DIRTY THOUGHTS

Our Joyful Endings follows the diary of a trans-masculine person who sees his own and others' views of his body change during his transition. Between desire, apprehension and questioning. From there, comfort grows with people who share this experience.                

Johnny Castro falls for London’s tower.
Slick studs Johnny Castro and J London get kinky in the CrashPad. Blindfolded                

A retro "hot lazy summer" vibe, a chrome sex toy, a memory. It smells like burnt skin, lonely road trip and sensual nostalgie.                

This video essay examines how sound is used to inject racial consciousness in early gay male moving-image pornography. Writings about seventies gay culture—both the journalistic and academic varieties—often trace a shift from a coalitional, multi-issue politics to a gender-segregated, single-issue lifestyle. Recent gay porn historiography often ignores the heady days of porn experimentation (sexual, thematic, formal) of the early 1970s and privileges instead the more regimented gay white clone formulas of the late 1970s and 1980s. A closer look, and listen, at a 1973 gay porn feature complicates this picture, reminding us of the radical potentialities of connecting sexual and social revolutions. Hailed as the first anti-war gay porn film, Brothers (dir. Jason Sato, nom-de-porn of Japanese American video artist Norman Yonemoto) constitutes a striking experiment in early gay porn, one in which gay sex is intimately linked to homosexual liberation and Third World struggles. Listening closely to Sato’s soundtrack, its voice-over narration and popular music, we hear how the film firmly grounds sexual fantasy squarely within social-political context. More specifically, Brothers’s scoring of news radio reports about the Vietnam War over scenes of incestuous gay eroticism functions to fill in the “spacelessness” of utopian gay sex with the ambient noise of Third World liberation. The video seeks to divert attention from the visual to the aural in order to activate a more embodied, heady mode of hearing-reading, one that animates an affective form of pornographic interest and interpretation.                

While exploring cruising, the director questions his identity and uncovers shifting forms of violence where he once sought freedom.                

“A film about consistency and small, uneventful changes. Completely contrary to the spirit of the times, ”15 Years of Vacation“ celebrates simplicity and routine. For the protagonist, life—or at least certain sexual routines—has remained the same. The trees have grown a little, and a few houses have been built in the neighborhood. However, this does not detract from the vacational feeling.” (Julian Stockinger)                

"The screen is a window and a mirror.
We're all exhibitionists, we're all voyeurs.
What does it mean to fuck in a hall of mirrors, in an infinity of your own reflection."