Pre-awakening I would’ve never walked into a gay bar. Would’ve never gone to a queer club. But I have seen and enjoyed gay porn. While gay marriage was illegal in this country, gay porn presented an escape where queer people are treated well, have meaningful lives, and form loving relationships. They still do - straight people are allowed to have fantasies, but straight fantasy outnumbers queer fantasy 100 to 1 in the mass media. Where else can we turn but alternative means? Where else is there to go when, even now, queer keywords are systematically suppressed by trillion dollar companies?

Talk about obscenity, let’s talk about how despite our nominal equality, queer people AREN’T getting the sex scenes straight people grew up with. Queer stories weren’t being told decades ago, and people were horny and there wasn’t an internet, so they got a huge dose of straight sex scenes. With the internet and a general prudishness wave, sex scenes seemed less necessary, so they got cut. Coincidentally, this is about the time when queer people were allowed to exist in mass media. So those special sex scenes our straight friends talk about, the time they saw Megan Fox or Angeline Jolie and thought it was the best thing in their teenage life, those are harder to come by for queer people.

This is about so much more than access to “smut”, it’s about stamping out the culture that creates the smut. Porn is almost always more meaningful than whatever focus-grouped mush the advertisers on tech companies' websites are trying to shove down our throats. Amateur porn is particularly valuable - no art is purer than art created for free. I have 100% felt more non-horny emotions from some amateur porn than some movies I paid 10 dollars for. You call amateur porn “obscene” but I say that acting in a pointless cash-in like Alvin and the Chipmunks 2 is more obscene. Our art has meaning, but your drivel is allowed to be shilled on late-night shows on PUBLIC airwaves. Ours has to find a new home every 2 years because you want to advertise on the space WE built into a valuable platform.