Daniel Laurin defended his doctoral dissertation, "Straight Guys: Sexual Identity and Realism in Gay Pornography", on Friday, July 12, 2024. The committee consisted of Corinn Columpar (supervisor), James Cahill, Patrick Keilty, Charlie Keil, exam chair George Elliot Clarke, and external examiner Mireille Miller-Young (University of California, Santa Barbara).
We asked Daniel about his work, as well as his plans for the future.
My dissertation examines the ways in which gay moving-image pornography has tried to claim realism and authenticity across its 50-year history, and how discordant sexual identity is marshalled to buttress these claims further. I identify three moments in this history in which which gay pornography adopts the dominant realist aesthetic of the era—home video in the late 1990s, reality television in the early 2000s, and social media in the 2010s—while relying on both on a faith in the image and the unrationalized coexistence of multiple models of sexual orientation. I use these texts to reconsider both amateur production and amateur performance, confession, the racial and socioeconomic construction of American heterosexuality, and a new form of sexual labour I term “subscription intimacy.”
I’m thrilled to have defended my dissertation—it has been a long time coming—and would like thank everyone who has helped me along the way: my committee, my professors and colleagues at CSI, my students, my parents, and my partner Kevin, whose unconditional love and conditional support sustained me throughout this process.
I am currently co-authoring the second edition of Jeffrey Escoffier’s Bigger Than Life: The History of Gay Porn Cinema from Beefcake to Hardcore (under contract with Rutgers University Press) and looking forward to a bit of a break before hard-launching myself on the job market later this year.
His supervisor, Corinn Columpar, had this to say about Daniel's dissertation:
In “Straight Guys: Sexual Identity and Realism in Gay Pornography” Daniel takes up the subgenre of pornography that features straight-identified male performers engaged in gay sex acts. Upon this subgenre’s historical emergence, the late 1980s, it was dubbed “gay for pay” and employed an array of tropes to guarantee the authenticity of the pleasures on which it traded. While it has persisted into the present, Daniel’s claim is that it has changed considerably due to an array of textual and industrial factors. Drawing on meticulous and exhaustive research, Daniel traces those changes across a variety of different subgenres of porn, including studio productions, amateur work, reality porn, and the content available on direct-to-consumer subscription platforms. Yet as much as this project illuminates these historical shifts, it also thinks through, with great insight, theoretical questions that extend far beyond the immediate milieu of porn – questions related to performance and labour, identity and representation, pleasure and its multifarious production. As a result of this scope, “Straight Guys” makes an extremely valuable contribution to not only the field of porn studies, but also a number of other broader areas of inquiry, including cinema and media studies, gender studies, and sexual diversity studies. Congratulations, Daniel!
Congratulations, Dr. Laurin!
(photo credit: 2024 Christopher Sherman)