Sep 4, 2013 11:15 AM PDT    Text size: 

NEW YORK — CockyBoy’s curator Jake Jaxson was paid substantial (philosophical) lip service in a recent writeup on Salon.com, which seeks to draw a parallel between the mindful gay porn producer and Walt Whitman.

Focusing primarily on Jaxson’s art-house series “A Thing of Beauty,” Salon reporter Justin Abraham Linds first points out the obvious elements suchering Whitman and Jaxson: the first episode of “Beauty” opens with two performers reciting lines from Whitman’s “We Two Boys Together Clinging,” as well as John Keat’s “Endymion,” from which the project siphoned its name.

Then Linds invokes semantics: he takes specifics phrases uttered by Jaxson (who heavily annotates his films) and grafts them onto Whitman’s teachings. When Jaxson says he is trying to create a “guilt-free porn experience,” Linds pairs it with secondary source material on the famed American poet: “Whitman sees it as his task to invert hierarchies of judgment, giving full recognition to those stigmatized by official morality.”

Yet, while Linds heaps significant praise on the adult filmmaker, he manages, if somewhat lightly, to note the continued presence of typical “fucking” in “A Thing of Beauty” — a realm that the author finds lacking in Jaxson’s offscreen philosophy. After all, in episode three of “Beauty” Gabriel Clark sits half-naked, poring on sentimentally about a near-death experience that has pushed him closer to life; About 20 minutes later, Linds pointedly remarks, he’s one leg of a double penetration scene.

Jaxson explains that his films need to be taken wholly, with dialogue, music and annotations serving as a fundamental viewing basis.

CockyBoys has released a new Bonus Episode of “A Thing of Beauty,” now available online. The behind-the-scenes followup to the series, which ended last week, delves deeper into the relationship between performers Clark, Colby Keller and Dale Cooper as well as with filmmakers Jaxson, RJ Sebastian and Benny Morecock. The latest episode also features a novel pairing of Cooper and Clark.