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Pornography . . . is profoundly and paradoxically social. But even more than that, it's acutely historical. It's an archive of data about our history as a culture and our own individual histories-our formations as selves. . . . Pornography is a space in the social imagination as well as a media form.
-Laura Kipnis, Bound and Gagged: Pornography and the Politics of Fantasy in America
THE FORTY YEARS BETWEEN 1960 and 2000 were among the most tumultuous decades in the history of gay male sexuality. For many gay men who came out in the period after the Stonewall riots in New York in 1969, the seventies were a golden age of sexual freedom.1 It was an era during which it became possible for American men to openly acknowledge their homosexuality and foster a sense of identity and community, and it also initiated a period of sexual experimentation.2 The advent of AIDS in 1981 changed all that.
The emerging epidemic provoked debate and conflict over what aspects of the so-called gay lifestyle might have contributed to the pattern of immune deficiency among gay men. Many observers attributed the outbreak to sexual promiscuity, the frequent patronage of bathhouses and other public sex venues, along with the general availability of sexual activity in the urban centers of San Francisco and New York.3 An enormous body of epidemiological literature, social scientific research, and cultural studies, as well as hundreds of memoirs and volumes of fiction documenting the sexual life of gay men, has identified patterns of sexual behavior, modes of sexual interaction, and the cultural norms and fantasies that shaped sexual conduct before the emergence of the AIDS epidemic.4 In this article I would like to explore how pornographic films and video could also be considered as documents in the history of gay male sexuality.5
According to sociologist Martin Levine, the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, the emergence of the gay liberation movement in 1969, and the increased freedom of sexual expression all combined with the massive migration and concentration of gay men in the urban centers of New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco to fundamentally alter the forms (both social and sexual) of American gay men's lives.6 The migration and increased visibility brought...