“Ruszczycky analyzes gay pornography’s penetration of popular culture and high culture since the 1960s, and its enduring impact on gay sexual fantasies and practices. Comprehensively unfolding—and bravely affirming—that impact’s most unredeemable ‘vulgar’ expressions, Ruszczycky thoughtfully details sensational gay visions of leathermen, hot cops, AIDS-era ‘sleazehounds,’ intergenerational sex, and ‘boys’ who become ‘pigs.’ Vulgar Genres is a major contribution to gay literary and social history, and to cultural studies in general.”

Robert L. Caserio, Pennsylvania State University

“Vulgar only in the best possible sense, and by no means generic in its analytic sharpness, Ruszczycky’s Vulgar Genres gives us a vitally important account of how gay pornographic writing—though largely ignored in the scholarship of queer literary history and of porn studies— facilitated, enriched, and helped make possible both contemporary gay literary fiction and lively gay counterpublics in the late twentieth century.”

Darieck Scott, University of California, Berkeley

"Embracing crudeness and rejecting overt politics, pornographic writing in Ruszczycky’s analysis is neither merely erotic nor transparently sociological, but experimental and inventive in its imagining of gay subjectivity, desire, and community. . . . As the best work in porn studies does, Vulgar Genres finds that pornography is always doing more than stoking erotic pleasure in readers."

American Literary History