Evangelos Tziallas. Psychology and Sexuality. Volume 6, Issue 1. 2015.
Michael Lucas’ Men of Israel (2009) was launched during a particularly volatile period in cross-cultural moving image discourse in North America. John Greyson’s open letter to, and withdrawal from, the 2009 Toronto International Film Festival caused a national and international stir (Archibald & Miller, 2011). The gay Canadian film-maker pulled his short film Covered from the festival to protest what he saw as political collusion between the Toronto International Film Festival and the ‘Brand Israel’ campaign—an Israeli-government-sponsored initiative meant to change perceptions of Israel as war torn, raise the profile of Israeli products and promote tourism, a unique and desirable branded national identity, similar to how ‘Italy’ or ‘Italian’ evokes images of high fashion, wine and art. Lucas’ film was not part of Brand Israel—at least officially—but it is spiritually aligned with the attempt to recalibrate images of Israel and Israelis, in Lucas’ case, of Jewish gay males as erotic, virile and tender, and Israeli society as exotic but familiar, safe and homophilic, and thus Western and different than nations in the surrounding region. Lucas’ Men of Israel has already been discussed in relation to queer politics and the continual conflict between Israel and Palestine (Cavitch, 2010), as a tourist brochure and as part of the Israeli cinema’s transformation into international cinema (Hagin & Yosef, 2012) and as a generic text consumed outside of its political context (Leap, 2011). Building on these works, I wish to make the case that Lucas’ film is not only contributing and responding to broader political and cultural dialogues about sexuality and queer/same-sex sexuality in and between the West and Arab and Muslim majority societies, but is also reacting to the rise of Arab, Turkish, Persian and Berber representation in contemporary gay male pornography.
Colonial contact with, and mass immigration from, North Africa and the Middle East provided European, specifically French, gay male pornographers, such as Jean-Daniel Cadinot and the online studio Citébeur, a historical and contemporary context for their representations. However, it was not until after 9/11 that Arabic and Middle Eastern cultures and identities registered on American porn studios’ radars, with Arabesque (2005), directed by Chris Ward for Raging Stallion studios, reported to be the first American ‘Arab-themed’ gay male pornographic film (Stabile, 2005). Following its success, numerous other films, such as Mirage (2007), Tales of the Arabian Nights: Part 1 and Part 2 (2009), Arabian Heat: Tales of the Arabian Nights Part 3 (2010) and Collin O’Neal’s World of Men: Lebanon (2006) and Turkey (2009) were released, profiting from this surging interest. The 9/11 attacks grouped together a mass of different cultures and societies into a monolithic other that stood in opposition to everything American, engendering a perverse fascination with the differences of a vilified minority. Although American porn productions fed off of this negative energy and discourse, I argue that they also refashioned it and made an effort to address and forge a space for ethnicities and cultures that contemporary Western gay male culture almost entirely ignores and renders invisible.
The strength of the American representations, however, is also their drawback: many of the performers employed in these ‘Arab-themed’ films are, in fact, not the ethnicity or part of the culture they represent. The films could easily be read as racist and symbolic of white privilege, misappropriating cultural identities and trafficking in popular tropes to sell porn, but I argue that the representations must also be recognised for their performative potentials: they are attempts to challenge rigid identity formations and appropriate the potential power of dissimulation and the instability of racial and ethnic identities that manifest from the ebbs and flows of an increasingly globalised world. It is my contention that recent American productions attempt to present a more inclusive, although not unproblematic, vision of Arab, Turkish, Berber and Persian men and culture. Playing with authenticity and performance, the films attempt to blur the manufactured border between the East and the West, ‘white’ and ‘not white,’ and resist dominant images of Muslim and Arab men as categorically homophobic: it is precisely this blurring of identities and racial bodies that Lucas is responding to and reacting against. It is not just that Arab or ‘Arab’ men are the latest gay pornographic craze, but the way in which the breakdown between Eastern and Western bodies, identities and cultures symbolically attempts to bridge what is popularly manufactured as a chasm between two opposing civilisations.
The last thing Lucas wants is for the West, or at least gay men in the West, to see the surrounding regions as not only nonthreatening but similar, and Lucas uses his film to reassert an imaginary East/West border. Regardless of their diverging politics, Lucas, O’Neal and Ward all vie for the Western gay male erotic gaze by projecting digestible, analogous representations in order to push a particular cultural politics: the battle between the left and the right as fought through pornography. These films are not just symptomatic; they are actively intervening into global queer/sexual cultural politics. Cavitch (2010) argues that ‘if we think of the right to exist as the right to be seen, then, for sexual minorities especially, pornography is a vital genre in the art of being seen. Pornography, that is, has everything to do with the comprehensive visibility politics of sexual expression … ’ (para. 3). Lucas, Ward and O’Neal use the spectacle of gay sex didactically to initiate and induct their subjects and objects into a global gay male network. Mowlabocus (2010) argues that ‘pornography is written into the code of gay men’s everyday lives’ (p. 61) and what these films are trying to do is rewrite the code. Although I recognise that these films profit from certain stereotypes and the inaccurate perceptions and understandings of a diverse region and people, it is vital we also appreciate these texts as first steps that open the door for more and better representations and engagements. These are, after all, pornographic films and are part of a genre that is as infamous for its transgressive potentials as it is for its regressive ones. As is the case of queer cultural studies over the last three decades, my methodology involves subjectively interpreting cultural discourses as a white, Greek, Western consumer of gay male pornography and relies on the qualitative value of textual evidence, rather than empirical data. As such, I ask that readers approach these films as texts embedded in not just identity and sexual politics, but economic and social realities, and recognise that complex phenomena we call desire are manifest from political incorrectness (Bataille, 1957/1986).
Citébeur
I turn to the French online studio Citébeur first to underscore how the studio’s representations negotiate and engage France’s colonial history and recent volatile relations with North African and Muslim migrant communities. I do so to emphasise that representations of Arab and ‘Arab’ men in pornography, whether claiming to be ‘authentic’ or foregrounding their performativity, are not ahistorical, but are a product of specific historical, cultural and political contexts. The videos play with racial identities and categories, challenging while upholding and fetishising popular tropes about Beurs—a colloquial term for second- and third-generation North African migrants—and the working poor. After the Second World War and the Algerian War, large cités (housing projects)—mostly in the banlieus (suburbs)—were built to house new immigrants. Decades of mismanaging and failing to properly integrate the influx of post-colonial migrants has produced sprawling poverty and high crime rates in many of the French banlieus (Silverstein, 2004; Silverstein & Tetreault, 2006). Violence has often erupted as a result of continual marginalisation and rampant discrimination. The banlieus were built around factories, but with widespread de-industrialisation in the 1970s, ‘dreams of social mobility quickly transformed into nightmares of physical and economic immobility’ (Silverstein & Tetreault, 2006, para. 7). Citébeur videos are often set in abandoned spaces, with performers surrounded by or using debris as props. Performers frequently masturbate or have sex in front of brick or concrete walls covered with graffiti, with these activities taking place in public or abandoned spaces, or inside private residences; regardless of where the sex takes place, the graffitied wall seems to follow. The public settings are often dilapidated industrial spaces covered with junk and forgotten items, with the sex usually shot underground, but occasionally outdoors. The private spaces are cluttered, unkempt and cramped, marking them as not just working class, but impoverished. These stagnant and slowly degrading environments are fetishised, feeding off of their implicitly eroticised masculine and heterosexual aura, continuing a history of gay men sexualising the working class (Burger, 1995; Cole, 2000; Harris, 1997).
Cervulle and Rees-Roberts have published critical works on Citébeur and ‘Orientalist/ Ethnic/Beur’ porn both separately and together. Analysing Jean-Daniel Cadinot’s classic Orientalist French gay male pornographic film Harem (1984) in relation to the legacies of French gay liberation politics spearheaded by Front Homosexual d’Action Révolutionnaire in the 1970s, Cervulle (2008) argues that the Arab figure ‘has quite simply disappeared from the political framework of gay assimilationist politics … rather, they appear as erotic bodies in ethnic porn’ (p. 177). For Cervulle, the figure of the Arab exists as an image within a colonialist framework whose existence can only be configured as an empty image for consumption, denying said figure a genuine voice and stake in cultural and political dialogues. In their co-authored piece, the authors compare the legacies left by Jean-Daniel Cadinot and, later, Jean-Noël René Clair (JNRC) to Citébeur arguing that ‘there is a radical shift in focus from the neo-colonial sex and class tourism in Cadinot and JNRC to the multiethnic independent studio Citébeur, in which the gay/beur/racaille subculture attempts to mark both a visual distance from stereotypical imagery of Arab masculinity as savage and a political distance from institutional gay culture’ (Cervulle & Rees-Roberts, 2009, p. 206).
There is a discursive shift from Orientalist representation and perception to contemporary ones, brought about by continual migration and the dissolution of distance. ‘The Arab’ is no longer over there and ‘we’ are no longer in their space, but vice versa. Although recognising Citébeur ‘makes strategic use of “exoticism” as a marketing tool to attract white gay consumers … ’ (Cervulle & Rees-Roberts, 2009, p. 205), the studio ‘twists the codes of straightforward ethnography through an ironic acknowledgement of its own investment in artifice’ (p. 204). For Cervulle and Rees-Roberts, ‘The obtrusive masculinity is close to drag in that it artificially reveals its own construction, especially in the use of male accessories … [and] is less a reproduction of straight virility, and more a form of queer subcultural practice similar to drag king performance …’ (pp. 204-205). Rees-Roberts (2008) has gone even further, challenging the presumed white middle-class gay male gaze for whom Citébeur—if not gay male pornography as a whole—is presumably constructed. He suggests that the videos also ‘give young, lower-class beur men the raunchy images they might desire for and of themselves’ (p. 13), potentially bridging affiliation across class lines rather than ethnic or national lines. At stake, then, are the issues of gay male citizenship and belonging, and I argue that with performative, parodic, ironic masculinity also comes the blurring of racial bodies and ethnic identities.
The reclaimed spaces in the Citébeur videos make them open and negotiable, rather than closed and defined, mirroring the flexibility of the performers’ racial identities. The banlieus, after decades of neglect, are beyond repair and thus beyond ‘impoverished,’ framing them as post-apocalyptic. By reclaiming these unregulated environments and making them productive and useful in unintended ways (as cruising zones and spaces for men to have sex with men), these spaces become equalising arenas outside of typical bourgeois settings and norms and, therefore, are not subject to a regulating gaze. Desire is not politically correct, and since ‘civility’ has come to an end, these spaces become environments for participants to fuck in politically incorrect ways and negotiate amongst themselves new rules and codes of conduct. Unconcerned about offending middle-class sensibilities, the sex mixes aggressive thrusting and sucking with tender kisses and caresses; black, pale-white, tanned and brown bodies; circumcised and uncircumcised erections; shoe sniffing; mock-boxing and balaclava-wearing burglars into a singular stream. All bodies can top and bottom and all bodies can interact with each other. Positions are not determined by race, and racial segregation begins to dissipate as physical markers and/or associated tropes overlap—although more effeminate performers are more often marked as ‘white.’ These videos present a very different vision of same-sex male desire, interaction and community than what mainstream French (and generally Western) culture allows, challenging popular assimilationist methods of achieving citizenship in both the republic and gay male culture, eschewing nice, safe representations. Blurring racial divides, crossing class lines and portraying alternative visions of consumerist gentrification charge Citébeur’s corpus with a critical, if limited, edge.
French gay porn icon François Sagat embodies the critical potential of racial performativity, sporting a crescent moon and star tattoo on the very same back upon which he power bottoms. Sagat is famous for his scalp tattoo, muscular frame and playfulness. His appreciation of Arab culture inspired him to get his back tattooed, making him a perfect casting choice for Citébeur, likewise pointing to the fluidity of cultural signs in a globalised, transnational world. Sagat made his video debut in Wesh Cousin 5: Relax Man! and crystallises Citébeur’s attempts to break down stereotypes by playing a burglar who bottoms for his partner in crime. His muscular frame, masculine stature, tanned skinned, beard and tattoos dissolve the threshold between ‘French’ and ‘other,’ active and passive and performing and passing. It was precisely this unique personae and physicality that landed him an invitation to California where his breakout role in Arabesque shot him to stardom.
Arabesque
Bernstein (1997) notes how ‘Western narrative and ethnographic cinemas of the late ninetieth and twentieth centuries inherited the narrative and visual traditions, as well as the cultural assumptions, on which Orientalism was based, and filmmakers discovered how popular Orientalism could be’ (p. 3), citing Aladdin and His Lamp (1917), Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves (1918) and The Sheik (1921) as early examples. Orientalism—a term and discourse coined by Edward Said in his groundbreaking Orientalism (1978)—as Bernstein summarises, ‘described a strand of colonialist discourse in the ideological arsenal of Western nations—most notably Great Britain, France, and the United States—for representing the colonies and cultures of North Africa and the “Middle East”’ (p. 2), as exotic yet threatening, backwards and licentious. Playing with a history of white Westerners traveling to, representing and sexualising the Middle East and North Africa (Hopwood, 1999; Said, 1994; Shohat, 1997; Smith, 1994), Raging Stallion’s Arabesque is an ironic and parodic revision of Hollywood’s Orientalist past. Dedicating the film ‘with Respect and Deep Admiration to Jean-Daniel Cadinot & Kristen Bjorn,’ Arabesque opens with spliced in scenes from The Sheik (1921) and then dissolves into the pornographic diegesis, presenting Arabesque as ‘found footage.’ For various and obvious reasons, these scenes of explicit gay sex were purposely left on the cutting room floor, and director Chris Ward is simply showing us ‘the entire story’ as it was meant to be seen. After a few black and white shots of men praying and sitting in a desert, an intertitle reads, ‘Where the children of Araby dwell in happy ignorance that Civilization has passed them by [sic].’ We then cut to a scene of celebration at a bazaar, and then transition into the pornographic diegesis. The first few seconds are in black and white and mimic the deteriorating effects of old celluloid, transitioning into colour soon after. Although rescuing this purposely lost past, the film likewise feeds off a history of the Middle East being perceived as a zone of ars erotica, a sexually open and available space outside of the West’s suffocating disciplinary gaze (Foucault, 1990). Presenting itself as outside of scientia sexualis, outside of ‘civilisation,’—similar to the post-apocalyptic settings in the Citébeur videos—however, allows for alternatives to be cultivated in this unregulated environment.
Lacking a typical narrative and plot, Arabesque presents itself as a series of vignettes that are stitched together with scenes from silent American Orientalist films, with the lack of dialogue echoing its source material. Unlike the films of Jean-Daniel Cadinot and typical Orientalist offerings, here there is no outsider travelling to the Arab world. Typically, the white Westerner travels to the Orientalist realm to pursue a series of passionate affairs with the locals who are seemingly always ready for sex. In a gay male context, it is typically the visiting white male who bottoms for the aggressive Arab power top (Cervulle, 2009). Arabesque imbricates racial and ethnic distinctions, cross-pollinating ‘white’ and ‘not white,’ bringing them into intimate proximity. Penetrative roles do not fall across racial lines10 as no one is bowing down to another’s masculine superiority, and since there is no outside traveller, the typical threat of ‘going native’ disappears because there is no ‘other’ to seduce them into their world. Although the film presents the ‘Arab’ men as aggressive, hairy, and ultra-masculine, playing up and using stereotypes as selling points, we must take into consideration that this is Raging Stallion’s signature style. The performers and performances are no different than the rest of the studio’s oeuvre: hairy, muscular, masculine, aggressive and passionate, these together are Raging Stallion’s brand.
Descriptions from the studio’s website further confirm the film’s interstitial position, lampooning, yet trafficking, Orientalist fantasy. The website sets the film in a fantasy space where ‘the powerful drumbeat of the Arabian heart drove men into each other’s arms, a co-mingling of sweat and passion that filled deep-rooted needs, the result of a lonely existence surrounded by sand and palm’ (https://store.ragingstallion.com/show.php?m=6). The studio appropriates traditional Orientalist tropes to sell its vision by using images of sweat and sounds of drums to conjure up feelings of heat and isolation, eroticising the luxury of privacy this unwatched realm affords. Although aligning itself with a clichéd history, in a post-9/11 context, the film challenges prevailing visions Americans have of Arabs and Muslims as uniformly homophobic and anti-sex. Similar to the Citébeur productions, Arabesque confronts contemporary gay culture’s racial normativity and uniformity as well as historical and current portrayals of Arab and Muslim men; it presents a more liberal, inclusive vision meant to counteract right-wing rhetoric about the ‘Islamic world.’ Despite being set in the nostalgic fantasy space of some non-existent yesteryear, the film uses exaggerated stereotypes to integrate the figure of ‘the Arab’ and by extension, ‘Muslim other,’ into a global gay culture and consciousness.
Similar to the Citébeur films, Arabesque breaks down alterity by flaunting artificiality. The website states that ‘Arabesque emerged from the silent films of Rudolph Valentino,’ deploying Valentino’s racial perfomativity as a framing device. Valentino’s popularity during the era of silent American cinema came from wooing and seducing spectators (women mostly) by portraying ethnic lotharios, particularly those of Arab ancestry (Hansen, 1994). Like Valentino, none of the performers are actually Arab; many of the performers are studio regulars and known to not be of Middle Eastern origin. Even though the website states that performers Huessein and Sarib are from the Middle East—Huessein is German of Turkish descent and Sarib is South Asian—this disingenuous information is used ironically to parody the way racial and ethnic authenticity was touted in the 1920s (Stabile, 2005): typical Western features such as tattoos and piercings accentuate the bodies’ artifice, and the miniscule physical variance between them dilute differences. Arabesque is neither about passing nor about failing to pass, but about the instability between passing and performing. By emphasising similarity and employing theatricalised Orientalist décor and adornments such as pillows, rugs, candles, Kufis, turbans, robes and flowing pajama pants (loose trousers tied at the waist, a traditional article of clothing in South Asia and the Middle East), the film reflexively parodies the history it emulates. However, a drawback that must be emphasised is that even 85 years later, ‘Arab characters’ are still not being portrayed by those of Arab origin—something that would have enriched the sense of play.
The film is not about ‘Arabs’ but ‘Arabness.’ It is about the clichés and constructions that have endured for decades and continue to present inaccurate visions of diverse cultures, ethnicities and nations as one uniform other that, after 9/11, has become an immediate threat to America and the West. From licentious sheik to overly religious and sex-deprived terrorist, the portrayal of Muslims and Arabs has undergone radical revision (Shaheen, 2008, 2009), but still remains inaccurate and unfavourable. The figure of the Muslim/Arab remains the site where the West projects its anxieties, while at the same time reinterpreting and eroticising those very same properties that they project. Arabesque reflexively plays with a falsified history in order to challenge current misperceptions of Arabic men and same-sex desire in Arab and predominantly Muslim nations and societies, pointing to the instability of these constructed archetypes.
World of Men: Lebanon vs. Men of Israel
In Desiring Arabs (2007), Massad argues that the universalisation of gay identities to societies that live by different understandings of the sexual becomes an implicit form of Western imperialism. Implicating what he refers to as ‘Gay International’—International Lesbian and Gay Association and International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission—and their ‘missionary tasks, the discourse that produces them, and the organisations that represent them … ’ (p. 161), Massad argues that Gay International ‘produces homosexuals, as well as gays and lesbians, where they do not exist and represses same-sex desires and practices that refuse to be assimilated into its sexual epistemology’ (p. 163). Massad argues that same-sex desire was always a part of Arab culture but negotiated and expressed differently than in the West (El-Rouayheb, 2005; Murray & Roscoe, 1997). The call to identify as gay, and to be visible and ‘loud and proud,’ stands in opposition to how sexuality functions in the public sphere in Islamic and secular but predominately Muslim societies in the Middle East and North Africa. The attempt to discipline desire and manufacture public identities is, for Massad, an assault on how sexuality functions in Muslim majority nations, causing more harm than good. Along similar lines, Puar (2007) argues that ‘there is a transition under way in how queer subjects are relating to nation-states, particularly the United States, from being figures of death (i.e., the AIDS epidemic) to becoming tied to ideas of life and productivity (i.e., gay marriage and families)’ (p. xii). Puar calls this ‘homonationalism’ (p. 2), a recent attempt by gays and queers to integrate themselves into a national imaginary by trading perversity and difference for rights and sameness. She argues that ‘an emergent normativity, homonormativity, ties the recognition of homosexual subjects, both legally and representationally, to the national and transnational political agendas of US imperialism’ (p. 9). I wish to use these discursive frameworks to explore how Collin O’Neal’s World of Men: Lebanon and Lucas’ Men of Israel (hereafter to be referred to as Lebanon and Israel, respectively) use alterity to sell their films and their politics, but only to the degree that those differences are absorbed into a safe and digestible framework that, ultimately, upholds Western homonormativity and identity politics (Westcott, 2004).
Filming Lebanon just before the 2006 war between Hezbollah and Israel, O’Neal uses documentary aesthetics to strategically deploy reality as a way to resist Orientalist fantasies and poach journalistic accounts of life in Lebanon under Hezbollah. Collin O’Neal was a Raging Stallion performer-turned producer whose World of Men series took him and his crew to locations all over the world, where he films men from that region having sex with various Raging Stallion performers. In many respects, Lebanon is a typical offering; it is neither the first nor will it be the last gay male pornographic film to sell the fantasy of leisure travel or profit off of the exoticness of foreign locales (Markwell & Waltt, 2006). At the same time, the series highlights and advertises a global network of gay male sexuality, one which includes those typically perceived as hostile and in opposition to it, while simultaneously challenging the American gay porn industry’s preference for white performers and its tendency to sort races. Unlike Arabesque and Citébeur, Lebanon and Israel were shot in the Middle East offering a comparative portrait of how same-sex desire functions in a Westernised space in the Middle East, such as Israel, and in a non-Western nation, such as Lebanon. O’Neal presents Lebanon as neither an enclosed space nor a homophobic one, but a globally integrated nation that is sexually and culturally diverse: a gay-hub for men in the surrounding region. By Western standards, Lebanon is a fairly liberal nation and has received academic attention for its ‘don’t ask don’t tell’ policy regarding same-sex, mostly male, sexuality, and for its vibrant partially above and partially underground gay culture. Recognising Lebanon’s spatial fluidity, anthropologist Merabet (2006) argues that ‘there are different representations—i.e., counter-appropriations—of space … [such as] the appropriations of the café or the nightclub whose clientele changes from day to night times, tuning itself into the continuous flow of spatial contestation’ (p. 203). The subtlety of Lebanon’s gay culture and the emphasis on keeping one’s sexuality private contrasts with Israel’s—Tel-Aviv’s specifically—increasingly visible gay culture and the formation of public gay identities, reflected and buttressed by Lucas’ ability to openly shoot a gay pornographic film.
While the division between acceptable public—and private—display and behaviour is more rigidly upheld in the Islamic world (to varying degrees, as in the case of Lebanon whose population is approximately 40% Christian [Maronite, Greek and Armenian Orthodox and Catholic]), Israel’s predominantly European and North American migrant population has formed a gay culture around the Western ideals of visibility and confession. Lucas uses this cross-cultural similarity as a way to sell Israel as a desirable, safe destination that need not only be watched from afar, but can and should be experienced for oneself. Hagin and Yosef (2012) note that Men of Israel’s ‘double role as gay pornography and tourist advertisement is hard to miss’ (p. 161), especially when DVD copies contain postcards for a tour of Israel with none other than Lucas himself. Lucas hopes that similar to what Bel Ami did for Eastern Europe, the film will attract tourists to Israel and launch a new porn industry in Israel. In the same way that the fall of the Berlin wall and the dissipation of the iron curtain allowed for the discovery of new, young, unalloyed white bodies, Lucas is hoping that Men of Israel will make the Jewish/Israeli male body the most recently ‘discovered’ white body to be lusted after and consumed. With Israel, Lucas has torn down the invisible curtain that has hidden these bodies from the world; he wants to make these new bodies as visible, known and available as possible.
Discussing the now defunct website for the film (www.menofisraelxxx.com), Hagin and Yosef argue that Lucas reflexively showcases Israel as a character in its own right. Two of the five scenes in Israel are shot outdoors on a beach, with the heavy use of long shots making the landscape the most important element in the shot, integrating gay sex into the national landscape. Besides listing some of Israel’s amenities and tourist attractions (for its bourgeois target audience), the (defunct) website boasted Israel’s gay-rights track record and used inflammatory language and rhetoric, such as the following, to differentiate it from surrounding nations:
In a sea of hostility and intolerance of the Middle East, Israel is the beacon of freedom. In every surrounding country, homosexuality is illegal, often punishable by flogging and even hanging. Presently, Israel remains the only country in the Middle East to provide legal protection for gays. Many LGBT individuals have relocated to Israel, often fleeing cruel intolerance that includes physical abuse, exile, or death … The nation is a trailblazer in the area of gay rights, and the only nation in the Middle East and Asia to recognize same-sex marriages. (Source: www.menofisraelxxx.com [website now defunct])
But if Israel is a ‘beacon of freedom,’ then who is that freedom for, and how is it achieved? Freedom in Lucas’ vision is for white, Western, consuming, secular individuals, with the word ‘beacon’ symbolically linking Israel and America vis-à-vis their associating freedom with capitalism and consumption.
For Lucas, same-sex desire is part of a broader gay identity, while in Lebanon same-sex desire is presented as something less regulated and defined. Lebanon begins with credits superimposed over brief clips from the film, fading into a long take that starts with a close-up shot of a statue with a Lebanese flag flailing in the background. The camera then zooms out while panning right, revealing a gigantic mosque, a series of low-rise towers and a wall covering a construction site, stopping on what appears to be a shack using a Lebanese flag as a make-shift wall. The lack of editing in the opening panoramic shot gives it an amateur ‘home movie’ feel and a sense of immediacy, underscoring this experience as authentic. O’Neal, to some degree, continues the Orientalist tradition of the ‘white Westerner’ going to the Middle East for exploration and gratification, likewise representing and constructing it according to his Western perspective. At the same time, though, he is not escaping the West to ‘find himself’ in the isolated East and he is not using the local population; instead, he brings together an international cast to interact with the space, attempting to bridge the East/West divide.
From the opening establishing shot, the film dissolves to a high-angle shot of a police station, zooming out and then panning left, creating a natural split screen. Half of the screen space belongs to a building that looks like it was bombed into near ruin—recalling the various Citébeur settings—while the other half showcases a series of white-painted buildings on a tranquil street filled with trees and parked cars. The building is featured on Lebanon’s DVD cover acknowledging that violence and destruction are integral parts of Lebanon’s physical and emotional landscape. As the camera zooms into one of the blown-out windows and cuts to the interior, viewers discover the film’s first performer, Sayid, whose serene, relaxed body language conflicts with the suggested violence that surrounds him. In the bottom right corner, a green plant grows in the sunlight suggesting new life and growth are possible in this space. We are, again, introduced to transnational, ethno-flexible Francois Sagat as he makes his way up the stairs and discovers Sayid. Merabet (2006) writes that in Beirut, before ‘any kind of direct interaction involving speaking, let alone physical contact, takes place, it is up to the ubiquitous exchange of gapes and stares to respectively assess and categorize the potential object of desire’ (p. 223). As the two men gaze at each other, a series of reverse shots display this common pattern of sexual communication. Upon their mutual assessment and agreement, they make their way up to the final floor and engage first in oral and then in anal sex. Sagat uses the exposed rebar embedded within the concrete ceiling to hoist and hold himself up, while Sayid steadies Sagat by grasping his legs and anally penetrates him. Besides the performers’ amazing acrobatics, by using the space as something more than just a shield from the public’s gaze, it becomes a character, a third sex partner, similar to how Israel is used as a character. Both Sagat and Sayid end up with patches of dust on their bodies, a sign of the space’s participation. By placing the first sex scene in what was a private space, it suggests that gay sexuality in Lebanon not only exists interstitially, but is undergoing transformation as the politics of visibility and naming change the relationship between public and private.
In contrast, Israel’s opening credits present viewers with a series of landscape and city shots, with various performers making their way around Tel-Aviv and meeting up on a patio at a café. These brief snippets feature numerous male-on-male kisses at the café, in addition to some shots of the men sensually touching and kissing in various locations: the display of public affection lays in stark contrast to Lebanon’s empty street shots and displays of affection in secluded or private spaces. The first sequence begins with featured performer Matan Shalev and Naor Tal on an air mattress, under a canopy, on a somewhat rocky elevated shore. The opening sequence is public, open and unashamed, rather than private, hidden and closeted; indeed, the opening credits and first scene emphasise the cultivation of a public identity (Cavitch, 2010; Leap, 2011). Compared to Lebanon’s opening sequence, Israel’s opening sequence suggests ‘couple’ rather than ‘hook-up,’ with the warm lighting and earthy colour tones bolstering the scene’s sense of romance and passion. The opening sequence is meant to sell an image of what Israel’s target consumers can do in Israel themselves; the film is selling and emulating an identity, one based on consumption, leisure tourism and bourgeois homonormativity. In Israel, every scene of physical interaction takes place between only two men—except the opening sequence that features a masturbating voyeur (to be discussed later)—and every sequence begins with those men already together, coding every pair as a couple (even though some performers have multiple partners), selling Israel as a romantic travel destination for Western gay couples. Do not go to Lebanon where you have to keep your love and desire compartmentalised, come to Israel with your partner and do it out in the open on a nice air mattress—bring the private space of the bedroom into the public sphere.
But Lebanon, too, features a public outdoor scene. The fourth sequence starts with O’Neal himself and Sayid entering a rocky arid landscape and making their way over to a nearby stream where they begin to kiss. Wearing jeans and shoes, with Sayid also sporting a black and white keffiyeh, the two take off their footwear and socks and undress, showcasing O’Neal’s Calvin Klein underwear—a popular brand among gay men—and Sayid’s pair of Fruit of the Loom—a less expensive brand that can connote class difference, but one that also marks his body as global. After performing oral sex on each other, the two make their way over to a more secluded area, and while prepping Sayid for penetration by performing analingus, Francois Sagat enters the scene and watches from behind some trees. As Sayid bottoms for O’Neal, breaking the taboo of bottoming and its association with femininity in Arabic culture (McCormick, 2006), Sagat joins in via masturbation. Likewise, integrating gay sexuality into the national landscape, this exterior sequence differs from that of Israel as it suggests ‘cruising’ and is filmed with a multiethnic cast, rather than a couple of the same ethnicity enjoying a prearranged romantic evening.
The political connotations of these different sexual interactions are symbolically embodied by the participating voyeur. In Lebanon’s fourth sequence, Sagat sports a black and white keffiyeh, raising the threat of the foreigner ‘going native,’ blurring the border between ‘us’ and ‘them,’ while in Israel’s first sequence, Jonathan Agassi (the other featured player), wearing army fatigue patterned shorts, enters the scene from a higher vantage point and not only watches, but watches over the couple, also joining in via masturbation. The participating voyeur ‘stumbling’ upon men engaging in sex is a common scenario in gay pornography (Dyer, 1985), but Agassi’s position above the homonormative couple frames him as a protector as much as a voyeur: his placement above the action looking downward connotes surveillance, as if in a guard tower securing the area, protecting the couple. Agassi’s unbeknownst participation emphasises the role the Israeli military—the Israeli Defense Force (IDF)—plays in watching over its (gay) citizens, protecting them from harm, thereby fostering this type of gay visibility, identity and culture.12 In Lebanon, Sagat’s closer proximity and levelled position creates a greater sense of intimacy and equality; Sagat becomes Sayid’s double, with O’Neal’s acknowledging gaze fusing Sagat and Sayid’s bodies together. In contrast, Agassi’s masturbating voyeur comes to embody a homonationalist agenda. The gay couple can have gay sex out in the open on this beautiful beach because the IDF polices and secures the Israeli border, keeping the homophobic other in the surrounding region at bay (Ritchie, 2010).
Lucas uses Israel’s integrated military-industrial complex to merge the geopolitics of protectionism and border security with the common gay pornographic theme/fantasy of the military/soldier. Israel is a militarised culture; it is a society of soldiers and ex-soldiers. Military service is mandatory for every non-Arab, non-Hasidic Jewish Israeli citizen over the age of 18, regardless of their gender or sexuality. The ‘Cast’ section of the film’s integrated website lists all the performers and gives brief personal backgrounds and physical information. On Matan Shalev’s page, we are informed that ‘when Matan turned at 18, he joined the Israeli military [sic]’ and that ‘he had a one year posting working in a jail with the riot police division. It was a prison for the most dangerous terrorists, including suicide bombers who were caught before they caused damage. Matan’s responsibility was to control the inmates when they rebelled and rioted.’ This seemingly superfluous information sells the fantasy of a real militarised body, but one which eroticises the embodiment of a rights-based agenda and identity. Shalev is the hot and good Jewish boy who built up his body not for vanity’s sake, but to secure his homeland from terrorists, collapsing the Israeli body and landscape, characterising Israel as tough, hard and masculine (Cavitch, 2010). Although replicating the gay porn industry standard, these hardbodies not only showcase the benefits of army training, but sexualise them as pseudo-weapons. His body, like the bodies of all the performers, integrates, normalises and sexualises the military-industrial complex, an integral and inseparable part of Israeli gay male culture and the social consciousness (Kuntsman, 2008).
Lebanon’s focus on the global and Israel’s focus on the local crystallise their respective goals, mirroring the way each film uses similar settings to achieve a similar goal, but with a different end result in mind. In Lebanon, the bodies are the same, but the performers come from various places around the world, while in Israel, the bodies are also very similar to each other, but are all local, rather than international. Lebanon’s final scene begins with a tracking shot, taken from within a moving car, of the Baalbek Temple complex. Lebanon’s geographical location along the Mediterranean has, over millennia, been home to the Phoenician, Greek, Roman and Ottoman empire: the multiethnic, international cast reflects how the architecture testifies to Lebanon’s transnationality. After a few shots of O’Neal, Sagat and Jacko sitting and walking around the exterior grounds, they are filmed making their way to the ruins’ interior. A dissolve edit brings us to a fantasy sequence where the three men have sex on a couch in a room, both of which are covered with colourful sheets that orientalise the space, fusing fantasy and the past with contemporary reality. In Israel, the second scene is also shot in a ruin, but features two local performers. Both of them use ancient sites to localise the action, but while Lebanon’s final sequence acknowledges its past and stresses play and transnationality, Israel’s scene downplays the country’s cornucopia of ethnicities and layered history. Israel is an incredibly multicultural nation, although you wouldn’t know it watching the film, and considering ‘Men of Israel was filmed on the site of a destroyed Palestinian village’ (Schulman, 2012, p. 117), Israel’s ruin scene takes on disturbing doubled connotations.
Despite spatial variability that constructs the bodies as different, it is at the level of the body where these differences break down. In Lebanon, the men are hairy, muscular and generally tanned, exuding a masculine aura; similar characteristics can be attributed to the performers in Israel, although some of the performers, in both films, are smoother and thinner than others. When comparing the bodies from Lebanon and Israel to each other, they are far more similar than different: the threatening spectre of cross-culture sameness that haunts Israeli moving image culture’s manufactured alterity and the politics of passing, cannot, despite Lucas’ best efforts, be fully repressed or erased (Naaman, 2001; Stein, 2010). There were media reports about Israel’s performers being Jewish and the presence of religious jewellery as affirmation; however, the bodies’ uniqueness is diluted, leaving them open and vulnerable; they cannot be visually confirmed as authentically Jewish, and thus different than Arab/Muslim bodies, because they may very well not be. Despite their similar strategies but differing goals, when comparing the men, the divisions between ‘white’ and ‘not quite,’ between Jew, Arab, Christian, Muslim, American, French, etc., become unclear, creating a singular prototype that privileges, and is constructed according to, Western gay male ideals.
It is important we remember that the Jewish body, Arab body as well as the Muslim body have a history of being represented, discussed and constructed as sick, perverse, diseased, frail and weak (Abrams, 2009; Lehamn & Susan, 2007; Puar, 2007; Stratton, 2001; Yosef, 2004). Challenging a history of the nerdy, desexualised, diasporic Jew and the frail ‘Holocaust’ Jewish body, Lucas presents us with the new gay Israeli, a variation of the ‘new Jew’ (Yosef, 2004). In a similar vein, O’Neal defies recent constructions of the Arab body as repressed, violent and hostile to difference, presenting us with bodies where East and West not only overlap, but penetrate and lose themselves in each other. Taking this history into consideration, we cannot ignore how Lebanon and Israel respond to and resist these constructions by emulating the way gay men in the West emphasised virility, masculinity and muscularity as a way to resist images of the gay body plagued with HIV/AIDS. These films are projecting a corrective fantasy, which is not only trying to represent a vision that is closer to reality, but one that aligns with a consuming universal grand narrative.
Since gay culture is primarily organised around sex and sexual desire, it makes perfect sense that a primary way to bridge affiliation between these regions and the West would be through pornography: Lucas and O’Neal know this, and this is precisely why these films were made, and what they are, ultimately, trying to achieve. It also seems that the way one becomes part of a global gay culture is to initiate oneself into its Western-dominated discursive framework and adopt its values. Both movies act as rebranding campaigns, making the case that ‘they are just like you’—the target viewer—and both movies attempt to induct their respective subjects/objects into a global gay culture vis-à-vis a generic capitalist pornographic gaze (Cante & Restivo, 2004).
Conclusion
Mahawatte (2004) writes, ‘Since the attacks on the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001 and following the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the already-fraught relationship between the West and Islam has reached crisis point. These tensions have found their way into pornographic practice’ (p. 129). The 9/11 attacks incited heated, emotionally volatile discourse, but as initial reactionary and polemic rhetoric subsided, a space was cultivated to discuss similarities and placate anxieties about differences. In this article, I attempted to demonstrate that pornographic works do not simply symptomatically reflect concurrent dialogues but contribute to them as well. I attempted to demonstrate that American-based studio productions were challenging American perceptions and conservative rhetoric about Islam—which, incorrectly, encapsulates Turkish, Persian, Arab, Berber and various Christian minority identities—with my brief discussion of Citébeur highlighting that French pornographic representations of Arab men both preceded and differed from the American ones. Despite their diverging histories and engagements, Citébeur, Arabesque and Lebanon counteract contemporary constructions of ‘the Arab,’ who often metonymically stands in for ‘the Muslim’—a figure that seems to haunt the West and contemporary gay male culture, and who, in the case of Lebanon, is not necessarily even there. The figure of ‘the Muslim’ is often upheld as a signifier for everything in opposition to gay liberation, culture and identities, and what these productions do is dispute those assumptions. Lucas’ film was responding to the same discourse, but in a way that attempted to maintain the East/West and ‘gay/terrorist’ divide, with the Muslim equalling the Arab and vice versa. Lucas has never attempted to hide his pro-Zionist, anti-Muslim views (Rogers, 2010), and although Men of Israel does not explicitly make these views apparent, their distilled presence is implied throughout the film. Men of Israel was not created in a vacuum; it was created in response to a growing demand for representations of Arab men and ‘Arabness,’ and growing dialogue about integrating Middle Eastern and North African gays and queers into a global sexual network. Gay male culture is a sexual culture, and integration into this global network is achieved by being inducted and initiated into a pornographic gaze. It is clear, however, that those who want to integrate into this global culture must give up aspects of their differences and acclimate to this prevailing model. This can, unfortunately, force those who do not wish to assimilate, or at least in this way, fewer opportunities to chart alternatives.
Upon Inside Israel’s—Men of Israel’s sequel—release, gay porn industry insider and blogger Mike Stabile (2009), acknowledging this recent trend and developing discourse, wrote, ‘Coming next week from Lucas Entertainment, Inside Israel. (I hereby dare Collin O’Neal to follow up the week after with Inside Gaza.) If gay sex doesn’t bring peace in the Middle East, I don’t know what will.’ Nine months later, Stabile (2010), writing about the GayVN porn awards, jokingly made up his own category, ‘Best Proxy Battle for the Mosque at Ground Zero’ nominating Lucas’ Inside Israel and Raging Stallion’s Tales of Arabian Nights (a continuation of Arabesque’s Orientalist theme). Gay sex was going to help ‘solve’ the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but in a few months, it has only reproduced it. There is growing reflexive awareness in popular gay culture that a paradigm shift is taking place. Although Western centric, the integration of those who were previously left off the radar expands and, thus, shifts this centre, a shift that has revealed some very firm divides.
At stake is the issue of identity in relation to not only normativity but also to what has been termed ‘pinkwashing’; the trafficking of gay-friendliness as a way to palliate adverse perceptions. Coined by Sarah Schulman, she associates this phenomenon with Brand Israel and the way the Israeli government cultivates public gay identities and traffics them as political currency (Schulman, 2011a, 2011b, 2012). Pinkwashing is a critical weapon of a growing ‘Israeli Apartheid’ movement, and more specifically, queer Israeli apartheid movement (see http://queersagainstapartheid.org/ and http://www.pinkwatchingisrael.com/). The concept of pinkwashing, however, has been criticised by pro-Israeli activists, with commentators such as Dershowitz (2013) arguing that it is just repackaged anti-Semitism, and with Lucas himself threatening to organise a boycott if New York City’s LGBT Community Centre rented out space to a pro-Palestinian organisation who wanted to throw an Israeli Apartheid event (Nathan-Kazis, 2013). Whether one agrees with Schulman or not, there is very little room to suggest that Men of Israel does not use the spectacle of gay sex to sell a particular vision of Israel, one which stands opposed to the surrounding Arab region. But at the same time, in vying for the Western gaze, we also cannot ignore how films such as Arabesque and Lebanon likewise construct specific visions that downplay how many Muslim and secular but predominately Muslim nations control and punish the private sex lives of its citizens: especially those who desire the same sex. There is a pervasive sense that how a nation treats its gay and queer subjects is how we (in the West) now determine progress and commitment to democratic values (Tippetts, 2013), despite the dissipation of privacy, the rise of the surveillance society and decimation of the welfare state in favour of neoliberal social Darwinism and fiscal austerity. Most concerning of all is how queer and same-sex sexuality, as the litmus test of civility, becomes one of the major driving forces of these new democratic ideals. Queer sexuality and sex cannot be divorced from geopolitics, and in an increasingly digital, networked and image-saturated world, I argue that neither can their representations. Regardless of what one can say about Israel and pinkwashing, or contemporary Islamic society and homophobia, what films such as Arabesque, Lebanon and Israel attest to is not only that the West manages to inadvertently control the way in which other societies construct themselves—while somehow convincing ourselves that we have played no role at all—but that sexual and pornographic images play an increasingly important role in those constructions.
This article was unable to discuss all of the different texts available and all of the similarities and differences between them. Studios such as Men of ZIP appropriate an amateur ethnographic gaze, filming local Turkish and Moroccan men, while the Brazilian-based Alexander Pictures mimics Arabesque’s Orientalist fantasies, but without the irony and production values. Other films such O’Neal’s World of Men: East Berlin, recent Cadinot films such as Hamman (2004) and Nomades (2005), videos such as My Israeli Platoon (2008) and various ones from Gay Arab Club (a subsidiary production of Citébeur) demand further and more extensive analysis. Gay culture is a culture predicated on sex: having it, searching it out, desiring it, watching it and being punished for it; sexual visibility is not enough, but it is a start. Rather than invisibility or non-existence, these films are first attempts to address and integrate people who have been vilified or left off of ‘out culture’s’ map. Gay/queer identities are no longer invisible and marginalised, and gay politics are no longer solely a subcultural concern. For better or worse, they are fully integrated into the geopolitical landscape as rhetorical and ideological weapons. Whether explicit sexual representation is the right, or the best, path towards inclusion, whether this is something that is desired by those individuals or whether this will benefit them, or allow them to eventually define themselves and their own concept of citizenship, are open for further discussion.