If You Look at it Long Enough

‘If You Look at It Long Enough’, appeared in a special issue of the peer-reviewed Journal of Homosexuality, "Eclectic Views on Gay Male Pornography: Pornucopia". Simultaneously published as a book (hardback and paperback) by Harrington Park Press, it asks questions around gay studies and academic detachment. It is both autobiographical, and a persona ‘speaking'.

A playful post-modern mix of autobiography and academic study follows and develops the ideas in my book, The Book of Sodom (Verso, 1993) placing great literature alongside what might normally be dismissed as trash or pornography. The essay title references a Roland Barthes tribute to Antonioni, ‘What you add ... is to gaze at things radically, to the point of exhausting them’. My research represents a consistent, serious but creative approach to matters of sexuality and homosexuality.