Wellllll, this happened.
Yeah, I wrote that. It wasn’t fun. But it’s important.
Here’s what happened:
Back in June, I was in New York to promote my book, and I had dinner with my good friend Steve. We’d had a few beers as we sat down to ramen at our favorite spot in the West Village, and at some point the conversation turned to recent porn discoveries. He told me he’d come across neo-Nazis—or at least white guys with swastika tattoos prominently displayed—in gay porn.
I laughed out loud. It seemed ludicrous. “How on earth,” I asked him, “are you going to be a neo-Nazi and be on camera having gay sex? Doesn’t that undermine the whole idea of neo-Nazism?”
He shrugged and also laughed. “I don’t think that there was a hell of a lot of intellect that went into it,” he told me. “I think people are just ignorant. I think they don’t understand the context. ‘I’m a Nazi,’ they say, but they don’t understand what that means.”
I had to agree.
We finished our ramen and went our separate ways, and a few weeks later, he sent me a link to one of the videos he’d been talking about. I was appalled at what I saw—a young white guy with a swastika tattooed on his stomach having oral sex with an older black man—but I shrugged it off as a ridiculous display of stupidity and went about my life.
That was, until the events in Charlottesville, VA, earlier this month. I was as outraged as anyone else that the scum of the earth—white supremacists, KKK members, neo-Nazis—felt empowered enough to come out in public and poison the rest of us with their hateful rhetoric…and kill counter-protestors while they were at it.
But I wasn’t shocked. Anyone who isn’t aware of the existence of hate and racism in our country has been living under a rock. America was built on racism and genocide. America prospered on slavery. America continues to discriminate against the “other” (by which I mean non-white, non-hetero, non-cisgender people) every damn day, systemically, violently, and cruelly. White supremacy is our history, our legacy, and our present.
And, as Rule 34 tells us, since white supremacy exists here, so does porn of it.
I decided that for those who espoused the #ThisIsNotUs hashtag, who simply couldn’t believe that racists were marching in the streets, who don’t see color, it was up to someone who could leverage some disconcerting facts about porn to get the message across. Racism in porn is popular enough that white supremacist porn keeps getting made. That says volumes.
Anyway.
Go read the article. I sat through a lot of horrible porn that I didn’t want to watch so I could write this. I probably got added to some list of despicable human beings who subscribe to racist gay porn sites. Anonymous is probably watching me. ALL SO I COULD EDUCATE YOU. Please. Please. Please. Read this article.
Well, I mean, I also got to interview award-winning performer Sean Zevran, who is delightful. So that was cool.
But anyway, go read the article. I need to go take a bath.