Art and pornography in homosexual culture

Chris Ironside

Ironside as a long weekender

By: Victoria Gray
Chris Ironside explores masculine identities through his photography. Sometimes it’s very sexualized and could be considered pornographic, but he is dealing with a tough subject with Hard Candy: sexuality.
“I’m never about blatant pornography, he said. “I think pornographic images are lovely and I think they are lovely because of the oddest thing… it becomes a lot about muscle worship and less about ass and cocks.”

All photos courtesy of Chris Ironside

The art VS. pornography debate has been justified in homosexual and mainstream culture as an exploration of identity. Ironside and many others explore their own identities and others to understand themselves and the rest of the world.
Ironside finished his undergraduate degree in fine arts at the University of Guelph and then moved to Toronto to pursue a masters in Fine Art at York University. That’s when he became interested in masculine ideals and identity. He decided the explore this through pornography and spent five years researching for his exhibition Hard Candy.

Ironside put advertisements in papers asking men who thought they could be in pornography to come to a hotel room and let him take pictures of them from the neck down. He asked them to write their ‘stats’ (height, weight, penis size etc.) on the bottom of the Polaroid. He juxtaposed these Diesel Boys Polaroids in the gallery with images of actual porn star’s body parts.
“When the viewer was coming into that show they were able to stand between (Hard Candy and The Diesel Boys) and self-assess themselves and go, ‘OK, do I ally myself with the screen test guys or do I ally myself more with the bodies I’m seeing within The Diesel Boys work?’ So it was actually meant to kind of look within and figure out where your stance is on that work.”

John Ricco, an associate professor at the University of Toronto who teaches critical and queer theory, believes there really are no boundaries when it comes to questioning what art is. He says that art can be pornography, but pornography is not often art.
“It is important not to try to define that too strictly or definitively,” he said. “In fact really where all of the most interesting political and aesthetic or artistic questions lie is precisely on those blurred boundaries where we’re not sure exactly how to assess.
Homosexuals were being confronted with body issues in pornography before straight men experienced media awareness of their bodies in mainstream culture. Ironside’s exhibition explored the male gaze as experienced by another male.
“I was interested in figuring out where this male ideal, this hyper-masculine ideal that men were faced with, both gay and straight, was coming from…with men it seemed to me like it was a fairly new phenomenon,” Ironside said.

Geoff Person, owner of the O’Connor Gallery where Ironside showed his work, enjoys work like Ironside’s that explores identity because he likes experiencing and learning about the ‘other’. He believes that as long as there is a reason for exploring identity through sex or nudity, it’s a valid expression that can help people navigate a fragmented society.
“We are in a really fascinating time, and I think that people don’t recognize what a mashup we’re in, you know that in the space of a little more than a generation. Not just taboos like pornography or religion have been broken down or reconceptualized but whole social groups have changed,” he said. “(Society is) boiling right now, on every front. There is no sort of safe zone and it’s all really accepting of art and there is no homogeneous group of straight people anymore, or gay people for that matter.”

Through Ironside’s research of homosexual male pornography, he came across an interesting fact. Before the AIDS crisis of the 1970s, homosexual pornography included all body types, but during after and the AIDS crisis, pornography only included large, muscular men. These men were seen as healthy, whereas others were considered diseased.

“You also have gay-for-pay actors coming into play, because it was thought that if you were straight, you wouldn’t catch AIDS” Ironside said. “So you also have that body type coming in (and) that body type is being influenced by what they are seeing in their gay counterparts.”
Ricco believes that pornography’s popularity is due to the fantasy it allows people to play out, but today’s culture idealizes the experience one can have with the buff body type.
“It serves as a substitute for some actual experience with actual bodies that any one consumer of pornography may never have experienced and may never experience,” he said. “But what drives the desire is the potential that someday or in someway, (I’ll experience it) but in the meantime I still need to satisfy this desire so I will turn to pornography.”
The idea of the buff male caught on with advertisers and an element of homosexual culture became transposed onto mainstream media. This act would later breed a culture of men who had just as many body issues as women did.
“It marks a real change in modern masculinity,” Ricco said. “That there’s a generation of young men these days who really are conscious of themselves as sexual objects as well as sexual subjects…that has really confused things, (including) categories and boundaries and identities.”