Review: Jeffrey Escoffier's Sex, Society, and the Making of Pornography
Reviewed by Jeffrey Patrick Colgan
Certain significant portions of New York City’s history are indelibly linked to the production and consumption of hardcore pornography, and, conversely, the history of hardcore is without a doubt indebted to the city’s artistic, cultural, and economic history. Following the 1957 Roth v. United States ruling — which concerned New York City bookseller Samuel Roth and resulted in a narrower definition of obscenity — a series of Supreme Court decisions liberalized the production and exhibition of pornography and ushered in the so-called Golden Age of Porn. New York City was at the center of this pornographic revolution, where movies with explicit penetrative sex (aka hardcore) received wide, albeit controversial, theatrical distribution. Warhol’s Blue Movie, regarded as the first theatrical feature with explicit intercourse, was publicly released at the Garrick Theatre on Bleecker Street in 1969. Wakefield Poole’s Boys in the Sand, the first theatrically-released hardcore gay pornographic film, premiered at the 55th Street Playhouse in 1971. In the weeks before the debut, he hosted private screening parties around town and bought full-page ads in The New York Times and Variety. Gerard Damiano’s Deep Throat premiered the next year at the World Theatre on W 49th Street and brought hardcore pornography firmly into the mainstream.
These films, and their headline-catching releases, reflected already existing New York City subcultures of public sex, arthouse cinema, location-based sexual scenes like Fire Island, and the grittier documentary emphasis from urban photojournalism and cinéma vérité films (ala NYC filmmaker John Cassavetes). Early hardcore films were not simply prurient, money-making schemes; they portrayed (perhaps sometimes in a distorted fashion) historically-specific sexual practices, fantasies, and desires — not to mention long-lost landmarks and faded cultural touchstones. Pornography, it seems, deserves the theoretician’s and historian’s attention, for it is an incredibly extensive and ever-expanding archive of sex and sexuality, cinema theory and practice, and the accompanying political and economic systems of production, consumption, and regulation.
Sex, Society, and the Making of Pornography: The Pornography Object of Knowledge
By Jeffrey Escoffier
Rutgers University Press, 2021
238 pages
Jeffrey Escoffier’s most recent collection of essays, Sex, Society, and the Making of Pornography: The Pornographic Object of Knowledge (Rutgers University Press, 2021) further highlights the historical importance of hardcore pornography — nothing new to those like Escoffier, who has written on sex, sexuality, and LGBTQ history for over four decades.[1] As evinced by the subtitle, Escoffier is committed to the notion that pornography has an epistemic function. Not only does pornography serve as an epistemic tool for the individual seeking to understand their own sexual desires and proclivities, but it also serves as an archive for identifying how desire, sexual practices, and their related institutional contexts change over time and where we find ourselves today. But why hardcore specifically? For Escoffier, hardcore isn’t as consumed by the fetishization of “perfect” bodies as softcore pornography, because the sexual act and the symbolically-laden interaction between the sexual partners comes to the fore. Hardcore, with its explicit sex, foregrounds the interpersonal dynamic and the myriad social layers packed into the act like carbon into a diamond. By treating sexual acts as sites of cultural insight, we gain access both to all that is represented by the pornographic image itself as well as how these images (moving or not) are used in the creation of further sexual fantasies and practices.
Escoffier’s collection is not simply a history of hardcore, though, even if the historical is always near to hand. The book might best be described as an expert-led perambulation through the production apparatus of hardcore pornography — over time and viewed through various theoretical frameworks. New York City, specifically, provided a unique climate for the production of hardcore pornography to thrive — with mafia financing,[2] burgeoning gay rights activism that fostered vibrant sexual subcultures, and a thriving artistic and theatrical scene. Directors Wakefield Poole (Broadway choreographer) and Jerry Douglas (Off-Broadway director), actor Casey Donovan (Off-Broadway actor), and many more were all part of the artistic milieu of New York City and brought their artistic sensibilities to the hardcore pornography they crafted.
Escoffier presents a case for how hardcore complicates our assumptions about the function of sexual identity in both the production and consumption of pornography, the relation between desire and market forces, and the lives and livelihoods of sex workers. Particularly fascinating are his explorations of the production side of pornography, chronicling wage trends amongst various demographics of performers, the experiences of a sampling of “gay-for-pay” performers, and the industry’s treatment of the growing genre of trans porn. It is here, when parsing through the fine-grained details of the pornographic production process and finding fodder for broader and variegated theoretical interpretations, that the book hits its stride. Escoffier is no systematician; he is well aware that pornography is a messy affair, and no single theoretical lens can do it justice.
Yet, underlying the various investigatory approaches used throughout the essays, and ultimately providing them some cohesion, is sexual script theory. Developed in the 1970s by Kinsey Institute sociologists John Gagnon and William Simon, sexual script theory contested biological and psychoanalytic theories of sexual behavior. These scripts draw upon the interactional skills, fantasies, and cultural myths of the participants to create socially structured sexual behavior. For sexual script theorists, the expectations, field of possible activities, and arousing fantasy scenarios of a sexual interaction are all socially determined. Improvisation and the unexpected surely occur within sexual interactions, yet even the improvisatory possibilities have some sort of social determination. For Escoffier, sexual scripts theory can be used as an analytical tool to examine sexual behavior (either “out in the wild” or performed in a studio) to identify the constitutive elements: etiquette and social protocols, prevailing cultural and institutional narratives and constraints, acquired interpersonal skills, dominant stereotypes and their possible subversion — all of which provide insight into the specific historical circumstances in which the sex act takes place. This is where pornography enters the picture for Escoffier: sexual scripts theory can be applied to hardcore pornography to analyze the presented images and identify the determining social factors at work therein.
For the historian of New York City, the most valuable of the book’s essays are those that focus on the pornography and sexual and artistic subcultures of the 1970s. In “Sex in the Seventies: Gay Porn Cinema as an Archive for the History of Sexuality,” Escoffier argues that the hardcore pornographic films made in 1970s New York City function as an archive of a period of radical sexual experimentation that was brutally extinguished by the AIDS epidemic. The gay male sexual subculture of the 1970s has, for many, persisted as a golden era that was “an astonishing experiment in radically restructuring existing relationships, concepts of beauty, and the use of sex as a revolutionary tool.”[3] It goes without saying that the revolutionary boons of this period were not equally experienced, especially along lines of race and gender; however, it is undeniable that a profound change occurred in American urban centers that allowed for the emergence of new forms of sexual behavior. Bathhouses, leather bars, and public sex venues like abandoned piers or subway restrooms became for many emancipatory sites, where, as philosopher Arthur Danto claimed, sex was lived more creatively and the barriers of its enactment reduced.[4] With the ravages of the AIDS epidemic came the great erasure of this experimental period: gone were so many of the practices and the confidence that imbued them, gone were so many of the institutions, venues, and social networks that supported these practices, and gone were so many of practitioners themselves, their stories and strivings lost with them. Yet for Escoffier, the films in the cinéma vérité style of hardcore made during this period — which strove to film sex out in the places where real sex took place, according to the interactional conventions of the period, and including all of the grit and squalor of the 1970s urban realm — serve as a primary repository for this era that was almost lost. Arch Brown’s Pier Groups (1979) is filmed at the cruising sites along the abandoned Hudson River piers. Jerry Douglas’s The Back Row, Peter de Rome’s Underground, and Ian McGraw’s Subway show cruising and sex throughout the actual subway system. Like a time machine these films carry us back to a vibrant (and always slightly threatening) milieu of public sex, emphasizing the simple fact that the historical trajectory of New York City is reflected in the evolving ways that we think of and have sex.
The essay “Porn’s Historical Unconscious: Sex, Identity, and Everyday Life in the Films of Jack Deveau and Joe Gage” expands upon this theme by closely examining two hardcore filmmakers that embraced the New York-specific medium of “pornographic realism.”[5] These films, for Escoffier, “articulate a historical interpretation of homosexuality during a period in which both homosexuality and masculinity were redefined.”[6] The traditional (and simplistic) belief that gay men desire to be female was contested when these films presented a more macho, working-class, and darker conception of gay sex, which became a hallmark of a particular New York-style of hardcore.[7] Sexual identity, too, was represented as either blurry or of no consequence. Films frequently presented male leads in sex scenes with both men and women, alongside heterosexual relationships, and explored (often to comical effect) the impact of promiscuity on daily life and relationships. Through these films we can watch aspects of the sexual revolution and gay liberation seemingly play out before our eyes.
Using hardcore pornography as a lens, Escoffier’s book presents a compelling history of (primarily gay) sexuality in the United States during the latter half of the 20th century — especially in New York City. While many might think of pornography as only a minor aspect, Escoffier offers a strong argument that hardcore pornography has been integral to the recent historical developments of sex and sexuality. Hardcore, it is claimed, is an archive of desires and the structural conditions that both propagate and constrain them.
Jeffrey Patrick Colgan is an incoming philosophy PhD student at Tulane University and currently at the Graduate Center, CUNY. He is one of the founders of the Network for Culture & Arts Policy and a writer on social and political philosophy and history.
[1] It should be noted that this author has a personal relationship with Escoffier, and the two have collaborated on articles and essays in the past — including some for the Gotham blog.
[2] Gage, Nicholas. “Organized Crime Reaps Huge Profits from Dealing in Pornographic Films.” The New York Times, October 12, 1975, p. 1.
[3] Patrick Moore, Beyond Shame: Reclaiming the Abandoned History of Radical Gay Sexuality (Boston: Beacon, 2004), 4.
[4] Jeffrey Escoffier, Sex, Society, and the Making of Pornography: The Pornographic Object of Knowledge, (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2021), 49.
[5] Ibid., 67.
[6] Ibid., 76.
[7] Ibid., 76-77.