titan Media, who claim that condom-less videos promote unsafe sex and contributes to the continuing HIV problem, both in the industry and in the gay community as a whole.