Negotiating Love and Work: A Critical Ethnography of a Gay Porn Star

Abstract

This ethnography offers a glimpse into one person’s pornographic film career, thus rendering visible a frequently invisible sub-textual accounting of the adult film industry. And in so doing, I offer some critiques about how popular constructions of what “love” and affection mean are always tentatively related to our relationship with and exposure to pornography. This research thus argues that our popular understanding of sexual desire, lust, and love are in constant states of flux as sex is commodified and sold to us in a proliferating daily diet within a media-saturated culture. And few if any of us, are immune to its effects, but this proves especially true for those of us whose economic livelihoods are implicated in that complex, cultural gastronomy.