by Path Lassky

As a straight male in my early thirties I would not have thought that I’d find myself in the market for queer porn. Thankfully, Pink and White Productions, a local adult film production company directed by Shine Louise Houston that lovingly crafts ethical porn with a DIY feel, decided to meet me halfway. The first videos I had seen from this outfit were part of the now-legendary CrashPad Series, and though amazing, were often not something that I found I needed in my diet of porn consumption. Historically I’ve had a painfully average standard-straight guy porn diet, but when I heard that the Bay’s premier queer porn house had done a guy/girl scene almost as an experiment, I was intrigued. It seemed like an attempt to answer the question, “what happens when queer porn producers make straight porn?” You quickly discover that the differences between straight and queer porn have less to do with the gender configurations of the actors involved, and more to do with the philosophies that the creators have on sexuality and human bodies. The advantages of queer porn and the utter failures of straight porn were made extremely clear when I watched BED PARTY, a recent short film starring Eden Alexander and Sebastian Keys available on the PinkLabel.tv website.

I’ve never been convinced that porn is toxic. Like most things in the adult world, it can be dangerous, but it’s all in how you use it. So, with that understanding, I’d like to say that straight porn, that which is made to be used and consumed mostly by straight men, emphasizes disposability. Not just of the women, but of the all-but-anonymous men involved in the scenes. It is designed to arouse the lowest common denominator parts of a man’s brain, and to this end it is extremely effective. It doesn’t tell stories, it doesn’t deal with emotions, it addresses no real intimate dynamic between two human beings. I hardly blame porn for any of the missing or twisted parts of my young straightboy mind, and I see straight porn as mostly just a reflection of the world we live in, with all the troubling parts included. I’m never going to call straight porn the problem, but watching Bed Party, I’m ready to say that queer porn is the solution.

It’s the communication that immediately strikes you when you watch queer porn. The easy comfort, the absence of pressure, the fearless self-exposure the actors bring to their scenes, and the way they just talk to each other, like the way that real people talk when they have real sex. I’ve certainly never watched porn before that began with a female narrator’s voice asking “so, describe your sexual identity?” It kind of makes me wonder what would happen if that was a rule in straight porn, you have to ask one meaningful question about a person’s sexual identity. The actors are young, attractive, and they would seem at home in straight porn. The 20-minute scene was also edited down from a longer session of not only interviews, but playful sex. Like most good, real sex, there is a bit of nervousness at the beginning, but getting past that is half the fun for a lot of people in touch with their own sexuality. By the time sex starts the audience feels like we know a few intimate and important things about the people we’re about to watch. A couple sincere ‘I love yous’ have been exchanged and, magically, both people onscreen smile. At each other, at the interviewers, and at us, the audience. It’s nice to be included.

Brilliantly disruptive, BED PARTY immediately does away with one of the worst notions to ever burrow its way into the mind of an adolescent male; the idea that sex ends when the man cums. Instead, in this world, the man cums, and only then do things really get started. This is a lesson a lot of women would love to get through to a lot of straight men. Things proceed from there and reach a level of intimacy and intensity that I wasn’t totally expecting. My first thought when it was clear that the guy/girl scene was going to go immediately from kissing (sweet, expressive kissing that sets the mood like porn foreplay) to anal penetration of the male actor, I thought “okay, that might be a bit much for some straights. They’re going to lose a few people right there.” But, upon further consideration, I realized that for every straightboy viewer they lose, there’s at least one straightboy who just found something he’s been looking for forever. Pink and White is looking for an audience that’s been waiting for them, and they’re finding that audience. It’s clear from the high percentage of random queers I meet who know everything about the CrashPad Series and who can talk for hours about the intersections of feminism and porn. Something new is happening and Pink and White Productions is right at the forefront of it.

I also appreciated that the audio is dramatically different than straight porn (or straight sex which all too often seems to happen with one or both partners proceeding in dead silence). The sound adds another dimension to this video. The grunts and groans are real, and the sound of toys punctuates the soundtrack providing familiar cues to those who know what to listen for. The voices of the actors add even more to the sensual experience of the video as they add comments about how things smell, taste, and feel. It’s nice to be able to hear the heavy breathing and the quiet whispers without the whole thing being drowned out by generic, unsatisfying music. Even the musical cues that serve as bookends to the scene work well and provide smooth transitions into and out of the world of this Bay Area apartment that we were invited into for a few magical moments.

This whole experience of watching these two people make love is unlike the sex I grew up watching in mainstream, straight porn. It’s not really comparable at all. For one thing, I feel like going any deeper into what happens in this video would require spoiler alerts. It really would be best just to watch for yourself, which I highly recommend. PinkLabel.tv not only produces its material ethically, it distributes their proceeds ethically, so you can feel like you’re truly contributing to something special when you become the audience of one of their films.

They sought to ask what would happen if queer pornographers made guy/girl porn, and the answer they got was something that pushes boundaries, explores sexuality, and offers some clarity to real human sex. I feel like they’re not redefining porn, so much as defining it in the first place, pulling porn out of the murky depths it’s been in for so long. Why do we watch strangers have sex? How can watching this sex teach us about ourselves as individuals and as couples? What happens when we throw out all the cookie cutters that mainstream porn relies on to tell us how to look, how to act in bed, and how to view out bodies? What happens when we become unafraid to kiss each other and use our words to communicate what we really want? Finally, it asks an important, self-reflective question; who is queer porn for?

Queer porn is for people who are unafraid, people who are ready for things to be different. It’s for those of us who think communication makes sex so much sweeter. Queer porn is porn for humans. It’s made by humans and its purpose is to use eroticism to highlight our shared humanity. It’s art in its highest form, and if you haven’t already, I highly recommend you spend some time with it.

Watch BED PARTY: Eden Alexander and Sebastian Keys

Path Lassky is a poet, emcee, and native of San Francisco’s Castro district.