Dean Sameshima, Being Alone (2022), Archival inkjet print (Courtesy the artist and Queer Thoughts, New York)

Can you write an essay about porn theaters that doesn’t cite Samuel R. Delany’s Times Square Red, Times Square Blue? Similarly, can you look at photographs of queer spaces and not immediately start flipping through Jose Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia to find a relevant quote? These two texts have done a number on criticism and critical theory in recent years, even though they are both quite old (over a decade for Cruising Utopia and two for Times Square Red, Times Square Blue). Yet, they remain at the forefront of queer thought—not to mention on the shelves of every institutional exhibition’s reading room (*cough* The Brooklyn Museum’s Jimmy DeSana: Submission). While I won’t dismiss their importance as formative texts, at what point does using the same goddamn references narrow interpretation, leading to almost everything being viewed the same way through the same lens? Even when it doesn’t warrant it. For instance, can we see a porn theater as something other than an idyllic site of sexual freedom, community, and even political possibility? Can it, instead, just look kind of blank and lonely?

Because blank and lonely were the feelings I gathered from Dean Sameshima’s series of photographs, Being Alone, on view in his current exhibition of the same title at Queer Thoughts. Rather than the bright marquees and cum-caked movie house architecture of the heyday of Times Square sleaze, Sameshima presents a punishingly monotonous series of inky black-and-white prints of small porn screening rooms in Berlin. This sounds like a negative critique, but it isn’t. Though anyone visiting the gallery expecting neon-lit sordid glamour akin to Bette Gordon’s 1983 film Variety will be woefully disappointed, Sameshima’s unwavering dedication to rigidly framing and producing each photograph with an exacting sameness allows him to portray something different about the spaces of porn theaters and the people who momentarily inhabit them than those same old past queer utopias.

Installation view of Dean Sameshima’s Being Alone at Queer Thoughts (Courtesy the artist and Queer Thoughts, New York)

For example, instead of cruisers making googly eyes at each other from across the room, each photograph is empty except for one solo man, typically only seen from the back of his head rising above the seats. There’s no sex captured here—not in the theater itself nor on screen. Sameshima has dialed up the contrast to such an extreme extent that the filthy cinematic imagery shown has been transformed into a blinding white light that works to illuminate the photographs. No penetration. No money shots. Not even some softcore heavy petting. Sameshima has managed to make some of the least erotic photographs I’ve ever seen of a supposed erotic space.

In this, the photographs remind me of Ninja Thyberg’s 2021 film Pleasure. Though filmed realistically using almost entirely current and former porn workers with the exception of the protagonist, aspiring blonde bombshell Bella Cherry (Sofia Kappel), Pleasure is a fictional representation of the LA porn industry. The most lasting part of Pleasure for me wasn’t the bureaucratic navigation of consent (including numerous forms) or the aggravatingly conventional plot of a high-achieving girl that abandons her friends for a competitive shot at fame. Instead, I was struck by just how tedious shooting porn seemed—a job just like any other, even with close-ups of genitalia. In one scene, after Bella Cherry sells out her goofy and endearing D-list roommates in order to get into porn mogul Mark Spiegler’s circle, she sits isolated in the VIP section of a party, roped off from all the peons, appearing downright miserable amongst the sordid glitz.

Bella Cherry (Sofia Kappel) and Ava Rhoades (Evelyn Claire) have a great time In Pleasure

Pleasure’s smutty boredom is filtered through the same candy-colored cinematography that seemingly every feminist film has to use after 2020’s Promising Young Woman. Though diametrically opposed aesthetically, Sameshima’s photographs showcase a similar mundanity from the consumer side of the industry. Only Sameshima doesn’t stereotype consumers of porn as being almost entirely malformed nerds wandering amongst the beauties like the attendees of the porn convention in Pleasure. Instead, they are solitary silhouetted figures with little to no discernable features, just a glimpse of grey hair, a balding hairline, a raised hood, a pair of sneakers caught by the light of the screen. Though captured with a sense of empathy and care, neither the kind of hot stud heroism nor aberrant compulsive masturbator that mark the two poles of public and/or anonymous sex representations, these porn viewers are unquestionably participants—hold-outs or leftovers, even—of a fading era of sexual culture. This is not the sold-out audience watching, what looks to be, Boys in the Sand or some other Wakefield Poole film in Patrick Angus’s painting Hanky Panky.

Patrick Angus, Hanky Panky, 1990,

Because let’s face it, porn theaters like the ones in Being Alone are not much needed today with the endless supply of Internet porn, OnlyFans, and hookup apps. Of course, each of these brings its own form of isolation as we endlessly stare into the abyss of our phones for any number of forms of gratification. While the absurdity of flirting with a black screen has inspired a number of artists such as Colin J. Radcliffe, Salman Toor, and Justin Liam O’Brien, Sameshima, in contrast, focuses on diminishing and quickly disappearing porn theaters, which exist as a type of anachronism—a throwback to a more analog age. Granted, this is an ironic description given the center of a porn theater is still a screen. However, the promise of a porn theater isn’t only getting off through the visuals, but with the others at that same screening. Not that this possibility is completely absent if Sameshima’s concurrent 2022 series of still lifes—trashcans filled to the brim with fluid-coated spent tissues and used condoms—is any indication.

Yet, if we go by the action within the photographs of Being Alone only, these men sit silently, staring rapt at the screen. Though appearing on the surface separate and alienated, Sameshima forges a connection with the men who are still attached to this disappearing sexual destination. As the artist explains in Kaleidoscope Magazine, “I was contemplating where I fit in, feeling in limbo in the communities I thought I was a part of…I never felt comfortable within any mainstream group but balanced between the few that I felt I had some connections to (art, gay, Asian). I started to identify more and more with these ‘marginal men’ I was interacting with and less with any other group previously I thought I was a part of.” Because my continual description of these men as solitary isn’t quite true, is it? Neither is Sameshima’s series and exhibition title that trades in the same façade. These men aren’t being alone. Sameshima and his camera are right there behind them—the resulting photograph a kind of physical manifestation of his lens-mediated Warholian voyeurism. Voyeurism, of course, is another fun part of the porn theater experience. For those who don’t want to participate, they can always watch.

Dean Sameshima, Being Alone (2022), Archival inkjet print (Courtesy the artist and Queer Thoughts, New York)

We can’t, however. With the erasure of the erotic action on screen and the relegation of the figures to near shadows, we, as viewers, are left to gaze at the utilitarian austerity of the screening room architecture. The drop ceilings, pipes, fuse boxes, possibly a radiator, and banks of hideous and uncomfortable-looking chairs that recall waiting room décor à la Joseph Liatela’s bondage rope-encircled chairs, Formative Systems, in his past exhibition Nothing Under Heaven. In certain photographs, random elements that break this pattern pop: a soda or beer can, a bottle, a garbage can. But, what granted me entry into and further appreciation for the series was the most consistent object: a Kleenex box. In almost every photograph, there is a tissue box placed on a table or the shelf on the back of a bank of chairs. Its white tissue is easy to spot against the darkness enveloping the room. Helpful for an emergency clean-up!

Admittedly, what amused me about these Kleenex boxes is pretty niche and probably not something anybody else is going to think. But, for me, I had never before considered the similarities between the design accessories in Berlin porn theaters and psychotherapy rooms (also funeral homes and the September 11 Memorial Museum, both of which seem a bit too grim to bring in here in any depth). Part of this strange conflation is due to the context of my visit to Queer Thoughts, immediately after my weekly meeting for my writing consulting gig at a therapy practice. There, in every office, most flat surfaces also have a Kleenex box, a feature of the therapy environment so normalized that you barely even notice it, unless you need it to wipe away tears or a wayward sneeze (hopefully, not for the result of a vigorous public jacking). Though its function is different, the Kleenex box is a necessary item for both locales.

Dean Sameshima, Being Alone (2022), Archival inkjet print (Courtesy the artist and Queer Thoughts, New York)

What does this odd correlation mean? Maybe nothing! But, at least I take something from it. One of the healing parts of therapy is the ability to be with—to sit across from a therapist and build a kind of intimacy that is unique to that relationship. In the porn theater, as represented by Sameshima, the screen also sits opposite the viewer. Perhaps this, too, is a unique type of intimacy, not intimacy as in the communal and, at this point, nostalgic potential of anonymous sexual encounters in porn theaters as described in Times Square Red, Times Square Blue. But the exchange of people sitting solo (or sort of solo) in that space staring up at the screen. Though normally projecting its own imagery, here the screen is a blank slate, filling the room with light, while also being filled up, projected on, by the multitude of desires directed at it by those who are there, being alone.