SEAN CODY IS A fifteen-year-old porn site for gay men fascinated by what’s been called dude sex or bro sex.¹ The videographers strive to convince us we’re watching two or more all-American heterosexual college-jock types go at it. Gays have always borrowed straight style tropes – tattoos, camouflage, denim – but by trading in straight looks, straight attitude, Sean Cody might be the ultimate cultural appropriation. A careful, informed reading of the clothes opens up possibilities for various kinds of engagement.

The typical Sean Cody video begins with low-key flirtation, often involving a sport – tossing a football, hitting a punching bag. ‘Arnie and Dean: Bareback’ opens on a pair of shirtless young men sitting atop a picnic table on a golden fall day. Arnie, a good six inches taller, has a chin-curtain beard, broad shoulders and the sort of scars you might get from steroids. Clean-cut Dean, from Portland, Oregon, has a correspondingly softer look; he could be a Hollister model. Dean’s shorts are wide-gauge cotton jersey, Arnie’s a jolting red microfiber with a blue stripe along the side seam.

An off-camera voice says, ‘Dean, I want you to tell Arnie about yourself.’

‘What’s there to say about me?’ Dean says.

‘This is Arnie’s first film…’ the voice prods.

‘So, uh, Arnie was it? Where are you from?’

Arnie’s first line is, ‘Montana.’

‘Been doin’ this a while myself,’ Dean tells Arnie. ‘Lookin’ forward to workin’ with ya.’ They might be any two laconic dudes, downing brewskies, getting ready to go shoot some hoops.

Sean Cody is just one gay porn site among many. (Corbin Fisher and Randy Blue truck in a similar look for their models.) Their stats are impressive, however: One of over 2,200 videos, ‘Arnie and Dean’ has been viewed almost 22,000 times since it was posted December 22 2016. The most popular scene, ‘Brandon Bottoms: Bareback’ (November 28, 2015), has over 127,000 views. ‘Brandon’ also appeared in the site’s first bareback vid, released Christmas Day, 2011. In 2014, designer Riccardo Tisci used an image of Brandon on a T-shirt for Givenchy.² 

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‘Devon Hunter’ is the pseudonym of a man who describes himself as a ‘professional gay courtesan.’ He’s performed in more than thirty porn videos, including some for Sean Cody. The filmmakers told him how to act straight: lower your voice, don’t talk with your hands and don’t use big words. Don’t say you’re an exotic dancer – which he was – say ‘gymnast.’ The clothes might look like an afterthought, but au contraire: At the anonymous San Diego warehouse where they filmed, ‘They had a huge wardrobe – shoes, shorts, even hemp necklaces,’ Hunter says. ‘They liked cargo shorts a lot – I mean, a lot.’ Models could wear their own outfits if they fit well: Sean Cody ‘wanted a balance of baggy and tight. Too baggy doesn’t show your physique, but too tight looks gay.’³

Cut to Arnie and Dean indoors, now wearing shirts. Dean’s is a light grey ringer T you might find at Abercrombie & Fitch, while Arnie’s super tight, dark-gray microfiber looks to have been sourced at a sporting goods place like Modell’s. In 1998, sex columnist Dan Savage tried to find out whether the Calvin Klein underwear that often appeared in gay porn was a deliberate product placement; the company wouldn’t say.⁴ Times have changed. Now, Hunter says, although A&F styles are favoured on Sean Cody, porn makers avoid visible brand labels because they can get sued. (Underwear isn’t an issue here, since these boys all go commando.) Suggesting sexual orientation is only one costume consideration. Muted colours might signify ‘straight,’ but overly bright or dark colours can also throw off the colour balance. ‘White is out, black is out,’ Hunter says. Earth tones and semi-bold hues look good against skin. Jewel tones, not so much.

Hunter appeared as ‘Ryan’ (models’ onscreen names are chosen at random, he says) in ‘Ryan and Fuller’ (September 7, 2009). Their scene opens with the pair cuddling, supine, on a bed with a brown comforter. Ryan, the designated bottom, wears tastefully distressed denim, while top Fuller sports straight-cut jeans. An off-camera voice says to Fuller, ‘Girl update?’ ‘It’s a little confusing,’ Fuller admits, with a deep chuckle. ‘It was good until today.’ ‘Oh no! Let’s not talk about that!’ the voice says. Both men onscreen wear shirts featuring the kind of splattered, double-exposure graphics that are less prevalent now than they were eight years ago, when these mass styles could be spotted on Michael Sorrentino (‘The Situation’) on MTV’s Jersey Shore.

Recently, the trend on Sean Cody is flat-fronted shorts and soft, monochrome shirts. There’s also plenty of breathable microfiber. The clothes match the sets, which are full of sand, taupe and grey in what a friend of mine refers to as the ‘Starbucks regency’ look – bulky, plain furniture you’d find in your local coffee shop. Far from the scuzzy, sweaty-jockstrap, sling-in-a-basement aesthetic of much gay porn, Sean Cody’s look is more timeshare promotion video. Lighting is unobtrusive, but allows for detail in shots. Props include a Rothko-esque canvas and cute glass-ball plant holders. Dean ejaculates on a gunmetal grey rug with a white, interlocking diamond pattern, possibly from West Elm or CB2. (In another scene, a model shoots on a deep-pile oatmeal carpet.) ‘Nothing with a sheen – no hairspray, nothing gloss,’ Hunter says of the strategy. Walls are painted with matte or satin finish, since reflective surfaces affect the quality of the tape.

Once Arnie and Dean disrobe, a paradox in the portrayal of masculinity becomes apparent: Arnie has not only sculpted his pubes, but shaved his asshole – a pretty fussy touch. Via the bear aesthetic, hairiness has made a comeback in gay porn since the 1990s, when it seemed like every guy was smooth and skinny; but the denuded look is still big on Sean Cody. Hunter says the site conforms to trends in body hair: ‘They leave the belly, thighs and taint [perineum] alone, but shave the balls. For a while there was this trend where they’d shave the tops of the abs but leave hair in the grooves.’ Until recently, when the fashion became undeniable, tattoos were also rare. Sean Cody doesn’t want the models to evoke anything too specific, Hunter says, and that includes everything from their build to their body language: ‘You should be as blank a slate as possible, so you can be an everyman.’ What’s there to say about me?

Somehow, it’s not a surprise that the worlds of fashion and Sean Cody overlap: these videos look like a logical extension of fashion photographer Bruce Weber’s homoerotic work for Abercrombie & Fitch. Aside from the rare African-American guy (who usually tops), Sean Cody, like the A&F catalogue, is mostly white. (Michael Jeffries, A&F’s once-closeted CEO, commissioned Weber; Jeffries was forced out in December 2014, and the brand has since dialled back the homoeroticism and made gestures toward diversity.⁵ ) The clean, sans-serif masculinity apparently appealed to Mr. American Modernism himself: In 2010, Calvin Klein fell in love with a Sean Cody model, Nick Gruber, who was forty-eight years younger. They were together, sort of, for a couple of years.⁶ Simon Dexter went from modelling for the site to starting his own underwear line, and Colby Keller appeared in a 2016 print ad for Vivienne Westwood.

Porn is like fashion in that it is such a huge phenomenon that it threatens to negate individual reactions to it. According to a 2014 Pew study, only twelve percent of Americans watch porn, a figure that strikes Shira Tarrant, author of The Pornography Industry: What Everyone Needs to Know as decidedly low.⁷ (Hunter laughed when I mentioned the number: ‘More like twelve percent don’t watch it.’) Perhaps because it gives rise to embarrassment and shame, it’s hard to find much even-handed analysis. The phrase, ‘the Golden Age of porn’ (roughly 1968-1980, after which porn became more widely available for the VCR), usually refers to the quality of the product – shot on film, with actual production values. But for that brief period, porn was also social. In 1972, Wakefield Poole’s hardcore gay movie Boys in the Sand grossed $400,000 in New York’s 55th Street Playhouse, supported with ads in The New York Times.⁸ Even my suburban parents went to see Deep Throat (also 1972) with their next-door neighbours. ‘By the mid-80s, gay porn had once again retreated behind closed doors…’ writes Jack Stevenson in A History of Gay Sex Cinema. ‘[It] had passed through its most interesting phases as an agent of gay liberation. It was spent as a (sub)cultural force and reverted once again to a mere consumer commodity.’

Just as the average person has no idea who knitted their sweater or where, that same person has little idea of how the porn they watch was made, who made it, or at what human cost. Hunter says the eighteen-minute scene with Fuller took eight hours to shoot. Fuller really is straight – though it would be hard to know for sure, Hunter claims about ninety percent of actors in porn are hetero; in his experience, they’re more in demand, and better paid – and could only keep it up for about a minute at a time. When it was time to film his climax, Fuller told Hunter, ‘Don’t look at me, or you’ll fuck me up.’

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There is a real Sean Cody, by the way. It’s not clear whether he’s still affiliated with the site, which did not return requests for comment. In 2014, the company was purchased by the global IT firm Mindgeek, which owns the majority of the world’s porn tube sites as well as the celebrity gossip site celebs.com.⁹ According to an apparently deleted interview, Cody, who grew up Mormon, likes ‘men who are clean cut and in shape, with good builds, handsome faces and nice dicks.’ In a scene that now also seems to have been deleted, a man who has been identified as Sean Cody wears an unremarkable gray polo shirt and white, baggy khakis. He looks like a nice, ordinary guy.

Alex Joseph is an independent writer and curator.

1. See Jane Ward’s Not Gay: Sex Between Straight White Men [NYU, 2015], Tony Silva’s similarly themed research in the November 2016 issue of Gender and Society and Brokeback Mountain. ↩

2. https://blowyourmindaway.wordpress.com/2014/06/30/gay-porn-and-fashion  “Gay Porn and Fashion,” Blow Your Mind Away [blog], June 30, 2014. ↩

3. D. Hunter, author interview, December 23, 2016. See also Hunter’s blog for a detailed (and well-written) account of his experience with the site: http://www.devonhunter.info/archives/1625/ ↩

4. D. Savage, “Savage Love,” The Stranger, June 25, 1998. ↩

5. S. Berfield & L. Rupp, “The Aging of Abercrombie and Fitch,” Bloomberg Business Week, January 22, 2015. ↩

6. C. Swanson, “How Nick Gruber Became Calvin Klein’s Ex-Lover,” New York, August 11, 2013. ↩

7. S. Tarrant, The Pornography Industry: What Everyone Needs to Know, Oxford, Oxford University Press, March 29, 2016. ↩

8. J. Stevenson, “From the Bedroom to the Bijou: A Secret History of American Gay Sex Cinema,” Film Quarterly, Vol. 15, No. 1, Autumn, 1997. ↩

9. K. Forrester, “Making Sense of Modern Pornography,” The New Yorker, September 26, 2016. ↩

The designer’s story begins in the grim setting of pre-War Europe. Gernreich and his Jewish mother fled Vienna for California soon after the Nazis accessioned Austria in 1937. After a few short stints in Hollywood, such as his job sketching for famed costume designer Edith Head (much later he crafted delightful costumes for Otto Preminger’s awesomely bad musical Skidoo), he started producing designs for the fashion industry in 1950. Around this time, he became romantically involved with Harry Hay, a political activist often called the founder of the modern gay rights movement. During their three-year relationship, they co-founded the Mattachine Society, America’s first gay rights organisation. Gernreich’s participation in the group was brief but crucial; it lasted only a few years, and afterwards he never publicly acknowledged his homosexuality again. His co-founder and ex-partner Hay went in the other direction, going on to found the Radical Faeries, a ‘gay hippie’ group, in the 1970s, a group that continues to have active memberships internationally today.

Gernreich’s brief, but influential involvement in the history of the gay rights movement survives in a Mattachine notebook in the designer’s archive at UCLA in California. One particular page shows notes for a planned discussion about ‘camping’ – acting outrageous and effeminate. The tone of his questions is surprisingly circumspect for 1951, and reads: ‘Since we agree that camping is conscious homo [sic] expression, what then is unconscious homosexual behavior [?]’ and, ‘How can camping become an acceptable homosexual expression?’ After leaving the group (and Hay) in 1953, Gernreich never publicly acknowledged this or any association with gay rights again, although his work as a designer continued to embody ideas of radical thought and personal expression. When Gernreich’s topless bathing suit first appeared in 1964, the design was a succès de scandale, inspiring some 20,000 press articles in response. The design was created on the suggestion of Susanne Kirtland, editor at Look magazine, reading Gernreich’s pronouncements about the impending craze for ‘toplessness’. Kirtland contacted the designer in 1962 and asked him to make a topless suit, he demurred, fearing it would ruin his career. Kirtland’s response was, ‘Oh, but you’ve got to; I’ve already had clearance from the front office.’ Gernreich finally conceded, motivated by the fear that his competitor, Emilio Pucci, would make a topless suit first. Though the design was not a commercial success (only 3,000 copies of the suit sold), this single garment put Gernreich in the history books for its risqué and revealing nature. But this was not the statement the designer intended. For Gernreich, the gesture had roots in his European upbringing; the garment was progressive, and implicitly feminist: if men can go topless, why can’t women? In an essay for a touring retrospective of the designer’s work, ‘Fashion Will Go Out of Fashion’, author Elfriede Jelinek underscores the suit’s value, explaining that Gernreich ‘doesn’t do it to emphasise the nakedness of the top half of the woman’s body. Instead, in partially exposing this part of the body, he clothes it, but in a different way, and thus re-creates it.’ Despite this, the American media’s response was leering and thereafter Gernreich became associated with the ‘kookiness’ and ‘crazy’ styles of this revolutionary period of the mid-sixties, a cliché he never managed to escape.

In 1967, at the height of his fame, Gernreich shuttered his atelier, telling The New York Times that he was ‘exhausted’. He never mounted a major collection again but continued to offer dire predictions to the press. In 1970, Life magazine asked him to predict the future of fashion, Gernreich arranged for a pair of models to appear nude, and completely shaved, at a promotional event. He later explained, ‘What unisex means is that we are beyond pathology, and fashion is finished.’ The death of fashion became his great theme: ‘Fashion will go out of fashion,’ he told Forbes. To another interviewer, he said, ‘I’m not out to kill fashion. It’s already finished. The word has no meaning. It stands for all the wrong values. Snobbism, wealth, the select few. It’s antisocial. It isolates itself from the masses. Today you can’t be antisocial, so fashion is gone. Even the word has become a little embarrassing. Clothes. Gear. These are the words of today.’ These broadsides did little to aid the designer’s career, and were largely ignored by the fashion press.

Two years after his death in 1985, Peggy Moffitt, his muse and friend, gave an interview to the Fashion Institute of Technology that reveals the limitations of his activist approach for the designer. She explains that, ‘He liked the idea of being the prophet. It’s great to prophesise, but then you say, “Peggy, can we see the first piece?”… He loved being in the headlines. But he didn’t love making these clothes any more.” When examined more closely, Gernreich’s career has a profound implications beyond his ‘monokini’ design. He was an activist at heart, with progressive and controversial design statements that were often misunderstood by the press. What the industry wanted was the ‘kooky’ clothes so popular at the time; but what Gernreich had was an abundance of ideas. It’s interesting to speculate, fifty years after this radical – and misinterpreted – gesture of toplessness, whether he spent his final years wishing he had never made that bathing suit at all.

Alexander Joseph is a freelance writer and editor in fashion.

All Wiseman films are odd. Stubbornly original. Iconoclastic. (‘Near Death‘ is six hours long.) Without music, narration, or staged interviews, they force the viewer to constantly interpret their meanings. Sometimes it’s a struggle. ‘Model‘, for example, contains an extremely long and detailed sequence about the filming of an Evan Picone commercial. Novelist William T. Vollmann writes of this scene: ‘That model descending the steps excites my pity when I see her being made to do it over and over again. Life, so I want to think, should not be like that. It should be “spontaneous.” Or should it?’ Here Vollmann bursts out in exasperation, ‘What does Wiseman want me to learn?’¹

But it’s worth the effort. Though there has been a string of critically praised fashion documentaries recently (‘Valentino: The Last Emperor‘; ‘Bill Cunningham New York‘), nothing quite like ‘Model‘ exists. A comparison to ‘The September Issue‘, a highly regarded fashion documentary, brings Wiseman’s work sharply into focus: The film featured a human protagonist (Anna Wintour), an antagonist (Grace Coddington), within a conventional narrative arc. Wiseman films have none of these. In ‘The Store‘, we are instead confronted with a Rorschach ink blot – seemingly mundane images of shoppers sifting through merchandise, a sales associate’s awkward birthday celebration, and merchandising strategy meetings (‘We’re in Neiman Marcus for one reason and one reason only – and that’s to make sales,’ one VP remarks, unwittingly providing the key to the film). The protagonist of ‘The Store‘ is the store itself, carefully observed in a document that is deeply meditative, absorbing and mesmerising.

Wiseman’s films prior to ‘Model’ had stark subjects: welfare recipients, insane asylum inmates – yet when I spoke to him, Wiseman told me his fashion films weren’t necessarily a thematic departure: ‘I am trying to make films about as many different aspects of contemporary life as I can. Documentary film does not have to be restricted to films about poor or exploited people.’ Furthermore, the editing process is a crucial aspect of Wiseman’s work, since his documentary style is so unobtrusive, filming for long periods of time observing his subjects, I was interested to know if any sequences in ‘Model‘ and ‘The Store‘ surprised in this process, emerging as more significant than he’d realised during filming. He explained further, that ‘It is all a surprise since I know very little about the subject before I begin shooting. The idea is that the film should at least in part show what I learned as a consequence of the shoot and the long period of editing.’

Both films have been interpreted as Marxist critiques. Author Dan Armstrong, for example, argues that ‘Model‘ ‘examine[s] contemporary American class struggle from the perspective of the ideological and cultural hegemony of the Professional Managerial Class over the subordinate working class.’² Yet if Wiseman held any particular animus toward fashion, his description of how he selected his quarry sounds blameless, almost random: ‘I did not make a list of all the possibilities in the fashion world. The idea of a model agency appealed to me. I contacted Zoli and he agreed. I knew something of Neiman Marcus’s reputation and thought it would be a good choice.’ Likewise, the decision to shoot ‘The Store‘ in colour (all the previous films were made in black and white) was practical, not strategic: ‘I thought it was important to show the colour of the products sold. Also, the quality of the picture is better in colour when you are shooting in low light.’

Wiseman’s mandarin responses remind us of his mandarin films. Seemingly simple and direct, they provide endless opportunities for reflection and are surprisingly open-ended. While Armstrong makes an excellent point about ‘Model‘, for example, the film also documents the exacting work of making advertisements, something we’re prone to overlook. If ‘The Store‘ is about an engine of commerce that exploits consumers, the consumers in the film are collaborating with that process.

Neither ‘Model‘ nor ‘The Store‘ is a simple satire of fashion. In fact, Wiseman reminds us, nothing is simple. The films instead represent a unique way of thinking about our field, as subjective and expansive as any great work of art can be.

‘The Store’ and ‘Model’ are available from Frederick Wiseman’s production company, Zipporah Films.

Alexander Joseph is a freelance writer and editor in fashion.

1. W Vollman, ‘In Memory of Us All: Some Scenes Out of Wiseman,’ in Frederick Wiseman, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2010, pp. 69-76. [Note: Italics are Vollman’s.] ↩

2. D Armstrong, ‘Wiseman’s ‘Model’ and the Documentary Project: Toward a Radical Film Practice,’ in Film Quarterly, California, University of California Press, Vol. 37, No. 2 (Winter 1983-1984), pp. 2-10. ↩