When Girls Look at Boys - Beyond Heated Rivalry

The Lesbian View of Gay Men’s Porn

I finally settled into the Canadian gay hockey romance show, Heated Rivalry.

Do you realize what a hit this is?—10.6 million viewers per episode! That’s a lotta ice. I proceeded to read all the hot takes, of which Alexander Chee’s might be a classic.

For me, the show is a hot tub time machine. Make that two hot tubs, actually. I’m having deja vu from two different centuries.

Number 1

In the early 2000s, I was an editor at Audible who suggested we bring in independent romances, something different from Harlequin. The romances on audio at the time were tame, very “Forever Amber.”¹

At the time, the “Reigning Hunk” of the Romance genre was the Navy S.E.A.L, à la Top Gun. This broody leading man had replaced the “Fabio Swarthy Bodice Ripper” fantasy years previously. Movies like An Officer and a Gentlemen kept the Navy hero going. I thought we’d never see an end to the military cosplay.

Then, one day in 2014, I got a comic manuscript from an author named Helena Hunting, about a libertine tomboy from a hardcore hockey family who hooks up with her stepbrother’s bad-boy team captain— an NHL team. Yes, she was Pucked— all the way down.

“This is going to be a bestseller,” I said. Her series made her a fortune.

BOOM— in one year, Navy S.E.A.L. was old socks, and it was hockey bad boy, center stage. We’re not even near the end of it.

In the same era, Romance fans were demanding, and producing, male/male storylines, or “fan fiction”— it dominated the indie ebook circuit. Mainstream publishers were bewildered until the money became undeniable. Whatever happened to Cathy and Heathcliff? What were straight women thinking?

I had a hunch . . . straight girls were thinking the same thing dykes had been thinking for awhile.

Number 2

In 1989, the topic of women voyeurizing gay men first came to my desk.

37 years ago, I was editing a lesbian magazine, On Our Backs, and it was the heyday of “video rentals”— ha!

Women, for the first time, were checking out porn tapes. Why not? You could sit privately at home and laugh, or grab your vibrator, or wonder what all the fuss was about.

Women had never talked, as a group, about what kind of sex movies they liked before. We had endured trite sociology like, “Women don’t like to look at sex, it’s too bracing for them.” Or, the classic, “Women aren’t visual.” They really said that.

It all came back to the chestnut that women didn’t have sexual appetites, period.

OOB began our erotica beat by reviewing the nascent lesbian-made erotic video scene. —Not the fake girl-girl stuff that came out of Hollywood and Times Square.

Then came a surprise: a small but ready stream of readers confided to us, that they enjoyed gay men’s porn.

Some dykes told us they liked it better than any other kind of erotica, while others remarked that it was something they got an occasional kick, or enlightenment, from.

I wanted to interview them further. I put out the word that On Our Backs was looking for lesbian’s detailed experiences with gay pornography. The answers I got were some of the most candid sex histories I’ve ever read.

1. What kind of gay porn/erotica do you like?

2. What’s one gay fantasy that gets you off?

3. Who do you identify with, when you fantasize about men together? The top, the bottom, the watcher?

4. How does a lesbian perceive gay porn differently than the intended audience?

5. If someone asked you, “How can you fantasize about men and not be straight?” —What would you say?

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You’ll read their answers below, along with Honey Lee Cottrell’s 1970s and 80s, photographs of gay men in our erotic milieu.

© Honey Lee Cottrell, On Our Backs July 1989 feature, “When Girls Look At Boys”

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