Amateur pornography has often been defined negatively in relationship to its professional counterpart; featuring average-looking people, awkward or disengaged performances, and poorly recorded video. This understanding of amateur performance has yet to be reconsidered in light of the mid-2000s industry shift to ‘reality porn,' which boasts professionally-lit scenes shot on clear, high-definition video, and features normatively good-looking performers—performers who are still billed as ‘amateur.'
This paper fleshes out current definitions of reality porn, suggesting that in addition to adopting the aesthetics and conventions of reality television, it adopts its promise: that by putting real people in a contrived scenario it can produce a truthful document of a human encounter. Because the believability of this encounter hinges on the understanding that the performers are appearing as themselves, reality porn must establish their ‘real-life’ status via on-camera interviews and behind-the-scenes vignettes.Taking major gay porn studio Sean Cody and one of its star performers Curtis as an example, this paper suggests that the realism of amateur performance is no longer based upon a lack of skill or less-than-ideal looks, but rather constructed within the video itself and across several scenes, creating a serial narrative of sexual exploration and discovery.
1 ‘Bareback’ refers specifically to gay pornography produced after the late 1990s that deliberately eschews condom use. Sean Cody have been producing bareback pornography exclusively since 2012. For a history of bareback pornography, see Dean (Citation2009), Mercer (Citation2012b), Mowlabocus, Harbottle, and Witzel (Citation2013), and Lee (Citation2014). For the recent industry shift towards all-bareback production, see Dean (Citation2015), Mercer (Citation2017, 139–144), Tollini (Citation2017), and Brennan (Citation2020, Citation2022).
2 Qualifying porn studios’ success is tricky. Unlike mainstream cinema, there is no centralized box office reporting, and studios do not release their subscriber numbers or income. Gay porn blog Str8UpGayPorn publishes a ranking of gay porn studios by popularity using global Alexa rankings (which rank the most-searched websites globally). Curtis became the Sean Cody model with the most individual scenes to his name in 2015, a record he held until 2018, when he was surpassed by Randy.
3 While I do not have the space to adequately summarize them here, discussion and debate surrounding straight or ‘gay-for-pay’ performers have existed since the earliest writing on gay pornography. See Tom Waugh (Citation1985), Dyer (Citation1985), Burger (Citation1995), Thomas Waugh (Citation1996), Escoffier (Citation2003, Citation2009), Mercer (Citation2012a), Stadler (Citation2013), Bozelka (Citation2013), and Mercer (Citation2017).
4 Most gay porn blogs presented this act as something never before seen, but The Sword pointed to three amateur scenes (two featuring trans women) where the same act was featured. (Waxner-Herman Citation2015b).
5 In an article comparing the construction of gay masculinities of Sean Cody and Treasure Island Media performers, Craig Tollini suggested these behind-the-scenes moments of performers joking or hamming it up for the camera are evidence of what he termed their ‘goofball masculinity’ (Tollini Citation2017, 428–429).
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Funding
This article draws on research supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.