‘Straight sex in porn is anything but just straight’: Exploring queer heteroporn

Abstract

Several ideas across pornography studies and queer theory have gestured towards the potential queerness of heteroporn, and this article synthesises this body of scholarship by considering its logics, merits, and implications. It explores the ways in which heteroporn may not be as ‘straight’ as often thought, and identifies queer practices, glimmers, flourishes, residues, creations, and forms of spectatorship that infiltrate the genre. The findings suggest that most ‘queer heteroporn’ occupies a ‘kinda hegemonic, kinda subversive’ space, wherein while this type of pornography contain queer elements, it nevertheless reifies central attributes of heteronormativity via its privileging of sexism and the penetrative economy of sex. Against this backdrop, the article considers the opportunities that these queer interventions might make, and speculates whether these queer traces are inefficacious, or alternatively, worth lingering upon to imagine and build a queer/er future. The overall findings suggest that ‘queer heteroporn’ should be viewed cautiously as a site with which to build further resistance; it may be that certain types of queer heteroporn offer a route through which straight subjects can challenge heteronormativity and embrace a queer/er world. Anchored throughout this contribution is a discussion about the meanings, possibilities, and ethics of queer.

Introduction

This article takes up several ideas across pornography and queer studies that consider the queerness of heteroporn. Heffernan (2015: 46), for example, has suggested that the rise of hardcore heteroporn in the 1970s ‘relied heavily on the culture, infrastructure, and major players of the art cinema movement of the previous 20 years’, and this was an industry often coded as queer, and as such, imbued many queer influences and traces across 1970s and 80s heteroporn. Gerli (2004) and Strub (2017a, 2017b) have analysed the influence of gay directors during this period, such as Zebedy Colt, Chuck Vincent, and the Amero Brothers, who embedded queer practices and subtexts within heteroporn. More contemporarily, Shelton (2002: 139), whose quote is contained in the article’s title, argues that ‘straight porn is anything but just straight’, suggesting that heteroporn ‘obsesses on the ability of heterosexual imagery to encode potentially homoerotic elements of homosocial spectatorship that are too threatening, too disturbing, to be depicted openly’. Waugh (1992, 2001) has also noted the homoerotic elements of heteroporn spectatorship, while Edelman (2009: 38) more broadly notes the amorphous permeations between porn and queer: ‘[l]ike pornography, queerness occupies the space of what resists the advances of knowledge, what conceptualisation can’t domesticate by way of its will-to-identity. As such it never coincides with itself, never quickens into form’. Each of these perspectives note different genealogical, stylistic, and content-based associations between queerness and heteroporn, and gestures towards the multiplicity and opacity of queer itself.

My own thinking about the queerness of heteroporn emerged from my analysis of pissing pornography contained in studios such as Gonzo.com. As I viewed the material, it felt decidedly queer. I mean ‘queer’ here in its traditional and common-sense usage: as strange, odd, unusual, abnormal, and perhaps sick (Halperin, 2003). The more I watched, however, the more it felt transgressively and subversively queer. Beyond the initial shock and surprise, there are indeed several aspects about pornography generally and pissing pornography particularly that (seek to) subvert (hetero)normativity. Pornography generally contributes to the culture of ‘public sex’ (Berlant and Warner, 1998), and thereby challenges heteronormative ideals that sex belongs to the private sphere and ought to occur between monogamous couples for the purposes of reproduction and family life. Bersani’s (1987: 197) famous article ‘Is the Rectum a Grave?’ commences with his equally famous first-sentence proclamation: ‘[t]here is a big secret about sex: most people don’t like it’. Heteronormativity is antisexual unless the goal is reproduction, yet most (hetero)porn is uninterested in this teleological aim (Bersani, 1987). Rubin’s (1984) famous sex hierarchy denotes a ‘charmed circle’ of appropriate forms of sexual practices and sexualities (e.g. heterosexual, monogamous, procreative, and vanilla.) versus an outer limit of inappropriate and impermissible forms and practices (e.g. non-heterosexual, non-procreative, and alone or in groups.). Many pornographic representations, as well as pornography itself, sit outside of the charmed circle, and question and problematise the establishment and maintenance of sexual and gendered norms and practices (Paasonen et al., 2021). Pissing pornography certainly sits outside of ‘good, normal, blessed sexuality’, and in so doing, calls into question the circumstances that render some practices ‘bad, abnormal, unnatural, [and] damned’ (Rubin, 1984: 281).

Yet, as I viewed this pissing pornography, I also felt uncomfortable about associating the genre with queerness. While the practice and representation contain queer flourishes, much of it might also be ordinarily associated with power and humiliation. Many of the practices involve male performers pissing in or on women performers, and as such, they may stage gendered power relations and imbalances. This interpretation may be a little too reductive, however, as pornography is too readily identified as a documentary of abuse (or as a fantasy that allegedly indexes reality), and particularly when it involves non-normative (and especially BDSM) sexual practices (Kipnis, 1999; Rubin, 2011). An image or set of images may not reveal much about its mode of production or the desires and fantasies of the performers who create it, not to mention the logics or configurations of pornography and its genres (where transgression is one key principle). Representation and action are not the same thing. Central to this discussion is also an understanding of what queerness is and does, and the recognition that regimes of seeing, analysing, and theorising are not monolithic or one-dimensional but subject to one’s interpretation at a particular point in time. Alternative readings are always available, and particularly when queer ‘takes on varied shapes, risks, ambitions, and ambivalences in various contexts’ (Berlant and Warner, 1995: 344).

Desirous of articulating these ambivalent ideas, this article reflects upon the queerness of heteroporn generally and pissing pornography particularly. I start with the question, ‘what is queer?’, to contextualise the analysis. I ground my approach to queer (theory) within an ethical framework, and one that aligns with feminist theory and politics, and a suspicion towards the taken-for-granted and uncritical valorisation of anti-normativity and transgression. This helps situate the ways in which certain pornographic and sexual practices can or should be received in relation to queer/ness. I then review the literature that discusses the queerness of heteroporn, and identify the ways in which queer practices, readings, glimmers, flourishes, residues, creations, and forms of spectatorship haunt and infiltrate heteropornographic practices. Following this, I return to my example of pissing pornography, and think through the ways in which it too might be understood as queer. The overall findings suggest that most queer heteroporn occupies a ‘kinda hegemonic, kinda subversive’ (Sedgwick and Frank, 1995: 5) space, wherein while these pornographies contain queer elements, practices, and creations, they nevertheless reify central attributes of heteronormativity via its privileging of sexism and the penetrative economy of sex.

In such circumstances, the article concludes with a discussion about the implications of these findings, and speculates whether these queer traces are totalisingly inefficacious, or alternatively, worth lingering upon to imagine and build a queer/er future. Engaging with the work of Ward (2015), Muñoz (2019), Thomas (2000), and others, as well as my own ethical (and perhaps utopian) commitment to queer theory, I consider the ‘promise’ that queer glimmers and flourishes might open, create, and/or invite. I conclude by suggesting that ‘queer heteroporn’ should be viewed as a site with which to build further resistance and forms of subversion in imagining a queer/er world. Focussing on the ethical aspects of queer theory, I suggest that straight subjects may be confronted with a reckoning once they realise the constraints of the normative regimes they inhabit, and it may be that queer glimmers and flourishes may prompt such a reckoning and invite ways of living otherwise. In short, ‘queer heteroporn’ may offer a route through which straights can challenge their heteronormativity and embrace a queer/er future.

What is queer?

Queer is a ‘deliberately ambiguous term’ that connotes multiple ways of doing, being, naming, and describing (Monaghan, 2016: 7). There is no singularity to queer; rather, it signifies a plurality of different meanings and perspectives (Halperin, 1995). Originally, queer meant something that was odd, strange, abnormal, or sick, and was used as a slur against homosexuality (Halperin, 2003). The term was resignified by the gay and lesbian community in the 1980s in the context of HIV/AIDS activism and used to denote a resistant and unashamed non-normative sexuality (McCann and Monaghan, 2020). The reclamation of queer led to its association with new meanings and inflections, and often with a radical and provocative edge.

In the 1990s the field of ‘queer theory’ emerged. Commonly attributed to Teresa de Lauretis at a conference at the University of California (Santa Cruz) in 1990, de Lauretis envisaged queer as a heterogeneous device that could ‘recast or reinvent the terms of our sexualities, to construct another discursive horizon, another way of thinking the sexual’ (1991: iv). In the years that followed, queer theory became a ‘deliberately disruptive’ force that challenged the conventional wisdom of academic theory (Halperin, 2003: 340). It is also commonly understood to have emerged in response to gay and lesbian studies as part of collective efforts to disrupt its normative and normalising tendencies (Warner, 1991). Wiegman and Wilson suggest that challenging norms, normativity, and normalisation ‘marks the spot where queer and theory meet’ (2015: 1, italics in original). Anti-normativity and transgression are not followed within queer thought uncritically; rather, it is the domesticating, dominating, exclusionary, familiar, homogenising, identity-based, oppressive, and regulative quality of norms, normativity, and normalisation that motivate queer’s turn to the anti-normative (Berlant and Warner, 1998; Halberstam, 2011; Jagose, 2015; Wiegman and Wilson, 2015). The tyrannical character of norms provokes queer’s attachment to the politics of oppositionality in efforts to imagine ways of living and being otherwise.

While a large bulk of queer scholarship preoccupies itself with the disruption and subversion of normativity and particularly heteronormativity, McCann and Monaghan argue that queer also operates ‘as a wish and a hope for a different kind of thinking and engagement with questions of sexuality, gender, identity, power and the politics of oppression’ (2020: 3). Queer thought is thus strongly linked to feminist, ethical, and social justice frameworks (Huffer, 2010). ¹ A central focus of queer (theory) is a political positioning arrayed against unequal power relations, and particularly forms of masculinism, patriarchy, and phallocentrism that privilege and naturalise male dominance.

Queer thus means many different things, and sits on multiple scales, sites, and perspectives, and with many different hopes and political ambitions. Queer can be a noun (‘a queer space’), an adjective (‘I have a queer feeling’), a verb (‘let’s queer gender’), or (allegedly) an identity (‘I’m queer’). Queer ‘ranges from denoting an identity category for some, to an impetus for deconstruction for others’ (Ball, 2016: 47), and there are endless debates about who and what is queer, who can do queer theory, and where queer theory should head. What is queer for one may not be for another, and this varies from moment to moment and place to place (Smilges, 2022). There is also value in sacrificing queer’s legibility, as Smilges suggests, in ‘admitting that we don’t always understand why a thing is queer’ (2022: 34). Queer is and needs to be unstable and undomesticated. Its yielding needs to be ‘never fully anticipated’, and only through ‘insurrectionary’ uses and ‘without prior authorization’ can queer maintain its radically critical character (Butler, 1993: 173, 1997: 160). It is important to bear these points in mind while thinking through the ways in which heteroporn could intelligibly be understood or coded as queer.

Queer heteroporn: The existing literature

Earlier I mentioned that porn may be queer because it sits outside of Rubin’s (1984) charmed circle, contributes to the realm of public sex, and its telos is non-procreative. Additionally, DeGenevieve (2014) suggests that porn operates as a site that resists cultural restrictions of pleasure. Pornography can be understood here as a rejection of the normative expectation that pleasure is a private matter. Shelton has also suggested that pornography often ‘interrogates rather than affirms dominant ideology’, and they also note that much of pornography aims to ‘subvert any boundary that implicitly exists between “legitimate” and “illegitimate” culture’ (2002: 127, 125-126). Pornography, like queerness, often centres transgression, which involves identifying and crossing taboos and prohibitions that trouble or redraw normative markers (Bataille, 1986). Paasonen (2011: 161) similarly notes that ‘[n]orms of taste and morality are regularly turned over, inside out, and upside down in pornography’. Here we see that pornography is positioned against the normative, and thus can be understood as queer. Halperin defines queer in this vein by suggesting it is ‘by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant’ (1995: 62, italics in original). These accounts suggest that queer may be understood both ontologically and as a matter of orientation towards or against something.

Several scholars have identified queer readings, glimmers, flourishes, residues, creations, and forms of spectatorship within heteroporn. ² Strub (2017a), however, has suggested that most scholarship exploring the resonances between queer and heteroporn have overlooked the somewhat obvious queer practices contained within it. This oversight stems from poor porn archives which expose invisibility with many aspects of porn’s past (Strub, 2017a). Examining the performance and directorship of Zebedy Colt, however, Strub (2017a) identifies several queer practices contained within heteroporn. Colt’s performance in The Story of Joanna (1975) is perhaps the most obvious example. Following several scenes of masochistic heterosexual sex, Jason (Jamie Gillis) receives a massage from his butler Griffin (Colt), which transitions into fellatio. The Story of Joanna presents itself as an entirely heterosexual film, yet the homosexual blowjob produces ‘an anomalous rupture in the monolithic straightness of heterosexual porn’ (Strub, 2017a: 359). Less overt instances can also be found: while receiving a blowjob from Sharon in Sharon (1977), Colt suggests to her that ‘You take after me’, while later suggesting, ‘Gonna have to teach your husband how to take it up the shit-shute’. Allusions to queerness, and even sexual practices that many consider queer, have existed in many pornographic spaces that are otherwise considered straight, thus exposing fluid sexual desires and potentially queering heterosexuality and its conventions (Pramaggiore, 1996).

It is also as a director that Colt provides a picture ‘into the queer production of heterosexual pornographic cinema’ (Strub, 2017a). Colt blends queer themes and practices throughout his films, whether that be through presenting ‘straightness and its hang-ups as inherently ridiculous’ (Strub, 2017a: 373), or through the explicit enactment of homoerotic or non-heterosexual content (such as wiping another man’s semen in contravention to standard porn orthodoxy as a performer). Colt constantly emphasised the male body, and often the male penis in varying states of flaccidity that undermine the ‘hard, towering cock-monolith’ generally found in other pornographies (Strub, 2017a: 372).

For all the queer practices and inferences, however, Strub (2017a) suggests that Colt’s oeuvre fails to live up to its promise. For Strub, Colt’s films personify ‘a reactionary queer heterosmut, one that smuggles queer desire and male same-sex contact into straight porn, even as it wallows in misogynist violence against women’ (2017a: 362). Strub argues that Colt failed to question the supremacy of phallocentrism and the penetrative economy of sex:

while Colt undeniably queers the sexual field of straightness in his porn work with his phallic displacements, diffused bodily pleasures, gender troubling, and homoeroticism, with few exceptions he ultimately shares with traditional heteroporn a masculinist ontology predicated on the exercise of phallic power in the genitocentric form of penetration and domination as the inscribers of meaning and difference (2017a: 380).

Colt perhaps too heavily relied solely on transgression as an end in itself, but this transgression subsumed itself within heterosexist practices and politics. Colt’s queer flourishes incorporate themselves into heterosexuality and the phallic economy retains its dominance. Strub notes that ‘queer theory has questioned the often-assumed linkage between queerness and antinormativity, and that ongoing conversation will determine how Colt should be historicized’ (2017a: 361). Colt queered heteroporn in several complex – explicit and implicit, literal and allegorical – ways, and while Strub (2017a) takes issue with his reliance on heteromasculinity and phallocentrism, these tensions animate queer’s multiple registers and readings, and invite considerations regarding the promise and utility of ‘queer’.

Several scholars have suggested that the queerness of heteroporn derives in large part from porn’s spectatorship. Perhaps the most obvious version of this practice is 20th century stag films, which were exhibited publicly for mostly male audiences in fraternities, screening rooms, cinemas, and brothels. For Waugh, the ‘collective rituals of male homosociality are blatantly and inescapably homoerotic’ (2001: 280), and the homosocial/homoerotic forms of heteroporn viewing can be understood as queer. He writes:

[a]bove all, the spectacularization of homosocial desire is in place, in the screening room, on the screen: men getting hard pretending not to watch men getting hard watching images of men getting hard watching or fucking women (Waugh, 2001: 280).

In these films, Waugh notes, ‘men share women, men get off watching men with women, men help men with women, men supplant men with women, [and] men procure women for men’ (2001: 282). Scott (2013: 3) has also noted the ways in which heteroporn ‘play[s] upon the straight, male viewers’ curiosity in seeing a large male penis in action’. Screening heteroporn engages with and illuminates the homosocial continuum, which Sedgwick (1994) defines as an unbroken line between homosociality and homosexuality. Such viewing practices may expose pluralistic (and even contradictory) desires, identifications, and possibilities. Bisexual theory often refuses the equation between ‘sexual practice’ and ‘sexual identity’, and such practices accommodate fluid sexual desires unencumbered by ‘either/or’ (binary) frames and monosexual identities and practices (Angelides, 2001). The exploratory and experimental nature of pornography enables the proliferation of alternative (or queer) social/sexual arrangements and relations.

Shelton (2002) has provided a more contemporary example of heteroporn’s queerness through spectatorship. Examining the porn career of Ron Jeremy, Shelton (2002) wonders how he was able to achieve such stardom within and beyond pornography despite his apparent ‘unsexiness’. For Shelton, the answer lay in part due to heteroporn’s inherently homoerotic and homosocial forms of spectatorship, and Jeremy ‘serves as an alibi for male viewers who, in deriding his generically inappropriate body, can both indulge and disavow the homosocial element of porn spectatorship by redirecting their anxiety into a social (laughable) rather than antisocial (masturbatory) engagement’ (2002: 132). This leads Shelton to suggest that Jeremy is closer to the women porn performers than to the men: ‘like the woman, he is there to make male viewers comfortable with the fact that they are looking at other men (and, more specifically, their penises) and that they may even want to be looking at them more than they are willing to admit’ (2002: 132). It also need not matter whether porn spectatorship occurs privately or socially, for Shelton (2002), because any viewer is addressed as part of an audience, and thus, there is no desocialising of porn consumption (not to mention the fact that each viewer is simultaneously placed within and beyond the film they are viewing). The inherent homosocial and homoerotic forms of pornography spectatorship help collapse neat distinctions between hetero and queer porn (Shelton, 2002).

Some scholarship has also suggested that queer heteroporn creates queer possibilities, both for performers and viewers alike. Drawing on interview data with women porn performers, White argues that pornography ‘creates a unique opportunity for performers to experience sexual pleasures disinvested from sexual desire and what they take to be their own sexual identity’ (2018: 398). Many of White’s (2018) participants spoke of the ways in which they engaged with performers and practices that did not match their sexual identity or sexual interest, and nevertheless discovered previously hidden desires, pleasures, and possibilities. White suggests that the ‘chaos, disorder and confusion brought about through the dissolution of the self in sexual pleasure have the potential to undermine a presumed stable sexual identity’ (2018: 398). The participants identified intense and unexpected pleasures and the desire for those pleasures to be explored and experienced again and again. Some of the participants noted changes in their sexuality (from straight to bisexual, from straight to lesbian, from straight to questioning, and generalised sexual fluidity), and suggested the uniqueness of pornography – a site of sexual exploration and experimentation – that helped facilitate their sexual becoming. In short, the women practiced and embodied sexuality’s capacity to transcend the straight-gay binary (Hemmings, 2002).

Lesbian or women’s bisexual content is commonplace in heteroporn, and while it’s often noted how this serves the straight male viewer, such practices also enable productive sites of possibility for its performers (and viewers, discussed shortly). Former porn performer, Annie Sprinkle, for example, often rubbed male penises together for her own queer pleasure, and it’s noteworthy that she entered the scene as ‘straight’ but now identifies as ‘queer’, much like the women mentioned immediately above (Strub, 2017a). Porn may be queer in that sexual activities can occur without recourse to desire or sexual identity, and such practices can open up (queer) opportunities for (sexual) creativity and pleasure previously not thought possible (Pramaggiore, 1996). ³ Scott (2013) also suggests this can occur for the porn viewer, where pornographies that defy easy categorisation – such as queer heteroporn in this instance – can initiate unexpected emotional and physiological responses. In so doing, witnessing performances that blur boundaries, disrupt binaries, and avow agency beyond the sexually normative allows them to discover new sexual possibilities, practices, pleasures, and desires.

Beyond the queer practices and forms of spectatorship, several associations exist that help blur the boundaries between heteroporn and queerness. Dean (2009) speculates that heteroporn has increasingly mimicked gay porn with its growing focus on condomless and anal sex, and it is also worth noting the recent uptick of fisting, a distinctly queer invention, within heteroporn. Rimming, a popular act in gay male pornography and more taboo in straight circles, is also increasingly present in heteroporn as well. DeGenevieve (2007) has claimed that there is little difference between hetero and queer porn, while Dyer (1992) has noted their various similarities. Kipnis (1999) proposes that pornography is invested in representing a one-gender world where male and female sexuality is commensurable rather than incompatible. Kipnis (1999: 200) argues that heteroporn ‘creates a fantastical world composed of two sexes but one gender, and that one gender looks a lot more like what we think of (perhaps stereotypically) as “male.”’ For Kipnis (1999: 200), heteroporn’s premise is guided by the following question: ‘[w]hat would a world in which men and women were sexually alike look like?’ According to this logic, heteroporn is interested in presenting a fantasy of gender malleability (even as it often exaggerates sexual difference). While of course it is problematic that the onus is on women to change, Kipnis (1999) points to other industries and genres where that onus is reversed (e.g. the romance industry is often predicated on men changing so they are emotionally and romantically compatible with women). The binarised (and perhaps outdated) way of thinking notwithstanding (men/women), this account highlights a partial queer politics invested in questioning and troubling gender and of potentially imagining a different future. This is why Kipnis (1999) suggests we should watch pornography as a form of science fiction, as fantasies about futurities.

The analysis thus far suggests there are indeed several resonances between heteroporn and queerness. Whether it be queer subtexts, practices, readings, or forms of spectatorship, it is clear that the heterosexual/homosexual distinction is not as concrete as often thought – in heteroporn and elsewhere. Freud (1949), Kinsey et al. (2003), and others have remarked a range of sexual activities, behaviours, and desires that cannot fit within the bounds of the exclusively heterosexual nor homosexual (and one further wonders whether ‘heterosexual’ or ‘homosexual’ can even be embodied all of the time). Likewise, Pramaggiore notes that bisexual epistemologies, that which involve ‘ways of apprehending, organising, and intervening in the world that refuse one-to-one correspondences between sex acts and identity, between erotic objects and sexualities, [and] between identification and desire’, help to ‘acknowledge fluid desires and their continual construction and deconstruction of the desiring subject’ (1996: 3). It may be that queer interventions in heteroporn help reconstruct sexualities and attendant practices as fluid and porous, and significantly, invite more capacious ways of doing and being with selves and others. In the following section, I extend the existing discussion by speculating about the queer aspects of pissing pornography in heteroporn, as evidenced in studios such as Gonzo.com.

Pissing heteroporn and the question of queer

Paasonen (2011) observes that any form of non-normativity, including non-normative heteroporn involving fetishes, kinks, or taboos, can be considered queer because it sits outside of the norm. Pissing heteroporn by this logic easily fits within the category of queer as it sits outside of conventional forms of heteroporn. Yet, I am also reminded of Lewis’ (2016: 276) claim that ‘[o]pposing normativity is a politically empty gesture’, which infers to me that a particular sort of ethics and politics needs to accompany our engagements with the non-normative and any association we might like to make to queer/ness. Perhaps there should be something beyond the mere non-normativity of pissing heteroporn that builds its resonance with queer. Wiegman (2015) has similarly warned against configuring queer theory against norms and normativity as if that automatically combats the political complexities of the contemporary moment; to put it another way, we should perhaps be cautious about prescribing anti-normativity as the exclusive source of queer’s political aims. McCann and Monaghan suggest ‘queer’ should be adopted cautiously and that scholars and activists ‘should always be attentive to the dangers of prescribing anti-normativity as the solution’ (2020: 16, italics in original). This is why ethics and politics is so important. ⁴ Without accounting for these and other considerations, pissing heteroporn risks collapsing within hegemonic heteronormativity, as evidenced earlier in the analysis of Zebedy Colt’s work, leaving us in a ‘kinda subversive, kinda hegemonic’ space that is politically equivocal (Sedgwick and Frank, 1995: 5).

My engagement with the studios that exhibit pissing pornography, however, suggest there may be elements that associate the genre and practice with a form of queerness that go beyond the simply non-normative. Many of these studios produce gonzo pornography, which often effaces narration and plot that is otherwise found in traditional hardcore heteroporn, and instead focuses on the sexual act, and particularly in expanded, experimental, and boundary-pu(ni)shing ways (Biasin and Zecca, 2009). Moving from the narration of sex to the ‘monstration’ of sex, gonzo pornography is interested in expanding bodies and their capacities through sexual activity – such as double and triple anal, bukkake, and gangbangs – and as such, involves multiple performers in close proximity (Biasin and Zecca, 2009). These scenes thus involve many performers, particularly men, that are often imbued with homosocial/homoerotic practices and themes, non-normative sexual practices (including piss), and in some instances the explicit depiction of non-heterosexual sexual content.

Strub (2017a: 365) notes that male porn performers working in heteroporn ‘have always been a remarkably fluid and queer group’, and many of those under analysis provide ample evidence of this claim. Not only have many of the male performers performed in gay and bisexual pornography, they have also participated in behaviours and practices that stand outside of traditional heterosexual conduct within heteroporn. For example, some ‘behind the scenes’ clips circulating on the internet show some men receiving blowjobs from other men while watching and waiting to fuck. ⁵ Homoeroticism also saturate the ‘official’ scenes as the men thrust, grind, and fuck against each other, and revel in the piss that is produced and the homoerotics of such communal pissing practices. Freud (1964: 187) speculates that men pissing on fires together is fuelled with a ‘homosexually-tinged desire’, and Mechling (2014) more generally notes the bonding qualities of group pissing practices. Urethral eroticism may not be that surprising when we consider the fact that urination stimulates the genitals. Pissing can often also shift between private and social practices and pornography is intent on sexualising many things and provocatively exploring the thresholds and dynamics between titillation and disgust (Paasonen, 2011).

The men in these scenes stand in their own and each other’s piss, often shoeless and sockless, as the piss has flowed from the penis to the women’s body and onto the ground. Sometimes male performers will accept another male performer’s piss onto their bodies, which often occurs when they are ‘caught in the line of fire’. Engelberg and Needham (2019: 351) also note that viewers can find ‘unintended queer pleasures’ when they witness the analogous practice of ‘friendly fire’ cum shots, wherein a man ejaculates on another man in heteroporn, and this is sometimes evidenced in this porn archive as well. Some men also accept piss inside their bodies. An ‘anal pissing party’ with Cherry Kiss and Lana Bunny, for instance, portrays moments in which men drink their own piss and the women performers’ through an elaborate exchange of pissing into each other’s mouths and shooting them around from mouth to mouth. These practices may depart from the conventional assumption that pissing in pornography only demonstrates the domination of women by men (Thomas and Williams, 2018). These scenes and practices also exemplify pornography’s existence as a form of civil disobedience often centring transgression and fantasy, and in so doing, expose alternative and fluid sexual possibilities, desires, and practices available to performers and consumers.

More explicit queer pissing practices can be evidenced in scenes that feature trans women, and particularly for the ways in which they defy many conventions attached to the trans and hetero genre. Whereas many trans(phobic) scenes contain the ‘tranny surprise’ – the moment wherein the cishet man discovers the woman has a dick (Escoffier, 2011) – these scenes steer clear from such representations. These scenes are not interested in these tropes or representations (particularly given their gonzo orientations), but with simply presenting performers who can piss-(and)-fuck on cue. These trans performers add to the visual spectacle of pornographic group sex as they occupy many positions in the scenes (Escoffier, 2021). From being a top or being a bottom, or being a top and bottom at the same time (some variation of the ‘daisy chain’ where the trans woman penetrates a performer while being penetrated themselves), they challenge traditional gender roles and demonstrate an exemplary form of skill and labour. From fucking and getting fucked, giving piss and drinking it, and sometimes all in one sequence, these are porn performers par excellence who explore their bodies and its capacities, and challenge what performers can and cannot do in pornography. They are agentic and skilled performers who contribute to the spectacle of the pissing pornography genre.

Many of the pissing scenes also work to de-emphasise sexual activity as relentless ‘in-out’ penetration by adding further opportunities to the sexual and pornographic arsenal. Like fisting (pornography), the penis is de-emphasised and sometimes detumescent, and this shifts or extends pleasure and erotogenicity away from the erect penis, and potentially de-phallicises the penis through its failure to live up to conventional phallic fantasy (Martin, 2022). Williams (1989) argues that semen and the money shot structure many porn scenes, but in the context of pissing pornography, this is de-emphasised. It could be said that piss displaces the money shot but also imitates and extends it; semen loses its valued status as piss is laced through the scenes, and partially de-emphasises the penis as the ‘frenzy of the visible’ is extended elsewhere (Dean 2009; Williams, 1989). Many of the scenes demonstrate that piss is not an instrument of domination or humiliation, but rather, a precious gift (of sustenance) that is given, exchanged, and received. There is a certain level of playfulness and fun within these scenes, where dominance and light-heartedness intermingle as alternative sexual practices and possibilities are explored. ⁶ There is also a sense in which, aligning with the gonzo orientations of the genre, that the performers are more interested in focussing on acts rather than identities, and this helps to open up possibilities as they are no longer constrained to act within the rules of those identities. All in all, this analysis suggests there is more to piss than meets the eye; pissing in porn is an alternative sexual practice that queers heteronormativity along with other forms of group, de-phallocentric, pleasure-oriented, and non-normative gendered and sexual practices and expectations.

Notwithstanding the above, however, a critical question remains: can pissing heteroporn be queer if it entails the domination of women by men, and particularly when much of queer theory and activism is interested in dismantling existing norms and practices associated with sexism, misogyny, patriarchy, and masculinism that are produced through the gender binary? Many of these scenes depict cis men pissing on/in cis women, and notwithstanding the queer flourishes mentioned above, pissing on/in women is generally understood to represent hostility, sexism, and misogyny. This assumption may be a little too neat, however, because it elides questions of context, sexual subjectivity, and agency. It would be problematic to accept the monosemic and universalist message that a particular practice always enacts gendered oppression, and particularly when such acts are engaged in consensually and transgression is a key pornographic principle (Paasonen, 2011). What might be humiliating for one might also be a set of practices based on ‘consent, mutual desire, and shared codes’ for another (Paasonen, 2011: 231). It would be erroneous, and perhaps not very queer, to fall into a normalising and moralising discourse that fails to consider the contexts, rules, and special interests of pornography and its performers. It makes very little sense to critique the treatment of a group of people – in this case, women porn performers – yet at the same time cast judgement on what they can or cannot do. Representation is a fraught business where many seek to control who, what, where, and how sexual practices and subjectivities can be portrayed, and ‘respectability’ too often becomes the barometer with which such practices are judged – leaving non-normative practices abject and outcast. ⁷

Notwithstanding, I wonder whether these queer incursions – explicit in some contexts and implicit in others – is sufficiently transgressive or radical enough to build or imagine a queerer world? What do the promise or utility of these queer traces and flourishes invite? Given the multiplicity of queer, it will always remain contested whether some things are queer, and whether they are ever queer enough. Relying on transgression alone as a tool for subversion may also leave other issues unresolved, and whether something is ‘queer’ or being ‘queered’ is subject to an audience and its reception. I suggest that most of the ‘queer heteroporn’ analysed in this article aligns with a ‘kinda subversive, kinda hegemonic’ or ‘straight with a twist’ framework (Sedgwick and Frank, 1995; Thomas, 2000). Whether this opens or closes desires and possibilities – for performers, consumers, and others – is up for negotiation, and that negotiation rests on the utility and promise of queer.

Discussion and conclusion: The promise of queer?

The utility or efficacy of queer theory and politics can help inform how ‘queer heteroporn’ can and should be received. Ward (2015), for example, argues that heterosexuality maintains enormous recuperative power in absorbing any form of queerness into an authenticating tool that reifies heterosexuality, and this is often leveraged through whiteness, violence, and misogyny. For Ward (2015), sex between straight white men, for example, serves to reaffirm and bolster heterosexuality. Within this way of thinking, any glimmers of queerness do not tap into uncharted or unarticulated desires or alternative ways of being or doing, but instead, merely authenticate their own heterosexuality. I am not so sure I agree with this analysis. While I readily accept the ways in which homosexuality figures in the production of heterosexuality, Ward refines her analysis to ‘extreme or unusual examples’, such as ‘the kind that occurs in biker gangs, or rest-stop bathrooms, or within military hazing’ (2015: 44). Missing from Ward’s (2015) account, then, is an exploration of the more subtle and exploratory ways in which practices may create (queer) possibilities. Ward’s (2015) account can almost be read in essentialist terms wherein heterosexuality is nothing but a starting and return point, with no window for discovery or agency within this allegedly circular and deterministic journey. For Ward (2015), any promise of queerness is fallacious, and thus, any glimmers of ‘queer heteroporn’ are just teases that offer no redemptive or transformative quality.

Queer glimmers and flourishes may have more promise than Ward (2015) suggests. Muñoz argues that queerness is a utopian ‘horizon imbued with potentiality’, and an ‘ideality that can be distilled from the past and used to imagine a future’ (2019: 1). For Muñoz, ‘[q]ueerness is that thing that lets us feel that this world is not enough, that indeed something is missing’ (2019: 1). Thus, queerness opens a space for something, and that something is worth grasping, holding onto, lingering upon, and sticking with. It may be that glimmers and flourishes of ‘queer heteroporn’ invite different questions and possibilities about ways of doing and being, for both viewers and performers, straight and queer. Thomas (2000: 13) asks:

[w]hat would it mean for straights really to understand (and not just theoretically toy with) the queer argument that the normative regimens they inhabit and embody are ideological fictions rather than natural inevitabilities, performatives rather than constatives? After such knowledge, what normalness?

It may be the case that queer glimmers, flourishes, and residues help disrupt the stability of identity. (Hetero)normativity is oppressive to everyone, straight and queer, as it instantiates (and internalises) scripts on all lives, relationships, and ways of being in the world. Butler argues that ‘identity categories tend to be instruments of regulatory regimes, whether as the normalising categories of oppressive structures or as the rallying points for a liberatory contestation of that very oppression’ (1991:13-14). Identity instantiates rules (‘to be X I must do Y’), yet a focus on the pleasures of acts, rather than the rules of identities, resists normalising power. In short, queer (theory) can be liberating for straights, if only they can see beyond the hegemony of their normatively constrained lives and live differently, perhaps queerly. Straight subjects have often had the political luxury of not contemplating their sexuality, but it may be the case that queer glimmers will draw them to ‘interrogate their own sexual practices and the exclusions and repressions that make them possible’ (Thomas 2000: 17). I am turned on by the prospect that straights may be confronted with a reckoning once they realise the constraints of the normative regimens they embody. I want to imagine spaces in which straights can learn from these queer flourishes and in turn make interventions into the reproduction of compulsory heterosexuality and heteronormativity more generally.

Thus, lingering upon and working with queer glimmers and flourishes might be one way of ‘working the weakness in the norm’ (Butler, 1993: 181, italics in original). Such subversion seeks to undermine the hegemony of compulsory/institutional heterosexuality and attendant heteronormativity. Butler writes:

hegemonic heterosexuality is itself a constant and repeated effort to imitate its own idealizations. That it must repeat this imitation, that it sets up pathologizing practices and normalizing sciences in order to produce and consecrate its own claim on originality and propriety, suggests that heterosexual performativity is beset by an anxiety that it can never fully overcome, that its effort to become its own idealizations can never be finally or fully achieved, and that it is consistently haunted by that domain of sexual possibility that must be excluded for heterosexualized gender to produce itself (1993: 85).

Heterosexuality is haunted and anxious and repetitively performed through norms to naturalise itself. And yet, in the norms’ enactment ‘something may always go awry’, and when this occurs, ‘some weakness of the norm is revealed’, ‘another desire starts to govern, and forms of resistance develop, something new occurs, [and] not previously what was planned’ (Butler, 2015: 31). ‘[N]orms are continually haunted by their own inefficacy’, and thus, there is space to establish new identifications and possibilities (Butler, 1993: 181). It may be that certain types of ‘queer heteroporn’ offer a route through which straight subjects can challenge heteronormativity and embrace a queer/er world.

This article has demonstrated the many ways heteroporn can be understood as queer. This claim stems from a desire to (re)make the world more queer (Warner, 1993). There is value in leaning into queer, but that must also involve dismantling and resisting heteronormative ideals associated with sexism, misogyny, phallocentrism, and the penetrative economy of sex. Sedgwick writes that queer invites an ‘open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically’ (1994: 8). Proliferating queerness in unexpected ways – such as the curious and seemingly oxymoronic nature of queer heteroporn – may help in reiterating heterosexuality otherwise. While the results of this line of inquiry remain to be seen, and ethical problems may persist within the ‘queer heteroporn’ canon, this article provides a tease, and sometimes the tease and promise of queer is just enough to keep imagining things otherwise.