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, 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 found footage that Jones edits together into a sort of analog horror film.
These interviews are presented along other moments from the tapes that Jones refers to as the “boring parts” viewers might fast forward through to get to the real action, including shots 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 anachronistic 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.”
These interviews are presented along other moments from the tapes that Jones refers to as the “boring parts” viewers might fast forward through to get to the real action, including shots 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 anachronistic 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 jobs, pensions, and social infrustructure, these boys became part of a generation that for the first moment 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 sometimes reluctant actors.
“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 prefigures this hopelessness in 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. Ranging from hesitantly amused to visibly uncomfortable, their facial expressions are the genesis of the meme: “He has the sadness in his eyes that you only see in Eastern European gay porn.” In those eyes is a brief glimpse into a moment between one future ending and another failing to arrive.