The emergence of gay hardcore films provided explicit representations of gay sexual behavior not otherwise available… and the availability of such images helped to affirm the nascent gay identity.” Now, with “Bigger Than Life,” Escoffier shows how “pornography created space for increased experimentation with a whole range of sexualities not organized around procreation and reproduction.” For gays, film pornography contributed mightily to what the film critic Richard Dyer has labeled the “education of desire.” We must not forget that until 1962, as Escoffier notes, “homosexual materials, even those without any sexual content, were considered obscene by definition.
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Of his five previous books, his seminal 1998 work “American Homo: Community and Perversity” (University of California Press), which I regularly recommend to budding gay activists, remains an important theoretical work to this day. When he moved to San Francisco in 1977, he helped to found the San Francisco Lesbian and Gay History Project, and during the ’80s he was the executive editor of Socialist Review, a smart, non-sectarian New Left journal, run by a San Francisco-based collective, that first brought to national prominence a raff of notable queer writers and artists like the historian Alan Berube (author of the groundbreaking “Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War II”), the lesbian feminist Amber Hollibaugh (who went on to become senior strategist at the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and is today a leading authority on the problems facing LGBT seniors), and Debra Chasnoff (the Academy Award-winning filmmaker of “It’s Elementary” and other gay-themed documentaries).Įscoffier went on to found Out/Look, the national lesbian and gay quarterly, and while there he launched the OutWrite Lesbian and Gay Writers Conferences, held throughout the ‘90s, which were undoubtedly the largest gatherings of LGBT writers in history. As the first president of Philadelphia’s Gay Activists Alliance in 1970, he co-founded and edited The Gay Alternative, a pioneering journal of gay culture and politics and one of the skein of influential, early queer publications that helped mold and spread gay liberation’s first wave.
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Why would a noted gay intellectual devote his time to a history of the queer porn industry? Because, as Jeffrey Escoffier demonstrates in his fascinating account of this billion dollar business, same-sex pornography has not only been a window on changing sexual styles and identities but has helped to shape them.Īs Escoffier writes in “Bigger Than Life,” just published, “The sexual revolution of the sixties and seventies would never have taken place without a series of extended legal and political battles over obscenity and pornography.” Escoffier chronicles how a series of “struggles over free speech and the First Amendment that were also business ventures… helped to create a public space where it was permissible not only to discuss patterns of sexual behavior but also to portray sexuality honestly and bluntly in fiction, on the stage, and in movies.”Įscoffier has been both a product of that sexual revolution and a significant intellectual force within it.