My partner texted the news with a dejected “Welp.” eBay, which has long been a key marketplace for finding materials outside of traditional archives, announced changes to its sales policies. As of June 15, a bevy of “adult materials” are forbidden from sale on the platform. No longer will sellers be able to post listings for “adult only” magazines, VHS tapes, or film reels (or, somehow, jewelry or music). Anything “containing nudity and displays of sexual activitys [sic]” are banned—except, curiously, for a small number of prestige magazines like Playboy, which were deemed acceptable because they “generally do not contain sexually explicit content.”1 Outside of these specified publications, however, anything else is fair game for removal. Curiously, eBay stressed that this blanket policy of removal for materials already held behind age-verified categories was being enacted “to make adult items available to those who wish to purchase them and can do so legally, while preventing those who do not wish to view or purchase these items from easily accessing them.”
My best friend and I flooded the group chat with questions: Why would eBay willingly give up revenue when it already had policies in place barring the sale of illegal materials? What, exactly, constituted “adult material” anyway? What marked the difference between “artistic” breasts and “sexually suggestive” breasts? What if materials are erotic only to certain kinksters (behold the wide world of feet pics)? How does someone create an erotic album, a titillating brooch? And why were a few magazines deemed exempt from banning—were we seriously still going to pretend most people read Playboy for the articles? But even amid this uncertainty, all three of us understood that our project would soon take on frustrating new challenges.
Together, the three of us—Elizabeth Purchell, Tyler Thomas, and KJ Shepherd—make a gay adult film podcast called Ask Any Buddy. Every other week, we look at one of the 120-plus films from the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s that make up Elizabeth’s namesake film project.
While the film version of Ask Any Buddy is a giant cut-up, a sonic and visual collage that examines man-on-man fantasy and desire by turning porn into a gay day-in-the-life, the podcast is anchored in historical inquiry and critical analysis. The show isn’t dry or stodgy: we are talking about gay porn, after all. But we do take the topic seriously. Every episode involves weeks of preparation, from viewing the source material and supplemental media, to scouring digital and personal archives, to scripting and voiceover and editing.
Two beliefs guide our approach. First, we think that pornography can also be artistic expression. The more you look at the genre, the clearer it becomes that the distinction between what is “art” and what is “porn” is pretty phony. Despite their miniscule budgets, gay porn films often had narrative structure, technically complex compositions, and intricate editing. Several directors, in particular Arthur J. Bressan Jr., made critically-acclaimed films both with and without explicit sex.2 At their best, films in this genre made sex part of the story itself.
Second, my collaborators and I maintain that gay porn is a crucial way to make sense of gay history.3 Gay porn films not only contain reflections of material culture and sexual geography—where do you go to see the boys in leather and Levis drink, cruise, flirt, fuck?—but are also items for forming political identity. The idea of gayness, and what “gay” means both personally and collectively, sexually and politically, are historically inseperable from the influence of erotic media. And gay adult film didn’t just show up out of nowhere. It built upon older forms of expression: suggestive photographs, hypermasculine cartoons, and physique magazines, among others. Through these pieces of sexual art, men forged a sense of relation and affinity to other men based on shared attractions, building networks of commerce that predated (and laid much of the foundation for) gay liberation. Porn films weren’t just shown in gay enclaves: they often reflected the very neighborhoods gay men lived in and reinforced the concept of community—however tenuous, however fantastic—by the very act of their screening.4
Rather than treat gay adult films as the historic artifacts that they are, eBay has decided to disregard nearly all sexual material as inappropriate for their marketplace. It has also conveniently shielded its profit motive. The company recently severed ties with its longstanding online-payment partner PayPal in favor of its new Managed Payments system, allowing eBay to finagle a higher cut in auction processing fees. Thanks to the divorce, eBay also received considerable shares in Ayden, the Dutch fintech company making its direct-deposit services possible. But most merchant accounts—including Ayden—refuse to process payments for “adult materials.” Whatever profits eBay may lose in its adult-material purge, it will gain many times over by nickel-and-diming millions of purchases.
The purge adds a chapter to two different stories: a general antisex sentiment that is increasingly stifling digital spaces, and the antigay obsession that has shaped the history of homosexual porn.
“Scholars of pornography have always relied on commercially accessible materials,” says Whitney Strub, a historian and professor at Rutgers University. As Strub notes, porn is not well archived in academic spaces—and accessing those few high-quality academic archives that do exist requires resources that are difficult even for those with university credentials. The pandemic has, unsurprisingly, only made the issue of access worse. Given these restrictions, Strub says, “the advent of eBay as a centralized repository for obscure historical documents was a research godsend for a generation of scholars.” Thanks to eBay, Strub has been able to analyze the differences between ’70s hardcore theatrical releases and their ’80s home-video releases—in other words, how these materials responded to the conservatizing sexual politics of the 1980s by erasing certain gay and straight sexual practices and, in turn, rewriting the history of sexuality through the illusion of complete material. (Fists and piss: here today, gone tomorrow.)5 By stripping researchers of their ability to find these kinds of sources, eBay is effectively launching what Strub calls a “direct attack on the history of sexuality.”
eBay’s practices also harm those adding to the broader queer archive. Carta Monir runs Diskette, a micropress based in Ann Arbor that showcases trans and artists and writers, and which also includes the erotica imprint Harder Disk. According to Monir, eBay was “the largest and, in general, the best-priced marketplace for hard-to-find gay ephemera,” crucial “for people like me who don’t have access to brick-and-mortar queer bookshops.” Blocking access to these materials makes it nearly impossible to search, sort, and gather these pieces of history.
In many ways, digital platform censorship is nothing new for queer material. As Strub explains, the internet has long been a central “site of attempted sexual regulation … from the 1996 Communications Decency Act through the more recent FOSTA/SESTA, which also encouraged regulation of sexuality through the private financial sector.” Despite its purported aim (to prevent internet sex trafficking), FOSTA/SESTA has been a nightmare for many sex workers, as platform after platform have shuttered their doors to anyone advertising such services. By rolling back Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act—the safe harbor clause that protects websites from being held liable for sex crimes committed by users—FOSTA/SESTA also disincentivized many internet platforms from allowing users to engage with adult content altogether. Anyone who remembers the Tumblr purges knows how suddenly rules prohibiting anything sexual can appear, turning havens for pornographic exploration into ghost towns overnight. eBay is just another digital space willing to trade off any sense of community or camaraderie for legal cover.
Yet the dividing line between acceptable and unacceptable content remains as vague as ever. An inch of skin can make the difference between content riding high on an algorithmic wave and getting pulled for violating arbitrary “community guidelines.” Even with the general best practice of “maybe don’t post a raging erection” in mind, algorithms don’t account for anything beyond what they’ve been programmed to look for. Algorithms are not neutral. They are programmed by humans—and those humans have built-in biases about what is and what is not appropriate. An algorithm knows that “faggot” is often a derogatory term, but it can’t parse the difference between a lobbed slur and two homos chatting with each other. Skin is not skin is not skin, but filters are not built to parse for nuance.6
Queer archives and historical research thus have difficulty existing for very long on the internet, unless they conform to certain self-censorship. Our group chat is riddled with conversations over whether certain Ask Any Buddy posts show a bit too much body hair or if a pose is overly suggestive of anal or oral sex. (One time, we considered whether a still image of a man receiving a massive facial—truly the only good moment in Performance—would be flagged if we used it as the cover for our members-only Spotify playlists.) Even after this attention to detail, Instagram will make truly absurd decisions, removing posts without any suggestive imagery at all. Carta Monir was less lucky. Her Instagram account “Dykes On Paper” focused on “archiving interesting excerpts from hard-to-find lesbian zines”—but was “completely banned on the grounds of hate speech” for using the word “dyke.”
Some queer researchers have seen years of public digital work go up in a flash. Ryan White, director of Raw! Uncut! Video!, has had more than one Instagram account tied to his documentary removed without warning or further discussion. White’s latest work focuses on the rough and rowdy fetish tapes of Palm Drive Video, tapping into the “documentary nature of queer pornography” as well as “the ways that erotic films often exist as the only historical documentation of specific LGBTQ+ cultures, communities, individuals, spaces, and practices.” As White explains, the first account for Raw! Uncut! Video! was removed without warning, despite avoiding genitalia and explicit sex. Two more accounts met the same fate in a much shorter timespan—particularly damaging as the documentary was set to premiere at several film festivals. In a press release, White declared, “it’s apparent that queer artists are disproportionately targeted for removal”—a sentiment echoed by other LGBTQ+ artists throughout social media.
But these attempts at erasure aren’t just in the present moment: they’re baked into the very history of gay adult film. Even when pornography laws began to loosen, it was easy for police to monitor and raid gay film theaters because gay sex acts were still illegal. From the perspective of law enforcement, especially the violently homophobic LAPD, gay porn was criminal not only because it depicted illegal sex acts but also because that very depiction required a knowing attempt to commit such acts. Before smartphones and cloud-based storage—or the convenience of camcorders and videocassettes—relatively few people could capture impromptu moving images of sexual acts. The act of filming required some sort of staging. By that logic, any moving image of homosexual behavior required some sort of forethought in order to be filmed. A gay porno, no matter how tepid or softcore to our eyes, was evidence that the participants planned on breaking the law. Gay porn was thus proof of “conspiracy to commit sodomy and oral copulation” in California, a stiffer charge than the mere distribution of pornography. (Famously, Roger Earl’s classic Born to Raise Hell would have tremendous problems ever playing in L.A.)
The LAPD tried to use this logic in the early 1970s to ensnare Pat Rocco, a softcore film director whose main works came out at the beginning of the gay liberation movement. Rocco was a wonderful eccentric: a toupeed friend of Phyllis Diller who later ran for congress in Hawaii and whose films inspired genuine fanatics.7 Although most of his films are charmingly benign—the stereotype of sparsely-haired flaccid collegiate boys bouncing around on pogo sticks isn’t too far off—Rocco’s work is a testament to earnest salesmanship and a celebration of gay joy.8
Rocco was arrested in 1974 as part of a complex web of raids that also trapped other gay community leaders in Los Angeles. It was actually sparked by another director’s film. When Tom Pepin, an actor in Gorton Hall’s Zoomerang!, was picked up by the LAPD vice squad for prostitution, he snitched to the cops about the film’s production, both to lessen the damage of the prostitution charge as well as get revenge for a pay dispute. The actor detailed how he got from Boston to Los Angeles and ultimately wound up in the film’s psychedelic group sex scene. Through an advertisement in The Advocate, Pepin sought out L.A.’s Homophile Entertainment Group, “sponsor of [the] Beulahland crash pad for itinerant homosexuals,” which connected the young man to Pat Rocco.9 Rocco then connected Pepin to Brian King (better known by his alias Barry Knight) at Jaguar Films, which was about to begin production on Zoomerang! As Pepin recalled in police testimony,
Pat asked me what I did sexually and I told him just sucking and fucking. Pat then lifted the phone up and had a conversation with a man he called “Brian.” He told Brian that I was just in town and was looking for some film work and that I was a groovy looking stud.10
In a series of deliberately humiliating raids, the LAPD took film reels and materials from Rocco’s premises and Jaguar Films headquarters. Pat Rocco then addressed hundreds at Goliath’s Bar, knowing officers were outside to take him into custody. (Less clear is if he knew TV news crews were outside as well.) This attempt to bust Rocco and company on conspiracy followed months of increased LAPD harassment against gays, including park-cruising raids, theater busts, forced gay bar closures, falsified depositions, and another illegal search of Beulahland.11 Gay spaces, whether sexual or more broadly social, were considered areas for criminal activity and thus fair grounds to target.
Pat Rocco’s eventual acquittal shows that the space for gay adult film was sometimes gained by legal technicality. California law mandated that conspiracy to commit sodomy had to be proven by corroborating testimony. It wasn’t quite enough to have the film; someone involved in production also had to testify that they had indeed conspired to commit sodomy. Rocco’s defense team was also able to show that the police failed to follow any sort of protocol for raiding his compound. Arrogantly, the officers who conducted the raid filed several extensions to the search warrants—but failed to obtain rights to search any person on the premises, including Brian King, the producer on whose body they found the film. Without any admissible evidence, there was simply nothing to corroborate, and thus no way to prove conspiracy to commit sodomy.
What historians and archivists face in eBay’s new policies, then, is part of a larger story of censorship and punishment. But maybe, and perhaps most frighteningly, the call is also coming from inside the house. It’s June, which means every queer within shouting distance of the internet is once again subject to the discussion of Whether Kink Has a Place at Pride. It’s an argument I was tired of hearing long before I was even aware of many of my own perversions and sordid interests. It was an argument I was tired of hearing five years ago, when people I knew were murdered along with dozens of others in a gay nightclub in Orlando. It was an argument I was tired of hearing in its original form when it came out of the mouths of straight people—coworkers, classmates, and relatives alike—who didn’t understand why “those people” had to “flaunt themselves so much” by holding hands and kissing at Disney World. It’s no less exhausting as we are crawling out of a pandemic and state legislatures are trying to ruin trans kids’ lives. The illusion that there is such a thing as acceptable queer behavior—the art of the sanitized gesture, the bloodless gaze—is baked into the very business practices threatening our history. What we don’t need, this June or any other, is to see any member of the family gleefully reach for the eraser.
Collage by the author.
- Since the first version of eBay’s announcement, a few gay and queer periodicals have been added to the “no ban” list, including On Our Backs and Butt—the former being a gloriously bratty snapshot of lesbian and kink culture, and the latter remaining a favorite for many millennial gay men and queers who came of age at the turn of the century. Still, the question remains: do the rose-tinted pages and casually artsy interviews of Butt magazine make it more “respectable” according to some undefined metrics—and how does this hazy math obscure the fact that many readers bought Butt to masturbate to (amazing) images of poorly-tattooed otters?
- For more on Bressan, check out Caden Mark Gardner’s examination of his work for Mubi. Gardner is not overstating Bressan’s reach by calling him “the auteur for the post-Stonewall, pre-New Queer Cinema era of Gay Liberation”—an important reminder of the artists who operated before Todd Haynes or Greg Araki.
- I’m using “gay” rather than “LGBTQ+” or “queer” because, quite simply, that was the main perceived audience for the films used in Ask Any Buddy: men who were sexually attracted to men and were open enough to watch films of men having sex with other men. While some directors and performers were openly bisexual, and while others rejected the term “gay” and instead embraced an overall appreciation of masculinity, we are usually looking at films for gay men by gay men which shaped, in direct and indirect ways, what it meant to be gay.
- Historians have long drawn connections between gayness and capitalism. While attractions between men exist outside of capitalism, as have sexual acts between men, the meanings given to those acts, their performers, and their depictions have changed over time, and are central to the crystallization of “gay” as a personal and political identity. To learn more, you should read David K. Johnson, Buying Gay: How Physique Entrepreneurs Sparked a Movement (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019), Peter Boag, Same-Sex Affairs: Constructing and Controlling Homosexuality in the Pacific Northwest (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), and John D’Emilio, “Capitalism and Gay Identity,” in Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell, and Sharon Thompson, eds., Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983), 100–13.
- Whitney Strub, “Sanitizing the Seventies: Pornography, Home Video, and the Sanitizing of Sexual Memory,” Feminist Media Histories 5 (Spring 2019): 19–48; Whitney Strub, “Trans Porn Genealogy beyond the Queer Canon: Kim Christy, Joey Silvera, and the Hetero-Industrial Production of Transsexuality,” Transgender Studies Quarterly 7 (May 2020): 174–91.
- For the best overview of the biases built into search engines, see Safiya Noble, Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (New York: NYU Press, 2018).
- Seriously: a cavalcade of aspiring thespians started the fanclub SPREE, the Society of Pat Rocco Enlightened Enthusiasts, and would later create a namesake award ceremony that would celebrate excellence in adult films. Pat Rocco won several SPREE awards in its first year.
- You can see both skills in his documentary on Los Angeles’s 1976 Christopher Street West parade, We Were There, which captures not only the exuberance in an early major Pride parade amid the fervent nationalism of the bicentennial, but also showcases Rocco’s abilities as the parade’s organizer.
- “Raids Jar Hollywood Gays,” The Advocate, Jan. 30, 1974, pp. 1, 3. The Advocate covered the raids, arrests, and subsequent trial in considerable detail through 1974 and early 1975.
- This police testimony and corresponding press coverage can be found in the Pat Rocco Collection at the ONE Archives in Los Angeles. We also did an episode of Ask Any Buddy detailing both Zoomerang! and its frankly more interesting legal story.
- Doug Sarff, “Rocco Arrest Shocks Meeting,” The Advocate, Feb. 13, 1974, p. 3.
