The history of gay porn cinema.

...or: Gorgik's and Haiducii's thread on all you ever wanted to know about gay porn.

It has become sort of a tradition with me that I'm not totally sure what's the most appropriate area to post new threads, so that's really nothing new.

But what is new to me, and in the very best way, is finding out how much fun it has been working together with haiducii on bringing this thread forth. Sending gazillions of emails to-and-fro Sweden and Slovenia has been pure pleasure and joy, and it's important to me that even if this thread is formally posted in my name, it's just as much haiducii's work behind it as my own.

So what's it all about? Isn't that obvious - the history of gay porn cinema? Sure there'll be a lot of what you would expect - series of downloading links to lots of gay porn classics, and the central field of the thread will be selections of gay porn from around 1970 and onwards.

But not only that. We will start with a series of - so to speak - preliminaries, where we will wrestle with some fundamental things such as the very concept of pornography : What is it? And maybe even more important - why is it?

But even before that, let's start with a small query in this post: What is this small series of pictures?



That's easy, isn't it? Some thumbnails of camvideos of young boys wanking their puddings, could you imagine a type of gay porn vids more characteristic of our own day and age?

Well not that this kind of answer would be exactly wrong (I don't think it would), but I think it could be more interesting if we would apply another point-of-view, and look at these most modern camvids as a trace or a relic from the very first epoch of motion picture history, traces and relics from the Cinema of Attractions.

I promise I'll explain - in due course....(cliffhanger, cliffhanger)

This is gonna be good

Thanks to gorgik and haiducii for a new thread to look forward to reading, watching and maybe some wanking too.

Why pornography anyway?

We live in a pornographic culture with different types of pornography all around you, and with pornography having become something so obvious, so commonplace and so everyday.

But don't fool yourself! The specter of illegality and censorship still hoovers over everything porno, and in every Swedish election to parlament for the last 30-35 years there has always been some political nutcase to suggest the total prohibition of porn. Porn is very good to hate, prohibit and censor.

But why is this the case? I think it's important to try to understand that in many ways this is unique to the modern western society - but we've got big difficulties looking at our own "strangeness".

OK but hasn't every society and every culture had two- and three dimensional images of naked bodies and sexual actions, and hasn't every society tried to regulate sexual behaviour one way or another?

But that's just the problem! The modern concept of pornography hasn't got much to do with regulating behaviour; it's all about prohibiting imagery and looking at images. The good old greeks and romans didn't have any notion whatsoever that making, distributing and consuming images, books and poems about sexual emotions and actions could be considered illegal.

That my dear friends is a totally modern invention, and how it came about is a strange and peculiar story.

Let's start with the word "pornography"! Nothing but pure ancient greek, of course : pornographos, a word tucked into the greek writer Athenaeus book Deipnosophistai ("Learned Banquets") from 2nd century A.D. I's a word often translated in a way that implies that pornographia would mean "writing of harlots" or "writing of whores".

But there's two difficult ambiguities : a) The "writing OF harlots/whores" could mean two different things; aa) writing BY harlots/whores; or ab) writing ABOUT harlots/whores;
b)the verb graphein can mean writing, but it can also mean painting or drawing.

Now we'll have to look at what two important writers in the 18th and 19th centuries made with this ancient greek word!

The first writer was a frenchman N.E. Restif de la Bretonne who in 1769 published a book entitled Le Pornograph (The Pornographer), which was a project to describe and regulate prostitution and state brothels, and a pornographer in Restif's meaning was a man just like himself who wrote and published about regulating prostitution.

The second writer was of much greater importance to us, the German archeologist, art historian and philologist Karl Otfried Müller who in his immensly influential Handbuch der Archäologie der Kunst (1850) talked about "the great number of obscene representations...to which also mythology gave frequent occasion" and named the producers of such obscene representations "pornographers".

Behind Müllers words are nothing less than an emotional and intellectual earthquake and it got to do with the consequences of the excavations in Herculaneum and Pompeii in the 18th century.

Before these excavations and their spectacular findings, European scholars, antiquarians, philosophers and art historians had a very lofty and etheral image of ancient roman and greek societies; the scholars had a tendency to look upon ancient people almost as some kind of spritual beings with not much of bodily needs.

This view is concentrated in Johann Joachim Winckelmann's famous saying about Edle Einfalt und Stille Grösse, i.e. "Noble Simplicity and Calm Greatness".

But what the excavater's started finding was things like this! Not very noble, not very simple, and not very calming...
'




Obscenities of the worst possible kind from the point-of-view of 18th century european intellectuals. How on earth should images like these be handled? And what should they be called and how should they be categorised?

Pornography was the central conceptual answer to these tricky questions.

Here's a good YouTube-doentary to learn a bit more!

Sniffit said:

This is gonna be good

Click to expand...

There's no question about it [j/k]

Sniffit said:

Thanks to gorgik and haiducii for a new thread to look forward to reading, watching and maybe some wanking too.

Click to expand...

Welcome to our journey through history of gay porn

Thanks Gorgik and Haiducii for these enormous work which both of you have taken on your shoulders to give all of us, which are interested in, a great overview about the deployment of pornography until today. It will be thrilling and I'm happy to read and see more.

The Cinema of Attractions vs. the Cinema of Narrative Integration.

So in the middle of the 19th century we got a specific category of obscene images, objects, and books, images and objects that could and should be excluded from society and culture in general; things that maybe even could be considered illegal. Not just immoral but illegal.

Which was exactly what happened thanks to the worlds first modern Anti-Pornography Law, the British Lord Campbell's Act or Obscene Publications Act from 1857. This was what Britannia used to Rule the Obscene and Pornographic waves...



So what is that strange thing called pornography?

No thing at all, but a peculiar perspective on objects, images and books. An immoralizing and illegalizing perspective. A perspective characterized by moral and legal bad-ass-ness...

But not only that! In this specific post we will get into a specific bad-ass-ness of not just any kind of pornography, but cinematic porn, and even more specific : the movie aesthetic badness of anti-narrativity. (OK I know, maybe I'm getting too academic right now, but hang in with me, please...)

Almost everything that we recognize as cinema, as "the movies" emerged not in 1890 with Edison and not in 1895 with the brothers Lumière, but rather in 1907-1910 : movie stars, big film companies renting - not any longer selling - their movies to big and bigger cinema theaters with the help of specific distribution companies, specific trade journals, and the feature length narrative film as the standard fare of these film companies. All of this, what we recognize as cinema.

But what about before 1907-10???

Something very very different. In 1986-87 film scholars Tom Gunning and André Gaudreault published a couple of very influential essays, coining the concept of The cinema of attrations. Which wasn't just a string of random words but a serious attempt to characterize the difference between what had been before, and what came after.

Here's a little short YouTube doentary about this film historical difference!



While in the cinema of narrative integration everything is subsumed under the purpose of telling a complex story and erecting an ontologically independent narrative world, in the cinema of attractions the main point isn't complex storytelling, but rather showing off visual attractions of different kinds.

In the cinema of attractions, people in the film will relate to the audience in a fundamentally different way than in narrative cinema. In the cinema of attractions you will let actors recognize the precence of an audience, which normally won't happen in narrative cinema.

Look at this very short film made by Gerorges Méliès!



Maybe now it's time to get back to these thumbnails from modern camvideos and hopefully understand a bit why I said, that this very modern porn videos at the same time in a way are relics from the cinema of attractions, the cinema of showing off!



Now it's time to talk a bit about that specific illegal underground film genre - the stag film or the blue movie.

Stags are one of the oldest film genres, existing from the turn of the century until the late 1960s and having the same kind of formal characteristics. They are films with explicit hardcore sexual actions, never theatrically exhibited, always totally illegal, black&white, silent and always "one-reeler's" (never more than 10-12 minutes long).

Stags are one of the most important examples that the norms of the cinema of attractions continued existing underground after 1907, even if it got more and more distanced from the cinematic mainstream.

Now please be patient with me! I had hoped to find some stags with male same-sex action, but we couldn't find any one the net. The only stags I could find were strictly with other-sex actions, i.e. what we today would call "straight porn".

In the next post I'll explain why I use those clumsy expressions "same-sex action" and "other-sex action", but right now the problem is, that up-and-downloading straight porn is prohibited on the public forum.

But I thought that maybe it could be considered a lesser offence if I make an anonymized link to streaming a single example of stag film from around WWI.

The moderators may judge...

Anon URL

Let me tell you again how very interesting is your lecture here! I love it so much. But only one disadvantage: the thumbnails couldn't be seen (at least on my PC). The pics open only for a small strip.

Shelter said:

Let me tell you again how very interesting is your lecture here! I love it so much. But only one disadvantage: the thumbnails couldn't be seen (at least on my PC). The pics open only for a small strip.

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"...the thumbnails couldn't be seen (at least not on my PC). The pics open only for a small strip."

It sounds like the pichost p&h is in one of it's baaaaad moods. What you can do - if you already haven't done it - is trying to refresh the page, and maybe several times.

Otherwise I'm afraid it's just about grinning and bearing it...:angry:

gorgik9 said:

"

Otherwise I'm afraid it's just about grinning and bearing it...:angry:

Click to expand...

So it will be ~X( :worried:

gorgik9 said:

It sounds like the pichost p&h is in one of it's baaaaad moods. What you can do - if you already haven't done it - is trying to refresh the page, and maybe several times.

Click to expand...

A little friendly advice: You should try to use a new/better image hosting site, because P&H really s***s! It's really annoying!!! ~X(

haiducii said:

A little friendly advice: You should try to use a new/better image hosting site, because P&H really s***s! It's really annoying!!! ~X(

Click to expand...

I guess I'll go back to my old habit of using stooorage...

dargelos said:

That hundred year old porno is really cute even it it is, unfortunately, hetrosexual.
We are all broad minded adults here, we can tolerate hetrosexuals now and again as long as we remember that their lifestyle is neither normal nor is it desirable.


It seems to me like its the adverts that make pimp&host so unreliable. Theres one page of webcams that sucks up all the bandwidth so the pictures dont get a chance to load. When its just the usual small ads the picture do load reasonably well. To add insult to injury the webcams are all showing girls.

Click to expand...

I guess you're correct about p&h...bloody annoying...

And I think we should allow the so-called hetero's in their reservations. Let's feed them peanuts and bananas...I wonder, can they handle ale? But probably not Guinness?!?

gorgik9 said:

I guess you're correct about p&h...bloody annoying...

And I think we should allow the so-called hetero's in their reservations. Let's feed them peanuts and bananas...I wonder, can they handle ale? But probably not Guinness?!?

Click to expand...

Let the so-called hetero's in their reservations! Thats the best I've ever heard!:rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl:

Before I say anything else I want to tell all, that this is the first post in which I'll use direct links to other threads, where haiducii has uploaded a collection of gay porn classics for you to download. So now we're getting close to the central field in this thread!

Gay Male Porn vs. Stags with male same-sex action.

There was stag movies with male same-sex action in them, but there were no gay male porn movies before Stonewall, before 1969/70.

What's the difference? Wouldn't Gertrude Stein say : "- A blowjob is a blowjob is a blowjob is..." ?

Well Gay Male Porn isn't a question of blowjobs, it's a question of an established film genre, or to be more precise, an established subgenre of porn film, and that did not exist in 1920, 1940 or 1960, but it started emerging in 1970. Fundamentally it's a question of sociocultural expectations - the tag "gay male porn" means, that there's an audience expecting to watch gay male sexual actions, just as there's a bunch of commercial porn producer getting into making these films, and a series of venues where the films can be exhibited, sold or rented. So it's a pretty complex "thing".

But almost as important as what we expect is, what we doesn't expect - if you want to look at some gay male porn, you definitely don't expect to watch a man fucking an underaged boy, a goat, a mare or a woman.

Limits and borders of genres are powerful things. But film genres and their borders doesn't come down from heaven. They are sociocultural constructions. So how and why did they get constructed?

What could emerge when Hollywood came tumbling down?

What was Hollywood from the 1920s to the late 1950s? A vast kingdom of entertainment with five major princedoms - MGM, Paramount, Warner Bros., 20th Century-Fox, RKO - and three minor : Universal, Columbia, United Artists. The most relevant difference between majors and minors was, that the majors had their own chains of first-run theaters, the minors hadn't.

From 1915 and the US Supreme Courts desicion in Mutual v. Ohio, it was decided that movies weren't protected by the First Amendment. Meaning that anyone that wanted to censor movies could have a field day. Freedom of speech, freedom of the press? Well not for the movies, not in the US of the fuckin' A.

You could say that from the 1920s to the late 1950s, there were three fundamentally different categories in american film :

1) The fully legal production of the Hollywood studios.

2) The totally illegal stags.

3)The category in between - the problematic and controversial classical Exploitation movies.

But this grandiose system started crumbling, first in 1948 with US Supreme Courts decision in the Paramount-case, stating that the major studios had to start divest their ownings of theaters, which meant that the studio's economy soon would become troubled.

And then in 1952 with US Supreme Courts famous decision in the Miracles-case, giving the First Amendment protection back to the movies. And as if that wasn't enough, between 1948 and 1952 there was a new powerful news- and entertainment medium - network TV!!!

Hollywood was in for some very, very troubled days...



The distinction between the three fundamental categories started becoming meaningless and the Classical Exploitation category just petered out.

Instead a new genre emerged - the modern Sexploitation movie with director Russ Meyer's The Immoral Mr. Teas (1959) often considered the first.

The real media-economic importance probably was, that in an age when the old studios were having big difficulties supplying relevant films to the theaters exhibition slots, the sexploitation movies became highly relevant.

And then, in early 1967 yet another new category of erotic films emerged: the eager beaver movies, i.e. fully nude young girls showing off their pussies ("beavers").

It first started in San Francisco and not much later in Los Angeles, while New York was quite a bit later. Sexploitation had been 35mm film exhibited in traditional hardtop theaters; beavers were made on 16mm film and exhibited in small storefront theaters always with less than 200 seats.

The origins of modern hardcore porn movie was the vicious competition between sexploitation films and beaver films that started from 1967 on, and this is film scholar Eric Schaefer's explanation. I think it's the only serious attempt to an explanation that I know.

Hardcore goes homo!!!

But what about gay hardcore?

Things were a-changing which the Park Theater in L.A. and it's owners Shan Sayles and Monroe Beehler soon noticed. They wanted to cater to the gay community in L.A. and started from June 1968 on to make special exhibition programs - "A Gay Evening at Park Theater", so to speak.

Sayles and Beehler started their own production company Signature Films and employed a young film professional Tom DeSimone who started making gay hardcore in 1970. There'll be more about DeSimone in the following posts.

Some demythologization.

But hey! "Everybody" didn't live in big cities like N.Y., S.F. or L.A., "everybody" didn't even live in Stockholm, Copenhagen, Newcastle or Maribor. "Some people" lived in Yoknapatawpah County, Mississippi, or in itty-bitty villages in the deep Swedish countryside. How did they get in touch with gay porn or any kind of movie porn?

8mm porn shorts through mail order, of course!!!

http://www.gayheaven.org/showthread.php?t=494169

Gay Porn Pioneers from the Seventies!

After this post it'll be haiducii's turn to get in command of this thread. Personally I'm so damn curious about what's he gonna do, but I'm certain he'll treat us to some great stuff!!!

The main point in this post will be to - following gay activist and media scholar Jeffrey Escoffier - talk about the five gay porn directors who's commersial and critical success in the early-to-mid 70s paved the way for feature length gay porn movies as a commersially viable genre of cinematic porn:

- Wakefield Poole

- Jerry Douglas

- Jack Deveau

- J. Brian [Jeremiah Brian Donahue]

- Fred Halsted

A sixth item to be downloaded from this post is Tom DeSimone's early gay porno "doentary" Erotikus (1974, which is the correct year of production and premiere).

Wakefield Poole: Boys in the Sand. (1971)

http://www.gayheaven.org/showthread.php?t=495145

This is the first porn movie - and not just the first gay porn movie - to get reviewed in the leading trade journal Variety and the movie premiered in New York in late December 1971. Director was the Broadway theater director and choreographer Wakefield Poole, whose leading man Casey Donovan [Cal Culver] soon became the very first of gay porn stars.

The scene is the famous vacation resort for the gay upper middle class just outside New York, Fire Island. Since our file got Wakefield Poole's own DVD-commentary, we've got the most competent and authoritative commentary possible in this post.

You'll see that this is one of many examples of a gay porn feature movie from the seventies that isn't really a soundmovie, but rather a silent movie with a soundtrack or voice-over edited on the film.

Why? Because it was making synchronized sound that was a) the technically most difficult part of the moviemaking process; b) the most expensive part of the process. That Boys in the Sand had soundtrack edited on, but no synch sound immediately tells you, that Wakefield Poole didn't have big piles of money behind him, and not lots of contacts with film professionals.

Jerry Douglas : The Back Row (1973).

http://www.gayheaven.org/showthread.php?t=495223

Another movie with Casey Donovan [Cal Culver] as the star and made in New York, but this is about the goings on in one of the porn theaters around Times Square, a Times Square that no longer exists. You could say that Jerry Douglas' movie is sort of a gay porn version of John Schlesinger's Midnight Cowboy, and just like Boys in the Sand it's a silent movie with edited on soundtrack.

Jack Deveau: A Night at the Adonis (1978)

http://www.gayheaven.org/showthread.php?t=495379

The third director in our seventies collection is the third newyorker, but we couldn't find his first porno Left-Handed from 1972, so I decided to take A Night at the Adonis from 1978 instead, and the reason is that this is the second great classic about the happenings in an oldtime porn theater.

You'll immediately sense big differences on the sound front - synch sound all the way, and Deveau already had his own production company - Hand in Hand Films - with several film pro's employed.

The Adonis was one of the most famous (or infamous) of the old porn theaters in the Times Square area, and one of those who only exhibited gay porn.

If you want to know more about life in the New York porno theaters, the best things to do are a) to get hold of a copy of Samuel R. Delany's book Times Square Red, Times Square Blue; and/or get hold of b) Fred Barney Taylor's doentary The Polymath or; The Life and opinions of Samuel R. Delany, Gentleman.

And maybe I'll write some more post on the old porn theaters later on in this thread, but not right now.

J. Brian: Seven in a Barn (1971)

http://www.gayheaven.org/showthread.php?t=495157

When J. Brian made his first feature length hardcore movie he was already the big porno mogul of San Francisco having made lots of 8mm loops selling by mail order and the gay porn magazine Golden Boys.

It probably could be said, that J. Brian was the father of the porno concept of horny handsome healty and preferably blond boys of sunny California with big fat schlongs, always ready to fuck. Another claim to fame could be that it was J. Brian who tought a very young John Travis his earliest roaps in porn production.

But lets talk a bit more about the gay porn industry as a totality, instead of individual directors and films! The fact that there's three New York directors in our collection actually is a bit misleading, since in the seventies New York never had the same clout in the industry as S.F. and L.A.

And there were some interesting differences between the two big Californian cities concerning their gay porn production!

In early-to-mid seventies S.F. porno was much into 8mm short loops. Many of the early producers were mostly or totally 8mm freaks. J. Brian did 8mm and so did John Travis and Matt Sterling, who founded his Brentwood Studio.

In spring 1972 Chuck Holmes started what was to become one of the most successfull and influential gay porn studios of all times, Falcon Studios, but it took several years before Falcon churned out anything but 8mm loops.

L.A. gay porn was much more like a gay porn copy of the usual Hollywood film genres and TV film genres - cowboys and injuns, thrillers, roadmovies etc. So did Shan Sayles and Monroe Beehler who started Signature Films and their film productions manager Tom DeSimone. Beehler continued following the same road when he had opened his own shop, Jaguar Productions.

Fred Halsted : L.A. Plays Itself (1972)

http://www.gayheaven.org/showthread.php?t=495248

But Fred Halsted was absolutely not into copying Hollywood...


I think it could be a bit easier understanding L.A. Plays Itself if you realise that it was made by a guy who had done quite a lot of looking into Kenneth Anger's experimental films Fireworks (1947) and Scorpio Rising (1964) :





Anyway! Without a doubt LA Plays Itself is one of the early classics of gay S/M porn, but you could also say that Joe Gage's hypermasculine gay porn in the late seventies comes out of Halsted.

Tom DeSimone: Erotikus (1974)

http://www.gayheaven.org/showthread.php?t=494320

Under the pseudonyme "L. Brooks" Tom DeSimone directed the gay porn "doentary" Erotikus in 1974 with Fred Halsted as narrator, but to be frank the fairest judgement would be, that it's an extended advertisment for DeSimones own hardcore productions.

The movie's got three parts:

A short first part with Physique-films from the 50s and 60s.

The very long second part with no other content than DeSimones own productions.

A short third part with som clips from Fred Halsted and Wakefield Poole.


So for the time being, it's over to you Haiducii

In the meantime Gorgik again many, many thousand thanks for your really GREAT work!
I'm awarding to you in the name of all interested here the title Professor Porn h.c.!

But seriously - never before I've read such a very interesting history of porn. Until now I have only used porn for my own lust. A very interesting chapter - and now Haiducii I or we are waiting for your surprises!

Erotikus (1973 vs 1974)

gorgik9 said:

A sixth item to be downloaded from this post is Tom DeSimone's early gay porno "doentary" Erotikus (1974, which is the correct year of production and premiere).

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According to 1MDB it was released in July 1973. :?

haiducii said:

According to 1MDB it was released in July 1973. :?

Click to expand...

So it is!!!

I think I'm gonna take a flight to N.Y. and bash Jeffrey Escoffier and tell him to check with my maaan from Maribor, Slovenia, before churning out faults...

Thanks :big hug:

Shelter said:

A very interesting chapter - and now Haiducii I or we are waiting for your surprises!

Click to expand...

Don't expect too much from me. I'm only human

haiducii said:

Don't expect too much from me. I'm only human

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But WHAT a man!!!!
BTW I would be happy if I could so much. :blushing: