Conner Habib: The Thinking Man's Porn Star

Conner Habib is a gay porn star. What's his most attractive quality? It's not his eyes. It's not his smile. It's not even his hairy derriere, and it's certainly not his penis.

While a lot of teens aspire to be astronauts or President, Habib aspired to fornicate in front of a camera for a living. Habib had been interested in pornography since he was 12 years old, and not just pruriently interested but interested in it as an actual vocation.

It's not that there are requirements to being in porn, aside from the foreknowledge that you probably can't transition from porn to politics. You can't show off your genitalia and then expect to become an elected official, a notion former Representative Anthony Weiner from New York might disprove.

Yet, Habib does possess a MFA from the University of Massachusetts Amherst because of course most porn producers do prefer that their porn stars have graduate degrees, especially graduate degrees in creative writing. Like anyone else who watches porn, I'm always vitally interested, particularly in the moment before climax, if the half Irish, half-Syrian porn star on my computer screen has successfully completed his book or play.

Now, if you don't know who Conner Habib is, neither did I until he started popping up all over my Twitter feed at the end of March 2013. I received a tweet linking to an article Habib wrote for BuzzFeed on March 20th. A couple of days later, I received another tweet from Philadelphia magazine about Habib leading a discussion on sexual health in Center City. Immediately after that, more tweets about him caught my attention.

I decided to go back to that original BuzzFeed article. The headline for it was "Why Are We Afraid to Talk About Gay Porn?" Habib wrote the article in response to something that happened to him. He was invited to speak at Corning Community College for that school's Sex Week. The school's president, Katherine Douglas, subsequently disinvited him, citing LGBT rights and porn should not be connected. Yet, the thesis of Habib's article was that instead LGBT rights and porn should be connected, if they weren't already so.

In that BuzzFeed article, Habib's arguments are ones that I'd never heard before. I was curious, so I wanted to talk to him in person to explicate them. I managed briefly to speak with Habib by phone on April Fool's Day, but, sadly, I ended up being the fool because we were unfortunately cut off after a half-hour due to my dead cell phone battery.

Despite the disinvitation to Corning, Habib did speak at the school and to the college students there. The incident resulted in a lot of media coverage, and Habib has been very busy ever since. He's appeared at numerous events and lectured at various schools, including USC. He's also done a few podcasts, so I have not been able to re-schedule an interview with him.

I was hoping to discuss or maybe debate his BuzzFeed arguments and I still might. If I did, here would be my salvos. One of Habib's points is that positive images of gay men enjoying the sex act are a source of comfort for isolated gay men, not only in the United States, but all over the world. I would take issue with the meaning and value of that comfort. Much like the sex act itself, whatever comfort would only be brief, only a few minutes for some guys. You could easily derive as much comfort or satisfaction indulging in chocolate or marijuana. However, I'm sure Habib didn't just mean physical comfort. I'm sure he refers also to some kind of psychological comfort, but I would wish Habib to define exactly what that is.

Another of Habib's points is that gay porn reinforces identity because men are sexual beings. The problem with pornography though is that it's usually all about the sex. If it reinforces that men are sexual beings, it often only reinforces that. Men as human beings are more than their sexualities, but pornography boils mankind down to that base level.

There's this thinking that men can have casual sex or sex with others without any kind of emotional attachment. Certainly, men can have sex with people with whom they don't want to be in a relationship, but what people don't understand is that the mere fact that a man wants to have sex with another is in itself a kind of emotional attachment.

What I like to ask is what is it that men want and why do they want it. The primary reason for wanting sex is for reproduction, but Habib's article doesn't mention anything about the procreation of children. So, the question is again what do men want when they want sex and why do they want it. Is it simply for the physical pleasure? If so, that pleasure can be derived by one's self, meaning through masturbation. What do men need another person for?

Habib does write about the difficulty gay people face when trying to couple or pair up. He also writes about the loneliness that gay people face due to social restrictions, but Habib seems to argue against porn being just a masturbation aid. He seems to argue that porn helps gay men to feel okay about same-sex attraction, or it inspires gay men to have actual intercourse or maybe have real same-sex relationships. Yet, I don't see how.

Again, porn is all about lust and gratification in the moment. It hardly ever depicts love or long-term relationships, unless Habib equates sex to love, which some people do. Yet, porn doesn't have people who love each other. Porn doesn't have characters who say, "I love you". Unless Habib is advocating that men live life one-night-stand after the other, porn doesn't promote long-term relationships, monogamy or any kind of firm end to personal loneliness.

I certainly don't agree that Habib should have been disinvited from Corning Community College. The school was celebrating Sex Week, so having Habib there made perfect sense. The man was an educator at UMass. He's very smart. He's someone that can actually talk about sex and other subjects very intelligently, and has legitimately become a gay Dr. Ruth for the video blog age. Yet, I do think that the school's president Katherine Douglas had a point in distancing LGBT rights from porn.

On March 21, Amy Pascal, the co-chairman of Sony Pictures, gave a speech to the Los Angeles Gay & Lesbian Center. She, like I, pushes for more and diverse depictions of LGBT people. One of her points during the speech was, "Not every gay character needs to be defined by his or her sexuality."

Douglas might share in some ways this idea from Pascal. When we think about rights, be they LGBT rights or anyone else's, it should be about having the same freedoms as others, unified by the fact that we're all roughly the same and the connection we share is love. Porn is not about love. Porn is just about sexuality. It's about physical satisfaction and pretty much nothing else. So, when it comes to rights, it's not about sharing sex with everybody. It's about sharing love with everybody.

Habib does his best to elevate porn, but, pun-intended, it's hard.