Whenever a new communications technology arrives on the scene it can safely be predicted that among its earliest users will be churches spreading the Christian Gospel, and the creators and purveyors of explicit sexual imagery. Those with the strongest, if not necessarily the purest, motives will be the ones to explore the possibilities inherent in each medium to capture words and images and to convey them to those hungering for their messages. In the case of pornography, sexual images and stories have generally been officially condemned while privately enjoyed. They also have offered channels for the vicarious expression and satisfaction of minority interests that are difficult, embarrassing, and occasionally illegal to indulge in reality. For lesbians and gay men, whose sexuality is officially denied and erased, pornography often provided a vital message: “For isolated gays porn can be an important means of saying ‘other gays exist.’”
Lesbian writer Dorothy Allison recalls her first encounter with “hardcore” paperbacks she found under her parents’ mattress when she was a child:
What the books did contribute was a word—the word Lesbian. When she finally appeared … I knew her immediately … When she pulled the frightened girl close after thirty pages, I got damp all down my legs. That’s what it was, and I wasn’t the only one even if none had turned up in the neighborhood yet. Details aside, the desire matched up. She wanted women; I wanted my girlfriends. The word was Lesbian. After that, I started looking for it.
The pornography Dorothy Allison found was (most likely) written by and for straight men, who have always appreciated a bit of lesbian spice in their erotic menu; an appetizer before the main course. For gay men, however, heterosexual pornography has never been a welcoming venue. Still, as Thomas Waugh has documented, since the invention of photography gay men have created, collected, and enjoyed their own pornography.
In the 1940s and 1950s, photographers such as Bruce of Los Angeles and Bob Mizer of the Athletic Model Guild expanded the genre of “physique” magazines aimed, implicitly but successfully, at gay men. The physique magazines were sold mostly through mail order, but were also carried by newsstands in some urban locations. In the late 1950s Grecian Guild Pictorial, one of the gayest of these magazines, estimated a circulation of nearly 75 thousand, and estimates for the entire group reached 750,000. Waugh claims that “the exponential expansion of ‘physique culture’ constitutes the most significant gay cultural achievement during the formative quarter-century following World War II.” The pinup publications were an early form of community-building that provided, along with the bars, a rare venue for the cohesion of gay identity and the sense of community.1
Even so, only in recent decades has it become possible for most gay youth and adults to explore this narrow-cast channel of imagery created for and by queers. John Burger’s account of gay male video pornography illustrates several ways these videos serve as history texts of the gay male experience: “First, many of them resituate gay men into past and present social conditions in which they have mostly been hidden (such as the California gold rush, the U.S. Armed Forces, and college fraternities). Second, the videos also document current gay-specific social conditions, such as bar life, nightclubs, bathhouses, and so on.” Burger continues: “These videos … are important documents not only of the all-gay environment, real or invented, but of the gay male psyche which so desperately envisions such spaces where they can be free from the social oppressions encountered daily. … If we must be marginalized, let us at least create enjoyable spaces on the fringe—whether in imaginary representations or in reality, like the bathhouses.”
Similar accounts of pornography produced for and by lesbians (certainly a more recent and limited genre) note its importance for those, in Lisa Henderson’s words, “for whom sexual imagery is one link in a social and cultural lifeline, a link emblematic of their refusal to accept established sexual hierarchies and their will to make their own place.” It must be acknowledged, however, that minority cultural production is not immune from contagion by the racism and sexism endemic to our culture.
The existence of these sexual images is a threat to those who guard the ramparts of the sexual reservation. Visible lesbian or gay (or any unconventional) sexuality undermines the unquestioned normalcy of the status quo and opens up the possibility of making choices that people might never have otherwise considered. The fight to keep sexuality invisible (especially in its “deviant” forms) is part of an ancient battle waged by the forces of established order against the subversive potential of powerful images and the wayward impulses they might inspire in the vulnerable. The vulnerable, it is important to recognize, are rarely if ever the holders of established power themselves, but rather those over whom that power is held: children, women, and “lower classes” of all sorts.
Traditionally, the only acceptable storytellers outside the circle of family and immediate community were those certified by religious institutions. The emergence of schools intruded a new group of specialists between children and the world they grow up into. The arrival of mass media of communications fundamentally altered the situation: children were increasingly open to influences that parents, priests, and teachers could neither monitor nor control. Beginning with the widespread availability of printed materials to the literate, increasing with media less dependent on literacy (photography, movies, radio, and even the telephone), and culminating with television’s omnipresence (and newly creeping over the horizon, the Internet), children have become more and more independent consumers of mass-produced stories.
The feared power of images—verbal or, even more powerfully, visual—seems to reside in the representation of precisely those behaviors and options which the holders of power wish to deny to those they control, protect, and fear. Images of violence have remained ubiquitously available although repeatedly denounced by moral authorities (and endlessly studied by media researchers). Images of sexual behavior, in contrast, have been the targets of more effective attack, and their availability has been generally hedged through legal proscriptions. While parents, preachers, and politicians have criticized violence in the movies, comic books, and television, they have succeeded in criminalizing many explicit sexual images and have prosecuted those who produce or distribute and even, on occasion, those who consume them.
The legal term for prohibited sexual representations (in words or images) is obscenity, and its most influential definition in Western law comes from Victorian England’s Lord Chief Justice Cockburn, who ruled in 1868 (Regina v. Hicklin) that “the test of obscenity is this: whether the tendency of the matter charged as obscenity is to deprave and corrupt those who minds are open to such immoral influences, and into whose hands a publication of this sort may fall.”2 Just a few years later, in the United States, Anthony Comstock successfully lobbied for the passage of An Act for the Suppression of Trade in, and Circulation of, Obscene Literature and Articles of immoral Use, which President Grant signed in 1873 and which was widely referred to as the Comstock Law.
Comstock came to be a symbol of America’s fear of uncontrolled sexuality, just as his unique position as Special Agent of the U.S. Post Office for over forty years made him its moral policeman. In his writing and in his crusades against immorality Comstock articulated a widespread obsession with the ubiquitous Traps for the Young (the title of his 1883 work) which lay in wait. “Newspapers, ‘half-dime’ novels, advertisements, theaters, saloons, lotteries, pool halls, postcards, photographs, even painting and sculpture—wherever the poor child turned, in Comstock’s nightmarish America, something lurked, ready to debauch him.”
In the 1970s, North American and Western European societies witnessed an explosion in sexual expression by gay men and, to a lesser extent, lesbians, that added a new chapter to the so-called sexual revolution of the 1960s. The convergence of post-Stonewall openness and the increasingly liberal legal climate of the late 1960s permitted the rapid growth of a gay-male-oriented porn film industry. By 1973 there were more than fifty gay hard-core theaters in the United States, at least twelve in New York City alone.3 The era of theatrical gay porn was brought to a close by the emerging technology of home video. The video cassette recorder transformed the porn industry, just as porn was helping to popularize the VCR. In 1978 and 1979, before the major movie studios adopted the new video technology, more than 75 percent of the video cassettes sold were pornographic. For gay people the opportunity to view pornography in the privacy of the home was especially welcome, even before AIDS made porn the safest form of sex (except, unfortunately, for many performers).4
The same period also witnessed the emergence of the sexual and cultural counterrevolution that has come to play a large role in contemporary politics. At the same moment that lesbian and gay people joined to fight against the reactionary forces led by Anita Bryant in Florida and State Senator Briggs in California, many feminists were turning their attention to symbolic violence against women in media and advertising and its possible role in encouraging rape. By the late 1970s, Women Against Violence in Pornography and the Media, in California, and Women Against Pornography, in New York, used marches through “red light” districts to “take back the night.” However, despite their claims, the antiporn crusaders did not speak for all feminists, and theirs were not the only voices being raised. When the San Francisco lesbian S/M group Samois emerged in 1979, a line was drawn and lesbian sexuality became a central battleground of what came to be called the “sex wars.”
Lesbians resisting the antiporn arguments acknowledged the “deeply erotophobic” nature of Western culture but argued against the choice of primary targets. In Amber Hollibaugh’s words, “Instead of traipsing through porn districts … we might be demanding better contraception, self-defense classes, and decent non-judgmental sex education. Then women would be strong enough to make our ‘no’s stick as well as our ‘yes’s.” Further, and equally important, they were alarmed at the essentialist view of female sexuality implicit in the antiporn ideology:
They state that power in sex is male, because it leads to dominance and submission which are in turn defined as exclusively masculine. They suggest that any arousal which is translated through images and expressions of power originates from a masculine and sexist kind of desire. Any similar arousal felt by women is simply false consciousness. In real life this forces many feminists to give up sex as they enjoy it, and forces an even larger group to go underground with their dreams. For many women who have no idea what they might eventually want it means silencing and fearing the unknown aspects of their passions, as they begin surfacing. Silence, hiding, fear, shame—these have always been imposed on women so that we should have no knowledge, let alone control, of what we want. Will we now impose these on ourselves?
The “sex wars” loosed a flood of debate with (mostly lesbian) feminists playing leading roles on both sides. But the issue moved beyond the level of even acrimonious debate when the leading antiporn activists, Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon, entered the political and legislative arena. In 1983 they drafted an ordinance that was subsequently adopted by the Minneapolis City Council, but vetoed by the mayor. They were more successful in Indianapolis, where the mayor signed it into law. The ordinance never went into effect, however, as it was immediately challenged in the federal courts, where it was ultimately ruled unconstitutional.
The Dworkin/MacKinnon ordinance was not based on standard obscenity arguments. Pornography for Dworkin and MacKinnon is not a representation of harm against women, it is harm against women (in MacKinnon’s words, “pornography amounts to terrorism” against women). At the very least it is the theory of which rape is the practice (to paraphrase a famous statement by feminist activist Robin Morgan). Among the more striking and troublesome features of their analysis and their ordinance is the claim that women cannot consent to perform in porn: “a woman’s decision to pose for a sexual image should be treated as the product of coercion even under circumstances where a man’s decision would be treated as voluntary and consensual.” The logic of presumptive nonconsent makes adult women equivalent to minors.
However, these very features of the Dworkin/MacKinnon position also contained the seed of their eventual constitutional undoing (in the United States, though not in Canada, where their views were incorporated in the 1992 Butler v. The Queen Supreme Court decision). By arguing that pornography must be seen as a vehicle of sexist ideology, they confer on it the status of political thought, and thus render it worthy of constitutional protection. In the end, this was a major rationale in the federal courts’ decisions striking down the Indianapolis ordinance.
By the mid-1990s it appeared that the sex wars had died down, and it was possible to agree with Heather Findlay that “sex-positive feminists—those of us who are generally in support of the philosophy and civil rights of pornographers, S/M activists and sex workers—have won the lesbian sex wars.” Findlay’s evidence consists of the abundance of “high quality, often experimental lesbian erotics” available in print, image, and video.
Some of the credit for this might even go to the antiporn feminists. As Victoria Brownworth put it, “Lesbian erotica was born out of … the anti-pornography wave—partially because it was being born anyway, and partially in retaliation. Some lesbians had waited a long time to have sex and have fun, and didn’t want to be told what kind of sex was politically correct and what kind wasn’t.” However, much of the credit must go to the commercial opportunities and technological advances that have made the production and distribution of lesbian and especially gay male pornography financially viable. The free market can be a vehicle for free speech.
In recent years new options have emerged that offer isolated members of a minority the opportunity to reach and communicate with like-minded fellows: scattered cable-TV and radio programs that are available to those lucky enough to live within their range,5 and for those with access to cyberspace, the Internet and the World Wide Web.
New media create opportunities for the formation of new communities, and the Internet is no exception. In contrast to most other modern media, the Internet offers opportunities for individual engagement both as senders and receivers, permitting the coalescing of interest-based networks spanning vast distances. The potential for friendship and group formation provided by the Internet is particularly valuable for members of self-identified minorities who are scattered and often besieged in their home surroundings. A brief tour of the Web will reveal countless sites devoted to specialized interests that draw like-minded participants across national and international boundaries. Notable among the interests served by this (so far) uniquely egalitarian and open medium of communication are those represented by sexual minorities. Currently there are on-line forums, bulletin boards, home-page sites, and on-line “zines” addressed to lesbian and gay readers, such as the Oasis, a Web site dedicated to providing information and contacts for lesbian and gay teenagers.
“Does anyone else feel like you’re the only gay guy on the planet, or at least in Arlington, Texas?” When 17-year-old Ryan Matthew posted that question on AOL in 1995, he received more than one hundred supportive e-mail messages. Similar accounts abound, not only in the United States but in many other parts of the world. Lilach Nir interviewed Israeli gay teenagers who participate in on-line discussions unavailable to them in their “real” environments of smaller cities, rural villages, and kibbutzim.
The popularity of the Internet for gay men and lesbians isn’t limited to teenagers. According to the Associated Press, in June 1996, “It’s the unspoken secret of the online world that gay men and lesbians are among the most avid, loyal and plentiful commercial users of the Internet. On any given evening, one-third of all the member-created chat rooms on America Online are devoted to gay topics.” As described by Tom Reilly, the Internet executive who created PlanetOut as the “gay global village of cyberspace. … Gays and lesbians don’t have a high level of ownership of mainstream media properties. The Internet is the first medium where we can have equal footing with the big players.”
While one of the clichés of computer-mediated communication is that one can hide one’s true identity, so that nobody knows you’re 15 and live in Montana and are gay, it is also true, as Nir’s informants told her, that in their IRC conversations they “are unmasking the covers they are forced to wear in their straight daily lives.” The opportunities for deceptive (as well as truthful) self-presentation on the Internet have featured in the alarms raised in response to the Internet’s potential to disseminate that most volatile of media substances, sexually explicit words and images.
Consider 15-year-old Daniel Montgomery, for example. In June 1995 the Seattle papers reported that the teenager had been “lured” away from home by a stranger, but not someone “casing his neighborhood or hanging around outside his high school. … Instead, the mysterious character known to the Montgomerys only as ‘Damien Star’ was lurking in a place that has proven much more ominous: cyberspace.” The encounter took place in a “gay chat room” on America Online—“it was there that the man apparently enticed Daniel Montgomery with secret promises” to run away from home and join him in San Francisco. Daniel’s father believed his son was the victim of “an organized attempt by adults to recruit boys like Daniel.” The vice principal of his school told the paper that “we’ve certainly had runaways before … but holy cow, this makes you sick.” The police were sympathetic but not alarmed: “If a child is listed as a runaway, what we do is take a runaway report. … We don’t go and actively seek them out.”
Within a few days, however, it seemed that things were not quite as earlier reports had suggested. Daniel’s father, identified with the religious right, acknowledged that “there are issues between him and the teenager,” presumably because “Daniel may have been sexually confused.” More important, it turned out that Damien Starr wasn’t the pseudonym of a dirty old man who was infiltrating the Internet to lure innocent teenagers into a life of depravity. Damien Starr is the real name of a San Francisco teenager who met Daniel Montgomery in a gay America Online chat room and apparently responded sympathetically to accounts of his difficulties with his parents.
But the “unmasking” of Damien Starr did nothing to allay the fears of those who see in the Internet a threat to the innocent and vulnerable. The week after Daniel Montgomery returned home to his parents, the U.S. Senate voted to impose heavy fines and prison terms on those who distribute sexually explicit material over computer networks. Voting 84–16 in a session rife with lurid talk about child pornography and on-line descriptions of bestiality, advocates of tough regulation easily overwhelmed objections from a handful of lawmakers who said the measure would violate constitutional rights to free speech and threaten the growth of computer networks. “Take a look at this disgusting material, pictures which were copied for free off the Internet only this week,” said Sen. Jim Exon (D-NE), the measure’s chief sponsor, as he brandished a big blue binder with a bright red label: “Caution.”
Senator Exon, like his predecessors back to Comstock, presented his role as protecting children, not as restricting expression. “I’m not trying to be a super censor. The first thing I was concerned with was kids being able to pull up pornography on their machines.” Special Agent Comstock was present in more than spirit, however, as the U.S. Congress moved toward the inclusion of Senator Exon’s Communications Decency Act (CDA) as part of the omnibus Telecommunications Reform Act signed by President Clinton on February 8, 1996. The CDA revived the provisions of the 1873 Comstock Act prohibiting mailing of abortion-related materials across state lines, which are still on the books, though essentially nullified by Roe v. Wade, and added them to the prohibition against making available to minors on-line materials that “in context, depicts or describes in terms patently offensive as measured by contemporary community standards, sexual or excretory activities or organs.” The CDA was the target of an immediate lawsuit filed by the ACLU in the name of a group of plaintiffs that included Planned Parenthood, Critical Path AIDS Project, and an on-line publisher of writings by lesbian and gay teenagers.
In June 1996 a three-judge federal district court panel struck down the CDA. Judge Stewart Dalzell wrote that “the Internet may fairly be regarded as a never-ending worldwide conversation. The Government may not, through the CDA, interrupt that conversation. As the most participatory form of mass speech yet developed, the Internet deserves the highest protection from government intrusion” (ACLU v. Reno). The following year the U.S. Supreme Court voted 7 to 2 to affirm the lower court’s decision, explicitly resisting the politically popular appeal of child protection rhetoric: “Regardless of the strength of the government’s interest [in protecting children], the level of discourse reaching a mailbox simply cannot be limited to that which would be suitable for a sandbox.”
Comstock’s heirs are not easily discouraged, however, in their zeal to protect children from sexuality. In October 1998 the U.S. Congress passed a more narrowly drawn version of the CDA, the Child Online Protection Act (COPA), which President Clinton opposed but signed, relying on the courts to protect citizens from the legislative and executive branches. In the debate over COPA in the House Commerce Committee, Representative (now Speaker) Dennis Hastert articulated the familiar cry: “Even though our children may be at home with the doors locked that doesn’t mean that they are safe. We must continue to be proactive in warding off pedophiles and other creeps who want to take advantage of our children. It’s not infringing on our liberties, it’s about protecting our kids.” COPA was immediately challenged by the ACLU and seventeen plaintiffs, many of them lesbian and gay bookstores, publications, organizations, writers, and Internet activists. As PlanetOut founder Tom Reilly testified in federal court in January 1999: “Many people find just being gay to be ‘harmful to minors.’ … We operate a community of interest, rather than a community of geography, but based on our community standards no information on our site is offensive in any way” (Yahoo News, 1/22/99).
The drafters of COPA attempted to narrow its focus, thus hoping to avoid the fate of CDA, and they targeted commercial sites by requiring that they obtain credit card information before admitting users to so-called “adult” sites. The plaintiffs argued that these restrictions imposed an economic hardship and barrier both for providers and users, and that they also constituted a chilling effect that would lead providers to self-censorship. While the ultimate outcome of COPA and succeeding legislative efforts will remain in the hands of the courts—a federal appeals court struck down COPA in June 2000, and the Bush administration later announced plans to appeal to the Supreme Court—there is already ample evidence of the complications created by the imposition of related measures involving Internet “filtering software.”
Having lost the battle of the CDA, congressional censors turned to a technological fix akin to the V-chip mandated for inclusion in future TV sets: the requirement that filtering software for the Internet be used by schools and libraries that receive federal funds for Internet access, in order to block material deemed inappropriate for children. The introduction of the Internet School Filtering Act in spring 1998 opened a door much wider than that of the local school and public library, however, as commercial providers rushed to offer parents a variety of filtering services. In the words of GLAAD’s executive director Joan Garry, “We had gone from the frying pan of active censorship [the CDA] into the fire of censorship by passive omission.”
Commercial filtering software works by blocking access to sites based on keywords presumed to signal sexual content, and this often includes the very words gay, lesbian, homosexual, or even sexual orientation. Parents—or schools and libraries—that install such filtering software thus prevent teenagers (and adults, in many instances) from gaining access to support groups, informational sites, and even the Association of Gay Square Dance Clubs. As a representative of CyberSitter put it, “I wouldn’t even care to debate the issue if gay and lesbian issues are suitable for teenagers. … We filter anything that has to do with sex. Sexual orientation [is about sex] by virtue of the fact that it has sex in the name.” Thus, sites offering safer sex information are routinely excluded by many filtering programs (along with sites focused on breast cancer). Some filter providers, such as SurfWatch and CyberPatrol, promised to permit access to informational, educational, and support sites, but GLAAD and its allies remain concerned about the implementation of these commitments in deciding on specific instances and keywords.
Even when filtering programs do not automatically exclude sites that address lesbian and gay people’s concerns, they pose other dangers to gay teenagers. NetNanny, CyberSitter, and SafeSearch, among others, allow parents to set their own exclusionary criteria, and they make suggestions that some might find questionable. The president of Solid Oak, the provider of CyberSitter software, cited the National Organization for Women’s Web site as a target: “The NOW site has a bunch of lesbian stuff on it, and our users don’t want it.” CyberSitter was at the time the filter recommended by the ultra-right Focus on the Family organization.
At the end of the 2000 legislative session, Congress passed another filtering mandate, the Children’s Internet Protection Act, sponsored by Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), among others. Enthusiasm for the measure, which is likely to suffer the same constitutional fate as its predecessors, was diminished somewhat by the discovery that many popular filters, such as CyberPatrol, carried their blocking efforts too far, preventing access to the American Family Association’s site, and even to the “Freedom Works” Web site of Republican Representative Dick Armey (presumably because of his first name).6
The filtering technology has another worrisome feature: an “audit trail” that allows parents (or librarians and school administrators) to trace which sites and newsgroups their children (or other users) have tried to access. As GLAAD points out, this auditing feature is particularly dangerous to youth, if it leads to the accidental disclosure of sexual orientation.7 In the words of a 16-year-old lesbian, quoted in GLAAD’s 1997 report, Access Denied:
Living in a small town in South Carolina makes it almost an impossibility to be open about sexuality. Both emotional and physical safety is in the hands of those who are not primarily known for their open-mindedness and understanding. Through e-mail, I’ve created a support system for myself of different gay/lesbian listservs, and through people I could not have otherwise contacted. Coming to terms with my sexuality would have been so much harder if I had been alone. I owe a debt of gratitude to the people I’ve met, and who have supported me—the people who told me I was not “evil,” or “immoral,” or “sick” after these very things were drummed into my head. At 16, I am content with myself.
The battle over unfiltered access to Internet sites will undoubtedly end up in the lap of the Supreme Court, and even if the forces of freedom prevail, as they did with the CDA, Comstock’s heirs will continue their campaigns to search out and destroy technological traps for the young. If the cyber-nannies win the battle, queer teenagers like this South Carolina girl may be cut off from the lifeline represented by resources such as Oasis and left feeling like the desperate 16-year-old who wrote soap opera actor Ryan Phillippe, “Ryan, the only person in this world I can relate to is your character Billy Douglas on One Life to Live. Ryan, I’m so scared. I don’t know what to do and I’m afraid of what I might do. You, God, and I are the only ones that know! Ryan, please help!”