What New York City Can Learn From the Berlin Porn Film Festival

A time when Manhattan was a place where you could watch porn in a theater, when you could fuck in a nightclub, cruise in public parks; it’s this pre-gentrified, pre-AIDS crisis New York City that queer history so often comes back to and at the Berlin Porn Film Festival, it’s this Manhattan that I first see on screen in the documentary Hot Good Stuff. The film is part of the major retrospective of the festival, which aims to place transgressive classic films from porn’s “golden era” of the 1970’s alongside current flicks.

Hot Good Stuff features several rare 16 mm films from legendary gay porn label Hand in Hand by Jack Deveau. The outdoor shots are instantly recognizable as scenes from New York, that lost era of Times Square peeps and a West Side culture that no longer exists. In one beautiful, gritty scene gay sex happens on an empty subway car.

The retro-programming is an ideological grounding for the festival; harkening back to the time of “arthouse porn”, when porn was almost considered art, was considered chic, played at theaters alongside experimental offerings, when smut films were openly attended by anyone curious to see what the underground hype was about.

Though the 1970’s “golden era” of porn is a thread that runs through many of the new films shown at the festival, whether in aesthetics or in anti-capitalist avante-garde politics, the queer porn/feminist porn movement of the last twenty years has been a revolution of its own.

Though the 1970’s “golden era” of porn is a thread that runs through many of the new films shown at the festival, whether in aesthetics or in anti-capitalist avante-garde politics, the queer porn/feminist porn movement of the last twenty years has been a revolution of its own. Directors like Shine Louise Houston, Courtney Trouble, Maria Beatty, Poppy Sanchez, Vex Ashley, the collective of Meow Meow films and many others have been able to create a more diverse and inclusive pornography, with a strong sense for the intersection of aesthetics and politics. Thanks in part to places like Berlin with its thriving art scene and affordable cost of living, at least compared to New York, and in part to f the Internet as a place global place to find and share the work. But both of these realities are under attack, thanks to gentrification and Internet censorship.

Rents have risen in Berlin (to the point that the city is imposing a five year rent freeze

) and with it real estate speculation is predatorially targeting the queer and art spaces that flourished in the no-man’s land left behind by the fall of the Berlin wall. MovieMento, the theater where the festival has taken place for the last decade, the oldest working theater in Berlin, is on the brink of extinction as they are organizing a to come up with two million dollars in order to keep the theater.

During the festival, many of the directors and actors work maniacally, shooting new content in addition to attending screenings, workshops and the after-parties, which are also the fantasy-stuff of a forgotten New York. One official after-party was set in Ficken3000 a gay discobar with a crowded dancefloor, gay porn on tv screens, and a set of stairs that lead to a basement full of glory-holes, Saint Andrew’s crosses and catacombs for fucking.

Watching the films it’s hard not to also feel nostalgic for the just-now; for the queer porn of the aughts, a movement that was often described by journalists not by what it stands for (an anti-capitalist praxis) but what it appeared to stand against (the monotony of the commercial porn industry).

If there was a distinct trend in the new films of this year’s festival, it seems to be reveling in the retro, in The Love Witch inspired color palettes, in a cheeky nostalgia for the genre of sexploitation as an age of almost-innocence and joy. But watching the films it’s hard not to also feel nostalgic for the just-now; for the queer porn of the aughts, a movement that was often described by journalists not by what it stands for (an anti-capitalist praxis) but what it appeared to stand against (the monotony of the commercial porn industry). Journalists focused on surface aesthetics, in how these movies featured an array of body types, of multi-colored haircuts, of piercings and tattoos. But watching the fucking on screen, I revel in their representations of how queers fuck, the many ways that we make sex happen, the many ways we desire, lust, cum.

In Poppy Sanchez’s Tease Cake, shot on 16mm, four friends get together in a technicolor femme fever dream fucking atop pastel cakes decorated with catcalls, as a chandelier sways above. Clear glass dildos are covered in a substance that looks like honey, are licked and fucked, which prompted a male presenting movie go-er to ask during the Q&A why lesbians would want something that looked like a phallus in their film. The audience groaned and actress Le Roy laughed, saying “we can make a cock out of whatever we want.”

I was so deep in the world of queer porn I’d almost forgotten “mainstream” lesbian porn often doesn’t show dildos, strap-ons and the varieties of ways queer people have sex, let alone a variety of bodies and gender expressions. In Foxy Strikes Back by BEYONDDEEP blaxploitation aesthetics are reclaimed in an homage to the character Foxy Brown, and the kink roleplay scenes that leave no question that queers can fuck hardcore with endless cocks made from anything.

The French-Mexican slasher film Knife + Heart (Un couteau dans le cœur), a feature by Yann Gonzalez, also made a lot of noise at the festival, billed as “one of the greatest lesbian movies of the year”, it was also selected to compete for the Palme d'Or at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival. In it, a lesbian producer of low-budget gay male porn experiences a painful break-up while the stars of her film are slowly murdered by a serial killer the recalls the 80’s thriller flick Cruising. The movie plays with the themes of life imitating art, and art imitating life. We live through it the moment of passage from the candy-color psychedelics to neon-lights and chilly blues of the VHS tapes that will kill porn movie theaters.

Mixing art films with smut is the point of the festival, as is tackling the questions of whether pornography can be art, and what makes something a work of art. One independent short shown at the festival, The MultiVerse in a Mouthfuck by JorgeTheObscene manages this conjunction perfectly. The piece follows through a voice over the barrage of thoughts that go through the mind of a bearish protagonist who, at a sex club, offers to deep-throat another club goer. From the anxiety of wanting to offer the best blowjob to this hottie, the mind wanders seamlessly to metaphysical speculations, reflecting over the status of the self and its relationship to the other, thoughts circling in an ever more complex relationships to itself in a trippy multi layered voice-over, the seven principles of hermeticism mixed with sex; the all is the mind, the universe is mental. At the end all is one, one is all, and the beard is full of cum.

But in spirit with the anti-capitalist vein that runs through many of the films, what New York City artists could learn is how to push through both activism and art in the face of class warfare.

But works like this are becoming harder than ever to find, as directors and performers are pushed offline, shadowbanned, and have their social media accounts deleted by the platforms they need to work, in the name of confusing and ever changing TOS whose “community standards” target queer people, people of color, sex workers, and even left politics. It’s harder than ever to connect with others who want to create this work. We’re at risk as a community, since erotic queer art is losing nearly all visibility in a time when the vastness of the early Internet is giving way to the fewer and fewer platforms we utilize.

But in spirit with the anti-capitalist vein that runs through many of the films, what New York City artists could learn is how to push through both activism and art in the face of class warfare. In art, like in sex, we’ve got to make beauty from anything we’ve got; the politics of the left have never been about bread alone but roses too. The queer porn explosion that started in the early aughts goes on at the Berlin Film Festival. It’s not because of a commercial impetus, but thanks to the pornographer artists who realize the importance of making these films, who consider it not only an act of transgression but of political activism to make art from our time off, from our sex, from whatever we’ve got.