is
for Commercialization. To compare the actors of old pornography,
whose bodies were scrawny, hairy, sallow, untanned, pimply, scarred, wrinkled,
and buttless, with the buffed Adonises of contemporary films, is to see
the entire history of the last 25 years of the commercialization of gay
culture summed up in the most tangible way possible. Before the 1970s,
homosexuals and heterosexuals were physically identical. There may have
been gay clothing, gay gestures, gay walks, and gay voices, but there was
no gay body. It left the traces of the commercialized gay subculture burned
into the anatomy itself, which it resculpted, recolored, and reshaped,
polishing it to a satiny finish with electrolysis, turning it a healthy
and unseasonable shade of brown in the tanning salon, fattening it with
steroids and protein powders, and pumping it up with free weights and Nautilus
machines. The body was the final frontier that mainstream gay culture invaded,
coopted, and commercialized, and one has only to take a nostalgic glance
back at the unprocessed bodies of early pornography, with their scruffy
beards, dirty feet, and cadaverous complexions, to see how profoundly our
bodies have changed since Stonewall.
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