The recently rediscovered and remastered 1975 gay demonic possession pornography, Sex Demon, poses the unsettling question: what happens when a twink becomes a top? The first film by J.C. Crickett, the then 20-year-old manager and go-go dancer at the legendary Gaiety Burlesk in New York City, Sex Demon captures the repercussions of our twink, Jim, being gifted a cursed amulet by his boyfriend, John, who forgot it was their anniversary. In John’s rush to find anything resembling an acceptable gift at an antique store, he misses that the obscenely large and ugly costume jewelry has an ominous note that bursts into flames as John leaves. Upon wearing the medallion, the Devil possesses Jim and begins sexually terrorizing the tops of Times Square and the West Village--upending them and their expectations.

Sex Demon’s sex scenes, or numbers, can be split in two: before and after possession. The before numbers fit neatly within the norms of gay romance pornography of the time: intimate with a meandering camera and an edit that flows over and between the bodies and faces, showing pleasure, desire, and arousal. The edits continually pull towards and back away from the couple, producing a clear sense of space and relation between Jim, John, their home, and the camera.  However, the numbers after the possession are shocking in their violence--most becoming rape scenes and almost all ending in a bloody, gruesome death--and their style breaks from the numbers and tone of the first half and from the expectations of pornography as a genre: that is, to be arousing and erotic, producing a fantasy of pleasure to project onto. Just as Jim rushes past foreplay and quickly pushes the victim down to get his release; the film rushes through spatially and erotically erratic montage. These numbers prioritize violence and spectator horror over erotic arousal--an orgiastic form rather than content. 

As opposed to seeing this erotic failure as collapsing the film’s pornographic work, I want to consider that while this failure-to-arouse may cause Sex Demon to “fail” as pornography, it may be critical to what makes it pornographic for queerness. This failure to be hard and hardening offers an interesting limit case for what makes pornography pornographic, and by extension, when considering the homosexual, what it means to be pornographic. 

I take as a provoking lens Rich Cante and Angelo Restivo’s Lacanian linguistic play that hardcore, all-male, moving-image pornography is “more pornographic than pornography.”^[1] The distinction between the two is, in a way, a clear one. Pornography is a set of norms that define a genre, whereas, the pornographic points to the sexually obscene’s intrusion into the public. This is what brings the Supreme Court case with Justice Potter’s oft-quoted “I know it when I see it.” Louis Malle’s The Lovers was exhibited and this entrance into the public opens the censorous charge of the pornographic. Seeing it is required to know it. 

The pornographic also points to the formal play of pornography. In this register, the pornographic is a melodramatic intrusion of sexual excess--be that sex or sexuality--breaking the normative flow of narrative. This quality of excess--of too-much-ness, of the body overwhelming the frame, and the collapsing of narrative--is the threat that must be contained. To charge a text, particularly those that are not generically pornography, with being pornographic is a threat to its makers, its consumers, and those who merely learn of its existence. The pornographic marks what lies beyond the contours of the acceptable, respectable, and allowable--the abject that must be violently rejected. 

While pornography, as a genre, is always in the midst of both, I see a difference in kind for the pornographic between straight and gay pornography. For straight pornography, the pornographic-as-obscenity is a question of when the image arrives in the public. But for gay pornography, the pornographic-as-obscenity arrives in the making, for the pornographic is always-already present and public because of the very presence of the homosexual. Across their published essays on all-male, moving-image pornography, Cante and Restivo articulate the always-already public realm of the homosexual and its pornographic moving images. For, as with the pornographic, the justification for governmental violence against and the intrusion into the lives of the homosexual comes from their forced passage through the public. Forced in that the homosexual explicitly had no legal, logistic, or conceptual access to the private--with the fantasy of the private at least promised to the heterosexual. The homosexual, denied a private, becomes always-already public, and in being public, the homosexual, already marked as inherently and ontologically sexual, becomes obscene. Much like the pornographic, the homosexual comes to be defined as a problem of sex in public. 

It is this commensurability of the homosexual and the pornographic that has lead many queer artists to mobilize an antagonistic use of the pornographic outside of pornography. John Waters, Robert Mapplethorpe, Ron Athey, Andres Serrano, Bruce LaBruce, and a multitude of others intrude explicit sexuality into the world outside pornography. The pornographic here is rupturing the norms of institutional power. It is an intrusion and interruption against the fantasy of a “normal” life. The pornographic for queerness is an ecstatic display of publicity, a reveling in the always-already simultaneity of the public, the pornographic, and the homosexual. However, what Sex Demon provokes is if the pornographic can rupture the outside, what can then rupture its insides? What happens when the pornographic becomes the norm that collapses? What is the pornographic for the pornographic? 

I turn to Sex Demon’s end. While Jim kills his most recent victim, John rushes through the streets trying to find Jim and a way to save him. John, in his exhaustion, is comforted by a stranger on the street, who, upon hearing John’s story, says he knows a priest who can perform the exorcism and who is…part of the family. John, the stranger, and the priest return to John’s home to begin planning only to find Jim with his mutilated victim. While attempting the exorcism, Jim snaps the priest’s neck. Terrified, the stranger runs away, leaving John alone to find the answer to save his boyfriend, but all he can do is accept that Jim will fuck and kill him like the rest. As Jim begins raping John, the film returns to its kinetic editing of Jim’s past attacks. 

But something shifts in this number. The camera begins cutting to John’s face, showing his anguish and resignation. An image of humanity denied to Jim and his past victims. John’s face breaks Sex Demon’s previously established pornographic rupture sending the montage spiraling out into a frenetic accumulation. For six minutes, the editing dashes through the film’s previous events, pulling from the romantic first sex scene, the boyfriends lounging at the table over breakfast, the demon orgy sex ritual, shots of a lavender-stained performance at the Gaiety Burlesk, John’s screaming face, Jim’s penetrating penis, their empty home, and the streets of the Village. It is a frenzy of Sex Demon’s world. The length of the montage tests the patience of pornography as a genre. The montage begins repeating images, moving faster and faster through them, leaving the sex behind and becoming just an imagistic, affective flow. Six minutes that halt the foundational act of pornography--the fucking--but also the halting of the violent norms Sex Demon had established in its own previous break from pornography’s norms.

This rupturing of rupture is where the pornographic lies for queerness. The pornographic within the pornographic are these aesthetic interruptions that break the assumed flow of the film or game becoming obscene in its excessive collapsing of what is desired and assumed of the form. The intimacy with the homosexual-as-sex-act becomes the pornographic breach that explodes out the image, showing the innards of the pornographic. To quote Restivo once more, “a point of unreadability or radical ambiguity,” or rather, of unplayability and radical flaccidity that “arrives at the ‘unthought,’ in order for thinking to begin” a