A PornClub Review by Michael J. Morris

Heavenly Spire is an intimate celebration of masculine beauty and sexuality created by director Shine Louise Houston. Bobby Noble¹ describes it as “a project of fascinating incoherence centering a very willful feminist gaze and camera directly on the bodies of queer masculinity.” I have been enamored with Heavenly Spire for over a decade. I had the honor of including scenes from this project—one with James Darling and Quinn Valentine and another with Jack HammerXL and Jessie Sparkles—into queer porn screenings I curated in an artist-run warehouse space called Feverhead in Columbus, Ohio, in 2012 and 2015. I also had the delight of interviewing Houston about this project on the patio of Dynamo Donuts in San Francisco in 2014.

Houston created Heavenly Spire after years of directing her award-winning CrashPadSeries studio. She says that Heavenly Spire gave her the opportunity to go back “to more of my college experimental days, doing different camera work, different lighting, playing more with lighting, composition, and sound,” while also addressing a gap in the market at the time—namely, queer porn that focused on men and masculine sexuality. Unlike CrashPad, which is edited to adhere to a narrative arc that preserves the illusion of continuous time, Heavenly Spire is nonlinear, using jump cuts, non-synch sound, music, and moving through different segments that don’t have to preserve that continuity or narrative arc. She also describes the project as self-indulgent in that it allowed her to really explore her fascination with masculinity as well as how masculinity is constructed in performance. She says that the intention throughout so much of her work has been to offer validation and permission, and the permission she’s hoping to offer with Heavenly Spire? “That masculinity isn’t a tiny box! It’s way more complicated. It’s not a box; it’s a rhizome.”

All of the scenes in Heavenly Spire start with an interview with the performer or performers talking about their desires or fantasies as well as their own bodies—particularly parts of their own bodies that they like—which then moves into a series of shots scored with music that in some way visualizes aspects of what the performer(s) described, followed by footage of the performer masturbating or the performers fucking. The scenes almost always end with hearing Houston’s voice speaking to the performer or performers in the frame, often with something like “Cool!” “Awesome!” “Thank you!” or “That was great!” and laughing together.

Hearing Houston’s voice in the scene reminds me that she’s there, that what I’m watching is not a transparent window onto these people’s bodies and sex, but rather that I’m seeing through her lens, her eyes, her editing—witnessing as much about how she is seeing as what she is seeing. The videos have vintage film quality, both in terms of the coloration and also literally cropped into a frame that mimics the look of old-school film, accompanied in transition moments by the sound of film running through a projector. These historical references in the style of the editing might feel nostalgic, but also seem to pose the question: what if this had existed before? What if these beautiful, candid documentations of masculinity had been part of the visual history of sexuality that we inherited from pornographies of the past?

I remember when I first saw Heavenly Spire, probably around 2010 or 2011. It held a number of “firsts” for me:

• The first time I saw porn that started with a performer talking about themselves at all—let alone discussing their body and their fantasies.
• The first time I saw someone masturbating with a vibrator against his dick.
• The first time I saw someone fucking someone else with a Feeldoe-style dildo.
• The first time I saw a Black man flogging a white man who had been blindfolded, tied up, and gagged.

It was also the first time I had ever heard porn performers talking about the fluidity of gender and sexuality and fantasy, being turned on by the sounds someone makes as they’re cumming, how gender is attributed to them—people seeing them as male or cisgender—in ways that are different from how they feel about themselves, their insecurities and dysmorphia, how their fantasies changed with their gender transitions, the relationship between sex and safety, and more. The interviews at the start of each scene are self-reflexive, which is itself perhaps a subtle suggestion for masculinity: What if there was space within masculinity for self-reflection, self-awareness, and even self-love?

As each video transitions into shots of the performers’ bodies and sex with themselves or partners, there’s a tenderness to Houston’s gaze and her approach of these performers, finding glimpses of softness throughout these masculinities—in a vulnerable comment that they share, in the closeness of their breath, in their faces as they cum, in the moments of recovery or cleanup afterward—alongside plenty of hard cocks, thick arms, hairy thighs, strong chests, and other signifiers of masculine beauty. Even when scenes get rough, Houston still finds moments of space and quiet, a softening in the midst of intensity. In most of the videos, the camera stays close and tight, parts of the bodies filling the frame in a way that feels both intimate—bringing me so near to their skin, their touch, their breath—and in a way that also sometimes feels imposing as they take up all the space in the frame. But then I remember that this seeming imposition, masculinity taking up all this space, isn’t just manspreading for the camera. It is space that is given by Houston’s direction of the frame. It’s an allowance of space and visibility rather than space and visibility taken up by those who occupy a masculine position.

Across its collection, Heavenly Spire presents masculinity as something that is not tied to any specific kind of person or body. The people presented throughout the project embody a range of shapes, shades, and sexual practices, suggesting that whatever we recognize as masculine beauty and sexuality is not a privileged domain of any single group of people narrowly defined. Masculinity may not be an inherent quality at all, and it doesn’t belong exclusively to some group of people or specific kinds of bodies. This distribution of masculine beauty and sexuality across such a range of performers, bodies, and sexual practices proliferates not only the sites at which masculinity can be located but also the sites to which the desire for masculinity can be directed as well. And that’s where I find myself as a viewer: a genderqueer/nonbinary person who does not identify with masculinity but who finds the embodiment of some masculinities exquisite, exciting, and arousing. Watching Heavenly Spire, I find myself riding waves of tender desire by way of intimate observation. With each installment of this project, what masculinity can look like, how it is rendered and articulated through the frame of the camera, how it is pieced together in the editing, and thus what it can mean becomes more and more expansive.

In porn as in the world beyond the frame, we might understand masculinity as an aggregation of features and qualities—some of which are socially conditioned associations and others of which might be more personal or idiosyncratic. Maybe we think of masculinity as composed of things like specific physical features—the size of shoulders, the contours of a chest, the shape of a jawline, the depth of a voice, the presence of body hair or facial hair—or maybe what we think of as masculinity has more to do with how a body inhabits space, how they sit or move, the way someone touches themself or another, the kinds of sounds they make when they’re fucking, how they take on different sexual roles or positions, their relationship to strength or power. There’s a sense in which masculinity is to some extent always an imaginary ideal, an abstract collection of associations that may find some partial substantiation or approximation in the specific physical presence of an actual person. And for those of us who desire masculinity, who respond erotically to the recognition of something or someone as masculine, it is to some degree the correspondence between the actual and the ideal, this person and the imaginary construct, that we find exhilarating. Whatever masculinity abstractly gathers up as its substance or defining features, Heavenly Spire presents a series of performers who occupy a plethora of those abstract associations, anchoring them in their own flesh and voice and gestures, embodying some and stretching or defying others.

Across this collection, whether we’re watching for artistic merit, philosophical reflection, to jerk off, or all of the above, we might find ourselves asking: what then is masculinity?

• Is masculinity a hairy chest and bushy pubic hair, a handlebar mustache, or a clean-shaven body and face?
• Is masculinity a big belly or a slim frame, firm abs or a soft torso, chest scars or bulging pecs, a deep voice or a voice more lilting?
• Is masculinity a throbbing erection, stroking while watching porn, shoving your dick into a cake, sliding a dildo or butt plug in the ass, or one person fucking another with a dildo that’s inside both of them?
• Is masculinity bottoming or topping, having your fingers inside someone else or having someone else’s fingers inside you, getting tied up and flogged or the one doing the flogging, sucking each other’s dicks or jerking off side by side?
• Is masculinity steady and deliberate or starting slow then building in speed and intensity until there’s cum dripping down your chest? Tasting your own cum or running your fingers through the sweat and jizz covering your partner?
• Is masculinity framed in leather or rubber, bowties and fairy wings, jockstraps and tattoos, pierced ears, nipples, or dicks?

Part of what’s so hot about Heavenly Spire is that we get to discover masculine beauty in all these places and all these ways, finding more of what turns us on and gets us off as we go. As Houston says, masculinity isn’t a box. It’s a rhizome extending out in more directions than we can imagine, and as we watch Heavenly Spire, we get to discover ourselves and our desires in all these directions as well.

About the Author:
Michael J. Morris is a consulting astrologer and tarot reader, artist, writer, educator, and facilitator committed to personal and collective healing and liberation. They began their consulting practice Co Witchcraft Offerings in 2019. Michael holds a PhD in Dance Studies from The Ohio State University and was a university educator from 2009-2021. Their writing appears in The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Theater, TDR: The Drama Review, Choreographic Practices, Dance Chronicle, and the European Journal of Ecopsychology. Michael is based in Columbus, Ohio—the ancestral and contemporary territories of the Shawnee, Potawatomi, Delaware, Miami, Peoria, Seneca, Wyandotte, Ojibwe, and Cherokee peoples.
Learn more about their work on michaeljmorris.co and michaeljmorris.weebly.com and follow them on Instagram.

1. Bobby Noble, “Knowing Dick: Penetration and the Pleasures of Feminist Porn’s Trans Men,” in The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure, eds. Constance Penley, Celine Parreñas Shimizu, Mireille Miller-Young, and Tristan Taormino (New York City: The Feminist Press, 2013), 318.