Rolf Hammerschmidt’s Boytropolis and the Ethno-Ecological Imaginary

Abstract

Rolf Hammerschmidt, one of Europe’s most prolific gay porn directors and producers, first came to notoriety with an eco-utopian fantasy that descends into the dystopian. His two-part Boytropolis (1993, 1996) imagines a secluded woodland society of horny loincloth-clad young men whose insatiable sexual appetite appears to derive from a juice diet consisting of a mysterious emerald-colored potion that they extract from the local foliage, at least until they are denied indulgence in either this nectar or the sexual activity it inspires and vanish in a puff of smog. Attending to the unexpectedly rich cinematic history on which the film draws, which centrally includes not only Fritz Lang’s Metropolis but also Frank Capra’s Lost Horizon (1937), this article puts forth that Boytropolis exposes and explores a troublingly normative homotopian vision, one that relies on environmental and racial homogeneity, and on an eco-imperialist politics of conquest, for its erotic charge.