Notes From a Porn Island: Queer Identities and Documenting Legal Truth(s) in the Age of Treasure Island Media

I was away at the Law and Society Annual Conference last week (reflections to follow). My paper was as titled above, and below you can read my abstract (summary) and take a look at my slides from the paper presentation. All thoughts/comments welcome. I'm hoping to (finally!) finish an article this summer and get it sent off to a journal (probably sociology based).

Abstract:

Paul Morris cuts a controversial figure in the world of queer pornography. The San Francisco based Director and founder of Treasure Island Media (TIM) remains at the centre of a company that seeks to celebrate, highlight and explore the ‘raw’ sexual experience whether through bareback anal sex, intense oral sexual encounters and cascades of semen.

Morris’ films shock, excite and sell. The recent emergence of a ‘spin off’ website called Ryan Sullivan’s Island produced by TIM employee and film-maker, Ryan Sullivan claims to offer viewers an insight into the world of Treasure Island Media as well as insights into the personal journey of Ryan Sullivan.

Morris is himself at the heart of the bareback controversy, revelling in a brand that casts him as a demonic and twisted porn master, his ‘performers’ cast as the male species set free. Morris has commented that ‘TIM was meant to be a kind of pornographic nature reserve, a place where wildness could take place and be observed.’ For him, bareback porn represents an authentic documenting of the gay sex experience; the notion that wild ‘authentic’ men released from the bonds of a heteronormative society fuck as TIM records them. Rather than porn as the producer of fantasy, here TIM seeks to document gay masculinity as a lived experience.

Lsa11 notes from a porn island

View more presentations from Chris Ashford

In doing so, it challenges the established norms of the HIV/AIDS world, a socio-legal culture that seeks to respond to the medical realities of a world in which the spread of HIV/AIDS is a political and cultural concern in which even promiscuous slutdom is constructed through the ethics of high-risk health strategies. Since the emergence of HIV/AIDS in the 1980s and the subsequent medical response, the lives of gay men have been transformed leading to Carl Stychin noting that ‘the politics of safe sex education…is surely one of the primary moral issues surrounding our sexuality today.’ Fifteen years on from those words being published, it remains equally true.

This paper will seek to explore how TIM is attempting to document bareback gay sex within the wider context of bareback and bareback pornography. It will highlight the latest move by the Company within the context of ‘barebacking bloggers’ through Ryan Sullivan’s video log and film Island to document itself, and in doing so, will consider the construction of pornographic truth that TIM seeks to present, and the challenge that represents for the legal construction of queer sex.

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