by Daniel WK Lee

The new Mr. Gay World, Charl van den Berg of South Africa once did a j/o video for Liberate Studios before he was crowned—and oh, is a part-time stripper. Who’s shocked? Anyone? No? Well, prior to being crowned, the Mr. Gay World pageant producer Tore Aasheim told South Africa’s The Times:

Sometimes, within the gay scene there are opportunists who identify these men and promise them a better life and freedom within the adult entertainment industry, in which exploitation may result. Our organisation embraces those men that have found the courage to escape the exploitation in an effort to find a better life.

Aasheim’s blathering isn’t of course a unique voice. Along the way for the quest for “gay rights,” and no doubt influenced by anti-pornography feminist discourse, truly problematic labor issues in the adult entertainment industry, many many gays have turn their backs on the liberating, community power of sex and placed it in corner where it’s shamed and fitted into the sex-negative narrative that equates porn with exploitation. I have ranted before on sexual shame and resent the pageant’s notion that “finding a better life” is incompatible with embracing porn, stripping or other forms of sexwork.

Having been a stripper myself nearly a decade ago, I can honestly say that though my experiences in the industry wasn’t without repercussions, it did however give me a confidence about my looks, an upgrade of self-esteem because I couldn’t even intellectually deny that there was something sexually desire about me. Having been a chunky and very lonely adolescent did a doozey on my psyche, yet stripping had a transformative effect for the better.

We don’t all come out the adult entertainment industry being exploited creatures, as Mr. van den Berg clearly hasn’t suffered any psychological damage:

I did the video in April, way before I thought about entering Mr Gay SA. It helped me financially at the time and I gained good life experience. Porn is an integral part of the gay lifestyle, it’s just that most guys don’t have the guts to do what I did.

You may or may not agree with Mr. van den Berg’s assessment with porn’s role in the “gay lifestyle” (whatever that means), but in the heteronormativization of gay life and gay representation, gays are forgetting the diversity within the community and casting wicked judgement whose lives are a bit more queer their own. We must beware that this level of intolerance isn’t so far from one gay saying to another, “You don’t deserve the rights I’ve done nothing to enjoy.”