fulfilling the capitalist demand for sex
by Douglas Messerli
William E. Jones (director) The Fall of Communism as Seen in Gay Pornography / 1998
Over the years, in Massillon (1991), V.O (2006), Tearoom
(2007), Pyschic Driving (2014), Rejected (2017), and several other
works, American artist and filmmaker William E. Jones has taken found material and
recontextualized the images to create a mongrel kind of documentary that becomes
what he describes as a visual essay.
Taking images from gay films
made mostly in Moscow, Jones shows us the formerly Soviet youths, inexperienced
with gay porno, as they peer into the camera sometimes longingly, quizzically,
and often dismissively, but definitely unlike the Western porno stars going
about their sexual activities as if alone or with their partners in a room with
no one looking. These fresh youths stare out at us, at least in Jones’ images,
they are interviewed, often through a translator, while the director checks them
out like they were prize animals or slaves up for auction, their mouths opened
and explored with greedy adult fingers, the camera running down their bodies—although
Jones takes images focusing mostly on the faces, in reality the camera in the
full pornographic scenes here depicted roamed their buttocks (the fingers
equally exploring their asses), and ending up with their erect penises either
self-masturbated or sucked by the older men—while asking them questions regarding
their experience with gay sex, their attitudes about being featured in gay porn,
and their preferred sexual preferences (masturbating, fucking, sucking, being
fucked, or involving more kinky activities).
Almost always these young boys
claim they have never before had gay sex but are willing to engage in it if they
are sufficiently paid, that they are willing to masturbate and be fellated, but
being straight are not open to sucking or being fucked. But, if the price is
right, they are willing to go there as well.
Given the cheaper cost of a
gay body in Eastern Europe and the fact that many of these young men and even far
younger boys not put on display in Jones’ collation, have run away from home or
been kicked out for their homosexuality, they are what can only be described as
a bargain, their directors almost drooling at the fact that suddenly they and
their camera readily have available all this youthful flesh to sell to waiting
customers in the West, particularly to German and Scandinavian admirers—and, of
course, those like myself and Jones (the director worked for a while in a Los
Angeles video store) in the US.
As Jones observes: “When poor
white people suddenly found themselves treated the way people who are not white
have always been treated, they took this to be an outrageous humiliation. The
result was a recrudescence of racist, nationalist politics.”
As the director notes, it is
not accidental that their bodies are often posed with props such a portraits of
Vladimir Lenin or a book by Leonid Brezhnev or dressed in Soviet and
post-soviet military clothing.
Their stares, he argues,
reveal the “atmosphere of coercion” that pervades these tapes. But, at the same
time, it is also clear that some see it as a far superior way to survive than
the hard work of their parents in factories and sometimes even forced labor.
Some of these young men clearly willingly played along with their porno
handlers deriving pleasure from the filmed sexual acts.
Yet, ultimately, Jones’ brief
essay does not go deep enough. His particular selection of portraits were taken
primarily from one source which also usually displayed these boys pissing and
being masturbated by a heavy-set man. But there were dozens of pornographers,
as commentator Mike Kennedy points out in his brief reaction to this film on
Letterboxd, including William Higgins, the several local pornographers
described in Wiktor Grodecki’s trilogy, Not Angels but Angels (1994), Body
without Soul (1996), and Mandragora (1997), and the far slicker and
more westernized companies such as CzechBoys, Bel Ami, and Lucas Entertainment,
where the boys, appearing to enjoy a multitude of sexual encounters, behaved
much like Western porn stars.
It is not that Jones’ conclusions
are wrong, but the examples he has chosen represent just a very small part of a
radical shift in the values, social, religious, and sexual, that occurred with
the rise of Brezhnev and the fall of the Soviet regime.
Directors like Wrodecki and Robin Campillo in Eastern Boys (2013),
moreover, explore the same territory far more comprehensively, and I would
argue, demand a deeper emotional response.
Yes, these Eastern boys
suffered their interviews and their porn shoots for the sake, primarily, of
money in order to survive, yet as Kennedy perceptively argues:
“The interview tapes, which could also be edited together and used as
filler or sold separately, are little different from the interview tapes that
US porn directors like Dirk Yates were filming with US marines in San Diego
prior to them shooting gay sex scenes. The performers all say that they are
gay-for-pay and inexperienced in homosexual sex and are doing it for the money.
While some or all of those things are probably true for some/most of these men,
this is also what the American market wanted to hear (or what the producers
thought they wanted to hear).”
And these boys, in the end,
are not so different from the amateur boys of Jones’ essay, some strongly
representing their passivity in having to endure being masturbated by a gay
man, a few behaving somewhat defiantly, and yet others young marines quite obviously
enjoying the whole thing—as long as they were paid.
Los Angeles, October 14, 2025
Reprinted from My Gay Cinema blog (October 2025).
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