CREATIVE NONFICTION 21
important to be destroyed. A solution to this
dilemma was reached in 1819, when 202 of the
cities’ more lascivious artifacts were moved to a
secret, locked room in the Neapolitan museum
founded to house the area’s rediscovered antiqui-
ties. No women or children were allowed to
enter this room, and no poor people either. Only
moneyed gentlemen could admire its obscene
treasures—what scholars and cataloguers began
to call the museum’s “pornography,” adapting an
obscure classical term to a new (and very differ-
ent) context.
As a word, then, pornography is a nineteenth-
century invention. It’s also a word bound up with
shock—not the shock of the new, but the shock
of the ancient. The shock of touching the past.
I think of this history whenever I stumble
across a video I watched for the first time as a
sweaty, awestruck teenager. Often I’m struck
by how much I remember, and how vividly: the
faces and the bodies, the words spoken, even the
furniture in the background. All of it’s been pre-
served in the unyielding amber of the Internet.
But it’s been saved, too, in some kind of hidden
chamber in my brain, some secret museum of the
lewd, the lascivious, and, sometimes—it must be
admitted—the beautiful.
by my sophomore year of high school,
I was more practiced with porn. I had memo-
rized the addresses of websites that the filtering
software wouldn’t pick up on, and I knew what
kinds of photo galleries I liked best: ones devoted
to “college jocks.” In these galleries, locker
rooms became well-lit and surprisingly hygienic
arenas of sexual possibility, populated by smirk-
ing men in eye black and jock straps.
Every now and then, though, I would come
across a different kind of photo: an image not of
a posed professional model, but of what seemed
to be a real guy—an actual college jock in an
actual locker room. Often he would be soaping
up in the shower or tugging on a pair of boxers.
Unlike the models with their knowing smiles, the
real guy always seemed to be caught off guard; he
looked at the intruding camera with a mixture of
surprise, confusion, and (sometimes) the dark edge
of anger. Other candid photos were different—
shot through with a kind of drunken, electric
joy. They showed college boys tea-bagging their
frat brothers or peeing together outside, laughing
into the night air, blue jeans tangled around their
ankles.
When I first started looking at online porn,
I thought I’d found something startlingly real:
flesh in graphic detail, nothing held back or
hidden. But the candid photos changed that. In
comparison, the firefighters and army grunts
seemed fake, their outfits little more than cheap
costumes. Looking at the frat boys in all their
feral innocence, I believed I had discovered
something more authentic and—somehow,
because of this—more erotic. Porn rattled me
with wanting, but the candids played on another
deeper desire: to slip, quiet as a ghost, into the
secret world of straight guys.
It was a common gay fantasy, though I didn’t
realize how common until the following year,
when I started using peer-to-peer networks like
Kazaa and Limewire. This was the early 2000s,
when more and more porn sites were coming
online, and more and more videos were being
pirated and shared. One of the most popular new
gay websites was called Sean Cody, and—as its
innocuous, WASP-y name both hinted at and
concealed—it specialized in videos of clean-cut
college-age guys. In addition to being young,
good-looking, and white, the models were almost
always supposed to be straight. Before anything
sexual happened, first-time models often sat
down for on-camera interviews, in which they
were asked questions like What kind of girls do you
like? and Does your girlfriend know you’re here? (One
former Sean Cody model—an openly gay man,
and hence a rarity for the site—remembers that,
before his interview, he was instructed, “Don’t
talk with your hands, don’t use any big words,
and keep your voice kinda deep.”) For a number
of years, Sean Cody’s splash page featured photos
of its models playing outdoor sports—swinging a
baseball bat, gripping a soccer ball—and, beneath
these images, three words lined up so as to suggest
they were all synonymous: Straight. Muscular. Raw.
I wish I could say I saw right away what a
disturbing equation this was, that I immediately
recognized its implicit homophobia. But I don’t
think it bothered me at the time. If anything,
the logic at work on the site was familiar from