On the eve of its release, it looks like ASHLEY AND KISHA: FINDING THE RIGHT FIT is leaving the nest almost like a full-fledged film. It’s already listed for pre-order on Amazon.com, has a listing on Blockbuster and The New York Times, and of course let’s not forget the all important IMDb listing.

“The intent to arouse is often cited as the dividing line between art and porn. In the whole range of emotions a director might hope to incite in his audience, arousal remains the last taboo – a taboo Tony Comstock gleefully breaks.” is something I wrote for the press release supporting last Summer’s QueerDoc screening of DAMON AND HUNTER: DOING IT TOGETHER.

Well last Summer, the Australian government slapped us down, calling DAMON AND HUNTER unfit for public exhibition and threatening the festival if they screened the film. We fought back as hard as we could, and lost. The screening was cancelled and we went home to lick our wounds. But a year later, with an impending write-up in Oprah Winfrey’s “O” magazine, one could make a case that our intentionally arousing films have penetrated the very center of mainstream culture.

So what’s next? I have no idea. ASHLEY AND KISHA has been submitted to about 15 film festivals. There have been some encouraging whispers, but nothing definitive yet. Lest I jinx it, I’ll leave it at that. The important thing is that it looks like we can keep making these films, keep taking what we learn from each iteration and incorporate that into the next one, all while keeping a roof over our head and our pantry full. What more could a person want!

In contrast to the e-mail battle to get DAMON & HUNTER listed with the grown-up movies (as opposed to “adult” movies,) the rest of our filmography has appeared on IMDb sans drama.

It’s now possible for a casual IMDb visitor to look up both Xana & Dax and Matt & Khym, no having to log in, no having the secret “show me adult results” box checked. Whether or not this has something to do with the fact that Xana & Dax and Matt & Khym are straight couples, or it’s merely a matter of having worn the IMDb editors down with the Damon & Hunter episode, I don’t know.

I do know that sometimes fretting about this sort of thing seems like a lot of fuss over nothing, a distraction from the business of making my movies. Now that Ashley & Kisha is finished, I’ve got the backlog wittled down to four unfinished films. Maybe time would be better spend in the edit bay then worrying about IMDb listings and similar.

But in the last week I’ve had three different experiences that have reminded me why things like IMDb and Google, and how the hardware, software, and wetware resources at those, and other organization interpret sex, expecially sex words, matters.

* Yesterday I received e-mail from Good For Her announcing the awards event next month that Peggy is going to. In the subject line porn was spelled “P*rn”.

* A couple of days ago I got a note from Em & Lo, sex columnists at New York Magazine and elsewhere. In the subject line and throughout the body copy, sex was spelled “s*x”.

* Last week I sent a note to journalist Mark Glaser, with a link to a post on my blog. Mark wrote back to tell me that he couldn’t access my blog from his workplace.

No one has benefited more from the digitization of culture than I have. I have a comfortable life, living in a wonderful place, doing work I’m passionate about, all largely because of the opportunities this brave new digital world has provided me. But the same technology that makes it easy for information to fly around the globe also makes it easy to prevent people from receiving information, often without anyone even being aware that the information they have access to has been censored filtered.

For example, when I spoke to a representative at St. Bernard Software (conjures up an image of a benevolent protector, doen’t it?) the people who provide censoring filtering software to Mark’s workplace, he told me the default setting for their software is what they feel would be appropriate for a eight year old child.

A eight year old child? I was incredulous. What was internet filtering software like that doing on the corporate network of a journalism organization? The St. Bernard fellow explained that they sell to a lot of schools and libraries, so the defaults are set cautiously, and that network administrators can fine-tune the filtering to suit the needs of their workplace.

Well maybe that works in theory, but the fact everyone is busy, and St. Bernard’s sale force sells their software as a “turn-key” solution, “Just install it and our human-edited list of no-go sites will keep your kids safe, your employees hard at work, your workplace lawsuit free…” (I’m not speculating here. I spoke to the IT department at Mark’s workplace. “We’re not doing anything special here. Just running St. Bernard with the normal settings.”)

I’m both a parent and a businessman, I’m not unsympathetic to these concerns. But as parent and a businessman I have concerns of my own. The St. Bernard fellow told me they also sell their software to a lot of colleges and universities, and because their database classifies ComstockFilms.com as pornographic site, there’s a good chance that access to our website is blocked on campuses running St. Bernard software.

College students aren’t a very important part of our market (they don’t have any money), so I’m not particularly concerned about that (though that’s not the sort of university experience I want my daughters to have.) But I do sometime imagine an art or film studies professor going to look us up and not being able to access our site.

I also feel concerned about the prejudicial effect that being categorized and filtered in this way can have on our work, and our business. Amazon.com sells Shortbus, but they do not sell “pornography”. The BBFC gave Destricted an R rating, but “pornography” gets an R18. The catagorization of our films, at IMDb, and at St. Bernard, at the BBFC and elsewhere have a profound effect on who can see our work, where our films can be shown, and who can/will sell our DVDs. And in an increasingly wired world, the flick of a switch can send us or anyone else off into digital purgatory. (That’s how you get s*x and p*rn.)

So I’m relieved that Xana and Dax and Matt and Khym are listed with the grown-up movies on IMDb, out in the real world, with films like In the Realm of the Senses, Shortbus, and Pink Flamigos. If you’re registered at IMDb and wanted to go over and throw a few stars our way, that couldn’t hurt. They’re easy to find – just use the search function.

MATT AND KHYM: BETTER THAN EVER is listed on IMDb, and surprise surprise, it’s out in the “real world”, with films like LAST TANGO IN PARIS, PINK FLAMINGOS, and SCHOOL HOLIDAY 10: TEENAGE SPERM ORGIE. No frustrated blog posting, no angry letters to IMDb.

Does this have something to do with the fact that Matt and Khym are a nice married couple and Damon and Hunter are just a couple of dirty porn boys? Who knows. That’s the trouble with the “Is it art or is it porn?” question; the answers are opaque, subjective, and punitive.

IMDb has removed DAMON AND HUNTER: Doing it Together from the dirty movie penalty box. This means you don’t have to be logged in and have “show me the dirty movies” enabled in your searches in order to find Damon & Hunter on IMDb:

http://www.imdb.com/find?s=all&q=damon+and+hunter

It also means that our director of photography, Kiko Martin, is no longer consigned to hidden search results. (If your only credits are on what IMDb considers “inappropriate” films, then your listing on IMDb will also be hidden.)

http://www.imdb.com/find?s=all&q=kiko+martin

This sort of is the most insidious form of marginalization. When the censor puts a black box over the naughty bits, it’s plain to see what’s happening. You know someone is making decisions for you about what you can and cannot see.

But when you and your work are simply tucked away into a hidden room, locked up with a secret key, you might as well cease to exist.

New York Times, yes.

IMDb, no. (still)

If you’re not a registered user with your super-secret “adult titles” search enabled, you can’t.

You can find 9 SONGS, a film about a fictional pair of rock-show going, coke-snorting lovers, that famously features explicit footage of felatio, cunnilingus, coitus, and even a pop-shot.

You can find PLAGUES AND PLEASURES ON THE SALTON SEA, the film that shared the Best Documentary prize with DAMON AND HUNTER at the 2006 Melbourne Underground Film Festival.

You can even find MARIE AND JACK: A HARDCORE LOVE STORY, our first erotic documentary title.

But you can’t find DAMON AND HUNTER: DOING IT TOGETHER.

Says IMDB:

“The IMDb contains over 400,000 different movie titles. The aim of the database is to cover as many titles and genres as possible. As a result, some of these titles contain words or expressions that some of our users may find inappropriate and some movies themselves may also fall into this category. To provide some level of control for those of a sensitive nature some adult titles have been made searchable only by users who are registered with the IMDb and have requested access to this material.”

“Inappropriate.” Apparently an intimate film about two young men in love, and loving one another is “inappropriate.”

Caligola,, Bob Guccione’s notorious bait and switch production isn’t “inappropriate.”

Neither is Love Camp 7, the infamous Nazi exploitation flick. (From the IMDB listing, “The film contains numerous scenes of women prisoners being abused, tortured and humiliated by their Nazi captors. Indeed the whole purpose of the work is to invite male viewers to relish the spectacle of naked women being humiliated for their titillation. LOVE CAMP 7 contains both eroticised depictions of sexual violence and repeated association of sex with restraint, pain, and humiliation.”)

Apparently Pink Flamingos, which (among other things) features an actor eating dog shit, isn’t “inappropriate” either.

But according to IMDB, DAMON AND HUNTER, an award-winning documentary film featuring a consentual love-scene between committed lovers is “inappropriate,” and viewers with more delicate sensiblities must be protected from the pain they might feel should they accidentally stumble across DAMON AND HUNTER in the course of browsing through IMDB.

We’ve been here before.

Last Summer, the Australian OFLC “protected” the good people of Sydney from accidently stumbling into the queerDOC Gay and Lesbian Film Festival and being exposed to DAMON & HUNTER.

Last Fall, a printer in North Carolina refused to print the above poster for DAMON & HUNTER, lest anyone in their plant be exposed to the image of two men about to kiss.

IMDB’s been here before too. Last January, IMDB hid John Cameron Mitchell’s SHORTBUS in the section for “inappropriate” films. (An uproar ensued across the indie film world prompting IMDB to move SHORTBUS from the “inappropriate” section to the “appropriate” section” by the end of the day.)

Of course compared to us SHORTBUS and ThinkFilm are a marketing juggernaut. John Cameron Mitchell’s been quoted in a hundred places pronouncing that SHORTBUS isn’t arrousing and isn’t porn, where I’m quite proud of the fact that (at least for some people) DAMON AND HUNTER is quite arousing, and I’m ambivalent about the p-word. (Short version, it tells you more about the person saying it than it does about the film they’re applying it to.)

I’m also ambivelent about trying to get IMDB to change the listing. Not because I’m happy to have DAMON & HUNTER hidden away, but because I know that trying to get IMDB to change it will take a lot of time and effort. Comstock Films is me and my wife Peggy, there’s only so much of us to go around. And after financing, producing, editing, and marketing these films, there’s not always that much left over for fighting battles with people like the OFLC or IMDB. Sometimes I feel a little ground down,

What I am not ambivalent about is that Damon and Hunter: Doing it Together is not “inappropriate” film, and if “sensitive” IMDB users don’t need to be protected from stumbling across listings for CALIGOLA, LOVE CAMP 7, or PINK FLAMINGOS, they most certainly don’t need to be “protected” from accidentally seeing the listing for DAMON & HUNTER.

UPDATE

You can also find HONEY AND BUNNY, which played along side DAMON & HUNTER at the New York CineKink Film Festival, and features close-up shot of a half-eaten peach lodged in a woman’s vagina, as well as FILTHY FOOD, which also played with D&H at the CineKink Film Festival, and features close-up footage of a woman performing “oral sex” on a variety of foods in the place of penises, vulvas, and breasts.