When a community college in a small New York town hired Rumpus pal Conner Habib to speak about sex and culture for a campus Sex Week, he was psyched. After all, he’d grown up gay in a small town and knew firsthand how important it was to combat senseless taboos by talking openly about sexuality.
But when administrators found out Habib is not a former gay porn actor but a current one, they not only canceled his talk but also apparently “contacted a local hotel and local businesses to make sure [he] wouldn’t be coming to town” and instructed students “not to attend [the] lecture” if it happened off campus.
Habib wrote about the experience for BuzzFeed:
To deny the importance of images of gay sex while pretending to affirm gay rights…is a luxury, and it’s dangerous one…[I]t’s not an effort to understand gay men as whole human beings but to merely establish sexless caricatures of them to feel comfortable about.
