Mark is currently the 2024-2026 SPAN Postdoctoral Fellow at Northwestern University (with joint appointments in Gender & Sexuality Studies and Black Studies) where he teaches courses on race and pornography, gay porn history, and black queer studies. He’s currently starting a project titled Black Inches: Masculinity, Visuality, and Erotic Resistance in the ‘Blatino Porn’ Era. This project is a study of an under-examined moment in gay porn history where Black and Latino porn actors and producers were excluded from mainstream pornographic media and created pornographic content for themselves, by themselves. This project argues that blatino porn developed as a counternarrative and transformative space to create a more nuanced understanding of race, masculinity, fantasy, and desire. By focusing on the films, biographies, and cultural production of industry figures, this study reveals how blatino porn reimagined racialized masculinity and sexuality that were simultaneously subversive and transgressive. Through pornochiving—a term coined to describe the creation of a personal archive to address gaps in porn history—close reading, and personal interviews, this project provides a rich historiographic narration of this porn era. By reading across various media forms, including films, hip-hop music, and archival interviews, this study illuminates how blatino porn documented its history and created a legacy that challenges exclusion and erasure within the broader gay pornographic canon. This research has been awarded fellowships and grants by the The Department of Black Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara; Stuart A. Rose Library at Emory University; The Graduate School at the University of Maryland, College Park; The Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction; The Ronald E. McNair Scholars Program; and the University of Amsterdam.

For more information on Mark’s scholarly research, publications, and teaching portfolio, please click here for his CV.