Voyeur gay
For better or for worse, most of us are entity watched in some form or another at this show in our common digital life. Our clicks and preferences are registered by our internet service providers and algorithms, we’re on CCTV in stores and on streets, and your conversation is recorded when you call for tech support.
Before any of this, though, there was already another way that watching and being watched played a role in some peoples’ lives: people who like watching others in a sexual context (or favor other people watching them). Voyeurism is still a large part of a desire profile for many people, and technology has made it all even more dynamic and complicated. What’s voyeurism all about, and what does practicing it look love in our era?
What is voyeurism?
In straightforward terms, voyeurism means getting off on watching somebody else in a sexual context — sometimes voyeurism can be invoked with connotations of nonconsensual watching, but that doesn’t have to be the case. This can be a mild interest, favor finding it electrifying if your sex partner stands up and gets off the bed to slowly remove all her clothes for you, or masturbates in front of you. It can also
The Strange, Twisted Story Behind Voyeur
Photo: Cris Moris/Netflix
And now, the story of two men working on the story of a dude working on the story of a man who liked to watch people have sex.
Even when pitched in the simplest workable terms, there’s a lot going on in Netflix’s new documentary, Voyeur. Warring perspectives are everywhere, as two comparably unreliable narrators clash through layers upon layers of subjectivity. The trailer slims down the concept to its innermost layer and offers that as the whole: Master correspondent Gay Talese made contact with a strange fellow named Gerald Foos, who had spent upwards of two decades spying on and pleasuring himself to the visitors of his motel in Aurora, Colorado. The actual clip expands its scope to encompass Talese himself as he conducts the research for a guide about Foos, both men figures of boundless fascination for co-directors Josh Koury and Myles Kane. As Talese burrowed into Foos’s unsavory psyche, Kane and Koury kept their eyes on the big picture.
“We were fascinated by Gay not only as the eccentric character he is, but as an embodiment of this concept of the ‘living legend,’” Kane told Vulturein an interview ear
On January 7, 1980, in the run-up to the publication of his landmark bestseller Thy Neighbor’s Wife, Gay Talese received an anonymous letter from a man in Colorado. Since learning of your long awaited study of coast-to-coast sex in America,” the letter began, I feel I have important data that I could contribute to its contents or to contents of a future book.” The man went on to tell Talese an astonishing confidential, that he had bought a motel to satisfy his voyeuristic desires. He had built an attic observation platform,” fitted with vents, through which he could peer down on his unwitting guests.
Unsure what to make of this confession, Talese traveled to Colorado where he met the manGerald Foosverified his story in person, and read some of his extensive journals, a classified record of America’s changing social and sexual mores. But because Foos insisted on remaining anonymous, Talese filed his reporting away, assuming the story would remain untold. Now, after thirty-five years, he’s ready to go public and Talese can finally tell his story. The Voyeur’s Motel is an remarkable work of narrative journalism, and one of the most talked about books of the year.
Visualising Voyeur
The Voyeur's Motel composer Gay Talese, subject in Josh Koury and Myles Kane's documentary: "As a voyeur, you should be curious. And both of us are, the voyeur I dealt with in the book, and me, the narrator of the story."Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze |
On the afternoon of the first day of New York Film Festival press screenings at the Film Community of Lincoln Center, Lgbtq+ Talese welcomed me into his home to speak the evolution of Josh Koury and Myles Kane's highly anticipated Voyeur, which will have its earth premiere next month in the Spotlight on Documentary programme.
In the first installment of my conversation with Gay, he explained the roles played by Susan Morrison and David Remnick of The New Yorker and the reaction when Gay's literary agent Lynn Nesbit showed his unpublished work The Voyeur's Motel to Grove/Atlantic president and publisher Morgan Entrekin. We spoke about Gerald Foos, the subject of his book, the timeline of the movie deal gone wrong with Steven Spielberg and Sam Mendes, and how an article on New York Yankees manager Joe Girardi from 2012 eventually led to the film Voyeur.
Gay Talese with The Voyeur |