Lana's Sunset Boulevard

After the Dream Came True

2009-12-02T14:05:00.001-08:00

So what happens AFTER, – as Unzipped put it, – „a dream came true“? http://blog.unzipped.net/lana/

The return to your everyday life can feel dull and empty. That’s why a lot of people fear to have their dreams come true and their wishes fulfilled. They fear the time after the fulfilment.

In my case the situation is not as dramatic, but then again also more complex. It has been 14 days now since I met Brent Corrigan the second time in his home town San Diego. Still in the plane coming from New York the Sunday before I found it rather unbelievable that a young gay porn star would really find the time to meet me; A meeting he could practically gain nothing from, no new business contact, no public appearance, no increase in fame one could measure. Just an interesting meeting and a good conversation. Which we had, twice, all in all we talked about 5 hours at two occasions.

First he overwhelmed me by giving me a strong hug the first moment he saw me in the lobby of my hotel; and even though I knew that this is nothing but a nice convention, – I hate hand shakes by the way, and not only because they are the perfect way to transfer the swine flue – I could hardly believe that the petite slender body I was pressing against for a few seconds is the very same torso whose images I had admired so many times. Judging from the face, the voice and the personality of its owners it surely was; yet judging from the way how we construct reality it sort of wasn’t. I had to add the element of the tactile to the idea of Brent I already had. As fleeting is it was, this was a whole new dimension. Also I had to get over the one little disappointment that came with all the new sensory data. Brent is one of those young men who think it’s clean and sexy to put on Eau the Cologne. I happen to have an extra sensitive nose, I dislike all the scents created for men, no matter how famous their names. I would have preferred to smell a tiny bit of sweet boyish sweat. But you cannot have it all.

Next he overwhelmed me with a lively conversation he started right away. To be actually addressed and expected to answer was also new to me, even though I am very used to it in my life in general. So I had to ask for a transitional ritual, a small walk along the harbour where the sun was slowly setting. Walking next to Brent and his BF, who is a lot taller and more muscular than he is, did the job well.

I am a rather heavy person of medium height (about 5’6), in personal contact Brent did not seem a lot taller than me; and he surely weighs a lot less. Face to face I could look him straight in the hazel eyes. An experience I can strongly recommend. This body ratio could have felt awkward in other cases, and I might have felt tense about it years ago when I already liked rather small, slender guys but feared how my rubenesque self would look monstrous next to them. In this case the mutual agreement of being no object of sexual interest and therefore also judgment surely helped. And I am a rather self assured person now in my forties. Still, it was amazingly comfortable and relaxed to walk next to and talk to this young man who might keep a low and normal profile in his outfit and overall demeanour but who is very handsome and aware of it nonetheless.

Sometimes I took the freedom to lag behind and sneaked a look at the famous backside of my company. I was amazed how very tiny his bottom appeared in his jeans. Firm and taut of course, but really small. How much staging is needed to turn it into those twin peaks of pale round flesh we know from photos and videos. Yet the line from his shoulders displaying some discreet muscle to his narrow waist is exquisite. And he likes to emphasize it with very tight shirts.

After I had managed my transition and the sun had finally set we arrived at a classy fish restaurant with costumers queuing up. While we were waiting to be seated I remember Brent talking about shark attacks. He really can talk about lots of things, but always in a personal, sometimes witty way. The thing he did not do was ask me about myself and my life. He talks about himself and his plans, but that was fine with me as I came to hear about exactly those things. When the situation was still new his mode of talking strongly resembled giving an interview. This open but slightly formal mode was also due to the fact that he had brought his BF “for protection”, who later told me that they “rarely meet fans”. The fact that he never said a word while Brent and I talked and only responded when I asked him directly made it unclear if he was profoundly bored or just a silent listener. Still, Brent soon warmed up enough to let the style change slightly. We began to discuss films, career plans, possible theatre projects etc. And I began to utter my opinions, sometimes contradict his, and the conversation became very lively. At one point I asked him straight ahead, – as any good interviewer would do, – if ever someone could have a porn AND a film/mainstream career AT THE SAME TIME; and he replied with a very special expression: “No, but than again no one has been me before.” I wonder what it takes to shoot such a reply without any rehearsal. It almost sounds like the line of a film. Such a display of self esteem seems less arrogant than heart-warmingly spontaneous and innocent. As if someone displaying such bravado could simply convince destiny to make his dream come true.

One thing that is really striking about Brent is his amazing honesty and openness about everything, including matters of sex and physicality. We already know that from his blogs. While not having any problems to discuss the stretching of orifices and the sexual responsiveness of film partners with an almost strange woman he keeps a very matter-of-fact, almost technical precision in his vocabulary. In that respect his conversation is a perfect mirror image of his profession. On the other hand he is a person who always keeps control. He knew that he would still go to the gym after our dinner. But even though he ate normally he had a light dinner. He gave me the feeling that I seduced him to get one glass of beer, but probably he wanted to have one anyway. I can hardly imagine persuading him to go on a drinking binge if he would not already have to plan to do so. I don’t think that he with all his young and innocent looks can be manipulated into anything at all. That’s why one of his ongoing topics is to emphasize his “masculinity”. That’s the reason why nowadays he likes to top. He is an alpha animal no doubt. But it would have taken more than our already long conversations to explain to him why I think that no outwardly “masculine” role playing is needed to prove one’s dominant personality. I do not know what it would take to convince me that as a top he could ever be as dominant, demanding and radiant as he has already been in his best bottoming acts. Of course it might be hard to appear macho to a full bodied woman in her forties; he might inspire submission in a young slender boy.

I do not feel entitled to share everything we talked with the public, even tough there was nothing scandalous or outstandingly new about it. Also I do not have a complete protocol of everything in my memory bank.

The second meeting was a lot shorter and had us drinking coffee in the nice “Mexican style” station in central San Diego.

I somehow liked that meeting even more, because Brent came alone and we exchanged some amazing presents. I gave him the catalogue of the art show in Vienna and a humble portrait I drew in my spare hours; and he gave me a master copy of his next dvd “Working Hard” and an amazing signed autograph. I will not prematurely share my opinion about this film. I am sure it will live up to expectations. It contains something rather sensational commonly abbreviated “dp” in porn jargon. And the person suffering though this ordeal is the one you hope it would be. Yet, bad for business or not, I have to say that he is a lot prettier now (and in person) than on this dvd that stems back from a period 2008 or early 2009, the period of the rather odd Freshman shoot, when he was following a problematic chemical diet. I never got the point of him claiming that he has to work and slave himself for his beauty. I thought it is obvious that he is naturally good looking. Now I would say that one of his most dominant features is an amazing easiness to change looks, expressions, type. His looks are not sharp but smooth and mouldable. In time I could even imagine that he might be able to turn “ugly” if he chooses to.

Finally we stepped out on the sunny square where no one was around; so I asked Brent to take a photo of us in his signature style, with the outstretched arm. That was only feasible by putting an arm around each other, which he initiated without hesitation. We took three photos and in one of them my cheek very slightly brushed his, a tiny sensation I nonetheless enjoyed a lot.

Even though I positively know that out meeting was very enjoyable and, – as he put it – “stimulating” for both of us I cannot quite tell what consequences it might have. It might have created a new basis for the future; it might also have exhausted everything a person like Brent in all his youthful curiosity for new stimuli can find in such a weird relationship. Only time can tell. One thing that is both understandable but also a bit frustrating: he told me that he does not read my blog. He tends to ignore all the crazy stuff on the web that circulates around his person. He reads Dewayne’s blog and Unzipped, but apart from that he protects himself. BTW, I also met Dewayne, had a long evening with him. He was kind enough to show me San Diego at night, from Point Loma to Hillcrest, we drank beer at a porn star hangout where a very pretty flat assed boy revealed his funny underwear. Those are the places Brent tends to avoid. All in all, one just needs to read his tweets, he leads a rather reclusive, normal life.

So I cannot use my blog as a forum to send “secret messages” to him, messages about what I think works and does not work in his projects. Our occasional chats went on, but remained very short. When I made the joking remark that some people, – and I really did not meant to refer to myself – build their life around the clock of his upcoming website he reset several times, he responded in typical sincerity “Oh that is so sad”. And indeed it is. A little star like this is something of a muse, a source of inspiration, but not the centre of one’s life.

I did not need to be reminded to ”get a life”, I have a life, but this life is in (more than one) crisis and had me waiting for half a year for a decision that finally came today; I will not get the research stipend I applied for last may. Or better put: I will not get it right away. I can reapply within 14 days. And I will, as this stipend would be one good way to get myself to where I want to be: to Southern California. No, I will not be “Brent’s hag”, as one of those funny gay misogynists put it on Unzipped, but I am planning to be a guest researcher for science fiction, porn and gender studies at the University of California, Irvine. They just don’t have money.

The wait and the slow digesting of that little dream coming true, with uncertain outcome, made me rather dull and unproductive the last 2 weeks. Do you know that fits of “self punishing behaviour” when you feel bored with the world and yourself? Like eating a burger at McDonalds or watching a movie that you already know will piss you off profoundly? I finally punished myself not with bad porn, not with adolescent splatter or cheesy comedy but with a film that somehow tops all of these genres with its blasé self-importance. I watched “Antichrist” by Lars van Trier; I knew it would be hateful and crazily overrated; but I still was amazed by the degree. More on that soon.

Part 3: From Prince Bottom to Mr. Universal

2009-10-27T13:08:00.000-07:00

If Brent would go on with porn for a little while his ambition seems to aim at leaving the label as best bottom behind, – to leave his behind behind so to speak, – in order to become a top universalist, a top-bottom overall versatile porn star.
I do not want to judge his abilities to earn this new label. Yet there seems to be something of a law, a hidden secret in the arts that specialization and one-sidedness can be better than universality. If an artist concentrates on one particular topic or part or material he restricts himself to the amazing task to catch the whole in only one part. This single, particular, chosen something will gain in depth whereas the ambition to be and do everything might end up in superficiality.
In SM people say that there are great subs and great tops – and great tops are rare by the way – but whoever calls himself a switcher is probably not that good in any part. Claiming to be versatile might not be a sign for a broader sexual orientation but simply the symptom for not being able to decide what one really wants, or can do best. Those considerations might sound harsh and discouraging, but they are an effect of the actual difference between life and art. We all want to live a whole life as whole subjects who have the freedom to at least touch as many aspects of the world as we like. In life everyone can be a dilettante, because life surprises and overwhelms us and often finds us unprepared. Therefore it might well be true that in life a versatile person indeed is the best sex partner. But when it comes to art: as one great thinker of antiquity, Seneca, pointed out, art is long and life is short. The elaboration of an art needs so much time and energy that it seems to be wise to choose maybe one, maybe a few things one really wants to invest one’s artistic research in. To become a master in one particularity will set one apart from all the rest, all the well-meaning dilettantes who remain fumbling amateurs in the mediocre art of wanting everything and achieving very little.
There are some artists and thinkers who clearly realized what Heidegger has claimed for any great philosopher in history: that he had but one thought to think. And because any profound philosophical thought is too overwhelming and multifaceted to be put into one simple formula the great thinker has to express this one thought in many different variations.
A similar example we can find in Cezanne, not only one of the best painters who ever lived but also maybe one of the profoundest thinkers of his own profession. When I think about the many versions he has painted of this one mountain St.Victoire, a rather humble but distinct feature of his home landscape next to Aix en Provence, I know what magic, what rich secret lies in the principle of “theme and variations”, as all the different versions of Mount St. Victoire have the scope, the wealth and the depth of encompassing not only a whole universe of painting but also painting as one sensual slice of the very singularity of each person’s unique universe. What Deleuze would call a cutting through the plain of immanence.

Well, you will say, isn’t this shooting canons at a sparrow? Wasn’t this post supposed to be on the humble skills of a porn star whose performance, however brilliant in its own right, cannot be compared to the highest peaks of art and philosophy? I can only reply, I cannot choose where inspiration strikes. The ancient Greeks had the concept of the muses being the guiding spirits of the arts, and daughters of the God. They could count and name them and attribute each single muse to a particular art, thus forming a series that does not quite match our contemporary classification of the arts. I like the idea that there can always be one muse more, one art more, however instable this new element of the series might be.
(See Jean-Luc Nancy’s books on the muses http://www.amazon.de/Muses-Meridian-Crossing-Aesthetics/dp/0804727813/ref=sr_1_15?ie=UTF8&s=books-intl-de&qid=1256669968&sr=8-15)
In that sense it is not my permanent ambition to ad porn to the series of arts that are worthy of being provided with the protection of a muse. It is more likely that I start losing interest in porn all together. Now that it starts to bore me I might as well write a book or teach a class about it!
And I lose interest because I assume that I saw the best I could get out of porn when I saw Brent Corrigan bottoming. This particular performance might be an act of art or not, – I honestly don’t care, – but to me it had a quality that resembles the perfect particularities or (as Deleuze would put it) blocs of affect I named earlier. It is a truism to say that the quality of any work of cultural expression lies in the eye of the beholder. But I, as a beholder, am only struck by a cultural manifestation if it can stand for itself. Maybe this performance was, or is, only an idea of sexuality and enjoyment, but as such it stood.
No matter which opportunities Brent will take in the near future to prove himself as a top – and no doubt I would still follow them with interest – he can hardly top the profound and intense mark he has set as being the bottom that he was, or maybe still is.

And this holds even more true if we remember the fact that he has been topping his partners since Cobra day 1.
It is quite mind-blowing to see Brent’s seamlessly tanned, very fragile adolescent body get on top of a certain Jake Landaus and slowly insert his long pale rod with a mischievous but still childlike smile. I do not say that he is a bad top, sometimes he is an amazing top.

Legendary is Brent’s flip-flop in “Velvet Mafia” where he is allowed to break the convention of his own “type casting” as naughty bottom boy he nonetheless embodies so very perfectly. It is the merit of this campy parody of mafia movies about two porn clans fighting over Brent’s character “Fox Rider” – btw a plot with an uncanny prophetic touch to it – to embed this remarkable change of positions in a scene-in-scene dramaturgy based on one of the most common and hierarchical motives in porn, the “teacher-student-relationship”.
I for one am not immune to this particular stereotype. I assume that part of its attractiveness is due to the fact that any pedagogical institution is supposed to uphold and continue the disciplinary rules of a society, both in behaviour and rationality. And since the pedagogical institutions are no longer allowed to make use of corporal punishment and harsh disciplining measures to achieve that goal there is a whole set of subterranean manipulation and communicational skills being used by the teacher to “seduce” the students into compliance. And those measures can easily pass over into something “erotic”. So school is the perfect sultry environment where sex is both forbidden, for good reasons of possible manipulation of a minor, and permanently present as a lubricant for other purposes. Add the structural sexual appetite of adolescents and the slightly incestuous motive of an older and a younger person being forced into a close connection, and you have the perfect breeding ground for porn.
If there were a possible genre in between psychological drama and porn film a teacher-student story would be a perfect candidate. Just imagine the incredibly erotized and marvellously acted drama “Mädchen in Uniform” http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0051964/ turned into a lesbian sex film. You can say that loosing Romy Schneider’s suppressed lusting for the wonderful Lilli Palmer, losing the fact that this desire can never become a physical act, would mean losing the whole point of the story. This may be true. But it can also be understood as a challenge.

Be that as it may, Brent’s scene as the sullen student of Eric Rhodes might not be a subtle drama, but it has its merits. Brent has to embody two personae at once, his actual character, the arrogant foxy porn star diva with the fishnet t shirts and greasy hair,

and the generic school boy character that makes reference to the performer’s notorious under age history. After having introduced Fox, the porn diva and his demands for extra high payment in the very first scene the camera cross fades his hand signing the contract with his bad grades in – lol – sex education. We also learned that the “bottom boy” had chosen his partner himself, a heavily muscled member of the porn clan who had actually already retired. In that sense hierarchy is slightly dubious from the start. Also the fact that co star drops his act in the beginning of the scene-in-scene situation because he does not feel respected by his younger colleague contributes to that shift. However, most of this very long and well shot scene follows a predictable path of “Teach” threatening Brent/Fox/student with a well-deserved punishment, Brent teasing him with his readiness for it – “You know I am a trouble maker” –

“Teach” delivering a light spanking that could have been a lot juicier – but that’s just my old-English taste. And while “Teach” is going through his slightly hectic act of undressing, sucking and licking up his object of desire Brent still shows his dominant side when he commands “Lick up my shaft”.
The first position of the penetration with Brent’s genitalia being pressed against the top of the teacher’s desk is in all its obvious porn routine with cheesy electronic sounds announcing the moment of insertion still one of the hottest scenes of its kind.

The second position with Brent riding “Teach” who is uncomfortably lying on his back is a bit long but highly athletic. Then suddenly the camera cuts to a third position of the little student shoving his cock up the teacher’s mature butt. What is going on? A lot of commentators simply said “This is just wrong!” And of course Brent had to go over the top with this topping of a giant. Soon he hammers away like a maniac. His sweaty hair flies and his teeth are clenched.

Unforgettable the moment when he tries to add still more momentum to his already frantic speed – one almost thinks the tape is on double speed – by using his whole body weight as leverage. He starts to jump as if this still rather fragile boy would have to storm a fortress. Which he does.

This scene in “The Velvet Mafia” was and remains Brent’s most aggressive act of topping so far. Of course this unique quality is connected to the fact that also his work for this big old studio remained a unique adventure. And I would add that only this particular set up of an overdetermined narrative makes it enjoyable for me. It is ethically almost impossible to show a teacher taking full advantage of his hierarchical position while seducing a student, no matter of which gender. Even if the student were of age and would submit to this seduction with eagerness, the situation would still resemble rape. So all good love stories between teachers and students tend to circulate around the younger person somehow seducing the reluctant teacher who, unlike the carefree and hormone driven student, has a lot to lose if he (or she) gives in.

In other topping scenes though Brent appears self conscious, as if he thinks that he needs to prove something. This also shows in the difference between his bottoming and his topping face. While his face is all sensual, melting, open mouthed ecstasy when he is bottoming as a top he tends to clench his teeth and push his chin forward in a classical masculine mask of boldness and aggression.

Also Brent is not the most vocal of performers, fortunately in my mind, for as a bottom he has the most exquisite and enticing repertoire of sighs and grunts. As a top he tends to stay completely silent, as if concentrating on a difficult task like a good school boy. A variation of this mode of topping is his concerned face, a moment when he seems to drop out of the scene to observe the bottom’s reaction, as if checking if he still is ok. In the anyway unfortunate scene with Curt Wild, where Brent seems to be distracted by the heat, the traffic noise and his very vocal partner who desperately moans and whimpers all through his act Brent’s worried face appearing behind the dramatic performance of Wild’s climax has an almost comic quality, for it seems to comment on the weird similarity of the expression of pain and the expression of lust that is so significant for the rather fake exaggerations of porn.

If I, just for the sake of argument, would assume the possibility that Brent actually does not enjoy being penetrated at all, that he always faked the expression of lust when being fucked on camera, and that his reactions as a top are far more authentic and closer to his private sexual taste, my judgment about his unique quality as a bottom would not change at all. Maybe he would even gain in my esteem. It would after all not be news to any art lover that an artist cannot express the emotions he actually really experiences as well as the affects he has created only in and for his art. Let’s remember Oscar Wilde’s magnificent story in “The Picture of Dorian Grey” about the actress who falls in love with the protagonist; once she takes her “real emotion” as a basis for her part in “Romeo and Juliet” she starts acting so badly that he immediately abandons her, thus bringing about her tragic end. This is also a powerful objection to the overrated “Method Acting” method one mysterious Mr. Kruezer keeps on recommending to Brent on Twitter to boost his acting career.

Be that as it may, to not end up on a wrong note, I want to finally mention a few examples where Brent’s performance as a top is exquisite and unique precisely because it smoothly blends into his bottoming experience. In a couple of flip-flop scenes he manages to shake up any stereotype of the passive and active role in sex, being a powerful and demanding bottom and a gentle and resilient top.

Before I come to his work with his current company “Prodigy pictures” I would like to mention at least some scenes he did for his former website “BrentCorriganOnline”. Due to the fraud of a business partner this material is at the moment only available as torrent. The scenes are simple domestic set ups where Brent, more then in his later work, is the centre of attention, and usually bottoming. I like the natural flow of the material, the co-stars’ very sincere expression of lust for Brent, who is around 20, just started to work out and appears as the perfect twink idol. In these scenes he appears naughty, self assured, unconcerned and rather narcissistic. In the scene with the wonderful Chris Bowen he lets himself be fucked standing over a mirror. When he ejaculates on his own mirror image, thus covering his own reflection with his body fluids, he is adding yet another dimension to Narcissus’ myth.

Yet the most outstanding scene of them all is the flip-flop marathon with the innocent looking Brad Davis, a very vocal performer who expresses his affection for his co-star. When Brent lets Brad top him first he is so very intensely enjoying the act and going through a lot of positions with such gusto that the spectator is rather surprised that this scene does not end with a climax but is smoothly blending into Brent topping Brad, first shot from Brent’s perspective while he is mumbling something about disturbing shadows dancing on Brad’s back. Already before Brent was directing from within the scene, urging the camera man under his breath – probably Grant – to “shoot some wides” while being fucked spread legged in front of the couch. The long, sweaty topping act that follows he enjoys with youthful glee and a little nasty smile. The young men tumble from one position to the next while Brad dramatically exclaims for Brent to “own his ass”. Still, – if my observation does not betray me, – in all this never-ending passion Brent never spits out the gum he keeps chewing.

Whoever does not see the massive changes of the last years and still sees a “twink” in Brent should take a look at this material, when he really WAS the perfect twink prince – which also implies a certain self centred attitude he overcame since then. And some of the best scenes he did for his own company during the last 2 years are proof of that.

There are more interesting scenes, but to come to any kind of ending I pick 3 of them: The scene with Luke Hass on “Just the Sex”, the scene with Steve Oliver on “Just the sex 2” and the scene with Ryan Buckley on “Big Easy”. http://myblog.brentcorriganinc.com/?page_id=738

The Scene with Luke Hass is like a smooth choreography of sex, flowing in a beautiful slow pace the editor was subtle enough to preserve. The change of positions is both supported and contradicted by the use of a sturdy easy chair as main prop. This gives a very willowy Brent the opportunity to climb up the backrest assuming some unusual positions that would appear comical and almost obscene if he would not assume them with such elegance.
And this is one of the rare scenes where he seems to enjoy both roles, bottoming and topping, with the same intensity. Still, if I would have to take a bet I would say that he enjoys topping even more, maybe because again this time the person he is topping is taller, older and manlier than he is. And while his bottoming is fine his topping in this scene is truly outstanding in its quality of giving the other a certain control over him while still being able to gain enormous pleasure. There is the moment when Brent sinks down on Luke Hass’s long legs to let him move his ass cheek in the speed he sees fit. What a graceful move to let the other use you like a tool for their gratification!

However, as I tend to enjoy the affects of enjoyment most, I enjoy most that little moment when Brent interrupts his fucking as if keeping himself from coming too soon, gently rubs nouses with his partner – yet another “Inuit” style mannerism of Brent’s – and articulates his lust with an Elvis-style pout and two endearing little grunts. During the interruption of lust lust gains the freedom to express itself.

While Luke Hass acts the slow, sensual professional “latin lover” that he is, or became since then, Steve Oliver appears to be very innocent and inexperienced. And that is probably the reason why in this scene Brent seems to be such a hungry bottom. Even though Oliver has to ride him first and is doing fine when Brent asks him if he still does

Brent seems to be out of his mind with lust when it finally comes to being fucked himself. Dewayne, the expert on anything gay and porn, told me that there is a little nasty convention that something as precious as say Brent Corrigan’s ass is a treat the co star has to earn first. A little male power play being embedded in the sexual dramaturgy. Well, Brent might make a humorous use of this in the next scene to be discussed, but in this scene with Oliver it looks as if the boy has to do his duty, but the only thing Brent is really keen on is getting fucked himself. It might be an interesting question in both psychological and dramaturgic terms if a flip-flop is needed, – as a kind of detour or protective device – to give this bottom the opportunity to show such a powerful lust for the bottoming part. Be that as it may, I love his shameless lust in this scene, – how he lets himself be licked up once more, how he flexes his anal muscle like a very special kind of body builder, a muscle that can be as powerful as a vise, how he kneels on the bed while Oliver carefully starts his job, how he pushes his trembling cheeks backwards when he does not get drilled hard enough,

how he strokes his red dick with his arm reaching through from under his leg, smearing his pre-come on the bedspread.

And finally he rides his young little pony, and what a ride that is. Here the editing committed some major crimes, interrupting one rare aria of load moaning with an unnecessary silent close-up of these cheeks,– as if anyone needs to have further evidence for their rather unique boyish, but supple, muscular but round, pale but firm etc. etc. quality. Don’t this people also HEAR what they are cutting? And when the gallop approaches its natural climax and Brent is still moaning load, riding fast, letting his bone hard dick produce load slapping sounds on Oliver’s torso that seem to almost hurt, he is sucking his stomach in so dramatically that his waist appears so slim that he seems to crack up in the middle right before he comes.

The last scene I discuss here has to come from the work that Bent sees as his highest achievement, his latest release “The Big Easy”. All in all I do like the result, I like the reality TV approach, but I also think that he can achieve even more amazing results if he wants to.
I have some problems with it: I simply despise that elevator music someone has found necessary to add to even the most intimate scene of Brent and Buckley. I find it annoying that I can only watch that scene with the volume almost on mute, because I love to hear the sighs. But I cannot bear that absurd guitar sound.
I have problems with the fact that Brent made someone else the star of three scenes, someone I happen to be not interested in, while he is only in two. I have some problems with the foursome Brent is so very proud of. These problems are probably connected to my general difficulties I have with foursomes that are basically consisting of two couples the camera keeps changing in between. As I usually am only interested in one couple I find it distracting to fastforward the interruptions. I have my dramaturgic doubts why it is necessary to show four people if never more than two are connecting with each other. I also have slight difficulties with the way how Brent is expressing his topping lust in some sequences of the film, which brings me back to the Oscar Wilde story. Later on he said how much he enjoyed this scene, how it was a scene of real lust and passion. And I am sure this is true. The problem simply is that sexual lust that gets too private, too real does not translate to an outside spectator. Or at least not to some. Still, there is something that makes good for everything else, a spectacular almost hands-free orgasm of first Jake then Brent that is such an explosive expression of lust that I made quite an effort to time my own exercises to be synchronous with that Dionysian feast.

And then, as the first sex scene of the film, there is the scene with Ryan Buckley that has a quality all of its own. Again Brent seems to enjoy both roles immensely but maybe the topping part even more. Here he plays out the little power game card and makes Buckley earn it. Buckley, a lean, slightly punky youth, is neither a classical top nor a classical bottom. And he is an inventive and skilled lover. For example he does something during his rim job I have not seen anyone else do before, he gently bites Brent’s perineum,

an area I am fascinated with, because men are so very closed at exactly the spot where women have the opening they lack. In Brent’s case, the shaved perineum looks just like a toad’s pale taut belly of a toad, adorned with that tender red middle line that appears like an echo of the symmetrical division of female anatomy that in male embryos does not take place.
And then, after Brent has teased Buckley with some extremely lascivious wriggling movements,

massaging his dick by shifting his crack, he suddenly stops and demands him to “sit on it”. A move that would otherwise appear to be slightly rude and arrogant becomes the start of yet another choreography of smooth mutual enjoyment that takes all the stereotypical dominance and rudeness out of the act of penetration. Those two are both very athletic; none of them enjoys an outwardly submissive part; so here comes another charming sexual choreography of “taking turns”. While Buckley is riding Brent in a very difficult position, supporting himself on his arms while keeping his hips suspended, he and Brent take turns in setting the pace. Sometimes Buckley is literally riding, sometimes Brent is thrusting upwards.
The way how he sometimes lets his head fall back on the bed and how he gently brushes Buckley’s balls with the back of his hand betrays the breathless enjoyment.

And in his topping part Buckley proves what a lean little stud he is by taking advantage of his unusually vertical erection. He is able to lift his slightly heavier partner and let him sit on his dick with his legs in the air.

That is a unique and exciting moment. But even more I like the enthusiastic, childlike riding and rolling around on the bed that follows.

I might end here because this is a very log post, and because I think for now and quite a while I have said enough about Brent, the porn star, as I knew him as an apparition of lust and enjoyment on the screen. I wanted to ad something about the controversial topic of his muscle training, but I think this has been discussed enough. Brent is fascinated by transformation. Nobody will be able to talk him out of this. And porn stars cultivate certain artificial physical traits as a professional costume. If this is so, I by far prefer a bit of biceps to fake boobs and long fingernails.
Things might change soon, in more than one respect. And I do not want the time of maybe two years of porn fandom and Corriganism to slip by without trying to write a proper summary.

I close this post with a still from "Brent Corrigan's Summit" (scene with Mason Wyler) I produced a while back and found, – in all its highly abstract quality that has some people guessing which skin-to-skin contact they are actually seeing, – to be an appropriate, very physical but not sexist expression of “carnal love”.

Intermission 2: On a Sequence of "The Porne Identity"

2009-10-17T14:05:00.000-07:00

Talking about going over the top: this is what my dear sister in arms in Kiev left as a comment on the post about Brent’s mannerisms.

“Dear Lana! It's Irene! I am sorry for disappearing for such a long time, but be sure – I didn’t forget to follow your blog. I feel very excited now because you have finally published your observations on Brent’s mannerisms. It’s always interesting to examine what in his performance is real and what is fake or just slightly exaggerated.
I have watched once more that moment from “Porne Identity”, that you have described, and glad to tell you what I have observed: before lifting up his shoulders in such a sexy way, Brent was warming up the muscles on his back behind his neck, then, shortly, he was stroking his right breast with his left hand and finally – I mean that moment of shoulders lifting – he, as it seems, had squeezed his cheeks for a moment and then quickly moved his hands down to his thighs, doing it so violently that his shoulders in the process had jumped right up to his ears. So it was not, of course, “a spontaneous muscle contortion”, but a visual consequence of another one Brent’s mannerism – he strokes himself or squeezes his cheeks, and we, looking at it, want to do the same. Bad that this moment – I really believe that it was in the movie and was not just imagined by me - wasn’t caught by the camera.
As to the “ballet like stretching of legs and feet right before climax”, this gesture looks much more real to me. I can’t say that I had a lot of men in my life, but when it came to masturbation, they always did the same, and yes - it was always very aesthetic and sexy, of course.”

See also a quote in a previous post http://lana-e.blogspot.com/2009/05/female-fan-site.html

Now that’s what I call meticulous enthusiastic observation! Is it a female speciality? What a tricky question. For sure it is a form of wild fun to get hold of a material that has not been produced for you, reappropriate it and see your own stuff in it. Female watchers of gay porn, is it pathetic? There is no art without projection, and there is no sex without projection, so one can calculate how much projection there is in porn. Double as much. And if any cultural manifestation is able to “stand by itself” (a formula I took from Deleuze’ terrific testament of thought “What is Philosophy?” http://www.amazon.de/Philosophy-European-Perspectives-Gilles-Deleuze/dp/0231079893/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books-intl-de&qid=1255805339&sr=8-1 and will elaborate in the upcoming part 3), there is no rule and no law who is allowed or able to make something of it.

I am not quite sure if Mike Donner’s campy follow up of “The Porne Ultimatum” “The Porn Identity” http://myblog.brentcorriganinc.com/?p=1191, a spoof of the “Bourne Identity” action series, is able to “stand” in that sense. The acting is so hilariously bad that one cannot quite tell if the performers were told to act badly or if they were told to “act naturally”, which with amateurs often sums up to the same thing.

Brent has a very pragmatic, almost cynical attitude towards working for other studios. And he is very aware of the different demands of “professional” studios for “larger” expressions.

Which brings me to the sequence my friend Irene from Kiev described in detail. This particular sequence ending with the shoulder lift shows Brent’s reaction to a rather weird and sloppy blow job the supposedly threatening gangster character who has just abducted him for a notebook performs on him. So much for the logic of character. And this little sequence of sexual expressionism stands all for itself and seems to be completely disconnected from the cause of the arousal. That is maybe the secret reason why it is shot on two levels, the face and upper body and the groin, – only interrupted by a funny little counter shot right behind Brent’s ear giving us the subjective of the “being blown” perspective. Or rather the perspective of a witness standing right behind the receiver. For sure that is something evoking the female envy. I would love to be able to see so much of my organ being treated orally, without a mirror that is. But alas, one cannot have everything. Be happy with your ability to have 7 – 10 orgasms in a row, woman, and shut up! So one would expect that such a perspective so pleasant for the male genital narcissism would make Brent completely hard, but for some reason he never is in the Donner films.

So lets focus again on the face, the centre of expression, and the hands playing the accompanying bass of a melody of gestures. I gave you the whole sequence of major changes in facial expression and hand gestures above. You can see that Irene in her enthusiasm has actually performed something that Freud has discovered in the semiotic logic of dreams and has called “Verdichtung”/Condensation. http://www.cla.purdue.edu/English/theory/psychoanalysis/freud3mainframe.html Condensation shows that dream does not know time in the sense of linear causality. It shakes up things that should come first and things that should come afterwards. Therefore, I assume, Irene keeps mentioning Brent touching his “cheeks”, which cannot, as the sequence of stills proofs, refer to the cheeks of his face (even though they are very touchable too, a fact his then still macho partner takes advantage of in a quite mind-blowing finger sucking situation at the beginning of the scene). Yet right before that sequence there is a short bit of bottom close ups in which one hand of the co star and one hand of Brent’s share the task of spreading the posterior cheeks to show the puzzled audience a surprisingly natural spread of reddish hair in the crack, an original prop to make Brent look more like an adult medical doctor (just let that connection of professional adulthood and perineal hair sink into your mind). Be that as it may, and I would so very much beg Brent to re-post his famous instruction for the thorough removal of unwanted hair from intimate places from his former blog, Irene must have mixed up those shots with the face shots right after that; and so she constructed an amazing unheard-of reflex:

“he, as it seems, had squeezed his cheeks for a moment and then quickly moved his hands down to his thighs, doing it so violently that his shoulders in the process had jumped right up to his ears.”

A touch of buttocks and thighs that makes the shoulders lift violently! As a person professionally busy with questions of dance and choreography – maybe one reason for my over the top detailed observations – I love such a mad mix of artificiality and spontaneity. It is as if the eccentric fantasy of the beholder could invent a whole host of new “tourette syndromes” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tourette_syndrome for the sexual act. In dance it is one of the most demanding and fascinating concepts to develop a “dance language” that in the end resembles a new system of physical reflexes that do not look “done” but automatic, yet utterly artificial.

What I see in this sequence is a set of beautiful but rather made up expressions and gestures. There is the lip licking and mouth opening routine. The lip licking nicely hovers in between a completely self indulging premeditated yet futile effort to make the lips look even more wet and rosy, and the natural complement to the aroused mouth opening reflex.

And there is the arm lifting, an act that can never be a spontaneous reflex, exposing the arm pits as one more convention of porn to show the hidden places of the body. Strong arms being lifted give an ambiguous sign, as the very display of the strong arm muscles puts them in a position where they are completely useless. It is a posture of both swank and submission, thus nicely mirroring Brent’s character in transition. Several comments have shown us how obsessed he is with the girth of his upper arms.

And then the sudden lift of the shoulders adorned by an exquisite opening of the mouth and finally ending on the note of Brent’s characteristic animalistic flaring of the nostrils he might have borrowed from his beloved horses.

This self touching routine is accompanied by such blissful facial expressions that it almost seems like a spontaneous urge. As if the merely staged arousal caused by the blow job would have a mysterious sexual effect that forces him to touch himself. That absurd little logic is one good example for Brent’s high art of sexual performance. He is playing the piano of our fantasies that sometimes are as mysterious as they are widely spread. In both straight and gay porn we can observe a profound obsession with the narcissistic solo scene and the eroticism of masturbation and self touching. There are quite a lot of porn consumers who prefer the solo scene to any real action between 2 and more partners. I am almost one of them. There is something utterly intriguing about a fantasmatic object of desire being completely focussed on itself, a crazy masochist enjoyment in the thought that the very lust of this person for herself completely excludes the other, excludes us from the scene we are nonetheless staring at in longing. Or it is the gratification to be presented with the structural truth of porn, that we are in fact excluded from the action presented to us, also on the level of the content. However, as I pointed out in my first post on “The Look” the situation is more complex than that. At least with Brent who includes both the cameraman and the audience into his solo scene on “Just the Sex” with his flirtatious looks while he is playing with himself.

Brent is a master of the solo scene, no doubt. And the routine he is using in “PI” is learned. It traces back to the early Cobra days, to a solo scene on “Naughty Boys Toys” where he was told to fantasize about Brent Everett’s muscles while gently touching his still fragile torso. No wonder he had to run to the gym to overcome this humiliation.

And there is this opening masturbation scene in the notorious “Take it like a **** boy” where Brent is already showing some acting talent by embodying a rich daddy’s son who is, quite improbably, trying to get some work done in his daddy’s hotel suite. While impatiently waiting for his friend to get back to him on the phone he starts squeezing his dick in his pants. We can see that his hands are as attractive as the organ they are busy with. After a while he takes the thing out and an impressive shot from below shows the pale, slightly curved shaft tower over his torso. So far so good, so conventional. But now comes the extra hot and strange “Scorpio moment”, as I would call it (being quite familiar with the depths and twists of that zodiac sign not only from friends and relatives but also having Scorpio as ascendant myself) – young Brent casts a very melancholic glance at this strange thing that nature has miraculously attached to his boyish body as if he would see it for the very first time, but then, as if he nonetheless would feel some tender emotion for that alien little beast, he licks his finger, and in a move both distinct and absent-minded traces the outline of his circumcised glans. A gesture that does not serve any function of masturbatory friction but performs a pure sign of indexicality, circumscribing and indicating what is already the center of attention while giving this fixation an odd melancholic twist.

[Ok, here I went over the top once again; if I keep upping the ante I wonder where the actual part 3 will have to end up.]

Just some final considerations about this little sequence of “PI”. Even though I love to see and praise the sheer perfection of Brent’s neither regions like anyone else does, here it is clearly the face and the hands that are the most exciting erogenous zones. I do not know if anyone has ever tried to do without them but porn just does not work without facial shots. On the one hand I love (the idea) of a reorganization of the body in porn, the creation of a polymorphous, “acephalic” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ac%C3%A9phale body with more than one center of gravity, liberated from the symbolic (here I used the term, first time) order of being upright, symmetrical and ruled by the head. The ass and the genitals (of both men and women) look expressive and individual to me, like a second or third face. On the other hand I could never be interested in their adventure without seeing them mirrored in a face. Maybe the reason is not or not only the trivial fact that the face shows the most expression, but also the ecstatic quality of a body that is not one but many; as if the power of enjoyment could explode the very unity of the body and create a melting landscape of a physico-expressive manifold. And in this chaotic state of the sexually divided, erotically shattered body the left hand might not know what the right hand does (to quote the holy book, why not http://bible.cc/matthew/6-3.htm), but still the glazed eyes seem to be a far echo of an almost autonomous itching in a far away region of that sentient landscape.

Speaking of indexicality http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indexicality and reference: that funny little film takes the liberty to stage the all male action on the usual sofas in front of a very large nostalgic b&w poster showing a Forties babe of generic “Parisian” frivolity. The contrast between contemporary male flesh and this female icon of the past is distracting not only to the performers. The camera even cuts to this poster full frame to create a transition from the oral action to the anal intercourse. What does this use of female imagery in a gay porn movie tell us? Is it ironical? Indexical? Random? Or does it indicate that female guests are welcome in this all male world of campy gangsters and slightly intimidated but nevertheless horny doctors?

Intermission: Me and the Fagget Fairys on Youtube

2009-10-16T10:06:00.000-07:00

Before I come to the last part of this final aria to Brent Corrigan, the porn star I have to mention that the highly amusing and popular gay gossip site “Unzipped” did me that honour to mention my last post on Brent’s little mannerisms. http://blog.unzipped.net/2009/10/this-lady-has-some-very-specific-observations-about-brent-corrigan.html
Reading one’s own quotes out of context always makes one cringe, but that is normal. I got the impression that Mr. Zach Sire thinks that my style of writing is a bit over the top. He also claims that I wrote about some things that Bent does being symbolic for whatever. Well, that word does not even appear in my blog. Be that as it may, I take that as encouragement and plan a final post that is going to be even further over the top than any previous post.

For the time being I would like to respond to the doubt one commentator had about my actual sex (or gender). Actually I take this as a complement, not because I think men are better, as another commentator so naively insinuated, but because I can well picture myself as a drag queen of the second order. Drag queens btw are not well-respected in the US gay scene, not even on Unzipped. If they are being mentioned at all they are treated as non-sexual creatures. This might be a reason to pay homage to the not very well received comedy “Another Gay sequel”, this time not for Bent’s part as a merman but for its very interesting final scene of the fairy, effeminate gay man having his unexpected triumph. I for one will never be part of any cult of the supermasculine. And that far more than my dubious sex will set me apart form a large part of the (male) gay scene.
Just to give an idea about me, my artistic work and my strange identity I finally posted the beginning of the Science Fiction trash opera “Pathos Alarm in Outer Space” on Youtube, an ongoing series of videos produced by the group PATHOSBÜRO based in Vienna I am a founding member of.
Take a look

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_OffBSgCdc

And finally as a greeting to Brent, the horse lover, who just returned from good old Europe where apparently he has not been fed well (what a shame, bad cooking in England??? Since when???) I recommend this video “Feed the Horse yumyum”, a nice and juicy, this time lesbian anthem to sexual enjoyment by the Fagget Fairys (albeit not such a great video)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0CMx7M84KQ

Part 2: Brent's Little Mannerisms

2009-10-14T14:09:00.000-07:00

Just The Sex 1, Scene with Luke Hass

There are a couple of specific mannerisms, postures, expressions, skills that could be named after Brent: like the perfect bent of the spine he nowadays teaches to his bottom boys; Or the energetic lift when riding a top. And many more.
What I want to draw attention to though is a little something I would like to call the Brent Corrigan mouth opening extravaganza. This specific little feature is usually connected to a choreographic detail of bottoming that seems to be a convention of gay porn. In the doggie position the bottom half turns with a desperate expression, as if he would try to see which anonymous and evil force is demanding entry into his most intimate orifice. Clearly perspective prevents the bottom from seeing any detail of his penetration. Thus this absurd little drama is being performed for the silent third party, i.e. us. And this is yet another proof for the fact that porn is not showing a crude, ‘realistic’ depiction of untreated sex. Just like any filmic genre demanding the mental participation of an audience porn needs to be staged in a visual language making use of a set of conventions.
Well, Brent is simply a master in the desperate half turn. And to top this bottoming virtuosity even more, to make this whole pseudo-submissive, mildly masochist display of that puzzled expression even more sizzling he likes to combine the half turn with a specific fashion of opening the mouth. It might be somewhat physiological that a person in the throws of sexual arousal tends to open the mouth to make breathing easier in the onslaught of muscle contortion and physical exertion. In Brent’s case though this ‘natural’ reaction is being performed with such conscious gusto, slowly and in full awareness of the exquisite look of those full, rosy, heart-shaped lips whose perfect cupid’s bow he likes to emphasize with a matching lip liner.

Summit, Foursome with Jacob Powell et.al.

I have to admit that in porn I even prefer the slightly “fake” things to the completely ‘natural’ things; because in a certain sense they are more honest. A porn star is a sexual actor, a performer of the art of sex. He/she does not have sex like a ‘person next door’ in their private bedroom. And why should he? The lighting and the close ups make the action more artificial, larger than life. Mannerisms, “made up” expressions, choreographed body postures are simply a means of self-protection. They draw a clear lie in between the private and the porn persona. This seems to be the true reason for the fake boobs and endless fingernails of the average female porn star – unfortunately features that make me lose any interest in their sexual performance. How much more charming the little mannerisms of one Brent Corrigan that differ only slightly from what he calls an “organic” sexual act. Those features manage to stage authenticity and actual passion. They do not quite fake them, they magnify and shape them. The fact that we do not know to which extent those little peculiarities are consciously staged or just habitual elements of a personal routine even heightens their charm. Spontaneous reactions of arousal and staged mannerisms blur into each other, are either real or fake from one movie to the next. Sometimes I need to see one movie to diagnose the fakeness of a feature in another movie. Take the endearing lift of the shoulders close to climax that is very sexy as it makes him look more fragile, like a flashback of his former slender self he so successfully transformed into a manly, almost buff new body type. Is it a spontaneous muscle contortion? In “The Porne Identity”, this wilfully campy parade of utterly fake expressions and forced punch lines, he does the shoulder lift while being blown by his co star in such an odd and sloppy manner that sheer arousal cannot quite be the reason.

The Porne Identity

Or what about the ballet like stretch of legs and feet right before climax we can see twice in “Summit”? This particular posture that makes Brent’s leg muscles tremble with tension looks highly aesthetic, but it also seems to serve a certain purpose to intensify the thrust of the imminent orgasm.

Observations such as this can lead to the hypothesis that everything is done, even the little things that look spontaneous. And this artificial nature makes every gesture and every move oscillate in between physical reflex and aesthetic expression. Before we are tempted to criticize a porn star for his inauthentic behaviour lets remember that a particular style of artificial spontaneity as a form of “second nature” could also be described as the highest level of the art of acting.
And if Brent Corrigan’s dominant traits of narcissism and perfectionism drive him towards a maximum of control over his actions it is all the more fascinating that he usually succeeds in making it all look relaxed, gentle and indeed enjoyable.
To provide for this delicate balance Brent has managed to create environments that guarantee maximum safety. But this is a double edged sword. If indeed he will go on producing porn for a short while, he will need some courage and inventiveness to keep himself interested. In his latest works “Just the Sex 1 & 2” and “The Big Easy” he often chose partners less experienced than himself. In “BE” they also were, – with the remarkable exception of Buckley, – bottoms. The “celebrity” top in “BE”, M.J. Taylor, does not co-star in any of Brent’s scenes, due to obvious lack of personal chemistry. In a highly sensuous scene of nude posing without (a lot of) sexual action we see Brent as little prince on his throne, giving orders and pointing with his index finger while stroking his dick.

The Big Easy

And in another scene his co-stars appear a little reluctant to open their mouths, so a slightly intoxicated Brent has to tell one adolescent joke after the other. Some one has to do it.

If there might be a chance in the future I would wish for him to realize what he had announced in an “Unzipped” interview: to go for “odd couples”. http://blog.unzipped.net/2009/06/unreleased-excerpts-from-brent-corrigans-freshmen-interview.html#more
I also hope that he will work with other experienced and well-known partners and not stay fixated on the role of discoverer of unknown boy-territory. Unfortunately, or ironically, some of my dream partners are associated with Brent’s arch enemy’s studio Lucas Film.

Zack Randall is no option any longer, he seems to have retired. His sloppy, slutty stop-at-nothing piss drinking sleaziness would have been a charming contrast to Brent's always slightly controlled and clean grace.
I would also be fascinated by an encounter with Ben Andrews, whose enormous natural endowment gives him the freedom to otherwise stay a rather slim, not too manly, soft spoken fellow who is not afraid to appear slightly effeminate when he is walking his little dog in the streets of Soho. Such a relaxed top would make a nice complement for a power bottom who cultivates his muscles to leave his submissive and exploited past behind.

And indeed I found a mysterious picture nourishing my fantasies. It looks like the perfect cover photo for a non-existent video. If anyone can shed a light on its context, you are welcome.

Brent Corrigan, Porn Star

2009-09-18T05:59:00.000-07:00

An Homage with some Considerations about Porn in General.

Part 1: The Look

The future is hard to predict. We do not know for how much longer Brent Corrigan will be producing porn; his ambition aims into the direction of a career in theatre and film. Apparently dressed. And being aware of the fact that crossover careers from porn to mainstream are rare but not impossible one can assume that having a career in both, mainstream AND porn, simultaneously, is probably not working.
Brent Corrigan has set his mark in porn already, no doubt. You could say, five years are half a decade, who started earlier can retire sooner. Yet I do not agree that “Big Easy” has been an achievement that cannot be topped. Even though it points in a fascinating direction I still see a lot of potential that has not been fully exhausted in this project.

In that sense I do hope that Brent will go beyond the limits yet again, but I know him well enough to be sure that he cannot be pushed in any direction, not into and not out of porn.
So if his adult career as a very young man slowly comes to a halt this seems to be in any case an appropriate moment for an homage. Most of this has been written some weeks ago and was originally planed as an argument as to why I see the bottom (or the woman in straight porn) as the centre of attention, as the ruling person in any porn movie. The ground for these arguments has been paved by my earlier reflexions on penetration and enjoyment in porn. http://lana-e.blogspot.com/2009_07_01_archive.html
I felt provoked to express these thoughts in public by certain signs of weariness about his status as premium bottom Brent showed in his blog (in comments to the post http://myblog.brentcorriganinc.com/?p=895 now gone due to technical reasons) Even though I would not discourage his ambition to strive for higher goods such as being nominated best performer or best personality for the awards of his liking I wanted to make clear that the status of best bottom should not be underestimated.

Brent Corrigan is a creature of many faces, but I never considered it appropriate to label him a “boy next door” kind of type. He is the rather unusual sum of unusual elements. And it is one danger of the trade he is in that the beauty and appeal of the performer is being dissected into an assemblage of fetishes and partial objects. In order to not end up as a monstrosity, and be it a monstrosity of beauty, one needs one strong feature, one element that dominates and outshines the rest. And counter to commonly held opinion in Brent’s case its neither cock nor ass, but his eyes. Catlike and heartbreakingly androgynous when he was in his teens. Nowadays still large, hazel and doe-like, but displaying a decidedly more masculine expression sparkling with ambition and intelligence, sometimes even mischief.
However, we rarely get to see them in his movies. And maybe with good reasons. To be addressed by such a strong expressive gaze would almost intimidate the lusting stare of the porn consumer focussed on his/her favourite body parts.
It is interesting to note that the extensive convention of female porn actors addressing the camera, habitually glancing ridiculously submissive glances at the anonymous spectator while gagging on a cock, does not have an equivalent in gay porn. This is all the more notable as other mannerisms of submission, including making eyes at the top while giving head, are clearly very similar. There is something about the theatrical act of the female performer confessing to be a whore and a slut that does not translate into gay culture. One reason might be the convention of “naturalness” in gay porn. Any exaggerated theatricality would be perceived as “drag queen like”, and drag queens, for very disquieting reasons, are excluded from the realm of sexually desirable subjects. SM porn is a significant exception though; it is loaded with hilarious and utterly unnatural displays of dominance and submission. Yet even here, no direct addressing of the camera.
While this riddle stays unsolved for the moment we return to Brent who likes to keep his lids half closed to display a row of silky eye lashes that could inspire yet another eccentric fetish in me. This predominant expression signals that the subject is completely involved with his own enjoyment and the gratification of the other. He is utterly concentrated and concerned. He acts as if we would not be there, we and our obscene accomplice, the camera. Lately he has created a situation for himself that allows for an undisturbed and smooth dramaturgy of the scene, directed from the inside by the main protagonist. In the old days though, the dirty old Cobra days, there were very discreet moments when we see young Brent suddenly dropping out of the little bit of role-playing that is needed for a sex scene and glancing a private, brief, annoyed look at the camera that apparently is the reaction to some director’s command balked at him and cut out later, commands such as “Moan loader” or “Push your dick down”. It would be a wonderfully nerdy sports, – and I encourage the readers to do so, – to produce stills of all those little moments; and reconstruct what the commands might have been.

In this particular example of EPBD the command probably was to lift his right arm which he does the next moment very slowly and deliberately.

Since then the professional in him has established certain moments to consciously open his eyes. The submissive look upwards while serving a cock, as in “The Porne Idenity” is “done” and slightly fake. Closer to an authentic expression but still a convention is the look that hovers in between addressing the audience and the in-scene partner to announce imminent orgasm, like a moment of testimony. This almost desperate expression, as in “Velvet Mafia”, the second scene, combined with contorted neck muscles and lifted shoulders, is a truly heartbreaking and deeply arousing mixture of acting and experiencing it for real. Still, it occurs only rarely and in larger productions, such as the one by Falcon, where “acting” it bigger is demanded.

I personally love the announcement of a male orgasm in porn, as it seems pure luxury. There has been a lot of discussion within the feminist critique of male dominated porn about the obvious, visible character of male ejaculation, – the “money shot” –, in straight porn and how it dominates the dramaturgy of any scene. Which is absolutely true. Still, to the extent to which the male orgasm is also a matter of enjoyment and not only a sign of a job being accomplished it has its own imaginary dimension. That’s one reason why I, – as a female porn consumer, – strongly reject the demand of some feminist porn activists to simply ban it from any woman-friendly porn. What a childish revenge ! So if, – probably rather in gay than straight porn, – a man is sighing “I am coming!” to announce an event that everyone can see he might also give the cameraman a sign where to point the camera. But in addition to that he supplements the anatomically obvious with voice and facial expression as if to perform a split in between the physical and the symbolic dimension of the act. After all, all we get to see is some white liquid oozing or squirting out of a tube. The fact that this is accompanied by intense lust and emotion only a human voice and face can testify to us. By doubling this seemingly banal event with its announcement the male orgasm regains a certain dignity and mystery that some like to ascribe to the female orgasm, even though in most cases, – and mine for sure, – it is as much of an anatomically distinct and punctual event, and sometimes as mechanically achieved, as male orgasm is.
It is by the way truly amazing, – and to me much more of a scandal than the display of male ejaculation, – that this mysterious and cosmic event that some men see in the female orgasm is in general absolutely absent from straight porn. The women do never announce or display any particular moment when they actually come, if they are not squirting. It appears that an event without a visible equivalent is not worth marking. Thus the female curve of arousal and release that in real life has its specific structure and demands different practices and rhythms of sex is absent from straight porn. Women whimper and moan from the first to the last moment of intercourse as if being tortured by a permanent orgasm born in the anatomically ignorant minds of some men. This convention is for sure far more damaging for heterosexual relations being influenced by porn, and a far stronger sign for male dominance in straight porn than any display of ejaculation. It signifies that woman does not have her own time and timing in porn and really only serves as a tool for male gratification.

In general the Brent keeping his lust to himself and the Brent openly looking into the camera are two very different creatures. The moderation of the scenes in “Summit” shows him too slick and businesslike to blend well into the passion of the scenes. And he even seems to comment on this sharp contrast between performance and moderation in the brilliant little epilogue, the beautifully photographed performance of a full body orgasm with his head hanging over the edge of a couch, seemingly ignorant of the camera, but then staging the interruption of a private experience with the cameraman (probably Grant) shouting “Hey Brent!”, and with a jerk of the body coming back to his still heavily breathing but alert moderator’s self apologizing for not having been able to resist.

It seems that Brent has to push himself a bit to look back at us. But there is one quite hidden little performance that bridges the gap in between looking and not looking in the most tantalizing and seductive way; and it is significant that it occurs in a very intimate solo scene in which every glance is not directed towards an anonymous audience but personally towards the cameraman; the cameraman Grant Roy who as a (then still or already former) boy friend and business partner was able to provoke all sorts of teasing, flirtatious but also slightly annoyed expressions.
In the solo of “Just the Sex” Brent changes smoothly and rhythmically between looking at us (at Grant) and at himself. Every look seems to comment on the desire his body evokes in the onlooker and thus heighten it. Still, in a tiny, unnameable shift this look can melt into a genuine offering of himself. As if the diva-like, annoyed expression of “Is this what you want” can tip over into a warm, open “Do you want me?” in any moment. Those amazing eyes seem to arrive at an expression of real vulnerability and devotion the more they try to keep a cool, sober, slightly amused look. And we drown in their dark soft glow while Brent is playfully slapping his pale swollen dick against his stomach with adolescent yet charming pride.

Kicked out of the Global Village. My Brief Visit in Thingyville

2009-08-02T16:07:00.000-07:00

New idols is what you acquire while you are busy worrying about the old ones. Apparently Brent Corrigan is about to sneak out of porn; or maybe not. If he does, a quarrel with his business partner about the freshly launched website would not be a convincing reason, even less so now when he could build on his growing fame. To quit porn now would be very very unreasonable. But who said that a 22 year old moody and eccentric diva makes reasonable decisions? But as I said, that is another story.
In the long weeks of silence I grew more and more fascinated by a whole different type of star performer. Like many others I first noticed him and began to be interested in him when he played Mark Antony in HBO’s amazing show Rome. And that fact alone is already a clear indication that the British actor James Purefoy is a very untypical movie star. He managed to sail below the radar of superstardom till the age of 41 (Rome started 2005). In an interview he blamed his own “self destructive” character for not getting some of the major parts he auditioned for – James Bond one of them. Obviously he did not quite want to become part of the Hollywood dream factory; even though British actors like Jude Law, Ralph Fiennes and lately Clive Owen found their way to stardom. The trajectory of his career starting with classical Shakespearean theatre and setting a mark in a long series of British period dramas is wound and peculiar. Counter to his claim of avoiding typical Hollywood material he appeared in “Resident Evil”, an infantile, computer game style zombie movie, in 2002, without further consequences. Ever since I started to observe David Duchovny’s struggle to do anything meaningful after his part as Agent Mulder in “X Files” I am fascinated by the difficult periods highly significant and talented actors sometimes have to go through if they cannot or do not want to be typecast for their whole career. For Duchovny came “Californication”, a witty, naughty and well written show in any sense tailor made and modelled on the body and soul of its main protagonist. For Purefoy came Rome, an ensemble drama dominated by a mostly brilliant British cast, but leaving space for one character slightly outshining the others with his powerful, sexually charged, arrogant presence of audacious and finally tragic debauchery. James Purefoy’s Mark Antony. That no doubt deserves a post of its own I had already planned to write, and another one on NBC’s “The Philanthropist” with Purefoy in the leading part, a significant example for honourable failure.
I would have written those posts if not something would have come in the way that deserves an homage all of its own. I came about the apparently most active fan forum jamespurefoy.proboards.com, hosted by the website jamespurefoy.us calling itself “America’s Home for the Darling James Purefoy”. As an ardent James Spader fan I already had my experiences with one of those proboards, the so called “James Spader Meeting Place”. I do not quite know if they are really all the same, but now that I know two cases I might suspect so.

Those forums are highly maintained, apparently closely knit communities with a very active administration and a table of rules that are carved in marble. Anyone who is not either part of the founding generation or of a meek and humble character is surely up for an interesting time.
Whenever I stumble into such a forum I always have to think about the irony of how the proverbial prediction of the “global village” came true in an almost literal sense. The term was labelled to indicate that telecommunication and new digital media will shrink the global society to the size of a village. And certain segments of web 2.0 outdo themselves in becoming villagers. As if the anarchy and anonymity of the web were unbearable to some they are suspicious of strangers and re-enact the control mechanisms and finally the moral (mostly sexual) censorship of small village communities. In an open medium without any owner there emerge “hosts” who claim to administer the rules of a certain domain. In some of those boards (not the JP forum though) they indulge in the staging of vertical hierarchy, attributing the labels of “gods” to senior members to make the “new member” feel like the paria he is. Web forums become the symbolic space of a re-enactment of aristocratic and authoritarian regimes where the ancestors dominate those who come later, where the owner(s) of the house have absolute power, where basically no democratic mechanism is accepted that rules the outside world.
On the other hand, a fan forum such as this, peopled by adult women who discuss issues about an attractive male actor, is teaming with sexual energy. It would merit studying this particular phenomenon of collective female fandom, adult fandom that differs significantly from teenage frenzy. The women on this forum outdo each other in detailed analysis of the anatomy of the star, they compete in posting significant photos and commenting them with witty and naughty remarks. Actually I liked that and so, even though I had been warned, I tried to enter this community. I could simply not refrain from mentioning a tiny problem I had with the site. And that was its hilarious regime of self-censorship.
The problem starts with a site like that being a performative self-contradiction. The rules are supposed to respect the privacy of the star worshipped. Yet almost every photo and every post on the forum is to a certain extent invading his privacy. The only rule that applies is a strict separation of artistic manifestations and the private person. I am quite sure that no one on the forum is a potential stalker. As a crazy member of fan culture I can well understand why one dissects one’s idol down to the nipple, even though this is one more symptom of the cannibalistic nature of fandom, the Dionysian “tearing apart of the God” I mentioned before. Still, an actor who decides to play his part like Purefoy played Mark Antony, with such brooding sensuality, has to accept the consequences as long is they stay within the symbolic distance of the medium; consequences that might seem both embarrassing and flattering to him if he should bother to notice them.
I always thought the best protection of a star from the erotic zeal of his fans is his blissful ignorance. So the additional emphasis on child protection and “13+ friendliness” on the JP Proboard seems to be nothing but yet another symptom of this particular shame the fan feels for her own madness; for nothing can be more absurd and more self contradicting than the administration of this supposed teen friendliness.
Close ups of nipples, lips and buttocks are anyway not the right material for teens. If the administrators were serious they would have set up a strict and meaningful censorship. Also, Purefoy is not the actor who attracts any significant teen following. He is 45 now, he displays signs of a slightly decadent, intellectual European with a Leftist past. He takes care of a young son. Why should any teen visit a site in his honour? And even if a teen would stumble on the site accidentally he would find nothing that could be more dangerous to his or her premature dirty mind than the tons of free porn he or she can easily find anywhere else. But hey, there is no accidental stumbling as one has to apply for admittance. So why on earth can’t the site be the adult site that it obviously is? Well, it can’t.
What are, finally, the exact mechanisms of teen protection? Well, no frontal nudity. That’s understood. The classic taboo Purefoy broke with grandezza in the famous episode S01e04 of Rome. The countless mentioning of that small scene without permission to post the picture gives an impression of suppressed Victorian libido that is not at all in tune with Purefoy’s own liberal and very relaxed approach to nudity and sex. Still, innuendos can be fun. So let’s accept this. I for one would have done so, even though I would like to know when exactly the bare ass of a man stopped being dangerous to the adolescent mind while his cock still is.

Speaking of ass, or maybe “arse”, as Purefoy would have rather put it, – and he played with the American and the British version of the word in the San Diego episode of “The Philanthropist” – that leads me straight to the nitty gritty of JP Proboard censorship. I do not know if the board censors “arses”, but surely it censors ass. Not the picture of said body part but the WORD! And not only that filthy dirty word but any part of a word those disgusting three letters appear in. As if fearing that the misguided dirty mind of a teenager would see “ass” any time it would read “class” that word appears as “cl***” on the page.
Who will ever be able to explain the American fear of evil words to me? The American culture fears “bad language” more than nude display and for sure more then the display of extreme violence. What is that exactly? A leftover of the Puritan past? Yet with the fear of an evil syllable we enter the new realm of the irrational magic of letters, a realm that reminds me rather of witchcraft than the holy script. And that new magic has been created by some badly programmed semantic filter that does not make a difference between words and syllables, or between the names for certain body parts and their synonyms. If you write that “the cock crows in the morning” this glorious program censors it as “the thingy crows in the morning”. Just to make sure.
The thingy. A very regular word on that board. A British, and may I say rather vulgar expression hijacked for the sake of American teen care. When I read that word I see a middle-aged British woman with the corners of her thin lipped mouth pulled down in contempt as she is referring to some tiny shrivelled up penis. That word as substitute for any, or maybe only some anatomical expressions might not have the power to protect any adolescent soul but for sure it has the power to destroy any adult’s appetite for said anatomy.
Now, a caring morally concerned American housewife and mother who happens to entertain a little crush for a British celebrity in her spare time might find the forced use of “thingy” and the crossing out of one particular syllable a tiny and insignificant prize to be paid for the much higher good of child protection. Yet if that good is so very high, why doesn’t anyone bother to use (or program) a more intelligent software? Because language is a good that does not deserve even the tiniest bit of care? That is a pity, as some people on the forum surely know how to express themselves. It stays a secret why they accept a semantic regime like that. Well, I can’t.
I am one of those odd people who still appreciate the freedom of expression, who love language and think that it has profound aesthetic and poetic qualities, qualities that shape one’s life and personality and should therefore not be manipulated by an idiotic software program.
Therefore my strange encounter with the “thingy” taught me a powerful lesson; how I, a profound lover of both sex and words – by the way, the word “sex”, root of all evil, is not being censored on the board – deeply love those words, “cock” and “cunt” and “ass”. I could never live without them.
Just think back of George Orwell’s 1984, the authoritarian imposition of newspeak. Nowadays everyone laughs about “Big Brother” because we are simply living with him already. It is just amazing to see how this regime has already seeped into every single pore of language and communication, in the internet most of all.
Imagine that one day you would wake up in a world where all the proud, juicy, pulsating “cocks” and “cunts” and all the supple quivering “asses” of this world would have been melted into one big neutral flaccid pool of “thingys”. Wouldn’t this change of naming have an influence on our lives? Wouldn’t it change the perception of our bodies, maybe even our anatomy?

To borrow an example that shows the very hiatus between this forum and the class and style of the object of its affection: “Rome” is a great big carnival of carnal excess and dirty language, produced by decadent Europeans for an American market. In s02e01 Servilia, Ceasar’s former lover and mother of Brutus, shows contempt for Antony’s famous speech at Caesar’s funeral, one of the most famous speeches in theatre and film history the series oddly left out (would have loved to see Purefoy deliver that). She states that any pantomime could have performed that speech. And Antony replies with a glorious expression of scorn, "Lucky it was me then, or you'd be on your knees sucking pantomime cock!”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8B5jSLaAPA
some regime of censorship would have forced him to say “sucking pantomime thingy”, not only the rhythm of the line would have been ruined.

Well, I deeply despise any censorship. In my country censorship is associated with the corrupt and reactionary regime of Metternich. And while regimes like China and Iran continue to impose censorship any seemingly trivial regime of self-censorship in a supposedly democratic society should not be treated too lightly. As a means to an ethical end such as the protection of adolescents it is clearly dysfunctional. Still it is spreading and about to become a netiquette that might soon exclude anyone who does not accept it. One does not need to be a theorist of culture to know that the politics of signs and words is not trivial and does have political and existential consequences. If not so, why should the banning of certain words be in the interest of the youth?
And any censorship is simply the restriction of freedom. And freedom to me still is a very very high good.

After I left a comment the administrator sent me a pm informing me that the rules of self censorship should not be discussed in the public section. I asked the administrator of jamespurefoy.proboards.com about the reasons for this regime. And I wrote a funny little text without one dirty word, but lots of words containing ass and thingy. I cannot reproduce it here as her answer to my questions came quickly. She temporarily disabled my account.

UPDATE

This is the funny little text I wrote (actually the plain member of the forum liked it)

Indeed, he has cl***, and he is s***y too. I am sure there are m***es of people out there who share those views. I also love to hear the b***, well rather baritone of his voice. Already when the thingy crows in the morning I am busy ***essing the various qualities and ***ets of this man. What is most charming about his man? His eyes? His lips? His chest? Or maybe those thingys that cannot be named? And when I see him as knight I wish I were his l***. I would even adore him if he rode a wild *** and not a proud horse.
No, I confess, the best thing I ***ociate with him is his daring, uncensored, sensual access to his work as an extraordinary actor; no one can be ***imilated with that excellence; take the way how he decribed the nudity of the Mark Antony scene as a way to show that this man does not give a flying thingy to appear nude in front of a man that is below his cl***.

And this is what the administrator wrote to me:

"If you do not like the rules of this forum you are more than welcome to delete your account and leave. Other wise all Rules and Guidelines are to be followed.

As for your censor complaint concerning words such as "thingy" replacing certain words it is actually built into the Proboards forum.

Also if you have any further complaints you are not to air them on the forum itself as that is not the place for it. You may PM either Norbert or myself.

I have been informed by Norbert that your account was disabled for two days. If you choose to participate after the two day period ends and the same behavior that caused your account to be disabled continues you will be banned from this forum."

Amazing, isn't it? Not even school masters talk to you like that anymore. Farewell to free speech!
And I was right, that idiotic software comes prepackaged. I am (still) lucky on Blogger. I can only hope that some geek community with a love for language will do something about it.

At the Bottom of Topping the Bottom is Top. Part 1: The Secrets of Penetration and Enjoyment

2009-07-13T15:33:00.000-07:00

Top, bottom, versatile, the gay porn world revolves around that holy trinity. I can never quite innocently refer to it without remembering what Michel Foucault had to say about the concepts of sexual ethics in antiquity. Still marked and indeed contaminated by the moralistic and psychological weight of ascribing a heterosexual or homosexual “soul” to each individual we are still amazed by the ease with which any man (rather, man) in ancient Greece and Rome could change between sex with men and sex with women, sometimes in different periods of his life, sometimes intermittedly. And no one would even have the idea, the very concept to wonder if this person is really “gay” or “straight”. This does, of course, not indicate that there were no moral rules connected to sexual activities. On the contrary. There was an intense and even desperate “care” about the question if one assumes an active or a passive role during the sexual act. For a man it was considered shameful and dishonouring to accept the passive, the “female” part. So as long as one could manage to stay the penetrator it was under certain precautions ok to fuck whatever gender.

Greek Vase, Jupiter courting Ganymed

Without going into further details about the pitfalls of the highly ritualized love for adolescent boys in ancient Greece – one can easily find it in Foucault’s “History of Sexuality” Vol. 3,

http://www.amazon.de/History-Sexuality-Care-Self-Penguin/dp/0140137351/ref=sr_1_16?ie=UTF8&s=books-intl-de&qid=1247353193&sr=8-16

– I just want to refer to the amazing, or maybe misleading analogy to the “cares” and problematisations within contemporary gay pornography. Even though on the surface top and bottom are being treated as equally important roles, on a second layer there is a permanent discourse of power accompanying it. The bottoms are referred to as those who “take it”, like a punishment or a ritual of submission.
There seems to be a certain “care” around the masculine role, around the “honour” to be a top. The bottoms tend to be younger, smaller and slimmer. No surprise there. And on top of it – pun intended –there is an (unwritten?) rule that whoever wants to be in gay porn but does not own a big dick should better be ready to “take it”, no matter if this be his inclination or not.
In this sense gay porn in general seem to transport an old gender logic that does not really differ from a straight logic, but works on a more ritualised and abstract level, as it is in principle possible to change from bottom to top and vice versa if certain parameters are changing.
The game could be formalized as follows: the role of the bottom IS indeed less attractive, less “dignified”, in short: less masculine, BUT no one needs to stay a bottom forever and all the time. Unless his dick is too small. And even the most hunky tops can fall from the grace of topping when becoming too old or overexposed. Then they end up in a video announcing that such and such is “for the first time bottoming” – like Chad Hunt, the owner of a huge, semi soft baby arm of a dick he stuffed into young Brent Corrigan in “The Velvet Mafia”, who finally had to take it in the “Endgame” right before his retreat into a well deserved pension.
http://heroesnhunks.com/wordpress/2008/12/19/horsehung-chad-hunt-to-retire-after-bottoming/
On the pic Hunt really looks like he is desperately trying to give birth to, well, whatever

Lets cut for a moment to another completely different basic law of pornography that intervenes into this classical paradigm of penetration and makes gay porn a lot more complicated. For the demonstration of this other paradigm it is ironically best to switch to straight porn for a moment. Here the question is: why are women in straight porn by far more famous and better paid than men? Men in straight porn tend to be utterly anonymous and interchangeable, rarely attractive dummies, simple owners of the dick. There humble, sometimes idiotic part stands in glaring contrast to their display of dominance, there rude face fucking, calling her slut and pounding “the shit out of her” that is their usual routine. The very contradiction of dominant behaviour and insignificant identity is a perfect demonstration of two different paradigms at work in porn: the macho behaviour transporting the old logics of patriarchy and penetration as the ultimate power display is contradicted by the far more profound but also more hidden paradigm or porn as a display of excessive enjoyment. Watching porn means watching a subject who enjoys. And the ultimate in enjoyment in straight porn is embodied by the woman. That’s why she is by far more famous and better paid. The question now is of course: is enjoyment necessarily connected to femininity? Is the one who is being penetrated in principle the better or even the only subject of enjoyment? Or is enjoyment a more fleeting, a more subtle state that is in fact not really connected to penetration at all, that can indeed occur during penetration, but is rather prone to disappearance if the emphasis on penetration is becoming a little too crude and mechanical, and most of a little too connected to domination?
In that sense enjoyment and penetration can exist side by side, and even interpenetrating each other, but enjoyment gets stale whenever domination takes over.
I can always experience this, literally in my own flesh, when I notice how I get insanely aroused by the right kind of sighs and grunts and completely pissed off by idiotic phrases of male domination. And even though there are some female performers I find interesting, the female habit of permanent whimpering in porn just does not strike the right cord. The relation of this tension between enjoyment and penetration to the extreme nuisance of (almost any) background music I don’t even want to elaborate now. Fact is: I do not enjoy it.
I have to admit that the relation of a body orifice being penetrated and the expression of enjoyment is fascinating and puzzling to me. I am not sure if I am falling trap to an imprinted gender logic I otherwise reject, if as a porn consumer I simply enjoy the display of penetration, without ascribing the symbolic value of phallic domination to it. Do I as a consumer respond with a “primal female instinct” that I intellectually contradict as a “gender theorist”? It is not as simple as that. My responses are as complex and mixed as my analysis. And still, or therefore I enjoy them.

This image from “Jack the Zipper’s” “Squealer”, 2006 AVN award winner, is a good example for the whole messy complexity of straight porn. It is an extremely well done and well played orgy of female degradation. The uncanny background music, more like a deep breathing of the orgiastic space, deserves special praise A couple of women are kept hostage in a filthy, very “designed” farm barn by a couple of anonymous, faceless cowboy hooligans whose faces we never get to see. A situation of utter threat and violence in reality, but in porn it is not that simple. Even though those faceless dick owners brutally stuff the women’s throats till they puke the performance of the women, of the glorious Audrey Hollander most of all, is so intense and such an expressive display of enjoyment that yet again those faceless “masters” turn into dummies who just serve the bottom’s bottomless appetite.

Which brings me back to gay porn. Surely I can “identify” with the female part of enjoyment. But when watching a gay porn movie I enjoy, – and I do not really enjoy so many of them, – the game of identification and enjoyment becomes even more complex, a complexity I enjoy as well. A beautiful young male body being penetrated. What is my fascination for that? It is rich and paradoxical. I share his sensations of lust when his nerve endings are being titillated, his orifice is being stretched, his insides are being massaged. I am with him and his insides. On the other hand I am also with the other, I can well imagine how the hot, tight interior of another body would feel on a sensitive body part. I can share the dangerous desire to “violate” the beauty of another body, yet to compensate this violent urge with the will to be at the service of the other’s lust and enjoyment, by making any possible move of violation an act of care.

There has been a, in my mind completely misleading, even idiotic, feminist movement that would to a certain extent embrace the idea of pornography to the extent to which penetration is either avoided or at least marginalized. I totally disagree. What the aria is to the opera penetration is to porn. It is this one pathetic, monotonous, often failed, often cheesy “thing” everything revolves around. The fact that penetration is so vital to porn is a question of aesthetics and intensity. That’s why I compared it to an aria – thereby relying on Linda William’s already canonical comparison of porn to the musical (a thing that will be nice coming back to if I will manage to continue the Brent-and-Zac-story) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linda_Williams_(United_States_film_critic) Or the pas de deux in ballet.
It is an easy and somehow cowardly move to leave it out, to produce operas of recitatives only, dances with soli only, and porn without fucking. If the problems of male domination, socially indeed very real problems, come into play, it is in the blunt and stupid display of male dominance that abuses penetration for its own purposes. What makes penetration the center of porn is not at all the fact that it is the obvious display of male domination but the paradox that the most exciting, most intense moment in a completely visual medium is something invisible. If there were a transparent body, or a camera showing us the insides of a vagina, a throat or a rectum, indeed a “cock perspective”, this would be the end of porn. It would just be an anatomical display, something hovering uncomfortably in between medicine and splatter movie. Visuals like that would simply leave the paradigm of porn as theatre of sexual enjoyment behind. Everything that is mad, arousing, intense about porn disappears in the opaque body of the penetrated and takes my desire with it, somehow on both sides of the channel.
Thus the law of porn is fulfilled: that the eyes make you feel a sensation you do not really feel. This strange transference of the senses is finally the reason why some people become addicted to porn and others do simply not respond to it.

In “Corpus” Jean Luc Nancy would claim that there is no penetration at all http://www.scribd.com/doc/9833074/Open-Wounds-Body-and-Image-in-JeanLuc-Nancy-and-Claire-Denis-by-Douglas-Morrey), there is only one skin touching the other, and sometimes the skin is simply turned inside out, just like the anatomical observation that the vagina is an inverted penis. Jacques Derrida calls this folding an invagination.
Mario Perniola, in his “Sex-Appeal of the Inorganic” ( on the other hand, talks of an interpenetration of a neutral sexuality of sensitive things that stays completely exterior, a penetration without touching.
http://books.google.com/books?id=52KBf6Oa5_YC&dq=perniola+sex-appeal&printsec=frontcover&source=bn&hl=en&ei=ubxbSs22ApaOnAPn1OjdCQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4

I somehow dig both theories, and the inability to decide is also providing a certain enjoyment.

The images in the beginning and end of this post are details of stills of two Brent Corrigan movies. In the very unlikely case of someone identifying the two movies, or even only one of them, I think about a reward. But of course it cannot be the signed copy of the freshman magazine I just won in Unzipped’s Haiku contest. http://blog.unzipped.net/brent-corrigan/

Changing Idols – Confessions of a Complicated Fan

2009-07-11T15:31:00.000-07:00

I am a bad fan, I am a strange kind of fan, I am a confused fan. I am in the peculiar position to be adressed by my idol. It is my own fault; I could not stay in the shadows of anonymity like most fans have to, even if they are desperate to be known. There is this one Zac Efron site that has this very official announcement to all the fans that they should not believe anyone who writes them as Zac, because it for sure is not Zac.

http://www.zefron.com/forum/showthread.php?t=90018

He does not have the time to write to any fan in person. And he said clearly in a Degeneres show that he does not use Facebook or Twitter, he calls his friends on the phone.
When it comes to Zac I expect to stay in this completely anonymous position, even though my niece who happens to be a society reporter actually did speak to him in person recently.
But when it comes to Brent, who still is another category and another type of star, I carelessly stepped out of this status by writing a text about him (for the catalogue of the Viennese art show “The Porn Identity”, now over; the catalogue (in German), in my opinion the best thing about that show, can be ordered at

http://www.vfmk.de/($Itbi1F_kTX6EERp5I8zcjC$)/s,showModuleObject3,9_q1klWYtB,cxW0_xm1dtqZgVG,4Fa0jtW3hxW2nB,8xa0nVX0_JH,nRXYoxF1m_

a2uAb1jRW28Rr1uwVYpRr04NTMsQ8NmAD,nB,9VG.xhtml

My insistence to send mail after mail asking for the photographers of certain pictures I wanted to use is just one half of the story though; the other half is Brent’s amazing willingness to communicate with fans in person; a very irregular willingness, but still probably a phenomenon in its own right; the specific communicational strategy of a person who plans his status as star on the basis of a web 2.0 strategy. In a way in his extremely open use of all the common platforms, blog, email, facebook and finally Twitter, he still acts like any other youth who has a MySpace profile. By doing so he seems to deny his stardom and at the same time boost it. Any other star would have a pr manager who sometimes even writes to strangers or fans using the name of the star, – a nasty habit that I can only hope will never seem appropriate to Brent’s management; as it is becoming obvious that with the new site there will finally be someone who takes care for the contact with the public. Soon this contact will be a lot more professional and predictable, and a lot less exciting than my odd chats with someone calling himself Brent Corrigan, who once waited for a plane at an airport in Pennsylvania, telling me that the only other person he was chatting with was his mother. I was a bit nervous because I sent far more messages than I received.
This whole story of me being a fan of a young gay pornstar is very peculiar, and does not offer me any code of conduct. There are times when I think I overdid it, that I have been to public with my comments, at the same time too private, too outspoken. Yet I had to give my fandom a creative and an articulate character. As I said before, I deny the supposed pathology and regressive nature of adult fan culture; but I recommend building a culture, a creative activity around it.
I was flattered and proud to be mentioned by my web name after the announced photo moment with Zac had not happened. In a way I already knew, as the universe had not imploded.
http://myblog.brentcorriganinc.com/?p=848, right under the Patrick Wolf clip.
But a little later, instead of being grateful for that honour, I managed to upset the little star who knows me. In a comment to his celebratory post about his shooting in Palm Springs I mentioned my disappointment about him not bottoming in any of the scenes and got him really pissed off (comments now missing due to technical problems). Hm. What does it mean?

The obsession with the stars seems often perverted, aggressive, and cruel because it does not only resemble a cult for the hero but also a totemistic ritual. The desired powerful entity, the totem animal, the spirit, the ancestor, works like an energy source. And as we know of many rituals around Gods that are brutally torn apart and reassembled later on, Osiris, Dionysos, Orpheus, to name but a few, the object of desire is also in danger of being destroyed. All the celebrities who are a bit afraid of their fans have their good reasons.

But me, knowing about the secret cannibalism of fandom, I don’t want to be one of those crazy over-demanding fans who just feed from their star’s every move. Or is this a law too profound to be overcome by simple will? What about those absurd demands addressed towards a stranger? In fact I do not really appreciate demanding anything from anyone. And so I am a bit sad that I came across as an over-demanding fan in that comment. The whole situation is full of misunderstandings.

Mainly the problem here is about changes. Brent is a specialist in changes, and some of them come across as quite abrupt, some are just a storm in the water glass, and prove to be reversible, and a lot of the zeal for changing himself, his looks, his image and the circumstances of his life is still connected to the urge to leave certain things behind. Those changes are also part of his star appeal, as the trajectory of his career so far has so closely been related to his readiness to share his everyday life with the public. If this life would not be exciting there would not be anything to share.
How to be the fan of an ever changing person? It is not always easy, because one main part about fandom is projection. There was one particular image, a look, a situation, an appeal one fell in love with. In this case I was for sure fascinated by more than one look, role, period of his transformations. Still I know that it was something particular that struck me. And I am also aware of the poetic and indeed a bit tragic fact that a lot of the elements that struck me are bound to the very circumstances this young man desperately wants to leave behind. And with my blessing. Those elements were a special vulnerability, a certain grace, a radiant appeal in situations commonly labelled “passive” or “submissive” that had the power to put exactly those labels to shame. I have trouble to accept that this person, this image I got infatuated with is only a passing stage of a person who grows up and moves on. The situation is, however, even more complicated than that; I do like some of the new elements, but I see something forced in some of the recent changes. And that’s were the communication problems set in.
Brent often complained that people do not accept that his looks change with the normal process of growing adult. I do not see a problem with that. Still, it is an altogether different story that he decided to completely change his body type while his body still transformed. To read that it is those bitchy, over-demanding fans like me who make him slave in the gym and fast really bothers me. This is so very untrue. How could I, a woman who finally made peace with her inability to ever become slender, “demand” of anyone to torture himself for a certain look? I always thought Brent is a naturally slender person. In short, I assumed he does not need the gym to stay slim. And growing up would probably not change that. Maybe I am wrong, I don’t know. I can just say that there is projection and there is counter-projection. Just like in psychoanalysis, where there is transference and counter-transference. Also the star projects his ideas on the fans. I think that it is Brent’s idea that his fans “demand” a certain look. I have an altogether different theory about his obsession with working out. Brent discovered early on that his body is his product, the basis of his personal economy. And it was perfect as it was and probably would have stayed perfect while growing adult. But this contradicts the culture of capitalism: you cannot earn money from an uncultivated resource. This would simply be obscene. The source of your income needs to be also the object of hard labour.
Ok, this is a frivolous theory, in fact I know that it is simply the love for muscle within the or one particular gay community. There is just nothing clever I can say about that, as I do not get the point.
Which leads to more complicated questions about the productive or indeed not so productive relations of feminist and/or lesbian culture to gay culture, an extremely rich and tricky subject, and finally to Brent’s complaint the people like me just want to see him take it up the ass, a claim that is hard to deny when it comes to simple fact, but needs a lot of elaborating to show how very wrong the vulgar and dismissive tone is in relation to it.

To Be Continued …

Zac and Brent about to meet. Will the universe implode?

2009-06-07T15:32:00.000-07:00

As I am writing this the unbelievable, mind-blowing singularity is about to happen (if we trust Brent’s announcement http://www.brentcorriganinc.com/blog/?p=303#comments, and why shouldn’t we? ), and so much sooner than I would ever have predicted it to happen.
The twink “twinks” will be in the same room, maybe even shake hands (if nothing else) and snap a picture. Brent is strolling through the celebrity crowd at a (Disney sponsored) AIDS benefit in LA http://www.todaytrend.net/a-time-for-heroes-celebrity-carnival-sponsored-by-disney.html, marvelling at the silicone cushions some people have hanging from their faces like an innocent little Mowgli in the Hollywood jungle http://twitter.com/BrentCorrigan00 and looking for his better half to take a picture.
Obviously their haircuts have taken utterly different routes by now. Zak’s recent appearance at the MTV awards (http://justjared.buzznet.com/2009/06/01/zac-efron-mtv-movie-awards-2009/) has raised questions if he is really too lazy to see a hair dresser (as he had claimed at an Ellen Degeneres show http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7yyGcWE0t_g), Brent on the other hand saw his trusted hair person recently, actually to increase the difference to Efron, and with very convincing results.
http://www.brentcorriganinc.com/blog/?p=295
Funny chiasmic situation of a sloppy Hollywood prince and a well groomed porn star. However, don’t ask me about the prize of Zak’s suit he wore when receiving that oversized popcorn trophy, utterly distracted by a British comedian who had his bare ass planted on the face of one Eminem. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-csipe3TzMg

By the way, can anyone tell me why the “gay” dope of a fashion designer Baron is impersonating there is, of all places Austrian ??? Please throw in your 2 cents!

Anyway, so what will happen when the two finally meet? Will the blue of Zak’s eyes jump out of his pupils and slip into Brent’s hazel eyes, and vice versa, as my little “Whose eyes are this and what happened to their colour?”-quizz up there is insinuating? Or will, as someone else, – was it Jason Curious? –, once said, the universe simply implode? For we all know that a singularity does swallow everything around it (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_singularity.
Maybe 80+ celebrities will be gone by tomorrow!
Where is the genius Science Fiction/Horror director who does a short on that encounter!
Anyway, if we survive this, it gives me a good reason to continue my tale of twin(k) celebrities.

A Tale of Twin(k) Celebrities – Part Two: Gossip and Cultures of Admiration

2009-05-30T17:44:00.002-07:00

It is amazing and sometimes frightening how the internet led to a whole new symbiosis of ordinary people and celebrities. It is bit too simple to reject celebrity culture in total as an immature idiocy of people who should “rather get a life”. For a majority of people the life they are able of getting is neither glamorous nor very exciting. And in all cultures people create heroic figures or sacred ancestors to extend the rather humble range of their existence. Why shouldn’t we? Of course this fragile bond with people one will probably never meet in person, or at least not really get to know, needs some caution and some cultivation like any emotionally charged relationship that is basically founded on imagination and projection. The perversion of celebrity culture as stalking is a sign for this specific culture gone utterly wrong; the stalker is a danger for him/herself and his “star” because he/she does not know and does not admit that his/her relation to his/her star is only a fantasy. By calling it fantasy I do not want to indicate that fantasy is nothing. Fantasies are powerful and productive. There is no life, at least no meaningful or fulfilled life, without fantasy. Still, fantasy has its own rules. Even though there is no relationship that does not include a certain amount of projection, a stalker mixes up real and fantasy relationships in an unhealthy way. He insists on sharing his everyday life with the star as if he were his spouse. He follows this person to force him into such a relationship. Yet a fantasy relationship is based on distance. A stalker does not respect this distance.
In the World Wide Web we can observe the ubiquity of a kind of gossip that is always about to transform into a paradoxical form of communication, long distance stalking or virtual cyber stalking. By speculating and commenting on any private, physical, sexual detail of the celebrity the fans do not respect any boundary or distance, as the distance in this case is a matter of the medium. Probably only a few of those posters would go as far as to inspecting their idol’s garbage or spending whole nights in front of their houses, but in the safety of global anonymity, protected by their arbitrary aliases, the users show the demands, the pretended intimate insights and even the jealousy of spouses. Does this cyber stalking pose an ethical problem that is somehow similar to actual stalking? This is very hard to tell. As I assume that no celebrity is idiotic enough to read all the gossip sites speculating on his/her body hygiene, sexual orientation and genital size no one gets actually hurt or threatened. Also his/her reputation does not really suffer as the status of such gossip does not inspire any belief.

I am not writing this to impose any moral judgment on internet celebrity gossip; the numerous and hilarious examples I am going to quote in the following post prove that I am obviously a consumer and sometimes even a contributor to this messy phenomenon. I do not consider myself to be extremely disturbed, and I have a life, but at different periods of my life I find myself devoured by some celebrity cult or another. It all started with rock stars at the age of 12, I was one of the biggest Rolling Stones and Mick Jagger fans alive, and even before that with my relentless and quite erotically charged admiration for Spock, and I mean Spock, not Leonard Nimoy, at the age of 11. Teenage celebrity cult is of course no anomaly, but it occurred again at later stages of my life, to my own amazement. The quite mature and intellectual pat of me watched this other part plunge into something many would consider infantile if not pathological at any age beyond 30. This did not, however, prevent me from indulging those crazy periods of fandom that after some time usually come to a natural halt when different important business takes over, a new and “real” love enters my life or my fascination for my idol is simply fading.
This was the case when in my thirties I was for a few years very smitten by the Australian rock star Michael Hutchence, singer of INXS, as a new version of the Jaggeresque sexualized rock star. After visiting a couple of concerts, – once I even travelled to London to see one, but also visited a friend, the good thing about fan culture is that it gives you the energy and courage to do things you would normally not do, often putting you into interesting new situations that in the end have nothing to do with the star, anyway, – after all this experiences and being aware of the fact that I was an intellectual woman in her early thirties, and not a screaming teen, I decided to finally get to know my star.
Now, many people claim that this is the one thing one should never try, meeting the idol in person, at least not if one wants to stay a fan. Precisely because fan culture is a matter of projection one can only end up disillusioned. Stories are numerous about the deep disappointment of the fan when realizing that the person he knew as a huge phantasmagoria on the screen turns out to be a surprisingly little man. In those cases the admiration does not survive the brutal shrinkage of the projection, in both meanings of the term. Still, as a good, well-informed fan I know the body height of my idols. So I was not shocked by the fact that Hutchence, when I finally did meet him in a hotel in Vienna, was a rather small and most of all extremely thin man. I managed to talk to him about world politics for a while that felt like half an hour and probably lasted about ten minutes. He informed me that he was financing resistance groups in East Timor and even exclaimed “Fuck the Indonesians!”, one phrase I do remember well, as the Australian accent is not always easy to understand. After a while it became fairly clear to me that this man might be charming and weirdly attractive in his own right, but seemed almost like another species, with all his ticks, his extremely short attention span and a personality marked by frequent drug abuse. After it was over I was not disillusioned but slightly numb and puzzled. After all, it was not this one meeting, but a far more tragic event that brought my fascination to a natural halt. I liked to think that it was the Indonesian secret service that staged such a miserable scene of auto-suffocation going wrong in a Sidney hotel room 1997. I tried to give my fandom a closure by writing an essay (in German) that can still be found online. http://novak.department.at/novak/australia/sternenschicksal.htm

I do in fact recommend meeting the star in person if possible. One should put one’s fantasy to the test; one should be ready to destroy the spell, or put it on another level. Is it possible to change from fan to friend? I don’t know (even though I managed with one of my early idols in Vienna, the amazing performer and film director Mara Mattuschka whom I admired as a diva on stage when I was a twen, and who is my friend today), but in any case this would mean ending one’s career as a fan. And this willingness to take the risk of a personal encounter, however clumsy and brief, is also one of the reasons why I could never choose a dead idol. I do not look for the analogy of a sacred ancestor but rather for the analogy of a Greek hero. I want to be able to follow his adventures. I did not fall for Kurt Cobain, but I liked his music a lot. When he decided to put the barrel of a gun in his mouth at the age of 27 he did not become an angel of Rock ‘n Roll heaven for me but someone I lost interest in immediately. Is that cynical? I don’t know. I just do not like to mix fandom with nostalgia. I need to give my odd habit at least a certain form, a culture. As I am a writer and an artist I am fairly sure that my periods of celebrity fascination are not, or not only a matter of regression but a form of inspiration. To me the star is a muse. And any artist who ever had a muse knows that she lives in another sphere and cannot be forced to contact by will. This is also the reason why my fandom usually takes on a creative character. When I had a period of fascination for both James Spader the actor and Alan Shore, the character in the TV show “Boston Legal” (my web name Lana Erosh is an anagram of this name), I started to write fan fiction. And this blog might be my new creative way to handle my most recent obsessions for twin(k) idols.

It is after all a sad and trivial theory that fans are just lonely people who need to fill up the gaps of their life with invented relationships to people they don’t even know. In my case I like to think that I am simply hungry for as many, and most of all as many different types of relationships as I can have. The relationship to a celebrity, a distanced hero, does not replace any other relationship. I do have friendships, sometimes love relations, I have all sorts of relationships, why not also this one? And I am educated enough to give quite honourable examples from cultural history. I do not need to compare myself with a screaming teenager; I’d rather think of 19th century gentlemen who spend quite some time and money on their fervent admiration for an opera diva, an actress or a ballet dancer. In those high bourgeois days high culture was pop culture; and the frequent attendance of opera and theatre was as much of a sexually charged ritual as any rock concert is today. And isn’t it significant that this strictly male culture of sending one’s favourite opera diva flowers into her wardrobe, also without any hope of becoming her lover, does not suffer from bad reputation but is well respected as a sweet and romantic gentleman’s culture, whereas female fandom that only came up with pop culture, with Elvis and the Beatles, is considered immature and even pathological if it goes on beyond adolescence? Well, well, I smell gender trouble there.
As a woman I nevertheless identify myself as an admirer of the Proustian type. I follow my idol with a mixture of distance and fascination. I am erotically smitten by (in my case usually) male idol, no doubt, but I am not blinded by my admiration. Like any artist I am very much into detail. I follow the work of my idol like a Proustian character who goes to hear his Diva sing every evening, but sometimes also criticizes her for a bad performance; because only he has the right to do so, only he knows her so well, and knows how good she can be if she is at her very best.

To be continued …

Female Fan Site ?

2009-05-07T15:33:00.000-07:00

"And with a little gay porn boy it was a resembling story. Before I discovered him, I wasn’t much interested in gay porn. From time to time (very seldom) I watched such videos but always remained indifferent. There was nothing to become a part of my erotic fantasies that’s why I preferred reading to watching. But one day, when I had nothing to do, I just typed on YouTube something like “young boys kissing” and started to watch the videos, one after another… they were so numerous (these videos), but there was only one among them that really touched me and made my heart pounding. It was a scene from Every Poolboy’s Dream. I watched maybe 20 or 30 times how Brenty (that’s how I call him now) seats on a sofa, leaning his back against another boy’s chest, then lets him take off his undershirt and offers himself for the numerous kisses… His hands, his face, his neck, his nipples and his cat eyes (I also noticed that his eyes were cattish) – his entire body was so tender and beautiful and his movements so magically slow and gracious that for me it was not a porn any more (it was obvious that it was a part of a porn movie), it was a dance of passion and beauty, a fascinating fandango, performed by a God of Love."

This was a quote from a mail an amazing fan of Brent Corrigan wrote to me. She lives in Kiev, with husband and kids. I hope that our email exchange will flourish as it had so far. I just post this -- interrupting my tale of twink celebreties for a moment, -- to address fans who are interested in any sort of exchange, not necessarily ON Brent but maybe around him. It is amazing enough to get to know people, women, girls who have the interest in a gay porn actor in common. Already this fact in itself is amazing enough.
I was still unsure if I should get involved in this as my personal interest got a bit more critical, complex, “adult” than it used to be a year ago. Also I noticed that for a while BC had contact with me (I put him on an art show in Vienna and wrote about him for the catalogue), but then stopped responding. I asked him about his opinion about a female fan site, he did not respond, but mentions it proudly in his chat on Unzipped.net
“BC: Ha! I have a ton of female fans of all ages. They are about to group and start a fan site I think. It's a big compliment to know I can reach beyond the usual demographic.”
http://blog.unzipped.net/2009/05/exclusive-brent-corrigan-chatting-saga-continues-episode-ii-of-iithe-fan-questions.html#more
In the next section my question is being posed (with a slightly disappointing answer but that is another story).
Well, maybe I am too full of myself, and there are other fans who want to start something; if so I would also like to know. If this was about my initiative that I discussed with a woman in Berlin who is very busy though, and wants to stay in the background, I would have preferred a more direct form of communication. To me, it makes a bit of a difference if as a fan or rather a participating observer I have personal contact with the person of interest or not. I am a critical observer; and as I am also working in the field of film and performance I like to give my opinion about the style and direction of artistic production. I like to extend this to porn, why not? Why not review it like any other filmic form?
Anyway, that’s where I am at now as a rather adult and therefore maybe atypical “fan” who had brief email contact with her “star”.
So write me.
I will not publish your comments if you tell me not to do so.

A Tale of Twin(k) Celebrities. Part I

2009-05-03T15:13:00.000-07:00

A while ago a young Canadian film maker landed an amazing hoax by posting a trailer on youtube. That trailer announced the film “Cobra” about the life and times of one Brent Corrigan, the underage boy being seduced into porn by older boy friends and an ephebophile producer directed by Gus van Sant. And the main part would be played by the Disney star Zac Efron who supposedly bears a striking resemblance with the protagonist.

It was not only the well done professional outlook of that fake trailer that made me google myself half mad searching for indications for a final release of that movie. Back than I had no clear idea of the very separate universe Efron had so far lived in. Thus I would have known that this movie cannot be for real. Recently I started to gather some information about those two very different young men; and I have to say that with a little bold imagination that amazing film project is not that unlikely to happen after all.

The very idea that those two look so very much alike that they could be brothers, even twins, twink twins so to speak, proves by closer inspection to be one of those urban legends only the buzzing rumour mill of the world wide net can breed. There is a site http://famewatcher.com/2009/03/tighty-whitie-underwear-zac-efron.html using a photo of a very young brent, taken from the “cocktails with brent” event for Jason Sechrest that dates as far back as 2006 (http://www.photolarry.com/blog/2006/06/30/cocktails-with-brent-corrigan/).

Maybe one could state that younger faces tend to look more alike than older ones. The hair cut, in both cases a slightly tamed version of the emo kid’s eye covering curtain, and a certain cute and youthful expression suggest a slight similarity.

Checking out the series of photos on http://famewatcher.com/2009/04/celeb-lookalikes-brent-corrigan-zac.html does not give you any real evidence of Zac and Brent being twins. It starts off with a rather recent photo of Brent. His face is slightly triangular, due to a strong chin, his nose is clearly completely different, not only because it has not been corrected (to my knowledge), his mouth is bigger, his lips thicker, and most importantly, his eyes are brown. Zak’s are blue. Is eye colour a quantite´ negligable when it comes to similar looks? I don’t think so. Those two men in their early twenties have utterly different eyes and ways to look out of them. And the difference is growing.

Recently Brent put up a post where he declares his disgust about being compared to Zac. And he introduces this whole hearted statement with a head shot displaying a mischievous, almost cruel look. Add the statement that “Zac Efron will be prettier far longer than I will” (http://www.brentcorriganinc.com/blog/?s=efron&submit=Search) we get the impression that the young porn tycoon is wilfully decutifying himself. Apparently Brent’s big hazel eyed expression is a matter of conscious activation for photo shots. It’s the thing the fans and costumers love about him, that innocent, cute, slightly submissive look. But it is no longer in tune with his personality.

There is something strangely sweet and feline about Zac Efron’s blue eyes. It is this bright eyed look that might give the impression of artificiality and a made up saccharine Disney persona. If I had only seen a few photos I might agree. But I looked at a couple of photos more, both paparazzi shots and professional shots from “Interview magazine” and GQ, and I watched HSM and “17 again”. Judging from this broader material I would say that he is rather versatile. And he has just started to mould himself.

Brent’s and Zac’s similarity is partly imagined, and fading. Still there is significance to that internet myth of the long lost twins. The very fact of the comparison indicates that those two represent a new phenomenon, a new type, a new style of young manhood, and a new kind of stardom; and the very fact that a Hollywood actor made famous by Disney and a gay porn star can even be named in that same category is more revolutionary than the trivial format of celebrity gossip might indicate. Teenage stardom is not that new in main stream pop culture. The hordes of screaming female teenagers attending “Tokyo Hotel” concerts were however never connected to the phenomenon the gay culture calls the “twink”. Even though the occasional love for very young male celebrities is common to both gay and straight cultures, they usually were kept neatly separate.

Brent and Zac, the imaginary twink twins are probably the first broad media phenomenon to end that neat segregation. And ironically with something of a chiasmic twist, as in discussion forums the gay half famous for being one of the most exciting bottoms porn has ever seen is usually being labelled as the more natural, the more authentic, the more “masculine” part; whereas the effeminate and tamed, harmless aspects of Efron’s personal habitus are often criticized as both fag and fake. No matter if the forum is predominantly gay or straight/female, the discussions around Brent and Zac tend to mix up two meanings of gay, a factual and a judgmental meaning that is very telling for the present state of “heteronormativity” in general. Brent is openly gay, therefore he is labelled a “man”, as “manhood” is associated with straight forward honesty. Because Zac displays some exterior features that make him look “effeminate”, such as the occasional use of make up, maybe a certain choice of clothing (the code of low riding jeans I cannot read very clealy), a certain way of movement and a slightly unreal overall beauty people make the claim that he must be “gay”, without admitting it. Usually there is no evidence involved other than his looks and behaviour. The photos of him kissing men are extremely bad fakes in which you cannot even say clearly which anonymous teen with bangs is supposed to be Zac. I do not know (and also do not care) if Zac Efron is a gay in the closet, a bi sexual (which seems most likely) or a straight man. I do notice though that his “gayness” is simply derived from his looks; and that the fact that he supposedly “hides” the fact of being gay in order to pursue a Disney career is making him even more of a “faggot” in the sense of being a crooked and morally suspicious person.

To sum up: Brent is the straight forward gay man, Zac the “queen in the closet”. It seems as if the pre stonewall homophobic definition of “gay” and the present day self defined definition of gay are suddenly dumping hard against each other when it comes to the twin/k myth of Brent and Zac. That is very interesting, that is alarming too.

Fact is that a couple of years ago a British soccer player by the name of David Beckham became the icon of a new mode to mould one’s (straight) masculinity that we know by now as “metrosexual”. With regard to deeply rooted homophobia it was for sure a good move that a person involved in a hard team sport that traditionally guarantees straight manhood became the role model for a man that cares more about his looks, his body odours and his overall genteel behaviour. Ever since the first wave of metrosexuality ebbed the public is discussing if this had been just a short twist of gender history giving way to the return to the familiar smelly pushy macho ways that – as is the folk wisdom – “women actually prefer”, or if we can say that metrosexuality simply has become a normal way to be a (straight) man, so normal that it does not even need a name. My personal taste makes me want to hope for the latter.

However Zak Efron surely is a beautiful young ikon of metrosexuality. And to me every conclusion that certain elements of a person’s looks, behaviour and personality indicate that he is “gay”, no matter with whom he is apparently having sex, is a deeply disturbing gender fallacy that belongs to the dump of 19^th century ideologies. This theory makes a claim that there are male of female entities dominating a person; those entities are essential and unchangeable, “archetypes” in the sense of C.G. Jung’s reactionary mythology. And if a person of male biological sex displays an “effeminate” behaviour he is “gay”, as the supposed female substance in him is necessarily following a hetero-normative logic and has to look for its “male” complement. If that person would be seen in sexual relations with women he is simply faking it, adding another crooked and therefore “effeminate” character trait to his gay account.

I was hoping such theories were long gone, but when it comes to Efron they are reactivated. That’s what I call an alarming symptom. When I look at all the straight men who love to wear women’s clothing and all the super masculine self styling in gay communities (that by now seems to be far more the rule than the effeminate fairy with the tea pot wrist) I do not see the slightest correlation between “effeminate” features in a man and him being likely to choose other men as lovers. Which makes me a lucky lady as I like slightly effeminate men.

It adds a funny little twist to this whole beehive buzzing around Efron’s supposed “gayness” that someone put up a rumour that he does not like to shower.

http://showhype.com/story/news_zac_efron_skips_the_shower/; http://www.popcrunch.com/shower-hating-zac-efron-baby-wipes-cleanings-zac-efron-hygiene-poor/

Not even after a sweaty basket ball game! I doubt that the subject in question actually had he honesty to admit as such, but if so, the sense for provocation in that Disney kid is indeed amazing. Hygiene is religion in Modernity, even more so in the US and even more so for young metrosexual teen idols. It would mean that the very icon of metrosexual looks would simply disrespect the very root and basis of metrosexuality as such which is minute body hygiene.

No wonder that a couple of years after the (by the way very unecological) two-showers-a-day frenzy also reached the male half of the population (together with the amble use of concealer and the habit to shave the pubes in the illusion that “it” would look bigger and not simply nude) a very poorly written and invented book of the title “Feuchtgebiete” became a huge success all over Europe for the sole reason that it attacked THE secular holy grail of our times, body hygiene. Attacked it through the mouthpiece of the usual bearer of the hygienic obsession, an 18 year old girl.

Assuming that Efron is yet another crusader for a less hysteric approach to body odours and body fluids (I for one to not mind to smell a beautiful young man’s sweat, at least for a while and from a distance) one could conclude that he is that much of an embodiment of metrosexuality and cleanliness that he does not even have to bother with the actual realisation. This variant of Bartleby’s famous “I would rather not” (shower) adds an unexpected flavour of cool to this Disney kid about to leave his cage.

To be continued …

Between a splash and St. Petersburg

2009-02-27T06:08:00.000-08:00

So, how come I posted that clip of Brent Corrigan dancing in a New York Club on Youtube -- with the help of Dewayne in San Diego, thank you DeWayne,

http://dewayneinsd.blogspot.com/2009/02/splash-nyc.html

It was November 2008 and I was stuck in St. Petersburg, no, not Florida, Russia. It’s one of the hardest places to work in as a free lance artists and scholar. I don’t know so many places that I also tried to work in, but this one for sure is not easy, specifically if you are let down by your collaborator and your colleague accidentally had purchased a 3-day instead of a 7-day visa. Good thing was that I had internet access in my room, anyway, I can only recommend the Old Nevsky House to any daring traveller who thinks he/she needs to see the winterpalace and the maze of backyards, the marinskij or the nevsky prospect (just make sure to talk Russian, as people you meet in the streets usually do not really like to speak or understand English).

This was my island of comfort, and there I checked brentcorriganinc.com and saw an announcement of an appearance in NYC, a city I love, even though I visit far too rarely (the usual, financial reasons).

So there I was under a heavy cloud of November fumes in the middle of Petersburg, contemplating and surfing just for fun if it would be possible to hop across the atlantic just for one night in a club in Manhattan. The flights would have been astronomical, both financially and duration wise. And if I remember it right the connections (a lot of changes on the way!) would have been via Sibiria and the far East. Well, I had already an amazing flight Vienna-Moscow-Petersburg (financial reasons again) with changing in Moscow, taking out the luggage, going by a bus to the other airport (from Sheremetyevo international to Sheremetyevo national, and I can tell you, that’s a big difference) standing in line hardly awake to be let onto the Russian soil (which is holy, as you know) and then waiting 5 or 6 hours half asleep in the middle of all those early morning travellers and a young guy suddenly reappears in camouflage uniform after you have closed your eyes for a while; but the plan to go to NY would have been yet another category.

So I went on skype and contacted my dear Tribeca based web artist friend Ursula Endlicher

(http://ursenal.net/), she does the most amazing projects between web and performance, like impersonating websites, dancing html butoh and knitting colourful wigs representing the link architecture of major sites such as Microsoft and google, but that is another story), and she said, hey I am busy and I sadly gave up.

I had this stupid idea that this would be the occasion to talk to Brent about the article I was about to write about him (and wrote meanwhile, for the catalogue of the exhibition “The Porn Idenity” in Kunsthalle Wien, http://www.kunsthallewien.at/, catalogue to be ordered at the publisher http://www.vfmk.de/). The text is in German though, still planning to publish an English version online.

Anyway, that plan would have been utterly unrealistic, as Brent was actually eager to get to another party, as one gossip website insinuated after the event. I don’t blame him, in NYC one party is never enough.

But I am getting ahead of myself. First things looked dim in gloomy Petersburg, but a few days later, the day of the event in fact, Ursula said she will grab a nice gay friend and go to that club, Splash, video camera in hand. And she did. The place was packed, and, as she noted as a participating (you can hear some if her enthusiastic outbursts on the clip, she has a world shattering way of laughing than is utterly contagious) but still critical observer, everything tipped a bit to the commercial side. The autograph moment after the dance, also documented by her camera (but not posted (yet)) was short, she did not get close to BC.

Encounters with celebrities are tricky. I mean, BC was/is not HER idol, but mine. No idea how my experience would have been if I had been in her place. I guess it would have been similar, but I would have pushed my way closer to the stage. On the other hand, BC is not yet a star in the classical pop star/Hollywood star kind of meaning (maybe he will be, maybe not). People say that meeting your idol always is a big disappointment. I don’t know. But I assume that you have to make a transition from one mode to another. From a distanced object of projection, an image, an embodied idea if you will, to actually meeting and talking to a person. In a way you will meet a completely different person; and not everyone is ready for that (usually the star IS NOT).

Brent claims that he is very approachable and judging from my online contact with him I think this is true (And mind, I am not a potential model!).

For whatever reason he was not on that day in Splash. My friend Ursula filming in the middle of the crowd did not cross the magic line. She just filmed a little idol in motion, doing something he is an amateur in (dancing) for professional reasons (promoting his fame within the gay community and his dvd production).

That’s a funny and charming mixture, and very contemporary; I could go on with Paolo Virno’s ideas of virtuosity as phenomenon of the new post-fordist economy http://www.generation-online.org/c/fcmultitude3.htm

where you mobilize even your plain human resources such as humour, common sense and good conversation to extend your market value, a situation that creates a completely new blend of amateur and professional agency, but I stop here.

Getting Started

2009-02-26T07:05:00.000-08:00

So I am posting from a strange place in central Europe. And this is my first entry. I have been contemplating to blog for a while. But I was always afraid that I would lack a mission, a topic, a community, a goal.

Well maybe that's what it will be all about, about the very lack of a simple theme, a simple goal, an identifyable community. I will be an observer, sometimes an observer who participates, sometimes an observer who is just puzzled.

My background is art, philosophy, film, politics, lots of things. But at the moment I am quite busy with two, no three large blocks of research (I always loved that kind of nouvelle vagueish title, "two or three things I know about her")

1) Science Fiction (literature and film) in the context of a profound change in the very definition of what it is to be part of the human species

2) Eroticism, Porn and Sex in the age of web 2.0

3) Dance, Performance and Multimedia art production (also on a very pratical level)

So you may not know me, but I am the one who is interested in those topics and many more. And who knows that they are somehow linked.

Well, I could actually write in German, its my mother tongue. And I might sometimes.
But I am sort of obsessed with the united states. Obsessed, worried, puzzled, longing. An intense and stange relationship, sometimes fuelled, sometimes calmed down by actual visits.

So I use the language that is understood by the whole transatlantic spectrum.

I like the loose format of the diary, the casual report of ongoing events, both biographical and topical, or about the very mode how they are being linked.

So I want to make a rather private confession at the end of my first post. I am around 40, I am female, but the inspiration how to write a blog (on a level probably much more personal than I intend to be) came from a person much younger than me, and actually inhabiting a world very far away from my own. I have been following the blog of San Diego based young gay actor and adult film producer Brent Corrigan for a while. That has been some kind of Inspiration.

brentcorriganinc.com

I wish him all the best for his testimony in the harlow cuarda trial today
You can follow the ongoing events there

http://handjtrial.blogspot.com/2009/02/harlow-cuadras-trail-day-1.html