Are Gay Porn Award Shows With “Ethnic” Categories Racist?
I recently saw a few people on Twitter talking about the various upcoming gay porn award shows in January being racist for having ethnic categories, and as the producer of my own gay porn awards show (see you at the Str8UpGayPorn Awards in summer 2018!) who reports on the gay porn industry, here are a few thoughts.
Gay porn award shows (or any award show) with an “ethnic” category that separates out men of color can be considered outdated and wrong, but I don’t believe it means that the show organizers are racists who are trying to deliberately discriminate. It feels like, maybe, these shows are just clueless.
These industry events every January copy and paste the same categories they’ve had for years, and then they toss in all the names of nearly every single performer, studio, and scene released that year (or, in some cases, up to three years ago, LOL). So, as deserving as many of the nominees and winners are, these shows have no discerning taste, opinion, or thoughtful appreciation of what’s going on in the gay porn industry. Instead, they’re just an annual exercise of lazily dumping hundreds of names onto a list and hoping that people will tweet about it. Having literally 63 nominees in one category means that you’re only interested in having those 63 nominees give you free publicity, and you don’t really have any clue as to which of them is good. You’re not awarding people, you’re spamming people.
The ethnic categories at award shows are still around because they’re reflective of dozens of gay porn studios specializing in specific ethnicities (Latin, African-American, Asian, etc.) that only feature certain types of men, and award shows with ethnic categories are of course attempting to get publicity from them, too, by nominating them. So, are the owners of all those ethnic studios—many of whom are men of color—racist? People pay money to these studios because they like the types of men they film, and the studios are capitalizing on that appreciation, so I don’t know that this can be considered racist. There are obvious exceptions, and when I see black-themed studios with the word “thug” in the title being called out, I would agree in calling them out. Words are used in different contexts and have different implications over time, and a word like “thug” being applied to black performers shouldn’t be accepted.
If award shows with “ethnic” categories have to be protested, does that mean that studios only featuring specific ethnicities have to be protested, too? No. Ultimately, the award shows are singling out ethnic studios separately because the content that those studios produce is inherently based on a specific ethnicity. Going forward, ideally, the shows would remove the ethnic categories and simply nominate the best content, regardless of ethnicity.
In short, the industry as a whole is responsible for award shows having “ethnic” categories, so blaming award shows for their categories—which, again, are reflective of the industry—doesn’t address why some studios aren’t hiring enough diverse models in the first place. Studios have made some improvements over the years, but there’s still a long way to go.
(And, if you need another reason to not care about the award shows, there are plenty. Str8UpGayPorn, for example, no longer covers any show that nominates serial alleged abusers and actual deranged racists like Michael Lucas. Nominating him renders the show completely illegitimate, and that event is contributing to the abuse and harassment of performers.)
