THE FALL OF COMMUNISM AS SEEN IN GAY PORNOGRAPHY
“Even in an unlikely place, it is possible to find traces of recent history,” says William E. Jones in The Fall of Communism as Seen in Gay Pornography (1998). Evidently, some of these unlikely places are man-on-man adult films made in countries like Russia, Hungary, and the Czech Republic following the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the socialist bloc.
In grainy b-roll footage, taken from VHS tapes with titles like Czech In and Out and Hungary for Men, young men are interviewed by off-screen producers as they are posed by disembodied hands and prodded with invasive questions (“Do you ever masturbate? You find this very embarrassing?”) in clips that Jones edits together into a sort of analog horror film. Ranging from hesitantly amused to visibly uncomfortable, the facial expressions of these boys and others like them are the genesis of the meme: He has the sadness in his eyes that you only see in Eastern European gay porn.
These interviews are presented along other moments from the videos that Jones refers to as the “boring parts” viewers might fast forward through to get to the real action, including footage of flea markets and street beggars in the countries these videos were made—a sort of orientalist poverty fetishism that is its own kind of porn—and pre-sex scenes in which the actors wear military uniforms and pretend to study maps of the USSR in the vaguest pretext of set dressing. “A soldier will seduce a comrade under a picture of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev,” narrates Jones. “He wears the uniform of the post-Soviet Russian army. Symbols of old and new coexist in the fantasy world of gay porn.”
In grainy b-roll footage, taken from VHS tapes with titles like Czech In and Out and Hungary for Men, young men are interviewed by off-screen producers as they are posed by disembodied hands and prodded with invasive questions (“Do you ever masturbate? You find this very embarrassing?”) in clips that Jones edits together into a sort of analog horror film. Ranging from hesitantly amused to visibly uncomfortable, the facial expressions of these boys and others like them are the genesis of the meme: He has the sadness in his eyes that you only see in Eastern European gay porn.
These interviews are presented along other moments from the videos that Jones refers to as the “boring parts” viewers might fast forward through to get to the real action, including footage of flea markets and street beggars in the countries these videos were made—a sort of orientalist poverty fetishism that is its own kind of porn—and pre-sex scenes in which the actors wear military uniforms and pretend to study maps of the USSR in the vaguest pretext of set dressing. “A soldier will seduce a comrade under a picture of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev,” narrates Jones. “He wears the uniform of the post-Soviet Russian army. Symbols of old and new coexist in the fantasy world of gay porn.”
“They were products of a crude imperialist enterprise: cheap and nasty looking, with an atmosphere of coercion and cultural misunderstanding pervading them,” said Jones about this wave of videos that flooded the American market in an interview. “At the most desperate moment, old people were forced to sell piles of family heirlooms on the street to make ends meet; the only thing young people had to sell was access to their bodies. Someone from the West could literally enslave naive youths, if not permanently, then at least for the duration of a video’s production, and for as little as fifty US dollars.”
The dissolution of the Eastern Bloc and the introduction of the free market saw living standards and life expectancy drop at a rate that had never been seen before in history. As capitalist “shock therapy” slashed social safety nets and pensions, these boys became part of a generation that for the first time in their lifetimes had to deal with the dire possibilities of unemployment and homelessness, new citizens of a world where sexuality was now directly connected to money and where selling their bodies could become a real necessity. Porn producers from the Western countries that played a large part in bringing about the titular fall of communism swooped in to profit off their “unspoiled beauty,” briefly employing them in these videos as actors who at turns appear curious, reluctant, or overtly hostile.
“Sex tourism generally develops when white people from rich countries have the opportunity to fuck the people of the Third World,” said Jones. “It almost never involves sex with poor white people. There have been two major exceptions: Germany between 1919 and 1933, and Eastern Europe after the fall of communism. In the first instance, this departure from the norm was a prelude to fascism. In the second instance, it’s still an open question, but political outcomes in Hungary, Russia, and, most recently, Poland, have not been hopeful.”
Jones’s video excavates this hopelessness from the bodies and faces of the young men on screen, the disappointment and confusion that followed the collapse of the Eastern Bloc written all over them, with the sadness in their eyes that remains after one future ends and another fails to arrive.