
William E. Jones
Where are they now? I wonder of the pimply young men in William E. Jones’s seminal video, The Fall of Communism as Seen in Gay Pornography, 1998. Perhaps at a rally for Fidesz, the far-right Hungarian party, or guarding the dacha of Vladimir Putin. Recalling the making of that breakthrough work in his new novel-cum-memoir, I Should Have Known Better (2021), Jones notes the “atmosphere of coercion” that pervades the gay-for-pay tapes—at the time, freshly imported from Eastern Europe and rented from a Los Angeles video store where he worked—on which he found his subjects. “When poor white people