...is porn, gay porn.If you ax Michael Lucas, anyway.
The gay porn entrepreneur is planning a visit to the Holy Land to film a skin flick and to perform a live sex show for Israeli troops.
Unfortunately Ehud Olmert is too tied up with that Hezbollah mess and a UN-brokered ceasefire to the attacks on Lebanon to welcome Mr. Lucas with open, um, arms. In the meantime, other Israelis are pissed that Lucas has his eye on their country.
The porn "star" is crying homophobia.
Check it from Something Jewish in the UK: "The hateful comments from Jews were profoundly depressing," said Lucas on his blog. "We Jews were persecuted, killed and hated for thousands of years. All of our rights were always taken away and we were always considered second class citizens. I can't believe that some of us can be so intolerant, especially to gay people."
Oh lord.
I hate to quibble with my fellow gays but I must say that in this case, Mr. Lucas is wrong. Once again, this is where my conservative streak kicks in. Unfortunately Mr. Lucas' trip is going to do little to help the plight of the gay community in the Middle East. A live sex show and shooting porn in Israel is just a petty, self-aggrandizing move on the part of this "concerned" citizen.
Oy, this community of mine.
This seems like a real storm in a teacup. The idea that "many people love and need porn" is the most overdone way of saying "lots of guys like to jerk off to porn" I can imagine. Anyone who "loves" and "needs" porn is ... sad.
ReplyDeleteBesides, even if porn were precious as poetry, there's already enough to keep its lovers and needers satisfied till doomsday. George Steiner put it beautifully:
Despite the lyric or obsessed cant about the boundless varieties and dynamics of sex, the actual sum of possible gestures, consummations, and imaginings is drastically limited. ... In short: given the physiological and nervous complexion of the human body, the number of ways in which orgasm can be achieved or arrested, the total modes of intercourse, are fundamentally finint. The mathematics of sex stop somewhere in the region of soixante-neuf; there are no transcendental series
Sticky-fingered viewers of porn want to see Guy #1 on his knees/back in front of/behind Guy #2. Do they/we care whether that's in a desert in Israel or a desert in California? Err ... not so much.
Another snippet of Steiner too gorgeous to resist:
ReplyDeleteOnce all the possible positions of the body have been tried -- the law of gravity does interfere -- once the maximum number of erogenous zones and the maximum number of participants have been brought into contact, abrasive, frictional, or intrusive, there is not much left to do or imagine. One can whip or be whipped; one can eat excrement or quaff urine; mouth and private part can meet in this or that commerce. After which there is the grey of morning and the sour knowledge that things have remained fairly generally the same since man first met goat and woman.
This is the obvious, necessary reason for the inescapable monotony of pornographic writing, for the fact well known to all haunters of Charing Cross Road or pre-Gaullist book-stalls that dirty books are maddeningly the same.
What was true of dirty books in 1965 seems to me to be equally true of dirty movies in 40 years later.
Thanks for sharing your comments...not wanting to get into the complex issue that is porn, I just think it's ridiculous that Mr. Lucas thinks a live sex show is going to do anything to advance the cause of gay rights. That's sad.
ReplyDeleteI have to agree with Conservative Liberal here. What was he thinking would happen with his live sex show? This is the very sort of thing that turns straight folks OFF gay rights!
ReplyDeleteUgh.