Gay Male Porno Comics: Genre, Conventions, and Challenges

Gay male comics – and gay male pornographic comics in particular – have received little scholarly attention. However, as I have previously demonstrated (see Shamsavari 2017b) the history of gay male comics is rich, stretching from the early 20th Century to the present day. It can be considered in terms of a long “pre-Stonewall” period and following the Stonewall riots in 1969, in terms of a number of “waves” of activity. The “First Wave” stretches from 1969 till 1990, the Second can be indentified with the 1990s, and the Third can more or less be equated to the new Millennium. Two dominant genres have emerged within the field of gay male comics, crystallizing during the First Wave: the gay ghetto comic strip, with its emphasis on humour and representations of community (see Shamsavari 2017a), and the gay porno comic, which is the subject of this article. I have previously presented a rough definition of the gay porno comic in a broader discussion of gay male comics field (Shamsavari 2017b), but in the present article, I will discuss the generic tendencies of the gay porno comic in more depth.