Protests Force London Porn Film Festival Move to Secret Venue

In the United Kingdom, where online porn sites will be blocked starting July 15 for anyone unwilling to upload age-verification documents, as AVN.com reported, the leading LGBTQ porn film event has now been pushed underground by anti-porn protesters. The three-year-old London Porn Film Festival was scheduled to hold screenings at an arts venue known as Horse Hospital, but after threats of picketing by what festival organizers called “a transphobic hate group,” the festival will screen its films at an undisclosed venue that will be revealed only to ticket holders. According to the festival’s site, the group—which the organizers said they did not want to name “so as to not give them undue attention”—not only threatened to disrupt the festival, they filed complaints with the London Borough of Camden, which was then legally obligated to commence an investigation, “which has caused a lot of logistical and financial issues.” Janice Williams, who heads the activist group Object—which, as its name implies, objected to the festival—told the Guardian that the films screened at the LPFF would promote “degradation and oppression.” But festival co-organizer Rude Jude said that Williams was part of the “moral panic” gripping the U.K. when it comes to porn—especially porn that explores LGBTQ sexuality. “Britain likes to think of itself as a place tolerant of queer people, but when queer people assert ourselves, we’re attacked,” Rude Jude told the paper. The festival was conceived, Rude Jude explained, as a response to a 2014 U.K. law that banned the depiction of certain sexual acts in porn films produced in that country. “It banned the depiction of female ejaculation, caning, breast play, flogging. These things are part of queer sexuality,” the festival organizer told the Guardian. “The festival was formed as a protest.” At the time the law was passed, independent porn producer Erika Lust told The Guardian that the legislation would send U.K. porn back to “an age where porn is simply the boring, unrealistic, male fantasy of bimbos eagerly pleasing men as if it is their duty, where women are submissive and lack ownership of their sexuality.” The group Women Against Pornography denied the festival’s accusation of “transphobia,” but added in a Twitter post cited by the Guardian, “if transgenderism is apparently so closely linked with pornography then that’s not a very good advert for it.” Photo By London Porn Film Festival