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HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL TENSIONS surrounding issues of masculinity, race, violence, sexuality, and miscegenation commingle in both all-black and interracial pornography. Black men in gay porn customarily inhabit a position of power that has roots in racialized fetishism. To be blunt, black gay porn stars, when they are engaged in sex with white, Latino, or Asian costars, almost always perform as "tops," the penetrative partner. Anatomically, these men possess athletic physiques, very dark skin, and penises that are much longer than the average five to seven inches most men's penises measure when erect. Dwight McBride states:
In the all-black genre and in the blatino genre, black men are represented as "trade": men with hard bodies and hard personalities to match them, men from or tied to ghetto or street life in one way or another, men possessing exceptionally large penises ... and, more often than not, men as sexual predators or aggressors.
Bobby Blake was a veteran black performer who, over the years, unleashed unbridled ultra-masculine dominance over the many white men he had sex with on camera. A towering man with a solid Herculean physique, inky dark skin, plump lips and a broad nose, Blake has never been anally penetrated on camera. Blake maintained a long, successful career in gay porn and cultivated an avid fan base, but in 2000 he retired from the industry to become a minister. His stern, menacing appearance contrasts with those of black men who work in straight porn who must "be nonthreatening enough to appeal to . . . white men who [want] to jerk off to images of little virginal white girls being deflowered" (Poulson-Bryant). The black men hired to work in gay porn appear to be chosen for the opposite reason: the more threatening they appear and the larger their penises, the more popularity they garner.
Bobby Blake was no exception. His final film, Niggas' Revenge, boldly transgresses virtually every social, political, and sexual taboo in Western culture. Blake, along with two other African American co-stars, exacts revenge on a small group of backwoods white racists by imprisoning, torturing, and sodomizing them. The actors in this film inhabit their roles convincingly, shouting racial epithets and embodying the worst stereotypes of both African- American and Caucasian men. The...