CockyBoys CEO Jake Jaxson, whom Justin Abraham Linds dubs “the Walt Whitman of gay porn,” directs films that he terms “erotic documentary”:
Jaxson initially wanted to include Whitman’s poetry in “[A Thing of] Beauty” because of what the poet meant to him as a young boy growing up in New Orleans, looking for any mention of “gay” in the library. “I remember reading ‘We Two Boys’ over and over and over trying to squeeze the sexuality out of it.” Jaxson is not clear about whether his films are intentionally taking up Whitman’s call to exalt human sexuality or the soul as lover, but intentional or not, Jaxson does at times speak like a Whitmanite; for instance, “When I am engaged sexually, I try and connect those same moments to real things in my life.”
Now, it might just be because my introduction to Michael Warner’s “The Portable Walt Whitman” is underlined and starred and full of exclamation marks, but when Jaxson says things like that, I can’t not hear Warner’s assertion that Whitman treats sex as an instinct that “restores a primordial, undifferentiated self, fully embodied and in contact with the world.” What’s more, when Jaxson explains that he is “really trying to create a guilt-free porn experience,” it resounds as a modern demonstration of Warner’s claim that, “Whitman sees it as his task to invert hierarchies of judgment, giving full recognition to those stigmatized by official morality.”
