After three years of shooting, I’d disowned the Gonzo world. I had just seen too much. It had taken a toll on me, in the form of broken relationships, guilt, and regrettable behavior. I concluded that my life would be a hell of a lot sunnier if I could stop collecting money for videotaping women getting crushed before my eyes, and I simply removed myself from the arena. I applied to graduate school and eventually got in. I studied, talked a lot in class, and loved it. But I was poor. I was really, really poor.

So I called my last boss up, rather shamefacedly, and asked him for my job back. “I don’t have it anymore,” he said, “but we’re starting a new site. Would you be okay with shooting gay?”

For a moment I considered. I had never seen two guys go at it before, and at first the idea didn’t appeal to me. Though I thought of myself as very open-minded, for some reason the idea of filming male sex ad infinitum, from a first-row seat, depressed me. Perhaps I still envisioned my foray into porn as a type of sexual wish-fulfillment: with nothing to gain in terms of conquest, these scenes may have lost a bit of their luster. Or maybe it’s more honest to say that I was simply scared.

In the end, it didn’t matter: my desire for the easy paycheck won out, and I took the job. And rather quickly, I came to feel happy that I had—morally, it was another world entirely. The scenarios were still contrived, I admit, and the orgasms were half-hearted, if they came at all. I employed plenty of guys who were there for the money, make no mistake about it; and without exception, the production values stayed amateur. But the shame, rage, and sexual violence that I had come to associate with porn was almost completely absent. That meant something.

Gay porn, in fact, was so goddamn simple that it approached a type of Zen beauty. I mean, this was guys taking on guys, in every shape and form imaginable, for the most part in good humor and absent-minded lust. They may have stuck to roles of “tops” and “bottoms,” but in the dressing room, we all seemed equals, on the same team. Everyone laughed at me for being a straight guy shooting gay porn. Some tried to entice me to jump in front of the camera for kicks. But we all laughed about it. We all seemed like friends. The sadness and the degradation I had come to associate with my job, with videotaped sex for money, was suddenly absent.

But I’m saddened to think that the only path to the absence of hostility and anger in porn is to remove women from the equation. It doesn’t bode well, especially for a world in which men and women must continue to co-exist. In the first half of my porn-life, I lived inside of a world where it almost seemed like an entire gender was being denigrated, like that was the whole point—where very young women were choked and slapped and written-on with lipstick, simply for the crime, it seemed, of being a woman. You should have slept with me, seemed to be the unspoken message. Now see what I have to do to you

read more at www.alternet.org