As a gay man directing straight hardcore pornographic films in the 1970s, Zebedy Colt smuggled a certain queer eros into the visual culture of heterosexuality. Indeed, he belonged to a queer cohort of hetero-pornographers whose subversive flourishes have gone largely unrecognized by porn studies and queer studies scholars, in part because of the incomplete archives generally used to narrate and analyze pornography. Yet Colt's work, in such films as The Devil Inside Her (1976), Sex Wish (1976), Virgin Dreams (1977), and others, was a reactionary queer cinema, in which he leveraged a particularly misogynistic white masculinity to achieve his queer interventions. This article attends to both his implantation of queer desire into the heart of normative heterosexuality and the gender and racial politics that allowed heteromasculinity to absorb those seeming challenges without any threat of veering toward a queer utopian horizon.
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