Why You Can’t Take the “Porn” out of “Gay Porn”

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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.


Lauren O'Neal is an MFA student at San Francisco State University. Her writing has appeared in publications like Slate, The New Inquiry, and The Hairpin. You can follow her on Twitter at @laureneoneal. More from this author →