This essay examines the legacy of gay playwright and activist Robert Chesley through an in-depth look at his most controversial play, Jerker, or The Helping Hand (1986), uncovering a unique strand of safe-sex advocacy that emphasized sound—and the voice specifically—to manifest queer desire. Phone sex, or dial-a-porn, as it was first called, rose to popularity in the 1980s amid the AIDS crisis. Chesley's depiction of it onstage reimagined the pornographic address, unleashing it from the visual primacy of video porn of the time to foreground elegiac, pedagogic, and ethical dimensions. The broadcast of Jerker on radio station KPFK-FM, however, spurred a legal redefinition of indecency in 1987 and further imperiled safe-sex advocacy that refused to skirt eroticism. In an era when “Silence = Death,” Chesley's Jerker revealed the complexities of the mediated voice as a tool for survival, remembrance, and unbounded pleasure.
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Spring 2019
Research Article|
April 01 2019
Vocalizing Queer Desire: Phone Sex, Radio Smut, and the AIDS Epidemic
John Paul Stadler
John Paul Stadler
John Paul Stadler received his PhD in 2018 from the Graduate Program in Literature at Duke University, where he completed a dissertation entitled “Pornographesis: Sex, Media and Gay Culture.” His critical writing has appeared in the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Jump Cut, Art and Documentation, Reviews in Cultural Theory, and Polygraph. In 2016, his fiction chapbook Prehistoric was published by The Cupboard Pamphlet.
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Feminist Media Histories (2019) 5 (2): 181–210.
Citation
John Paul Stadler; Vocalizing Queer Desire: Phone Sex, Radio Smut, and the AIDS Epidemic. Feminist Media Histories 1 April 2019; 5 (2): 181–210. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2019.5.2.181
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