Journal of Gender Studies

ISSN: 0958-9236 (Print) 1465-3869 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cjgs20

Coming of age: Problematizing gay porn and the

eroticized older man

John Mercer

To cite this article: John Mercer (2012) Coming of age: Problematizing gay porn and the eroticized
older man, Journal of Gender Studies, 21:3, 313-326, DOI: 10.1080/09589236.2012.681187

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/09589236.2012.681187

Published online: 24 Jul 2012.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 670

View related articles

Citing articles: 9 View citing articles

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=cjgs20
Journal of Gender Studies
Vol. 21, No. 3, September 2012, 313–326

RESEARCH ARTICLE
Coming of age: Problematizing gay porn and the eroticized older man
John Mercer*

The Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Research, Birmingham, UK

(Received 11 August 2011; final version received 3 October 2011)

This essay discusses the author’s experience of researching gay pornography over
a 20-year period between 1992 and 2012 alongside an analysis of the contemporary
re-emergence of the mature male as figure of sexual interest in gay pornography.
One of the functions that gay pornography performs has been to articulate ideals of
sexual desire, and alternative bodies and modes of representation have often been
relegated from view or situated as abject.
The advent of the Internet has created conditions in which a diversity of types and
modes of representation can proliferate alongside an exponential expansion (and
bifurcation) of the market. Recent years have seen the increased popularity of so-called
‘Daddy porn’ catering for (and creating) an interest in the older man and the mature
body as a site of erotic fascination.
The essay discusses the implications of this development by focusing on the
narrative, discursive, and representational strategies of texts that present the older male
as a sexual figure. The essay assesses the extent to which Daddy porn might be regarded
as a progressive turn or whether this mode of representation is a reassertion of
patriarchal masculinity and a problematic eroticization of abusive power dynamics.
Keywords: pornography; homosexuality; generation; sexuality; aging; masculinity

The year 2012 is an important year not only because it sees the Journal of Gender Studies
moving into its twenty-first year but also personally in that it marks the twentieth
anniversary of the start of what was to become my own on-going scholarly research into
gay pornography. A great deal has changed in the world more generally and the gay porn
industry specifically during the intervening period as have my own attitudes to, and
perspectives on, the material that I chose to begin to investigate in the early 1990s, as much
to make sense of my own sense of myself, my own physicality, identity, and sexuality, as
for any other purpose. I now find myself working on a major monograph investigating gay
pornography and at a stage where I need to situate what is still of relevance in the work that
I have done so far, and this writing emerges from this process.
This essay is an attempt to reflect upon and contextualize the work that I have
undertaken during this period and to draw some conclusions about the scope and nature of
research into (specifically gay) pornography and the challenges that face the scholar who
chooses gay porn as field of enquiry. This essay is also concerned with identifying what

*Email: [email protected]

ISSN 0958-9236 print/ISSN 1465-3869 online

q 2012 Taylor & Francis
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09589236.2012.681187
http://www.tandfonline.com
314 J. Mercer

work still needs to be done to critically engage with (and what still needs to be said about)
an area of cultural production that has grown exponentially in the last 20 years. The essay
is inevitably then about ‘growing up’ as a scholar and also about adopting a ‘grown-up’
attitude to a phenomenon that has shifted from a position of relative obscurity during
the late 1980s and early 1990s to the status of a mode of production, consumption, and
distribution that (within the context of the Internet at least) has become ubiquitous.
Consequently it seems both opportune and appropriate that my object of study at this point
is the eroticized older man; a figure whose visibility within pornographic representation
has been resurgent in recent years and whose iconography in the most dramatic terms
problematizes the connections between masculinity, sexual desire, and generation.

Gay porn in context

In the late 1980s at the height of the so-called ‘porn wars’ Andrea Dworkin famously
argued that pornography is a genre notable for ‘an ahistorical character – a sameness
across time and cultures’ (1998, p. 265). Though her concern was primarily the
subjugation of women (which she argued was the principal function of pornography) she
made the radical claim that porn ‘ . . . does not significantly change in what it is, what it
does, what is in it, or how it works, whether it is for instance, classical or feudal or modern,
Western or Asian; whether the method of manufacture is words, photographs or video’
(Dworkin 1998, p. 265).
Dworkin’s comments and the heated debates that surrounded the feminist critique of
pornography on both sides of the Atlantic during this period were in many respects one of
the key influences on my own burgeoning interest in interrogating pornography from an
academic perspective. One is, of course, mindful that Andrea Dworkin cannot be regarded
as representative of a consensus. Indeed she was rather more often a divisive figure whose
penchant for a polemical prose style only exacerbated the polarized nature of debate around
porn. However, it is also the case that her interventions were extremely (if unintentionally)
productive in that a significant body of work was to emerge that has challenged and refuted
much of her more extreme assertions. This includes the output of a generation of feminist
scholars (most notably Linda Williams (1989), Constance Penley (1997), Laura Kipnis
(1999), and Mandy Merck (1989)) who were inspired to address pornography as a direct
response to the anti-porn debate initiated by Dworkin (1993), Mackinnon (1993), Kappeler
(1986), and others. I think it is now the case that Dworkin’s position can be seen as
belonging to a very specific cultural moment. As Erich Goode and Nachman Ben-Yehuda
in their work on moral panics note:
Dworkin represented the most extreme of the angry anti-pornographers. She possessed an
almost unique talent for alienating audiences . . . at every point along the political spectrum . . .
her divisive statements defined the turmoil over pornography as an instance of a moral panic.
(Goode and Ben-Yahuda 2009, p. 225)
Nonetheless whilst the excesses of Dworkin’s rhetoric may now seem outmoded, the
axioms that underpin her arguments are particularly robust and remain entrenched in
popular attitudes to pornography to a greater or lesser degree. Fundamentally that is to say
that there is still a popular common-sense understanding that pornography is both repetitive
and always does the same thing. This attitude can (and does) extend beyond popular
discourse and into academic considerations of pornography. So for example the American
sociologist Michael Kimmel (2005) in a chapter in his book The Gender of Desire sees
providing a working definition of pornography not as an important epistemological
question but instead as ‘both tedious and boring, an endless cycle of assertions that allow
 Journal of Gender Studies 315

men to abdicate responsibility for confronting the politics of desire’. For Kimmel
‘pornography is what pornography does’ (2005, p. 84). Subsequently drawing parallels
between male sports (boxing and wrestling), Kimmel once again posits a common-sense
understanding: a pornography that is repetitious, that is ultimately dehumanizing and
violent. My research, which has been exclusively concerned with gay male pornography
and its specific iconographic language, has led me to argue that this is not the case.
Indeed I would suggest one of the most distinctive features of pornography (and I think
that this applies as much to heterosexual as it does to gay pornography), due in no small
part to its small-scale and sometimes artisanal conditions of production and distribution, is
its facility to be extremely responsive and able to exploit technological, cultural, and even
geo-political change. This makes writing about the subject particularly challenging as
rather than the ahistorical sameness that Dworkin and others have suggested, porn is
constantly evolving and shifting its focus and attention and has an ephemeral quality,
especially in the new era of web-based pornography. These ephemeral and mutable
qualities of gay pornography are the aspects that have impressed me the most during the
process of reviewing my work to this point. So at this stage, looking at a body of scholarly
research built up over 20 years which has formed the basis of a set of chapters published in
edited collections and journals, what has clearly struck me is that it becomes apparent that
in the mid to late 1990s I was unwittingly writing about a moment in the history of gay
pornography that was about to come to an end.
There are a range of reasons for making this rather hyperbolic claim. In the first
instance the focus of my research during the 1990s was gay pornographic video made in
the USA, as this was the most ubiquitous and readily available source of material at that
point. At around the same time Richard Dyer (2002) (to whom my work owes a
considerable debt), Tom Waugh (1996), and to a lesser degree Kobena Mercer (1991)
were also focusing on gay porn as an object of study.1 My concerns during this period were
about interrogating a very distinctive and pervasive iconography that emerged from the
American gay pornography of the 1980s and 1990s that seemed to epitomize a highly
idealized set of dreams and fantasies surfacing from and firmly located in California: the
blond beach boy, the tanned body-builder, the rugged construction worker or mechanic, all
uniformly muscular, conventionally handsome, with hairless, tanned, and sculpted
physiques.
The iconography and typology that was produced in a range of texts during this period
was curiously insistent in its assertion of the signs of a distinctive version of youthful,
virile, sporty, health conscious, and undeniably American masculinity. This was an
iconography that, with the advent of the AIDS crisis, seemed to become more
overdetermined (even hysterical) in its assertion of the signs of an antiseptic model of
cleanliness and health and equally scrupulous in its denial of alternative physicalities. This
was also an iconography and life-style far removed from my own experience and it is to be
presumed the experience of the majority audience for such material. This disparity
between the eroticized representations that gay porn produces and more recognizable
‘authentic’ conditions of existence was an issue I was anxious to engage with. So the
connections between structures of fantasy, the processes of capitalism, and wider cultural
and social context have become my key concerns.
Secondly I was writing about a period in the development of the gay porn industry in
which a studio system and a star system had emerged. Concentrated in northern California
and San Francisco in particular, the gay porn industry, both at the level of production and
distribution, was dominated, during the 1980s and 1990s, by a relatively small number of
‘major studios’ with their own roster of exclusively contracted performers. Consequently
316 J. Mercer

video production companies such as HIS Video, Catalina, Vivid, and Falcon in the 1980s
and, during the 1990s, Hot House, Raging Stallion, and Titan constituted what might be
regarded as porn’s equivalent to the studio system of classical Hollywood cinema.2
The establishment of this quasi-studio system production model and a concomitant studio
‘style’ is further emphasized by a set of performative, narrational, rhetorical, and
representational strategies that are established during the period from the mid-1980s
onwards that effectively constitute a gay pornographic production code (albeit an unwritten
one).3 Whilst this was an unwritten code, it was supremely pervasive in its deployment and
highly prescriptive. This means that during this period norms of represented sexual conduct
emerge. The active/passive dichotomy of performers identified and positioned as sexually
‘tops’ and those whose iconography and representation situated them as ‘bottoms’ is
formalized as a demarcation of sexual performance/activity and as a strategy for the
organization and marketing of ‘types’ of models. This organization of sexual role and
physical type along with the rhetorical strategies of the gay pornographic narrative (the
convention of suck/rim/fuck/jerk; oral sex/oral-anal contact/anal sex/masturbation to
climax) and, as the AIDS crisis fully emerged, the eventual mandatory use of condoms,
results in the production of normative models of gay sexual conduct.
So by the start of the 1990s a gay pornography industry had emerged that was largely
based in the USA and was largely concerned with exporting an American ideal of
desirability. This was a porn where certain types of bodies (normal bodies, hairy bodies,
and so on) did not exist, a porn where certain ethnicities (anything other than Caucasian for
the large part) did not exist, a porn where certain generations (anyone over 25 for the most
part) did not exist. Once again this constellation of cultural, social, and institutional
determinations was intriguing to me; so here was a pornography that was normative, and
yet the norms that the texts established were very far from anything that might be regarded
as recognizably ‘normal’.
Finally, the purpose for conducting the research in the 1990s was in no small part
politically motivated. I was at that point trying to theorize about a phenomenon that was
significant in terms of its visibility and pervasiveness and consequently therefore
influential for the gay community in terms of the establishment of a sexualized
iconography, a set of ideals and norms, whilst simultaneously effectively (though not
actually) illegal in my own country. Since the mid-1990s (and even since the completion
of what was to become my doctoral thesis in 2001) the gay porn industry has undergone
immense and on-going changes at almost every level. In the UK for example the R18
BBFC classification (a restricted release classification reserved for pornography) which
was first introduced in 1982 but which had not been used was finally applied to
pornography sold in licensed sex shops in the late 1990s, and the material that I had
previously had to acquire for research purposes through visits to European cities and
sometimes clandestine methods became legitimately available.
The shift from VHS to DVD and increasingly to streaming technologies has all taken
place during this period. The rapid growth of the Internet as a delivery mechanism for all
moving image material has both increased access and opened up a global and an ostensibly
deregulated market for gay porn and has also brought an end to the dominance of the
American studio system mode of production. Perhaps one of the least anticipated
consequences of the impact of the web is that the gay pornography industry has shifted
away from US-dominated homogeneity both in terms of representation and output and
moved to towards segmentation and specialization, largely out of commercial necessity.
This change mirrors the evolving nature of the porn industry more generally; Matthew
Zook, in an essay that aims to estimate the size and scope of the adult industry, notes:
 Journal of Gender Studies 317

. . . there appears to be a steady diffusion of this industry away from the United States to other
countries. Although there are a number of reasons for the global distribution of the Internet
adult industry, three factors – regulation, low barriers to entry, and the diffusion of Internet
use – have played leading roles in shaping the location of the Internet adult industry. These
three factors offer a combination of push and pull incentives for the migration of the Internet
adult industry out of the United States. (Zook 2007, p. 103)
Given that some of my previous work has become, to some extent at least, a historical
document of a specific period in gay pornography’s history, the challenge that I am now
responding to is to identify what the focus of work on the contemporary industry should
be. There is certainly no shortage of things that need to be said as there is still relatively
little in the way of academic literature that engages with gay pornography specifically
relative to the size of the industry and its influence on (and place within) gay culture or
culture more generally.
My own scholarly focus and concerns continue to be organized around questions of
style and a gay aesthetics and their relationship to cultural politics in the broadest sense.
However, given the changing nature of the gay pornography industry and the rapid pace of
technological change, it is clearly both appropriate and necessary to broaden the scope of
research to look at gay pornography made outside of the US, to extend discussion beyond
the limits of what might be described as commercial or mainstream pornography alone and
of course that web-based pornography must now be a central focus for investigation. The
Internet has created the conditions for a huge growth in the sheer volume of material that is
available for analysis and has facilitated access in ways that were unimaginable when I first
started my research. The Internet has also crucially created conditions in which the market
can be segmented and where audiences are increasingly bifurcated. Consequently the
dominance of specific iconographic types and representational norms can be challenged.
The reason that gay porn has sustained its interest for me as a researcher is related to the
extent to which the form is about (and has always been structured around) sexualizing
types; that means physical, performative, and iconographic types and what these types
have to say about models and fantasies of masculinity. I think it is possible to argue that
one of the progressive implications of the Internet for gay men is that desires that were
absent, marginalized, or had disappeared from view can either be articulated or re-emerge,
and this is what I think seems to have happened with gay porn that represents the older man
as a figure of erotic interest. In this essay then, I present the emergent eroticized older man
in gay porn as one of the avenues for future investigation and indicate here some of the
issues at stake and some preliminary findings based around my own analysis. These are
preliminary observations and as such should be regarded as indicative of the direction that
subsequent work around this topic will take.

Coming to terms: the older man

There has manifestly been an exponential growth in gay porn that places the older man at
the centre of attention over the past five years, but what, in concrete terms, does ‘older’
actually mean? This question points to one of the perennial problems that anyone who has
ever chosen to study porn in an academic context faces; that is, the issue of defining terms
of reference. Definitions are a problem for two reasons; firstly, and in large part due to the
general lack of a sustained critical discourse around pornography, one often needs to
invent a language and terms of reference almost every time one writes about the subject.
Regardless of Kimmel’s views (discussed earlier in this essay) that such definitions lack
merit, the necessity to reiterate or establish them in order to engage systematically with the
material remains pressing.
318 J. Mercer

Secondly, the mutability of specific terminology within the world of pornography and
the wider gay culture can cause problems that need to be acknowledged. So for example
terms used in this essay such as ‘Daddy’ or ‘bear’ that refer simultaneously to specific gay
subcultures and are frequently associated with the sexualization of older gay men change
their meanings and applicability dependent on context and period.
Within the context of the contemporary gay pornographic material that I am currently
investigating then, the designation ‘older’ encompasses a very broad range of generations,
from the website Men Over Thirty (MO30) that rather depressingly suggests that being
over 30 is what constitutes ‘older’ to Older4me a site that often uses the same roster
of models as MO30 but, through a range of rhetorical and representational devices,
foregrounds and very explicitly eroticizes the signifiers of older age. What is important
here is that ‘older’ within the gay pornographic text is a fluid concept. ‘Older’ becomes
an elastic category in gay pornography encompassing a range of ages, physical
characteristics and body types, performative characteristics, and stylistic choices. It is
a category that is marked more by what it is not than what it is; what it is resolutely
not is youth fixated, grooming and body culture focused, in effect the look of the
gay ‘scene’. In this regard ‘older’ becomes an oppositional category as well as one that
vividly illustrates the narrow paradigm of what constitutes ‘mainstream’ sexual tastes and
aesthetics within gay culture.
It is also important to note that organizing and sampling material for analysis in the era
of the web presents challenges. There is a wealth of pornography that eroticizes any
number of different body types, ethnicities, and generations to draw upon for research
purposes, ranging from the home-made ephemera of sites like Xtube or live broadcasting
sites such as Cam4 to pay-to-view websites and commercially available DVDs. It is also
important to note that gay pornography exists and operates within an extensive and
seemingly ever-expanding network of promotional sites, personal and commercial blogs,
filesharing networks, and other discussion fora that all variously promote, produce, or
circulate material and consequently contribute to the processes of making meaning out of
these texts. Furthermore, these distinctions themselves are increasingly difficult to make,
not least because of the level of cross-over between categories such as ‘amateur’ and
‘professional’ pornography and the increased popularity (again as a consequence of the
web) of the amateur, vérité aesthetic.
The complexity of these channels of distribution and discussion can make singling
out specific examples and the legitimacy of sampling problematic. The ephemeral nature
of much of this material also presents problems for the porn researcher as it is not
uncommon for a website or an especially useful textual example to have disappeared
from view long before an academic article appears in print.4 This being the case for the
initial stages of this piece of research, I have made the pragmatic decision to focus on
texts made by a specific commercial gay porn production company, Pantheon, who
specialize in material that eroticizes older men. The essay focuses specifically on the pay-
to-view website Hot Older Male and the video series Daddyhunt, available to download
and purchase on the site. The choices that I have made here have been driven by
expediency and the need to ensure that the material discussed has some longevity in
terms of access. I make no claims that my sampling methods and findings constitute
empirical data. Rather this work should be regarded as speculative and indicative of
trends and avenues for further interrogation as I am suggesting here narrative themes,
tropes, models, and modes of sexual conduct that are recurrent across a range of texts that
open themselves up to critical engagement and indicate the direction that further work
may well take.
 Journal of Gender Studies 319

The Daddy in gay porn

Before discussing contemporary articulations of the older man in gay pornography it is
worthwhile pausing to place this resurgent figure within a cultural/historical context. It is
important to stress that whilst there is a resurgence of porn that focuses on older men and
that the definition of the older man is rather fluid within the gay pornography more
generally, the figure of the mature man in porn is nothing new per se. For example Richard
Locke, the star of Joe Gage’s venerated 1970s trilogy of porn films Kansas City Trucking
Company (1976), El Paso Wrecking Corp. (1977), and L.A. Tool and Die (1979), bearded,
hirsute, dark, and physically imposing, was unambiguously situated as a mature gay male
and the protagonist within the narrative of all three films. Consequently in Gage’s trilogy,
films that have been cited as important landmark examples of gay pornographic film and
significant influences on subsequent producers, the audience is encouraged to identify with
and to experience sexual encounters from the older man’s perspective; to desire what he
desires. Likewise, Jack Wrangler, the ubiquitous star of 1970s gay porn films ranging from
Gage’s Kansas City Trucking Company to Gemini (Steve Scott 1977) and Night at the
Adonis (Jack Deveau 1980), was positioned as a mature and macho gay male far removed
from the nubile beach boys and athletes that were subsequently to populate 1980s and
1990s gay porn.
Similarly the photography studio Colt was key in defining and articulating what was to
become understood as ‘Daddy’ iconography during the 1970s and onwards. Emerging as a
consequence of the proliferation of physique photography in the twentieth century, the
1960s and 1970s Colt were to specialize in producing photographic sets, magazines, and
latterly calendars that featured body-builders and ruggedly macho mature models. Their
popularity was based on both the extremely high production standards of their work and
their choice of models that demonstrate the overdetermined macho masculinity that was to
become associated with the studio. Colt were especially noted for the use of mature models
presented as the epitome of the rugged all-male model of masculinity, and this
specialization in the older man (albeit a highly idealized and overdetermined vision
of macho masculinity) was to become known as the ‘Colt Look’. In the contemporary
eroticization of the mature male and the articulation of the Daddy in particular I think there
is always a vestigial nostalgia for the 1970s. In the iconography of the hirsute body,
herculean physical bulk rather than sculpted muscle, facial hair, tattoos, piercings, and
denim, it is possible to determine a harking back to a pre-AIDS pre-queer era of fixed
gender roles and the associated celebration and eroticization of hegemonic masculinity
that was expressed in vivid terms in the clone iconography in the aftermath of the gay
liberation movement.5
Whilst the gay Daddy receded rather than disappeared from view during the 1980s and
early 1990s, to be replaced in dominance as an erotic type by the muscular and youthful
gay porn stars of the era such as Jeff Stryker and Ken Ryker, it is apparent that the Daddy
and his attendant iconography and milieu has now made something of a comeback.
I am suggesting in this essay that this new iteration of the mature gay male is a
relatively complex variant that draws on the iconography of the 1970s and is deployed in
two broad regimes that I will explore here; firstly the problematic notion of the Daddy
within the context of intergenerational sexual encounters, and secondly the context of
sexual play between mature males. The sets of texts chosen for analysis here illustrate
these two iterations of the mature gay male. Whilst both groups of texts are made by the
same production company, it seems apparent that the rhetoric of the respective texts is
designed to address a different audience and differing ways of desiring the mature male
320 J. Mercer

body. What this seems to suggest is just as there is not a monolithic model of pornography
(neither gay nor straight) so there is not a single, uniform way of understanding the older
man as an erotic figure.

Bodies of experience/bodies of power

Inevitably the deployment of the term ‘Daddy’ is problematic within the context of the
representation of a sexual narrative. This loaded terminology is clearly knowingly deployed
in this context for its suggestion of a taboo sexuality. Like much of the phraseology
routinely used in gay porn and gay culture the exact meaning of ‘Daddy’ is mutable,
referring simultaneously at various points and in varying contexts to a macho older gay
male, a dominant ‘master’ in sado-masochistic sexual play, and to the sexual role of a
domineering and potentially aggressive father figure in the enactment of abuse fantasies.
The term and its mutability and ambiguity goes to the heart of what is at stake in the
representation of the older male as the object of sexual investment, namely the absence of
an adequate visual and erotic language to situate the older man. Our sexual desires as gay
men operate within a culture where the signs of youth are equated with sexual desirability,
and consequently, in order to situate the signs of mature masculinity as sexually desirable,
one recourse is, inevitably, to problematic stereotypes and discourses that carry with them
the spectre of abuse and its attendant taboo frisson.
In Bound and Gagged Laura Kipnis usefully discusses the extent to which the
eroticization of taboo desires and practices is embedded within the function of pornography
as a mode of expression. She notes:
The world of pornography is mythological and hyperbolic, peopled by fictional characters.
It doesn’t and never will exist. But what it does do is to insist on a sanctioned space for
fantasy . . . Like any other popular culture genre (like sci-fi, romance, mystery, true crime),
pornography obeys certain rules, and its primary rule is transgression . . . its greatest pleasure
is to locate each and every one of a society’s taboos, prohibitions, and proprieties, and
systematically transgress them, one by one . . . Pornography is thus a form of political theater.
It’s a medium for confronting audiences with exactly those contents that are exiled from
sanctioned speech, mainstream culture and political discourse. (Kipnis 1999, pp. 162– 163)
Intergenerational sexual encounters are of course one of the more or less taboo practices
that pornography generally (and this type of gay pornography specifically) presents to
audiences. The ‘tabooness’ of these scenarios and enactments of intergenerational sexual
desire and activity are therefore eroticized. It is important to stress here that these are far
from straightforward representations. Indeed they draw on a rather complicated and
ambiguous range of reference points, from historical and classical precedents of man/boy
love to stereotyped notions of the predatory nature of the hypersexualized ‘dirty old man’ to
domestic sexual abuse scenarios.
Examples of the predatory older male and enactments of abusive scenarios are fairly
commonplace. Sites such as Daddymugs.com epitomize the style and content of much
material which uses an amateur aesthetic that emphasizes the impromptu and unstaged
nature of the encounters between a middle-aged ‘everyman’ and a succession of much
younger models in their early 20s, usually described as ‘boys’. Biographical details about
Daddymugs, the eponymous protagonist, featured on his site emphasize both his
ordinariness as a ‘regular Joe’ and consequently the ordinariness of his sexual interest in
younger men:
Up until a couple years ago, I worked in the auto industry. Then times got tough and
corporations laid off and I was one of the many that lost a job. Soon after losing my job,
 Journal of Gender Studies 321

my roommate came up with the idea of starting a website. I thought ‘what the hell, I’ll give it a
shot’. So that’s how the website started.
As for boys, I’ll get right to the point, I LOVE THEM. I love to fuck their brains out, have
them suck on my thick daddy cock and I love sucking and rimming them. My fetishes are
bondage, suits, leather, feet. I can be gentle with a boy or mistreat and be rough with them as a
Daddy sometimes should be. (daddymugs.com)
In the videos available on the website both the narrative and the rhetoric of the
sequences position us as experiencing the sexual encounter from the older man’s
perspective. So, within the context of these particular videos, it is sex with a younger man
that is eroticized. The description of the video Mugs Fucks Dillinger Outdoors illustrates
this:
I had Dillinger help me move some furniture but that’s not all we did. I think we were both a
bit horny so things went a bit farther. After clearing my truck bed of the furniture, I had him
start sucking my fat cock. I love the way this boy ‘gags’ on it as he sucks. I bent the boy over
the tailgate and got his ass primed for some fucking by rimming and fingering his hole.
I slapped him across his face a couple of times telling him to keep fucking his asshole by
bouncing up and down on my cock. So check it out as you watch me fuck Dillinger and get a
little rough with him.
Whilst these texts neither deny nor exclude the possibility of an alternative viewing
position, it is evident that in this and the other vignettes available on Daddymugs and
comparable sites that our point of identification is primarily with the older man desiring
sex with a younger man.6
The examples of those texts where it is the older man who is positioned as the object of
the desiring gaze and where our point of identification is less clearly determined as that of
the older man desiring the younger are of particular interest. The video series Daddyhunt is
of particular note in this regard.
The Daddyhunt franchise, which is in part a branding collaboration with the dating
website of the same name, is also ostensibly focused around intergenerational encounters
and consequently has the potential to reproduce similarly regressive and problematic
stereotypes to those deployed in sites such as Daddymugs.com. The videos feature a series
of vignettes and do not, in most cases, have a unifying overarching narrative; instead they
have a common set of themes. The narrative thematic in most cases (though there are
exceptions) is organized around the desire of a younger man who actively pursues and
attempts to seduce what appears to be a much older man (or men).
So for example in the first DVD of the series of six, Daddyhunt 1, online encounters
become real life sexual scenarios in which a younger man hunts out a Daddy to fulfil a
sexual fantasy. In Daddyhunt 5 two young models, Derrick Hanson and Justin Jameson,
pursue a muscle-bound, bearded Daddy in Raybans to the roof of a skyscraper in order to
entice him into a ménage à trois. In Daddyhunt 6: Frat Pack (the only edition in the series
that incorporates a sustained narrative structure) revolves around a fraternity house where
four students compete for the most exciting and illicit exchange with an older man. In turn
each student seduces a workman, landlord, gardener, and (in a turn that stretches the
plausibility of the narrative to breaking point) a private detective. In all cases the older
men are macho, muscular, resolutely masculine, and the younger men are presented as
active agents in soliciting the sexual encounters. So even whilst generational difference is
still presented in these texts for its erotic potential, the younger man is not the passive
object to be ‘taken’ by the older patriarch; instead he is presented in pursuit of the object of
his desire which is the macho older man who is presented as the epitome of what
masculinity means. What I think is interesting and worth closer attention is the extent to
322 J. Mercer

which in this series the sometimes problematic nature of these encounters and the implicit
inequity of power relations appear at some level to be challenged and undermined. The
rhetoric of the sequences positions us as seeing the older man through the eyes of a
younger man; in fact the usual lingering shots of young bodies and eroticization of the
signs of youth are almost completely absent or at the very least played down. The younger
men appear to be mere stand-ins for the audience to identify with. In these exchanges it is
the older man who is being objectified and eroticized, the older body (albeit an often
overdetermined, gym-built muscular body) becomes a site of erotic investment.
It is notable that the viewing position in these texts tends to be much less clearly
determined, indicating perhaps that the logical motivation for such a desire seems more
problematic. Indeed in many cases the annunciative position of the texts is often
conspicuously indeterminate, shifting between omniscient voyeurism to identification
with either Daddy or boy. It is almost as if the text itself is uncertain about how we are to
read and relate to the younger man’s desire for the older man.

Hot older males?

Whilst the dynamics and nature of the intergenerational porn described here might be
regarded as more or less stereotypical (and consequently more or less predictable in terms of
subject matter), a perhaps more interesting and potentially more ‘progressive’ development
is pornography that dispenses with the younger male altogether either as an object of erotic
desire or as a point of identification or to emphasize the erotic charge of generational
difference and focuses instead on the older male as the exclusive focus of erotic interest. As
I have previously noted, the older ‘Daddy’ figure is a staple of gay pornography, and
likewise, as Laura Kipnis (1999, pp. 163– 164) notes, there is ‘a subgenre of porn, both gay
and straight, devoted to the geriatric’. Kipnis is also careful to note that this specific type of
pornography is usually situated as a ‘specialism’ and consequently is speaking to a desire
that is normally positioned as a perversity. She observes that ‘The vistas of antediluvian
flesh . . . counter all of the mainstream culture’s stipulations regarding sex and sexual
aesthetics’ (Kipnis 1999, p. 165). However, whilst the pornography that I am referring to in
this essay addresses itself to a specialist constituency, I am also arguing that it
simultaneously speaks to an audience of older gay men. So it is a pornography that to some
extent eroticizes the older gay man for the benefit of older gay men.
Within gerontology there has been a significant growth in the body of scholarly work
that deals with issues surrounding aging amongst gay men and lesbians. As the so-called
‘baby boomer’ generation of gay men and lesbians, who were also the gay liberation
generation, are now moving from middle to older age, what it means to be an older gay
person is perhaps for the first time an issue that has increasingly come into view. As a
corollary to this, what gay sexual desire is and means for older gay men also therefore
emerges as a subject for enquiry.7
The website Hotoldermale.com provides examples that illustrate the differing modes
of address and modes of representation of the older gay male as an erotic figure. The site
features selected scenes from the Daddyhunt series mentioned previously alongside video
series such as Dads vs Boys and Real Couples, all of which focus on the intergenerational
sexual encounters that I have already discussed here. By contrast to these intergenerational
scenes, the video sequences for view on the website where the older male is the exclusive
focus are largely divided between two categories: solo performances by mature models
that can be chosen from a menu, and exchanges in couples or groups between similarly
mature men.
 Journal of Gender Studies 323

In both of these cases the rhetoric of the texts seems to position us as seeing the mature
body through the eyes of an older man. The shifting or ambiguous point of identification,
that I have argued earlier is a feature of the intergenerational exchanges, is less apparent.
In the solo performances that the site features it is very notable that models have been
selected for their performative abilities (the ability to produce an erection and masturbate
on camera to climax) rather than on the basis of their physical perfection. Indeed the very
ordinariness of many of the bodies on display is notable in comparison to the gym-built
macho muscularity of the performers in the Daddyhunt series. Whilst the performers are
insistently described as ‘Daddy’ in the promotional text that accompanies the videos on the
website, the impromptu settings and relative absence of an elaborate mise-en-scène or
narrative set-up work to allow the possibility to read the performances as designed to be
recognizably commonplace, as ‘natural’ expressions of the older man’s sexual drive that
an older audience may identify with. For example a scene with the performer Max Chase is
located in the domestic location of what we assume to be the performer’s bedroom. We
watch Chase masturbating and subsequently using a dildo for simulated anal sex. The
performance of these acts lacks the polish of the professional porn actor, there is an
absence of exaggerated body moves, eye contact, performing for the camera, the setting
seems unstaged, and this collectively results in the production of an air of intimacy to the
scene that echoes the intimate settings in which we can assume most of the audience would
choose to masturbate.
The scenes that feature couples or groups of older gay men engaging in sex tend to much
more consistently feature professional porn performers and consequently present bodies
and modes of sexual conduct that tend to be much more idealized. The types of models and
types of bodies that are chosen are important. I am suggesting that these texts are in part
speaking to a specific generation of gay men who came to maturity during the late 1960s and
into the 1970s. This is the generation of gay men who experienced gay liberation and
the subsequent investment in the idea of the macho gay male. The models that are used in
these sequences therefore often epitomize an articulation of the contemporary macho gay
male that simultaneously harks back to the clone iconography of the 1970s. These are also
often much more elaborately staged encounters, and it is through the use of mise-en-scène
and filmic rhetoric that we can observe the annunciative position that these texts seem
to offer.
The settings of these sequences are perhaps unsurprisingly arenas associated with
domesticity, luxury, and a particular sexual sophistication. So a mise-en-scène that has
associations of wealth, prestige, and maturity is often deployed: the beach-side villa and
the luxurious duplex in the Real Men series, the office in the Down to Business and
Unsuitable video series, the hotel/resort in Sonoma Heat, and the fetish club or dungeon in
Big Dick Daddy Club. These are settings that carry with them associations of worldliness
even if the realizations of these fantasies are often not quite so sophisticated in their
execution. I do not wish to overstate the case, though here, as in all cases, it is clear that
rhetoric and narrative sometimes struggle to situate and accommodate bodies that we do
not seem to have the cultural vocabulary to understand as sexually desirable. Consequently
the bodies of the models in these sequences seem to be exaggerated, hysterical versions of
macho masculinity, overdetermined in order to be inscribed as sexually desirable, and the
mise-en-scène and narrative seem to need to do additional work as it were to explain these
desires and situate them.
In a video, part of the Sonoma Heat series entitled That Fucking Gardener, we
can observe the older man positioned as a figure of desire through the eyes of another
older man. The set-up for the scene is a recognizable pornographic trope: the bored
324 J. Mercer

house-husband, distracted by the sexual appeal of the manual labourer. In this case Jake
Rowe watches his muscular gardener, Hunt Parker, strip to the waist to work in a lavish
garden. Rowe becomes increasingly sexually excited by his voyeurism and is eventually
noticed by the gardener. The two then move into the garden setting to engage in a sexual
encounter.
Whilst in pornography, class or social difference is often presented for sexual purposes
and is usually represented by the body that is marked by difference (the muscles, tattoos,
and body hair of the ‘working man’ for example), in this case the physical differences
between the working man and house-husband are non-existent. Both men are similarly
mature, hirsute, and muscular. Their sexual exchange is reciprocal. So the opportunities
presented here to eroticize social difference through sexual performance and sexual role
are not exploited. So rather than a scene where the working man asserts his superior
masculinity through overpowering the sybarite, or conversely the wealthy homeowner
exploits his privilege through sexual seduction, the scene eroticizes the sameness of the
couple in terms of physicality, sexuality, and generation.
I am suggesting that the rhetoric implies a degree of egalitarianism and a more direct
identification between what the audience desires and what the audience recognizes as
being like them (once again of course, the example I have chosen here presents
exaggerated hypermasculine versions of mature masculinity; I would emphasize that this
is not always the case). Given that it is not the function of pornography to provide
‘positive’ representations, and also given that whilst pornography may have a didactic role
this is not its purpose, I think that it is possible to argue that being encouraged to see
mature bodies as desirable and to see mature men desiring other mature men in this context
feels as if it is something approaching a progressive turn. Even whilst it can scarcely be
argued that the primary goal or intention of contemporary pornography is to effect socio-
political change, there are instances where porn offers representations that open up the
possibility of thinking differently, seeing bodies and practices differently, and the potential
of desiring differently. Additionally, just as successive generations of young gay men
have found images in pornography that have affirmed their sexual desires, so I would
suggest that the sexualized image of the older gay male and older bodies provides
affirmation to gay men of all ages that sex is not (and should not be) the sole preserve of
athletic youth.

Conclusion
I would like to propose some final thoughts to account for the resurgence and emergence of
the older man in gay pornography. These are not definitive conclusions as there is still a lot
of work to be done here in terms of understanding and situating these representations.
Instead this indicates the direction of some of my thinking as I progress with this research.
Firstly, there is a pragmatic explanation for the appearance of the older gay male in
pornography: The Internet, as I have already observed, creates and opens up new markets
for pornography and enables producers to identify, establish, and exploit ‘niche’ interests.
So ‘Daddy’ porn is a genre that has emerged because a demand exists alongside a
responsive delivery mechanism.
Secondly, as I have also observed here, I think it is possible to argue that as the first
generation of post-gay liberation gay men pass through middle age and beyond, and as
more and more gay men can live lives as openly gay, the desire to see sexualized
representations of mature bodies or bodies that are more recognizable (i.e. older)
emerges.
 Journal of Gender Studies 325

This I think can be seen as progressive, as images of the aging gay male are still rare in
mainstream culture and when they exist are often marked by negativity, as Dustin Goltz
notes:
In the rare appearance of older gay male characters, they tend to range on a scale from at best
peripheral and humorous and at worst monstrous. These invisible men who are absent,
missing and lingering on the outside of the frame become the most concrete examples of what
it means to be an aging gay male. (Goltz 2010, p. 73)
This is I think a potentially important development. It would be quite possible to arrive
at a glib conclusion that sees these representations as little more than the eroticization of
stereotypical patriarchal models of masculinity; instead I would suggest that in the figure
of the sexualized older gay male we see the indication of a progressive and necessary turn
for an aging population, challenging the hegemony of youthful athleticism and celebrating
what we all become.

Notes
1. Richard Dyer has written several useful articles about gay pornography, and during the period of
my doctoral research he was extremely generous with his time and in his support for my work.
Similarly, Tom Waugh’s historical study of pre-Stonewall porn, Hard to imagine remains the
only significant monograph to deal with gay pornographic film, and I greatly benefited from his
expert comments on early drafts of my thesis.
2. See David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristen Thompson (1985), The classical Hollywood
cinema: film style & mode of production to 1960.
3. In Men’s pornography: gay vs. straight (1985), Tom Waugh offers an early attempt at describing
the generic characteristics of the gay pornographic film. For a more specific analysis see also
J. Mercer (2004), ‘Deep in the brig: The myth of the prison in gay pornography’ in Todd
Morrison’s Eclectic views on gay male pornography: pornucopia.
4. This is a matter that is discussed in a forthcoming chapter ‘Gay for pay: The internet and the
economics of homosexual desire’ in Karen Ross, ed. (2011), The Blackwell handbook of gender,
sexualities and the media.
5. In ‘Theories of sexual identity and the masculinization of the gay man’, collected in Simon
Shephard and Mick Wallis, eds (1989), Coming on strong, Jamie Gough offers a much more
detailed discussion of this iconographic shift than space will allow here.
6. Examples are almost too numerous to mention. The website jakecruise.com for example presents
scenarios where the eponymous auteur (a middle-aged male) films younger, gym-built models
and then engages in sexual play with them. The encounters are often presented as transactional,
the inference being that the audience would desire to be the older man seducing younger men.
7. The essay ‘Gay men and aging: sex and intimacy’ written by Edward A. Wierzalis, Bob Barret,
Mark Pope, and Michael Rankins collected in Douglas Kimmel, Tara Rose, and Steven David,
eds (2006), Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender aging: research and clinical perspectives
provides a considered and thorough overview of the existing body of work into gay male aging
and outlines the issues at stake.

Notes on contributor
John Mercer lectures in Visual Culture at The Birmingham School of Media and is a member of
The Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Research. His research interests concern issues of
gender and sexuality in popular culture, in particular the construction of gay iconographic
taxonomies. He is also interested in the relationships between aesthetic and stylistic tropes and
emotional affects across media texts but especially in the form often described as melodrama. He has
previously published work on gay pornography that has appeared in Paragraph (J. Still, ed.), The
Journal of Homosexuality, Pornucopia: Eclectic Views on Gay Male Pornography (T. Morrison,
ed.), Framing Celebrity (S. Redmond and S. Holmes, eds), and Hard to Swallow: Reading
Pornography On-Screen (D. Kerr and C. Hines, eds). He is an editor of The Journal of Gender
Studies and is the author (with Martin Shingler) of Melodrama: Genre, Style, Sensibility.
326 J. Mercer

References
Bordwell, D., Staiger, J. and Thompson, K., 1985. The classical Hollywood cinema: film style and
mode of production to 1960. London: Routledge.
Dworkin, A., 1998. Against the male flood: censorship, pornography and equality of the gay man.
In: R.M. Baird and S.E. Rosenbaum eds. Pornography: private right or public menace?
New York: Prometheus, 264–270.
Dyer, R., 2002. Only entertainment. London: Routledge.
Goltz, D.B., 2010. Queer temporalities and gay male representation. New York: Routledge.
Goode, E. and Ben-Yehudi, N., 2009. Moral panics: the social construction of deviance. London:
Wiley Blackwell.
Gough, J., 1989. Theories of sexual identity and the masculinzation of the gay man. In: S. Shephard
and M. Wallis eds. Coming on strong. London: Unwin Hyman, 119– 135.
Kappeler, S., 1986. The pornography of representation. London: Polity Press.
Kimmel, M.S., 2005. The gender of desire: essays on male sexuality. Albany: State University of
New York Press.
Kipnis, L., 1999. Bound and gagged: pornography and the politics of fantasy in America. Durham:
Duke University Press.
Mackinnon, C., 1993. Only words. New York: Harvard University Press.
Mercer, J., 2004. Deep in the brig: the myth of the prison in gay pornography. In: T. Morrison, ed.
Eclectic views on gay male pornography: pornucopia. Binghampton: Harrington Park Press,
151– 166.
Mercer, K., 1991. Skinhead sex thing: racial difference and the homosexual imaginary. In: Bad object
choices, eds, ed. How do I look? Seattle: Bay Press, 169–210.
Merck, M., 1989. More of man. Gay porn cruises gay politics. Perversions: deviant readings.
New York: Routledge, 217– 235.
Penley, C., 1997. Crackers and whackers: the white trashing of porn. In: M. Wray and A. Newitz eds.
White trash: race and class in America. New York: Routledge, 89 – 112.
Waugh, T., 1996. Hard to imagine: gay male eroticism in photography and film from their
beginnings to Stonewall. New York: Columbia University Press.
Williams, L., 1989. Hardcore: power, pleasure and the ‘frenzy of the visible’. Berkeley: University
of California Press.
Zook, M., 2007. Report on the location of the internet adult industry. In: K. Jacobs, M. Jansson and
M. Pasquinelli eds. C’Lick me: a netporn studies reader. Amsterdam: Institute of Network
Cultures, 103– 124.

Websites
Daddymugs.com
Hotoldermale.com
Jakecruise.com
Older4me.com