(Following up on an account of the gay porn flick Close Up on AZBlogX, a posting about the first scene of the film, involving Trenton Ducati and Jessy Ares — in part about the use of language in this encounter and in part about the the assignment of roles — what I’ve called b vs. t — in this encounter. This is a close call: usually my postings analyzing the action in porn flicks go on AZBlogX, but in this case I thought there might be enough language-related stuff to put it on this blog. You should understand that there’s a lot of plainly described gay sex in this posting, though no photos — they’re already on AZBlogX — so you might want to pass.)
Late on the night of March 5th — the ways of UPS are strange — there arrived on my doorstep (literally) the porn flick Close Up from TitanMen, which I’d written about on AZBlogX (link above). I viewed the whole film the next morning, then went back and viewed the first scene (between Trenton Ducati and Jessy Ares) two more times, partly for pleasure and partly to take notes on how the encounter is structured and how the two men use language. (Answer to unspoken question: twice.)
Close Up is a typical gay porn flick, in that it has a series of episodes (referred to as scenes in material about these films), involving two (or often more) nameless men engaging in hot sex; each episode has its own structure.
(There are other possibilities. A common variant has a long narrative thread interrupted by barely connected episodes designed to provide sexual variety — something for everyqueer. There are a very few porn flicks in which each episode grows out of and serves a larger narrative. And there are porn flicks that resolutely cater to a fetish — watersports, spanking, bondage, cum on the face, whatever — recurring in each episode, though almost always with other sexual elements, in particular sucking and fucking, worked in.)
In the Ducati-Ares episode, there are no names, and no backstories for the characters, beyond the fact that they know each other, possibly live together. The action takes place in a kitchen and in a carpeted area (maybe intended to be a dining area) adjacent to it.
After minimal dialogue establishing that the two men know each other, they take to kissing and feeling each other up. The ensuing action:
(1) Ducati sucks Ares;
(2) Ares sucks Ducati;
(3) Ares eats Ducati’s ass (a standard prelude to fucking);
(4) Ares bends Ducati over the kitchen counter and fucks him, standing;
(5) Ares then doggie-fucks Ducati on that carpet;
(6) Ares mounts him from behind (and on top) and fucks him hard;
(7) Ducati turns over and frogs up, and Ares fucks him face-to-face;
(8) Ducati eventually comes first (on his belly), with Ares still fucking him;
(9) And then Ares pulls out and comes on Ducati.
In this episode, Ducati is clearly b to Ares’s t (on this distinction, see this AZBlogX posting, where it’s pointed out that the distinction is related to physical, social, and temperamental differences between the two men in an encounter and is manifested in what they say to one another and in who does what to whom and in what order during the encounter) — though the order of sucking and coming is variable in b/t encounters (usually b sucks first, as in Close Up, but sometimes t takes the lead, converying dominance by running the show; usually t comes first and then b finishes himself off afterwards, but sometimes b takes the lead, especially if he has t in his ass, as in Close Up).
[Digression: Both actors are versatile, and I’ve seen both of them take and give with enthusiasm. Here we have to distinguish between the porn actor and the character he’s playing in a particular flick, even if his character is nameless. In Close Up, the character Ducati plays loves being fucked and the character Ares plays loves fucking ass. That doesn’t necessarily tell us anything about the characters’ enduring preferences. Maybe in a next episode they’d flip, and Ares’s character would happily open up his hole for Ducati’s character.
The men’s preference as porn actors don’t necessarily align with the roles their characters assume. As a porn actor, they both identify as versatile (this is, on the whole, a good career move), but they probably have preferred roles for their characters.
Then there’s the fact that a porn actor’s preferences don’t necessarily align with the actor’s preferences in real life. Ares — that is, the man who goes by that name in porn — says he’s gay, period, but as far as I know he hasn’t expressed a preference for roles in fucking; maybe he prefers mutual sucking, as many gay couples do, so that fucking isn’t much of an issue (really, that’s his personal business, and he’s not obliged to share with us). Meanwhile, the man known as Trenton Ducati hasn’t pronounced on his sexuality, much less on the acts he likes to perform in real life.]
Back to the Ducati-Ares episode.
First remark: When Ares bends Ducati over the counter, you appreciate what a beautiful fuckable ass Ducati has.
And at this point the dialogue begins. This isn’t a linguistically inventive scene: a very large part of the vocalizations are moans, grunts, pants, and gasps, plus ohs of various and heartfelt cries (almost uncountable) of Oh fuck! and Fuck yeah!
(Note: the wordless vocalizations are very hard to track and analyze, though Tyler Schnoebelen has started to make inroads on these things, in a paper “Sex Sounds” presented at the Lavender Languages conference on 2/7/13. An assemblage of materials — a big grab-bag of things — is available here.)
Early on, Ares to Ducati, about his own dick:
Swallow that cock! Come on, boy! Yeah, fuck yeah!
[A note on the distal demonstrative in that cock. Gregory Ward has reported to me some studies on this choice, vs. my cock (or this cock). The distal demonstrative (with that) is hugely preferred to the proximal (with this) and the personal possessive (with my). We can speculate on why that’s so — for instance, that the distal allows both participants to configure their acts as mere playings-out of desire, without regard to any other possible relationships between them. On this reading, that cock in this act of cocksucking is like taking an anonymous man’s cock under a partition in a t-room. In addition, that cock can be seen as helping to establish (or reinforce) the dominance of the man giving the cock over the man taking it. Other interpretations are possible, including the idea that the use of the distal demonstrative is now in part merely a convention of the genre.]
Ares is in fact not very vocal, beyong the fuck yeahs and pants and so on. Ducati, on the other hand, talks a lot (though it’s not always easy to figure out what he’s saying sotto voce).
The fuck segment is instigated by Ducati asking “You wanna fuck my ass, hunh?” — an invitation that Ares immediately takes up. Ares calls Ducati “boy” throughout, and Ducati feeds him endless appreciations: “I like your cock in me!” and “Oh, you feel good in me!” (with further variants); “Do you like my ass?” (a number of times); and of course a long litany of “Fuck me!” and “Oh yeah, fuck my ass!” (Notice the personal possessive; Ducati could have cried out, “Oh yeah, fuck that ass!”, but he chooses to make it personal.)
Ducati’s character comes across as a man who loves to be fucked, but on his partner’s terms; he’s not a power bottom, running the show, using his partner’s cock to satisfy himself. (It might be significant that though Ares and Ducati run through a series of fuck positions, they don’t do a sit-fuck, which is a power-bottom specialty: the bottom, physically on top, fucks himself on his partner’s cock. There is in fact a moving sit-fuck in the second episode of Close Up, with different actors.)
So Ares is clearly running the show: he gets sucked first, and of course he fucks Ducati silly, without flipping. And he calls Ducati “boy”, though Ducati doesn’t reciprocate by calling him “sir” (Ducati uses no address terms at all). Ares is t to Ducati’s b.
Ares is also in charge in that he supplies essentially all of the motion in the fucking. Ducati doesn’t push back against Ares, even in the doggie-fuck, an act that lends itself to enthusiastic movement on both sides.
Ducati’s presentation of himself while being fucked is interesting. He’s not doing the usual wincing, apparently agonized fuckhole presentation, playing on the convention that being fucked is a painful but pleasurable experience; the bottom in such cases is “taking it like a man”. Not a wince from Ducati. On the other hand, he doesn’t behave like a hungry bottom, anxious for the pleasure of a cock in his hole and ecstatic when he gets it. Instead, he’s workmanlike, much like your typical top fucking away. That is, this is something his character really likes and he’s going to work at it to make it good for himself and his partner.
This presentation is, in fact, what makes this encounter *really* work for me. Other queer guys might have different opinions. The wonder of the fantasy world of Gayland is that there are so many different neighborhoods.
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