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Gay Porn

The lack of gay porn followed from a lack of demand. There was no product because there was no market. "Gay images existed only as exotica within the heterosexual market," writes Jack Stevenson for the Fall 1997 Film Quarterly. "While viable markets for gay male material would emerge over the decades, genuine lesbian pornography as a commercial commodity… would not emerge until the 1980s…"

The 1950s saw the rise of "physique cinema" where musclar men, many straight, posed and flexed awkwardly to instruction from offscreen directors. Next came wrestling films. "Minimal plot setups introduced stereotyped masculine characters who quickly came to odds and soon, stripping down to jockstraps, were whirling in a frenetic, nearly nude mass of torsos and splayed limbs as fake punches and chops were thrown and pretend chockeholds applied…" (Film Quarterly)

Soft homo porn was distributed by Creative Film Associates, a film-makers' collective, and Amos Vogel's New York City-based Cinema 16.

In 1968, Park Theater in Los Angeles became the first theater to commercially show films with male nudity and gay themes. New York's biggest gay theaters were the Park Miller on 43rd Street and the 55th Street Playhouse. Hardcore homosexual features appeared in 1969. "The landscape was transfigured almost overnight as "beefcake" or "meatrack" productions, euphemisms for gay hard-core porn in the trade, began commercial exhibition at about the same time as straight hard-core features, albeit on a separate and smaller circuit. By late 1971, better-produced and more dramatically ambitious hard-core films began to appear in response to the lack of quality in the very first hard-core titles. On December 29, 1971, Wakefield Poole, an ex-dramatist who had once stage-managed the Phyllis Diller show on television, opened his $8,000 hard-core feature, Boys in the Sand, at the 55th Street Playhouse and grossed $400,000 on a smash run. Poole had unveiled the film with a slick and artful advertising campaign unheard-of for a gay--or straight--hard-core movie, placing ads and earning reviews in mainstream publications like After Dark, The Sunday New York Times, and Variety (which announced, certainly prematurely, that now "there are no more closets"). Boys in the Sand earned model-star Cal Culver celebrity status and prefigured the concept of "porno chic" popularized by Deep Throat in 1972. Poole's contributions to the relative legitimization of gay hard-core film were revolutionary: for the first time, a movie had credits and a real name was on it." (Film Quarterly)

Fred Halstedt reveled in sadistic porn, exhibiting The Pledgemasters in Manhattan in 1971 and L.A. Plays Itself in 1972. Police raids shut down many of his shows.

Lodestar shows Jesus coming off the Cross to perform homosexual deeds.

By 1972 America hosted 50 hardcore homo porn theaters, 12 in New York City. The production and distribution company Jaguar raised "the technical quality and the narrative content of gay hardcore feature filmmaking." Jaguar used such directors as J. Brian, Ignation Rutkowski, and Gorton Hall. Barry Knight, who produced many of the dreamy Salem cigarette ads, directed Devil in the Flesh and Blue Summer Breeze.

Gary Morris wrote for www.brightlightsfilm.com in an article on Radley Metzger: "The “golden age” of porn during the '60s and '70s was more fool's gold than real for queer audiences. In spite of the endless talk about the sexual revolution, gay sexual imagery was mostly confined to its own little ghetto of grainy loops and, eventually, a few all-male
venues that sprung up among the legion of relentlessly hetero Pussycat and Mitchell Brothers Theatres. (Lesbian “venues” per se never materialized.) Of course, there was always the seeming exception of the obligatory dyke sequence in much of straight porn, but these usually had a grim, forced feel, and it's doubtful
that queer viewers were fooled."

San Francisco painter turned filmmaker Curt McDowell tried the blur the distinction beteen art and porn, and gay and straight. He mixed homosexual and heterosexual acts in the 1975 cult favorite Thundercrack. Curt filmed his sister Melinda having sex in the 1975 Nude - A Sketchbook. "Although unrepentantly gay, McDowell objected to being ghettoized as a gay film-maker and demanded the freedom to draw on all ranges of sexuality in his work. And although he had a heartfelt love of prurient film pornography with its graininess and zoom shots, he would also attempt the inconceivable: to free explicit sexuality from the onerous implications of "pornography" by depicting it as an innocent and wholly natural act to be celebrated rather than commodified." (Film Quarterly)

"I have a collection of old gay porno novels from the Fifties and Sixties, with titles like Pretty Man, The Gay Trap, Mr. Queen and Savage Stud," wrote journalist Dan Savage. "These books are full of homophobic cliches--self-hating old queers, killer drag queens, unfeeling hustlers--and I absolutely love these books. Late at night I curl up with one and feel transported to the pre-Stonewall world of my gay forefathers. For a few hours, I live in this thankfully bygone era, and era of oppression, self-hatred and the delicious feeling of being a very, very bad boy. The Meatrack was filmed in pre-Stonewall San Francisco (1968) and is one of my dirty, self-hating novels put on screen."

In his 1994 book One-Handed Histories: The Eroto-Politics of Gay Male Video Pornography, John R. Burger writes about the years 1982-1988 this way: "A hierarchization of porn stars begins to occur within the star system. This hierarchy, vanguarded by Travis and Sterling, positions straight-identified actors such as Rick Donovan, Brian Maxon, Tony Stefano, Tim Lowe, Matt Ramsey [Peter North] and Tom Brock - men who, infrequently, could get f---ed for bucks, but would not be caught dead swallowing semen or kissing a buddy on the lips - at the top, and usually in the top's position, while the more obviously 'gay' performers (i.e., bottoms who enjoy being penetrated) are given a lesser status."

Dave Kinnick told journalist Charles Isherwood: "It was believed that the only people capable of being stars were these guys who were promoted as being straight; the mainstay of gay porn since day one has been these supposedly straight men f---ing gay guys. The bottoms are never famous; the bottoms are interchangeable." Until the rise of bottom Joey Stefano in 1990.

In his book on Stefano, Wonder Bread and Ecstasy, Isherwood provides evidence that many homosexuals find straight men more attractive than men who act queer. "Straight-acting" pops up frequently as a quality sought in gay singles ads. Gay videos emphasize stories about athletes, construction workers and men in uniform rather than interior decorators, fashion designer and hairdressers.

The late '80s however saw a rise of homosexual activism and it became more cool in gay life to be gay. Homosexual journalist Dave Kinnick says that Stefano's uniqueness was his public courting of other men. "He'd walk around at a club with a boy on his arm. The gay porn world has always been insular…backward. Then here comes Stefano, an aggressive bottom, who, to the extent he was capable of it, seemed very proud of being a bottom." (Wonder Bread)

Leading this new charge was cross-dressing director Chi Chi LaRue who helped transform the homosexual porn industry from self-imposed anonymity to loud partying.

In the 1990 video On The Rocks, Joey Stefano asks Jeff Stryker, "So why don't you ever kiss guys in films?" Jeff then gives him a quick French kiss, a 1990 acknowledgement that the biz had changed.

Isherwood points out that there is no such thing as a gay movie star. For public consumption, all the leading men are packaged as heterosexuals. "That gay men and women hunger for a movie icon they can claim as their own is amply demonstrated by the persistence of rumors of stars' homosexuality that spread through the gay population…. So the absence of any openly gay men and women among the most famous, movie stars, is an unsettling idea to the homosexual community. It says that at America's apex, among the gods and goddesses, gay people are not welcome…."

Porn stars, therefore, are the only gay movie stars. Isherwood says that about the only place where homosexuals can find visual representation of homosexuality is in homosexual pornography. "For many a gay man, stumbling upon a gay porn magazine may be the first concrete indication that there are others like him out there." Writes John Burger: "It [homosexual porn] is an attempt by gay men to rewrite themselves into American history." In his article "Male Gay Porn: Coming to Terms" in Jump Cut magazine, Richard Dyer writes that porn "has made life bearable for millions of gay men."

Writes John Lyttle in the Independent on Sunday, a London newspaper: "Starved of images… gay men have traditionally cruised the margins in search of the self… The narcissism is unavoidable, of course. Watching gay porn means you're sitting… watching two sets of similar genitalia bump while playing with your own particular set arrangement of the same. Unlike heterosexual porn, you're not identifying with one body and wanting the other. You're identifying with two, but they're the same body, one body, and that one body turns out to be your own. The real sex object in gay porn is the homosexual viewer…"

The 1990s rash of readable books about gay porn portray the leading performers as narcissists, posers, partiers, drug users and general idiots. Like their straight and mainstream counterparts, they are good models for arousing sexual excitement, but lousy models for constructing a good life. Those still under the delusion that sex, drugs, rock n'roll, money and fame bring happiness, should check out books like Charles Ishwerwood's Wonder Bread and Ecstasy: The Life and Death of Joey Stefano.

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