Paul Morris, the legendary founder of San Francisco-based gay porn industry giant Treasure Island Media, recently granted a rare interview in which he mused about the current status of gay pornography and the reality of gay sex. Over the years, Morris has been either resoundingly heralded or condemned for ushering in the modern bareback sex in porn revival. For, Morris is to gay porn what Camille Paglia is to feminism: a sometimes iconoclastic outside insider who takes perverse glee in rattling the establishment; oftentimes inadvertently bringing down the biggest liberal lies. On a personal level, in 1999, as the star of Morris was just beginning to rise, I was washing-out of the San Francisco gay porn scene. Then, my dealings with the burgeoning Treasure Island empire were momentary, but mind-blowing. What I mildly comprehended at the time was that Morris wanted to strip all the artifice away from the illusionary image of the gay lifestyle that was being heavily promoted by the homosexual elite. What he presented was violent and nauseating, but unapologetically realistic. Since, titles from Treasure Island regularly rank among the highest grossing gay porn films of all time. Marking a strict adherence to a repetitive theme in gay porn, most notably evident in the work of Morris, his latest effort pits one receptive gay man against numerous HIV+ aggressors. In response to this seemingly politically incorrect scenario, Morris said: “These aren’t the incidental fantasies of a small fringe of outliers. These speak to the heart of the sexual imagination of most queer men. It wasn’t made for you [referring to the straight interviewer.] There’s no reason for you to see it. For you, it would read as an irrational stunt. But for the straight world, much of what comprises queer culture and life is incomprehensible. Regrettably, the same can still be said for many of the older members of the gay world.” Of the current gay obsessions, Morris continued: “In gay culture, there’s never been more of an almost hysterical centering of life around two things—drag queens and marriage—both of which are unfortunate misogynistic parodies of heterosexual life. Gay men have completely lost the sense of who they are because they’ve been immersed in terror…” To Morris, this “terror” is represented by the fear of HIV; hence, his focus on bareback sex and “viral loads.” But, I would contend, although he is correct about the panic in the gay community, that it goes back to a sort of singular point of recognition- a moment at which many homosexuals are just arriving near the event horizon: the realization that the gay experiment didn’t work; that true happiness cannot be found there. Therefore, they are reaching out towards anything in a desperate attempt to avoid confronting the inevitable.
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