Robert Brink - Writer

Skateboarding & Gay Porn Unite!

July 9, 2006 | Skip To The Comments (4)

Warning: This one is explicit. You might read about dudes boning one another in the ass. It bewilderingly juxtaposes skateboarding and gay porn. If you think can handle graphic descriptions of gayness and a horrible misunderstanding of skateboarding videos, read on. If you can't, go somewhere else.

I've always wanted to do something with this gem of an article. I stumbled across it long ago while researching my Wood Recycling article. I simply Googled the term "Bareback skateboarding" to look up the popular skateboard deck manufacturer, and ended up finding No Limits: Necessary Danger in Male Porn.

I'm not quite sure how the worlds of gay porn and skateboarding meet in the eyes/mind of the author, Paul Morris. It seems he's simply stating that film makers in each industry are "socially irresponsible" (for lack of a better term on my part) because they don't portray the risks involved with the two activities in their films...only the successes. So, for example, even though a skateboarder could get injured or die while attempting a trick, and a gay porn star could get AIDS and die as a result of filming a porn, the average viewer is only given the impression that "irresponsible" and "high risk" behavior such as skateboarding and gay anal sex are "safe." Morris also claims that slams, injuries and run-ins with the law are deliberately left out of skateboarding films, (TransWorld's videos specifically) which, in turn "misleads" the viewer to thinking skateboarding is "risk-free."

In late 2002, I sent this essay to Dave Carnie, hoping it could be my gateway into writing something for my favorite skateboard magazine ever, Big Brother, and this was his response:

That essay was indeed crazy. i'm usually pretty thick-skinned when it comes to gay stuff, but something about men feeding men, and that one hour rim job story kind of got to me. To be quite honest, we try to keep homo stuff to a minimum, if at all. The Safeway chain didn't like our "Gay Issue" very much and since we've tried to please them with our outwardly heterosexual content. I'm sort of kidding.

I was pretty stoked that I managed to send something Dave's way that actually "got to him." Needless to say, although he wasn't into me handling this piece for the mag, he extended the invitation for me to pitch ideas to Big Brother, but it went out of business shortly after. So that's the history of this little thing.

One other funny little side note, this essay was "presented" at the World Pornography Conference in LA during the Summer of 1998. Paul Morris actually hired and 18-year-old skateboarder to read it for him. Morris also enlisted in the Navy at age 19, serving three years before receiving a dishonorable discharge for being caught on base at a self-made glory hole.

The passage where skateboarding is compared to gay porno is excerpted below.

No Limits: Necessary Danger in Male Porn
By Paul Morris

...Let me jump here, and bring in for comparison another American physically-based male subculture—skateboarding—and compare elements of their representative videos. The following are several simple points of similarity between the two:

1) Both skateboard videos and gay pornography emphasize the contextualization of the creative and erotic act in everyday life.

I experienced a nice coincidence that illustrated this. I interviewed a couple of young skateboarders several months ago. They told me that they came up with some of their best tricks on the way to the local 7-11 a few blocks away. That night I happened to watch a male porn video in which the central character met his first trick on the way to a convenience store. This is more than simply playing with the word "trick". In both cases, the practices that are peculiar to the subculture occur in the context of everyday life and are given a heightened meaning through the contrasting uses of these public spaces. They take place within but apart from the mainstream world.

2) The videos in both cases connect isolated members to the subculture. They show the viewers what people are doing, how these things are done and what they mean.

3) Both focus on places or situations in which the denizens of the subculture predominate and the conditions for their optimal functioning are readily available. These are videos that tacitly imply that "We are everywhere".

4) Both represent acts that are essential to the subculture because they are on the edge, because they are dangerous and illegal. Some skateboard and skateboard video company names I've encountered are Death, Danger, Watch Me Masturbate, Skull, Numbskull, Boner, Gloryhole.

In a remarkable skateboard video called "Radioactive Throwup", boarders not only skate, they also juggle while they skate over and off the roofs of houses. In many skateboard videos, unpleasant encounters with cops are shown, and risks are taken that are exhilarating, beautiful and irresponsible.

Let me footnote this—taking myself further afield—with a story about surfing, a sport that is obviously related in many ways to skateboarding. I spend a good deal of time in Santa Cruz and around the Monterey Bay and have many friends who surf and skateboard. As you know, the Monterey Bay is a favored habitat for Great White sharks. A few years ago, a young surfer was killed by a Great White, literally bitten in half. The next day—the very next day—I watched young friends of mine surfing in the same spot. When I talked with them about this, about risk and fear, they said that this is what often makes it best. This was the point of surfing: to experience not only of the proximity of danger and death, but also to feel a kind of species humility in being shunted down to a low point in the food chain, animals again. It's a practice of exploring the wilder animal self in the restrictive context of a neurotic society. That the price of admission includes the real possibility of death serves to point out the seriousness of their commitment as well as the ultimate expendableness of what they experience as self. Danger is the boundary that demarcates their cultural territory.

There was recently a controversy in the world of skateboarding videos. The controversy was due to the fact that larger companies such as TransWorld had been making skateboarding videos that were slicker, more expensive and more polished than most. Many skateboard videos are made by the boarders themselves. The TransWorld videos, in contrast, were designed not only to represent the practices of the culture and sport, but also to promote the sport to novices in order to encourage the purchase of merchandise being sold by sponsoring companies. In these videos, the "best" skateboarders (a term which rankles the sensibility of the street skater) performed extraordinarily difficult tricks. And they did them beautifully, perfectly.

I was fortunate enough to be "on set" for the shooting of one of the TransWorld videos. The location was an outdoor staircase near the gym at UC Irvine. One boy was to ride down the banister of the staircase. He did the trick over and over. I counted fifteen tries. He got it right two or three times. He got it perfect once. By the end of the shoot he was bloody. The perfect take was the only one that made it into the video, with no blood in evidence.

This sanitizing of the performance of the trick epitomizes commercial duplicity and irresponsibility. These videos sell well across the country. Newbie boarders try incredibly difficult tricks and are seriously injured. Important information—information about desire and danger—is being excised. The problem wasn't the dangerousness of the tricks. The problem was the way in which they were depicted, a basic dishonesty that is linked to the needs of merchandising.

The corporate skateboard video producers are presenting an image of skateboarding that is more saleable to the general public because it is buffered from the dangers the sport actually entails. The producers carefully remove images of either physical mishap or conflict with the law. These videos lead to a misunderstanding by the viewer of the nature not only of the "sport", but also of the culture that has developed about the sport. They also set the idea that only "special" or especially talented young men skate—young men such as those chosen for the videos, young men who seem able to perform the impossible trick perfectly in a single try. This allows the creation of a competitive elite among skateboarders which in turn enables the development of a lucrative system of sponsored competitions, sponsorship of marketable skaters and intracultural celebrity...

...It's perhaps sad but it's true: we cannot be trained not to do things because they are unsafe. We smoke, we drink, we eat wrong, we drive faster than we should, we leap from airplanes, we bungee jump, we skateboard, we have sex. It isn't that we must do these things, it's just that they must be done.

This is one of Gabriel Rotello's errors: in our world, safety cannot be mandated, particularly where the passions at the heart of our identities are concerned. As a people, we do believe in miracles. We are optimistic and irrational. We believe that we can be saved if we will just be ourselves. We smoke, drink, fuck and play because this is what we are and this is what we do. It is this depth, this complexity and this eloquent and tragic irrationality that porn has the responsibility to represent and represent accurately and honestly. That is its job. An avoidance of unsafeness doesn't work as an anti-AlDS strategy, and it has been bastardized by the slicker elements of porn in ways that have only exacerbated the problem, promoting not a culture of sex and sexuality, but a perfectly tantalizing world of vapid heat and "sexiness"...