Representation in Gay Porn, Part II
If you actually wanted to find POC fucking or getting fucked in gay porn, you’re not going to have much luck looking for them in those one-minute clips that Corbin Fisher provides. However, you’ll probably have more luck by looking up “black” or “asian” on RedTube’s search engine (unpopular opinion: RedTube is better than Pornhub). That leads us to our second problem with the representation of POC in gay porn: in the rare moments when they do get represented, they are misrepresented.
Before I go any further, I’d like to point out two caveats. I’m not saying that ALL gay porn studios hire only white actors. I’m saying that enough of them hire a very low proportion of POC that it continues to contribute to racism in the gay community. Likewise, when I talk about how POC are portrayed as racist caricatures in the pornos that they are featured in, I’m not saying that they’re always portrayed that way. However, POC are disproportionately portrayed as these one-dimensional stereotypes often enough that it have real, harmful consequences. The second caveat is that although I am focusing on the portrayal of blacks and East Asians in gay porn, other POC, such as South Asians, Latinos, etc. are also portrayed as their respective racist caricatures more often than not.
Black men have been portrayed as animalistic thugs ever since the Atlantic slave trade. These portrayals of black men have led to countless numbers of them falling victim to police brutality. It has led them face more challenges in getting employed and educated than their white counterparts. Within the gay community, blacks face just as much-- if not more-- discrimination. If we do not substantially decrease the amount of racism that blacks and other POC face within the gay community, it would be a spit in the face to Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson (the founding mothers of the American gay rights movement, who were Latina and Black, respectively). An effective first step would be gay porn.
A quick search on Pornhub’s gay section of the word ‘black’ will reveal a sea of videos of black men portrayed a thugs mercilessly rough-fucking a (usually white) ass. While there’s nothing wrong with jacking off to a video of a dude being impaled by a BBC, there is a problem when this is the only way that black men are portrayed. Black men only have one role in gay porn: to fulfill that racist stereotype of being more of an animal than a human being. I’m not saying the black men should never rough-fuck an ass in gay porn, I’m saying that they must be given more roles than just that.
When black men are portrayed as less than human beings in gay porn, the gay community is more likely to treat them that way. Using inductive reasoning, when the grander media portrays black men as less than human beings, institutionalized racism, such as police brutality, employment inequality, etc., is likely to pose more challenges for the black community.
The portrayal of East Asians in gay porn has contributed to the view that white gays are superior to gay Asians. Before I became a total social justice warrior, I too subscribed to this view even though I was a gay Chinese-American. When I was first exposed to gay porn, the few pornos that I could find with people that looked like me had titles like “Revenge of the Rice” or “Exotic Asian Twink Gives it Up for White Daddy.” Even those without the obviously racist titles usually portrayed Asians as submissive and exotic creatures whose only purpose was to pleasure the white man’s cock.
When Asians are portrayed this way to the gay community through porn, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that gays too often treat fellow gaysians as submissive and exotic but less than their white counterparts. Gay Asians, as with all other gays of color, become well aware through porn that in the eyes of the LGBT community, they are seen as less. It has profound impact on their self-esteem, which is already vulnerable from the homophobia that they face. The rest of this textpost will relate my first-hand experiences of the impact that the portrayal of POC has had on me.
When I understood that being gay was not accepted widely in society and that it was “something that should be a secret” around fifth grade, it dealt a major blow to my self-esteem. As if that weren’t enough, I started to watch gay porn around that time, which inevitably exposed me to the lack of Asians in those big porn studios such as Sean Cody and how people who looked like me were portrayed when they did show up in pornos. I started to understand that people like me were “too ugly” for Sean Cody, and through XVideos I learned that my race was submissive, exotic, passive, and less than equal. While I never saw Asians like me in any other role other than the submissive sex-slave, white people got to be power-bottoms, hole-destroying tops, and every other role in between. Asians, as with other POC, just had one role to fill, which translated to me feeling constricted to this one-dimensional image that gay porn and the grander media had created. Even though I was part of the gay community, I knew that I would be inferior to the white gay. And even when I came to accept my gayness and had come out of the closet, I still felt that I was lesser in the gay community.
Although I eventually I realized that I was not lesser than any other gay (which could be its own textpost), the fact that I could accept my gayness but didn’t feel that I could be fully accepted in the gay community as an Asian is an example of why we must address racism in the LGBT community. While it wasn’t just gay porn that contributed to this, something about the representation of POC in gay porn needs to change if we want to move further.
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