“Everything Was Better There”: Postwar Gay Porn Magazines and Transnational Homosexual Imaginaries in the European Periphery—Notes from Portugal and Spain

Porn magazines of the second half of the 20th century offered a form of queer pedagogy of desire and a means of self-invention and community building on a scale unimagined by the editors of activist publications. In the European context, the postwar decades which saw the development and solidification of ideologies of European identity and integration also witnessed growing numbers of gay porn magazines published and circulated transnationally, fuelled by subcultural consumer demand and the progressive decriminalization of pornography. Central to the formation of a shared homosexual culture and, therefore, of a shared homosexual identity, these magazines constitute important historical sources that have nonetheless tended to be overlooked by institutionalized homosexual historiography, with its privileging of heroic political actors and activist histories. At the same time, attending to their transnational circulation also offers an opportunity to examine the libidinal construction of relations of center and periphery in homosexual geographies and their imaginaries.

This paper draws on archival research and oral history interviews carried out in Portugal and Spain in the context of my current research project “The Europe that Gay Porn Built, 1945–2000.” From those, I offer some preliminary thoughts on the ways in which gay porn magazines allowed Portuguese and Spanish homosexual men to imagine themselves and others like them living in different corners of Europe. I reflect on pornography vis-à-vis activist and “community” discourses in the two Iberian countries during the last three decades of the 20th century, and I offer a glimpse of how titles like Órbita Gay Macho (Portugal) and Party (Spain) contributed to construct and cement an imaginary of peripheral backwardness among Portuguese and Spanish gay men, who looked outward towards “Europe” as the desired destination of their homosexual becoming.