Male Sex Work and Society by Unknown Read Free Book Online

film in its cinema verité style—a documentary of homosexual desire at one historical moment” (Escoffier, 2009, p. 26). This interest in documentary style has been praised by Joe Thomas (2000) for its “open representations of the eroticized male body presented within the relatively safe (for closeted gay viewers) context of avant-garde art” in a way that has been directly linked to the “formal and narrative models [of] the early days of gay porn” (p. 69). Early “porn filmmaking,” Jeffrey Escoffier (2009) explains, “included a strong documentary impulse—ultimately documenting and authenticating male sexual arousal and release” (p. 26), a goal that later became key to the New Queer Cinema movement as well.
    Interestingly, these same concerns (and the work of Andy Warhol specifically) played heavily into the early films of Pedro Almodovar and the aesthetics of La Movida , Spain’s post-Franco youth movement of the 1970s and 1980s (D’Lugo, 2006, p. 18), 7 and in the work of Rainer Werner Fassbinder and the New German Cinema of the same time period. In fact, Almodovar’s “Warholesque interest in … male prostitutes and drag queens” (p. 19) has been cited as one of the main reasons for his “meteoric rise to international prominence,” in that it was able to “align the gay scene in Madrid with Warhol’s New York of the previous decade” (p. 19). 8 Fassbinder, whose film Fox and His Friends (1975) deals with male sex work directly, 9 also has been viewed in relation to Warhol’s work. In a 1975 review, Manny Farber and Patricia Patterson wrote, “It’s interesting that the true inheritors of early Warhol, the Warhol of Chelsea Girls and My Hustler , are in Munich” (pp. 5-6). They point to this “inheritance” in Fassbinder specifically, in that both Fassbinder’s and Warhol’s films “sprung out of a camp sensibility” that includes an appetite “for the outlandish, vulgar, and banal in matters of taste, the use of old movie conventions, a no-sweat approach to making movies, moving easily from one media to another, [and] the element of facetiousness and play in terms of style” (pp. 5-6), a connection that later was made explicit when Warhol crafted the poster for Fassbinder’s last film, Querelle , in 1982. In this way, the shift in how male sex workers were represented in highly acclaimed art cinema produced outside the United States was very much tied to the New York underground film scene and, in particular, the work of Andy Warhol.
    While early films like My Hustler were groundbreaking in their representations of male sex workers, it was the release of Midnight Cowboy in 1969 that marked the first major Hollywood film (outside of the work of Tennessee Williams) to both feature male sex workers as main characters and allow them to fulfil their job description. Midnight Cowboy also was influenced by the work of Andy Warhol; in fact, director Schlesinger asked Warhol to make a cameo appearance in the film. As Warhol describes it, “Before I was shot, they’d asked me to play the Underground Filmmaker in the big party scene and I’d suggested Viva [one of the regulars in Warhol’s Factory] for the part” (Warhol & Hackett, 1980, p. 352). As Jody Pennington (2007) notes, “Among the novel qualities of many American films made during the period known as the Hollywood Renaissance,” of which Midnight Cowboy was a part, “was the routine inclusion of sexual behavior the Production Code had forbidden” (p. 52). Midnight Cowboy came at a time when Hollywood filmmakers were reacting to new freedoms that the studio system previously had limited due to the code. Thus it follows that subject matter from this postcode period that previously would have been unacceptable would emerge in film after a new rating system (the ratings G, M, R, and X) was established in 1968 (Casper, 2011, p. 119). Emphasizing the impossibility of creating a film like Midnight Cowboy during the code period,