John Paul Stadler, assistant teaching professor of film studies at NC State with a doctorate in literature, researches on sex and gender and their representations within media. As a prominent queer media scholar, Stadler is familiar with porn’s significance to queer scholarship and research.

Stadler said he views pornography as a cultural text and testament to the overall cultural anxiety that lies in the marginal spaces of society. 

“Some of my work has dabbled into the realm of porn,” Stadler said. “Specifically, looking at the history of gay porn and its relation to various political crises and interventions.”  

Now a billion-dollar industry, Stadler said porn didn’t start out as an enterprise at all — in fact, it took quite a while to gain momentum. Some of the most premature forms of pornography relied on avant-garde and guerrilla independent filmmaking. 

“The earliest form of pornography, [in an audiovisual sense], after photography, was the stag film,” Stadler said. 

The stag film, or the “smoker,” was generally made for all male, all straight audiences. According to Stadler and Dictionary.com, it was distributed by men only for secretive showings for male fraternal orders. Time went on and it shifted from less heteronormative representation and desire to more queer desire and representations. 

“You’d have a lot of these semi-clandestine videos of men, usually in singlets…sometimes even naked wrestling,” Stadler said. “These films were presented, not as inherently as porn and it would have a built-in culpable deniability, where you could say, ‘Oh, no, this is not homoerotic, just men showing off their physique.”

According to Stadler, porn was also the first kind of media that allowed and celebrated explicit representation of queer desire. In regards to film history, the production code, the Hays Code, was extremely restrictive of any kind of representation of sexual desire. Of course, queerness was never allowed to be represented in mainstream media (unless it took villainous roles) — so it has found its way elsewhere. 

“There are arguments to be made that the history of pornography is simultaneous to the history of all cinema… as new technologies develop, porn has always been at the forefront of new technological development,” Stadler said. 

According to a paper published in the American Journal of Public Health, at the beginning of the AIDS pandemic, pornography was used to teach its consumers and actors safe sex practice. From the use of condoms to the frequent testing of all porn stars (the PASS system), gay porn was ahead of the game when it came to promoting and instilling safer sex. Though, gay porn also started the fetishization of no condoms with bareback sex — so not a total win-win. 

The AIDS crisis was not the only pandemic the porn industry was faced with, as COVID-19 caused detrimental losses for the industry. When faced with a crisis, the porn industry again was at the forefront of change.

According to the New York Times, the models for COVID-19 testing and protocols were actually modeled after the PASS system used for the adult film industry. Highly adaptable to disaster, pornography has needed to be at ready for anything and everything — including its demand. 

Stadler’s most recent paper, “Pornographic Altruism, or, How to Have Porn in a Pandemic” tackles COVID-19 and its effects on the porn industry. 

“Pornography has so much baggage to it, and people walk into it with a lot of stereotypes and things you’ve been taught by either parents, religious institutions or educational institutions,” Stadler said. “Instead, come into the conversation with an open mind.”