Gay Male Pornography: An Issue of Sex Discrimination

John Stanley is a senior policy advisor in the Corporate Policy Branch
Management Board Secretariat, Government of Ontario. He is co-editor of
Nation and History: Polish Historians from the Enlightenment to the
Second World War.

“Pornography is big business,” as the author notes, and one of the
special markets of that business is pornography aimed at gay males.
Kendall regards pornography as exploitive and subordinating, ultimately
systemically undermining the equality of men and women. Kendall is thus
among the few gay men who follow the controversial views of Andrea
Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon. This approach has been accepted by the
Supreme Court of Canada, which maintained the Crown’s right to ban
pornographic materials, but changed the grounds from moral abhorrence to
sexual discrimination. However, the queer community has rejected this
logic when applied to pornography intended for gay men and lesbians.

Kendall has been working on this issue for more than 10 years; his book
represents a comprehensive application of the Dworkin– MacKinnon
thesis to gay male pornography. This topic came before the judicial
system in the Little Sisters case, and Kendall prepared the legal factum
for the feminist group Equality Now. In his reasoning, gay male
pornography creates a social definition of the masculine, privileging
the masculine over the non-masculine. It therefore instills self-hate
and internalized homophobia while reinforcing the dominant male power
structure and undermining sexual equality.

In contrast, most queer activists publicly regard homosexual
pornography as life-affirming and liberating, defending its circulation,
sale, and importation. They see such pornography as offering an
alternative vision of society and as central to gay identity. Any
attempt to ban it from the marketplace is viewed as a form of thought
control, necessarily homophobic and discriminatory.

Kendall’s arguments generally rely on assertions rather than evidence
(despite his pleas to the contrary). Although he presents what he
considers to be evidence of harm arising from the viewing of gay male
pornography, these studies are suspect. All involved small samples,
undermining their statistical validity. Most have been criticized for
their methodology or sample selection.

While Kendall’s book represents an interesting application of the
radical Dworkin– MacKinnon approach, it is not likely to be accepted
by its target audience, the queer community, which regards this material
as an important method for opposing the heterosexual messaging that
inundates Canadian society. After weighing the merits of Kendall’s
case, this reader returns a verdict from Scottish law: “not proven.”