by Jon Pressick
Some young black gay men, motivated by a desire to distance themselves from the rampant homophobia that exists within the African-American community, have adopted the homo-thug fa-çade as a means of declaring their masculinity while simultaneously embracing their desire for same-sex sex. Yet these men are loath to classify themselves as gay or bisexual. As a result, some engage in “down low” behavior. According to Keith Boykin, “the hypermasculinity of hip hop culture...created the homo-thug and the down low.” The glorification of criminality, misogyny and homophobia endorsed by hip-hop artists through not only their lyrics but their lifestyle as well serves as the standard by which a sizable population of young black men gauges their masculinity. The homo-thug embodies qualities that make him a social and sexual outlaw. He has the ability to cross sexual boundaries and maintain his masculinity by dint of his racial classification and his ability to perform an unimpeachable version of masculinity, possessing “a fantastic insatiable animal sexuality that will fuck you tirelessly and still be ready for more” (McBride).
The homo-thug presents white-collar gay white men with an opportunity to indulge their lust without leaving the insular world they inhabit. By viewing interracial gay porn, gay white men who purposely distance themselves from genuine relationships with African-American men can indulge their private sexual fantasies while allowing racist and stereotypical beliefs regarding black men to persist. As bell hooks observes, “Euro-Americans seeking to leave behind a history of their brutal torture, rape, and enslavement of black bodies [project] all their fears onto black bodies.” Even middle- and upper-class African-American gay men long to be sexually dominated by the homo-thug, who functions as a catalyst for their reclamation of an essential notion of blackness that they have tossed aside. The fetishization of the black male body, hence the black penis, emblemizes hypersexuality and masculine dominance while reinforcing the racist notion of white supremacy.
Gay pornography is considered a specialty market in the adult entertainment industry. Naturally, it appeals to a much smaller segment of the population, yet within this subdivision of the industry exists a multitude of studios that provide a sexual outlet for the desires of gay and bisexual men. The major studios film in scenic locations and employ only the most handsome and physically fit models. Each studio caters to the specific tastes of gay and bisexual men on the basis of fetish (e.g., leather, BDSM, bare-backing) or a particular type of model. Falcon Studios primarily showcases white men, either boyish and ectomorphic or athletic and in their prime, between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five. Colt Studios specializes in films starring steroid-pumped bodybuilders over the age of thirty. Titan Media, perhaps the most sophisticated of the studios, regularly casts burly men over thirty. The cadre of men under contract with Titan Media crosses racial, ethnic and international lines, though Caucasian men make up the largest section of Titan models. The cast of men who perform in Titan Media films range from beefy, hairy DILFs to heavily tattooed counterculture punks to preppie clean-shaven men who represent what is commonly called the “all-American” look. Since 1995, Titan Media has been highly successful in luring viewers into a fantasy world populated by rugged, stunningly handsome men with overdeveloped physiques who fuck each other wildly in implausible scenarios.
At the beginning of the millennium, Titan Media introduced a new star to its films. His demeanor and his frankly aggressive sexual performance set him apart from other Titan Media stars and other black performers in general. Dred Scott is unlike any other man in gay porn. Of indeterminate origins—virtually no information can be obtained regarding his private life—Dred Scott’s looks and temperament inspire as much fear as they do lust. Scott first appeared in the Titan Media film Fallen Angel IV: Sea Men in 2003. The star of the film, inspired by Jean Genet’s seminal gay novel Querelle of Brest, Scott plays a seaman roaming a docked freighter dressed only in dark pants, suspenders, work boots and a black beanie as he engages in a variety of sex acts with fellow seamen. Part of Titan’s fetish collection, Fallen Angel IV: Sea Man showcases Scott as he exhibits his penchant for aggressive sex, violent thrusting, slapping and rough language, elements that would later become Dred Scott’s trademark. In the Titan Media feature Trespass, Scott plays an escaped convict on the lam from several groups of bounty hunters (all of them white) who seek to recapture him. He scrambles through the wilderness shackled and handcuffed, dressed in a blue prisoner’s uniform in search of new clothes and a tool to cut his bonds. Once he finds bolt cutters and new clothes, free at last, he has his way with a brawny bounty hunter (Patrick Knight) in the bed of the latter’s pickup truck. Slammer, a film that takes place in prison, opens with Scott, acting as the prison warden, subjecting a wiry new inmate, Billy Wild, to violent sex and verbal abuse while a guard watches, aroused.
No single aspect of Dred Scott’s persona can sufficiently capture what distinguishes him from his African-American peers. Perhaps the one thing that makes him different is that he has never been marketed as a black performer. Titan Media’s other major black performers of the 2000s, Ben Jakks and Diesel Washington, had no choice but to be marketed in a way that confined them to essential and often stereotypical characterizations of black masculinity, and both appeared only in interracial films. In almost all of their films they were the only black males who star in the film, and they never shared sex scenes with other black performers. Ben Jakks, who is British, has unblemished bronze skin, no tattoos, a bald head and a basketball player’s sleek physique. In his five Titan films, he was often cast as a mysterious seducer. His sex scenes are imbued with a sensuousness that most pornographic films lack, and his approach to his costars—typically boyish white men—is tender and nonthreatening. Diesel Washington, for a time the reigning black performer for Titan, is an avatar of the ferocious black stud realized by Bobby Blake. His name—a combination of the surnames of actors Vin Diesel and Denzel Washington— trumpets his embrace of these two performers, one an action-film star of multiracial extraction and the other a critically acclaimed black actor working in mainstream cinema. Diesel Washington made ten movies for Titan since he began working for the studio in the mid-2000s. In his films he performs as a strict top. Like Ben Jakks, Diesel Washington is tall and lithe, yet in contrast to Jakks’s seductive image, Washington’s persona, buttressed by his heavily tattooed dark skin and sexual prowess, bears more relation to the homo-thug. While Jakks presents a version of black masculinity that is genteel and rather cosmopolitan, Washington fully embraces the stereotype of the menacing, hostile black man located squarely in the ghetto fantasies of Titan’s largely gay white audience.
Completing the trio of top black performers exclusively contracted with Titan Media during this period is the enigmatic Dred Scott. Though not seductive like Ben Jakks or as easily categorized as a homo-thug like Diesel Washington, Dred Scott, given his obvious multiracial background—the word Black is tattooed on his right pectoral, and the word White is tattooed on his left, both in Old English type—was allowed more access into the erotic fantasy world of Titan Media. Dred Scott’s stage name evokes the United States’ original sin of slavery, mixing his viewers’ erotic imagination with the destructive legacy of racism. However we may object to this rationale or protest against it “race is a salient variable in the sex-object choices we make in the gay marketplace of desire…[and] those who benefit unduly under such a system (whites) have a great deal invested in depoliticizing desire” (McBride). Given his racial blend, the fury contained in his facial expressions, his manic thrusting during sexual intercourse and his penchant for sadomasochism, one can easily imagine Scott as a vengeful mulatto conceived during the rape of a slave woman by her white master.
The real Dred Scott was born a slave in Virginia approximately two decades after the founding of the United States. He is famous for having unsuccessfully sued his master for his freedom, in a Supreme Court case now known as the Dred Scott Decision, which held that his bondage to his master remained in force even in territories
where slavery was illegal. Under the weight of such massive historical, racial, cultural and sexual systems, it is impossible not to draw a number of conclusions regarding gay porn star Dred Scott’s function within the sphere of erotic entertainment, and the messages, whether intentional or not, that he wishes viewers to glean from his work. Notwithstanding the various motives that might come into play, including financial ones—it has been suggested that Dred Scott was a heterosexual man who did gay porn because it paid better than straight—it seems unlikely that he would adopt the name of one of the nation’s most heroic African-American men without being aware of its implications. If our sexual desires are in essence a manifestation of our hidden needs and fears, they can also subsume our hatred and disgust. By reincarnating Dred Scott the slave, Dred Scott the porn star was communicating to viewers that our erotic ideation cannot be divorced from historical, political and cultural realities.
“Because of the legacy of white supremacy and its persis tence in the form of white American racism, the notions we have evolved of what stands as beautiful and desirable are thoroughly racialized,” wrote Dwight A. McBride (2005). “[O]ur ideas about aesthetics in the broadest sense are shot through with racial considerations that render attempts at depoliticizing them impossible.” Unlike his forebear Bobby Blake or his colleagues Ben Jakks and Diesel Washington, Dred Scott’s appearance—skin the color of butter pecan ice cream, an aquiline nose, rippling muscles, a stubble-shaved head, reddish-brown facial hair and a torso clad in black tattoos that resemble armor—is more closely aligned with notions of white male beauty. This affords him the opportunity to traverse realms of sexual exchange in areas of gay erotica into which few men of color are allowed to venture. In essence, Scott’s light skin serves as currency even more than his penis or ferocious sexual energy. Although Scott’s African-American ancestry is unquestionable, it is equally clear that he has Caucasian genes. Similar to house slaves in the antebellum South, Scott is white enough for his white costars, producers and directors to grant him entry into a rarefied space among the elite of gay porn, yet still black enough to keep him at a distance from his fans, white and black alike, as an archetype of the homo-thug.
Despite this license to enhance his homo-thug image, Dred Scott is still bound to the narrowly defined roles assigned to black men in gay porn. He performs on camera as an exclusive top, often exhibiting a domineering, hypermasculine persona. In the seven Titan Media films he starred in, he subjected his submissive white and Latino partners to verbal abuse, slapping, spitting, body slamming and urination. These acts are not uncommon in mainstream gay porn: sexual acts that were once confined to specialty or fetish films have gradually encroached into more popular productions. At some point in their careers, porn actors of all races and ethnicities participate in aberrant forms of sexual expression on camera. Bobby Blake in Niggas’ Revenge displayed behaviors far more sadistic than any that Dred Scott engaged in on camera, yet his character in Niggas’ Revenge operates within a system of sexual debauchery alive with racist and homophobic extremism. The entire film glories in depravity.
The sadomasochism that Dred Scott enacts upon his costars appears to come from an ambiguous place of rage, once again owing to his resistance to racial and ethnic classification. When Bobby Blake abuses white men in Niggas’ Revenge, viewers know without a doubt that the “rage” he expresses, as the title promises, is racial at root. Dred Scott is often cast as an anonymous drifter in his films. He speaks very little dialogue and, in keeping with the element of fantasy in these films, he embarks on sexual odysseys in which he alone determines the narrative course of action and which sex acts will be performed. Yet his sexual prowess and dominance do not obviate his limited function within gay porn. Despite Dred Scott’s ability to alter and expand the homo-thug archetype, he is still bound to its strictures: he is never the object of seduction in these scenarios, and he is never sexually passive with white men.
The sexual dominance exercised over white men speaks volumes about Dred Scott’s body as a site where historical, racial and masculine systems converge. And yet, like all African-American men engaged in gay pornography, he is confined to a role that forces black men to avoid expressing any authentic homosexual desire. McBride continues: “The ideological lessons taught and propagated by [such] films are that white men have sex with black men for reasons having to do with master fantasies and power, retributive sex…or to trade on their value as currency in the gay marketplace of desire.” Black men bottoming for white men on camera remains a taboo in films produced by major gay adult studios such as Titan.
Western culture’s insistence on preserving the Mandingo myth, and its propagation in films, television programs, advertisements and homophobic hip-hop lyrics, makes it difficult for men in the gay marketplace of desire to feel comfortable with the idea of black men, especially hypermasculine black men like Dred Scott, sexually submitting to white men. To some extent this discomfort stems from the belief that white men topping black men is somehow inherently racist, an idea that harks back to the same tensions surrounding pornographic scenarios involving white men and black women. But this argument has more to do with power than race. In his incendiary, vituperative and fiercely homophobic rants in Soul on Ice, Eldridge Cleaver lambastes black gay homosexuals, claiming that we have a racial death wish as expressed in the act of being sexually submissive with white men. Since white men, by and large, hold political and economic power in Western culture, in the realm of erotic desire a reversal of roles, where black men hold dominance and white men must submit to them, balances the power differential. Yet as African-American men gain political and economic power (as evidenced chiefly by the election of Barack Obama as the nation’s first black president) the dynamics that have traditionally ordered gay erotica and pornography are slowly evolving.
While the major studios continue to resist sexually subordinating black men to white men, smaller and emerging studios are producing some interracial gay porn in which black men bottom for white men. Planta Rosa Productions, which specializes in gonzo bareback films (unscripted films that involve unprotected anal sex), features black men—primarily Brazilian and Afro-Caribbean—who perpetuate the Mandingo stereotype, but it balances these scenes with others in which black men are topped by white ones. In all of these scenarios, the white top is a performer who goes by the mononym Igor. Well-endowed, lanky and hairy, with dark circles beneath his eyes, Igor mugs for the camera whenever he performs, contorting his face in a variety of goofy expressions as he thrusts and ruts inside of his costars, black and white alike, with gleeful abandon. White porn star and director Marco Paris performs almost exclusively with black men, though he assumes both active and passive roles. What is interesting about this inversion of the norm is that the tops in these cases are not American: Igor is Russian and Marco Paris is Slovakian. The fact that only European white men are allowed to sexually dominate men of African descent highlights the insidiousness of racism that pervades American society and the comfort black men feel sexually submitting to white men who are not descended from slaveowning ancestors.
The black male body historically has served both as a repository of Western culture’s most ardent and prurient desires, and its hatred and disgust of racial and sexual “others.” Dred Scott’s career in gay pornography ended as quickly and mysteriously as it began. After making seven films with Titan Media, he had no further public engagement with erotic entertainment. Dred Scott may have freed himself from the need to do gay porn, but his persona on camera remains captive to the social systems that perpetuate racist and homophobic myths and stereotypes regarding African-American men and gay men. The paradox of acquiring fame within the gay adult entertainment industry is no more or less problematic for Dred Scott than it is for all men of color. In an era when those who inhabit the ultraconservative fringe continue to lob racist attacks at President Obama, the de facto symbol of black masculinity in the twenty-first century, even as the gay rights movement is gaining grea
ter support among Americans, I find it damning that our culture is still unwilling to relinquish its addiction to destructive, shameful and anachronistic representations of black gay sexuality. Perhaps Dred Scott felt the same way and refused to contribute to it any longer. Of course the answer may never be known. And as the social and sexual paradigms that once ordered gay pornography rapidly change, as the major studios alter their films to keep pace not only with web-based production companies such as Tim Tales and Men at Play but also swift cultural changes within the gay community, redefinitions and realignments of all sorts will be necessary.
References:
Boykin, Keith. Beyond the Down Low: Sex, Lies, and Denial in Black America. Carroll & Graff, 2005.
Cleaver, Eldridge. Soul on Ice. Ramparts, 1968. hooks, bell. We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity. Routledge, 2004.
McBride, Dwight A. Why I Hate Abercrombie & Fitch: Essays on Race and Sexuality. NYU Press, 2005.
Poulson-Bryant, Scott. Hung: A Meditation on the Measure of Black Men in America. Doubleday, 2005 .
Reid-Pharr, Robert F. Black Gay Man: Essays. NYU Press, 2001.
When I Was a Birthday Present for an Eighty-Two-Year-Old Grandmother
