Yvan, also known as member QueerYvan, is a historian of sexuality. In an ongoing series, he shares some of his favourite fetish encounters in a whole lot of detail , as well as occasionally fill us in on the history of kink.
I am a regular at the sex cinema in Marseille. I am fascinated by this place - a former dance hall in the s, since it has been a porn cinema, the year that changes in pornographic laws regulated the industry and saw porn cinemas open in France. Now there are only two left, this one, and The Vox in Grenoble - and other countries have seen the same decline. Sex has seeped into the floors for 60 years in one form or another, but now it feels like it could close at any time, as the city tries to gentrify, waiting for this inner-city location to become another prey for developers.
Who knows what will happen to the place after covid passes? Pornographic film used to be a socially interactive art form - not people hidden away in their bedrooms watching fervently on their own screens, waiting for sex to come to them from an app, scrolling through Twitter trying to chat to their favourite porn stars, but social spaces that needed to be negotiated in order to find pleasure.
The films are always old, s strips of pubic hair or none at all ; smooth twinks - now doubtlessly middle-aged - fucking on screen in the gay room downstairs; two large screens upstairs with various representations of heterosex, almost always with the focus on the woman being fucked by anonymous dicks, gangbangs and MMF, foot fetishes, mild BDSM dynamics, etc. No scripts, just moaning. I don't think anyone comes here for the movies, now that you can see more on your phone, but they are interesting enough to analyse until someone better comes along.
I revel in the perversity of fucking another man while this kind of porn is on the screen. I am funny like that. It is mostly cis men who come here, and several trans women, perhaps a part of the trans sex worker scene for which Marseille is justly renown? There are always some people hustling, some voyeurs watching other men wank. Gay guys looking to suck some cock, and straight ones who will focus on the screen while an anonymous mouth expertly engulfs them in ways that their wives probably won't.
