Photo via Violet Blue.In a post titled Visible Difference: Gay Pornographers Shooting Straight Porn (don’t be shocked, the links aren’t “work-safe.”), Violet Blue makes a number of great points

I think I’ve posted one or two galleries from Next Door Hookups in the past when they’re tasty, but now this gay site is going all the way and is in full production swing making straight porn. “The hottest trend in gay porn these days is straight porn filmed for a gay audience. With the focus on the male performer(s), as opposed to straight porn where the attention is on the girl, Next Door Hookups delivers str8 porn with a twist.” I’ll say; the amateurs look like they’re having a great time, the guys look good and the girls are, well, real and diverse.

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• Kissing, smiling, laughing — wha? In porn?
• I like it when they start out with clothes on, like real people do.
• These two are having fun, too.
• Lanky tattooed boys with pretty multiracial girls are a plus in my book.
• Pierced guys and safer sex!

• Again, you can never go wrong with kissing in porn.

Read the quote in context here.

To be honest from a quick skim of the site the situations are still pretty awkward or cliché and the women aren’t really that diverse compared to the general population. But the images, and the people in them, definitely don’t neatly fit into the handful of categories offered in industrial porn.

I’ve complained in the past that men in mainstream/hetero porn are generally there as proxies or foils for the viewers and accessories for women who are the “real” attraction. That’s great if women really are the attraction for you but not so great if instead you prefer something beside the often joyless-looking contorted positions necessary to keep the man or men out of the way of the camera. At least from the particular samples Violet Blue provides and links to, because the men aren’t considered so incidental the women, perhaps ironically, seem more involved — not so much as proxies but as, you know, participants.

The end results of this particular experiment might not be a huge step but conceptually it’s a step in the right direction.