¿Do you Remember the Days, long ago, when the Mob (or Organized Crime, or la Cosa Nostra) made what it honestly--well, sincerely-- believed to be Gay Porn Movies?

For a year or so in the late 60's or early 70's they began to make them--or to oversee the production of them--because (1) they wrongly believed that they, or their trusted minions and nephews and brothers-in-law, already actually knew how to make gay porn movies, and (2) they never doubted that they should at least be in the business of making them, because, as a matter of self-identification, that's what the Mob, even to itself, is all about: supplying cheapo, semi-legal, cheesy sleaze, wherever there's a market for it. Right? They were thus the first of the Established (Heterosexual) Powers to confront the fact that gay porn couldn't be manufactured and sold at the same old low-risk, high-profit margin that, say, the heterosexual "blue" movies shown in whore houses in Tijuana could.  It took them a while--about a year on the West Coast, and a little longer on the East Coast--to realize that they'd made a fundamental error of judgement. Gay porn, whatever it is,  is nothing like the straight porn they were used to and which they had helped to invent. So, pretty much, they gave up on it. And thank God for small blessings that they did: We saw no more anal sex scenes ending with shit and blood oozing from torn and ravaged butt-holes--which Mob bosses evidently sincerely believed to be the inevitable and natural concomitant of gay sex, and had thought that images of which would be an enticement, if anything, to those whom they considered, by definition, "fudge-packers" (the depressing heterosexual cutism for "shit-packers," i.e., male homosexuals).

Still, since the late 60's or early 70's (when the lid, so to speak, came off), and it somehow became obviously preposterous to treat more than a tenth of the population as criminals, for no better reason than that they insisted on having sex with one another, male-sex gay porn did not so much flourish as proliferate or explode. With the unintentional help of delusional feminists, such as Andrea Dworkin (shown above), who could see nothing in male homosexual pornography but their own slobberingly hysterical obsessions with heterosexual rape fantasies, gay porn at last became the focused visual objectification of men and of exclusively male sexuality (no women in sight) that its purchasers and admirers desired only that it should be.  But that said, it had no philosophy, no psychology, no raison d'être, and no extensive romantic history behind it comparable to the vast literature of heterosexuality.  Gay porn movies became simply a sequence of male-sex scenes, more or less adequately filmed (and in the 70's decidedly less than adequately), organized by tempo and number of participants rather like the scenes and acts of a baroque opera. Attempts at acting, interpretation, plot and (shudder) psychological motivation were tentative, few, and almost invariably ludicrous--with the single exception, that I recall, of a 1979  movie called The Idol, which managed, despite its blurry low-definition, to be an entertaining flick, with real characters and a plot, and at the same time to be, withal, good, objective male-sex pornography.  In the 80's and 90's film quality increased exponentially, and in the first decades of the Third Millennium, vestigial efforts at tradition-bound plotting and psychological typification were, mercifully, abandoned.

But then, last year, an Argentine director name of Mónaco brought out, through JackRabbit Releasing, a movie called Learning, in which:

"A deeply closeted, homeless, 20 year-old street urchin from a working class neighborhood in Buenos Aires, who's never had sex with another man, yet dreams about it all the time. Featuring gorgeous drone shots (I was wondering how they did it) of seedy ports, dangerous hookups, first-timer deep-gagging blowjobs, intense bareback fucking, nervous touching and groping, thigh-trembling oral cumshots...."

Like it is.  Like it really is.  No explanations necessary.

And then, this year, the same people give us Starving, nearly three hours long, and a fucking psycho/social/sexual cinematic masterpiece; with, if you're paying attention, a fascinatingly detailed plot.

How very interesting this is.  And still no girls.

So, let me just say that I don't really know very much about heterosexual pornography, but the little that I have seen strikes me as utterly distasteful.  It's not just the presence of girls and their gaping vah-jay-jays--though of course it is that.  Girls do ruin everything, but what makes heterosexual pornography unbearably unpleasant to me in particular is the tone of it--the sickening, tormented screeching, the horrific, wounded-sounding moaning.  And the men in it are really quite ugly. Besides all of which, heterosexual pornography (i.e., pornography with girls in it) in general seems to be some sort of grim, Ingmar Bergmanesque tragedy in which nobody smiles or laughs, or appears to be having a good time. Very like, if you'll forgive my saying so, heterosexuality itself.