The history of gay porn cinema.

[gorgik9]

Great Gorgik and Haiducii we all will wait. This is really one of the best posts and/or threads I've ever read. Very informative, good written und not so academic. So you can read it easy and learn plenty of knowledge. So thank you to both of you for your GREAT work.

Your words warms my heart Shelter!

 

[Hyp]

more dirty old magazines are available here:
http://www.gayheaven.org/showthread.php?p=2067428#post2067428

 

[Hyp]

after reading through this thread you might consider yourself well-schooled...



and, oh, look, here's Matt Ramsey's "straight" hole getting schooled by Rick Donovan's monster dick!

​

 

[Hyp]

if you have your Masters Degree in the Classics,
you should be able to ID this dick instantly...



is this classic performer:

a) The Cowboy from the Village People
b) Kevin Williams
c) Chester A. Arthur
d) Eric Manchester
e) Chad Douglas
f) none of the above


​

 

[gorgik9]

if you have your Masters Degree in the Classics,
you should be able to ID this dick instantly...



is this classic performer:

a) The Cowboy from the Village People
b) Kevin Williams
c) Chester A. Arthur
d) Eric Manchester
e) Chad Douglas
f) none of the above


​

Chad Douglas of course, but it's the moustache which identifies Chad, not the cock...

 

[Hyp]

Okay, here's a bigger challenge for all the Classics majors out there...



THIS MONSTER MEAT BELONGS TO:

a) Jeff Stryker
b) Dick Masters
c) Tom Brock
d) John Davenport
e) Margaret Cho
f) none of the above

bonus points if you can name the movie this clip is from...
​

 

[gorgik9]

17th and 18th Century Obscene Literature: Part 1.

Hello y'all! This will be a two-part post about early modern obscene literature, beginning with the French invention of obscenity in the modern sense in the 17th century and with a short intro on Italian Renaissance erotica, and moving on - next weekend probably - with French 18th century proto-pornography and Marquis de Sade.

The double-post could be called "porn before porn" or in other words: the first traditions of criminally obscene books.

Before mid-17th century France, Europe didn't have any specific legislation against printed books depicting explicit sexual actions and using obscene vocabulary (cock, cunt, asshole, fuck - the four words that became baptized "the primary obscenities".) There were no secular authorities for censoring books and no trials against persons writing "bad books". Even the very words "obscene" and "obscenity" were missing.

Of course there were religious authorities censoring books, but if you imagine that religious censors in the 16th and 17th century were mostly on the look out for books praising boyish buttfuckology you're in the wrong parts of European history; catholic censors were on the look out for the Bible in any odd vernacular language, and the reason why Giovanni Boccaccio's juicy 14th century book Il Decameronewas put on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum wasn't because of all the bawdy eroticism. The problem according to the 16th century censors was rather, that Boccaccio depicted monks, nuns and priest as horny bastards, which was considered negative for the authority of the Church. But they didn't have any problems with the 16th century expurgated version of the book, showing peasants and craftsmen as the horndogs instead of monks and priests.

Talking about the Italian Renaissance, I think it's of some special interest to note, how extremely different policies on sodomy and its legal punishment the different Italian republics had in the 15th century. Here's a download-link to a recently published essey comparing Florence/Toscana and Venice:
Anon URL


Italian Renaissance Eroticism.

There were quite a lot of sexually transgressive literature in the Italian Renaissance made by writers like:

Pietro Aretino (1492-1556)

Antonio Vignali (1500-1559)

Antonio Rocco (1586-1653)

and others, and there was the kind of juicy poetry in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance called bawdy in english (Chaucer and Shakespeare wrote a lot of bawdy lines...) and gaulois in French, but let's inspect a famous Italian case that will show in an exemplary way what the difference was between traditional bawdy or gaulois and early modern obscenity.

It's the case of the well known engraver and printer Marcantonio Raimondi (1480-1534) who in 1524 made and published a series of engravings called I Modi (The Ways) based on a series of erotic paintings by Giulio Romano (1499-1546), made as a commission for Federico II Gonzaga's new palace in Mantua.

What happened was, that the Papal police in Rome threw Marcantonio in jail and destroyed all copies without any trial and without any laws behind trhe happenings. Pope Clement VII was - however - soon compelled to let Raimondi out of prison. Pietro Aretino wrote a series of bawdy sonnets - Sonnetti Lussuriosi - and used the engravings as an illustration of the poems, and so I Modi got a second edition in 1527.

One of Marcantonio's engravings

Aretino's using Marcantonio's engravings

The problem with Marcantonio's engravings from the Papal authorities point-of-view wasn't their explicit sexual content; Giulio Romano's paintings never caused any problems. No the problem was rather the new meaning of the expression "to make something public, to publish" that emerged after the printing press, hence just a few decades before I Modi.

Before the printing press, the only possible meaning of making something public was what it always had been since times immemorial : to make a speech in front of an audience. But now, after the printing press publishing more and more started meaning to hand a manuscript over to a printer, printing as many copies as necessary and then distributing the copies all over town, all over the region, all over the country, all over Europe.

The fundamental problem with this new type of making public was - from the authorities ponit-of-view - that no one really could controle who read what and why.

When during the Reformation translations of the Bible into vernacular languages - German, French, English, Swedish, Polish etc - started being printed all over Europe, catholic authorities got very, very nervous and tried to controle printing as much as possible.

The French invents modern obscenity: from Théophile Viau to Molière.

"Obscene/-ity" is pure ancient latin and a word whose history was totally cut off after late Antiquity. It didn't have any existence in the medieval Romance vernaculars and didn't re-emerge until 1511 in France in the compilation volume Vies des saints Pères. It seems the editor of this compilation simply choose the French equivalent of the Latin obscenitas without considering that this noun had no modern meaning.

The simple and honest thing to say is, that we don't have a fuckin' clue on what Latin obscenitas originally meant in Antiquity, and the modern meaning was constructed in mid-17th century France.

So in March 1623, king Louis XIII made the first attempt to name official readers/censors, which started a fierce catfight between the traditional religious censors (the Theology professors at Sorbonne University) and the new secular censors appointed by the king.

Meanwhile - in late 1622 or early 1623 - a collective volume of poems, Le Parnasse des poètes satiriques, was published without privilege which would become the center of arguments in the fight between religious and secular censor. The first poem in this book was this sonnet written by Théophile de Viau:

Phylis, everything is all ...ucked up; I'm dying of syphilis,
It's attacking me with all its might:
My C. lowers its head and has no strength
A stinking ulcer has spoiled my speech.

I sweated for thirty days, I vomited paste
Never did such great pains last for so long
The most steadfast spirit would have died from such languor,
And my affliction has nothing to console it.

My most intimate friends do not dare to come near me
Even I do not dare touch myself in this state,
Phylis, I caught the disease from ...ing you.

My God, I repent of having so badly lived:
And if your anger does not kill me this time,
I swear from now on to ...ck only in the ass.

A few years earlier a poem like this would have been a laugh and a lark and called gaulois, but now it was time for the big fight between authorities.

It was a Jesuit, Father Francois Garasse, who tought all and sundry the modern meaning of obscenity in a fat 1623 tome vehemently attacking de Viau and Le Parnasse. In Father Garasse's book, obscenity is made nothing but a speech crime: dangerous words pronounced by dangerous men o0f letters. What makes these obscenities dangerous and a problem that the civil authorities need to suppress, is that they aren't pronounced in privade homes but publicly circulated.

Obscenity is print residing on the border between private and public.

It took precisely 40 years before obscenity in this modern meaning occured again in French literature, this time in Molière's book Critique de "L'Ecole des femmes" published in 1663, and it seems to have been the second half of the 1660s when this new language of the secular censors got the grip on the French language.

When the philosopher Pierre Bayle talked about obscenity in the second edition of his Dictionnaire Historique et Critique in 1702, he took for granted that all his readers would be aquainted with the meaning of this word.

L'Ecole des filles and the new obscene novel.

In the beginning was L'Ecole des filles, published in 1655 and one of the most influential books ever written. During most of the 20th century it's been a popular opinion to claim, that a man named Michel Millot wrote the book, but - as Joan DeJean has shown - the opinion closest to the historical sources is, that it was the product of a small collective of printers, writers, booksellers and illustrators, among which Millot was one in this group.

What is certain is, that this group had all their fingers on the pulse of the trends in the Parisian book industry in the years immediately following the Fronde (the French civil war 1648-1653). They understood that things were much a-changing in the book market and they inaugurated a lot of the new flow.

L'Ecole des filles is one of the earliest books of prose fiction we would call a novel, and it's a novel written in the French vernacular, not in latin - the mid-17th century being the period of the definite tilt from latin to vernacular in the book production.

There was a lot of tilting going on in the book market: from aristocratic and academic readers to middle class; from male readers to female, and all of this emerges as a synthesis in this remarcable book.

Most writers before 1650 had some wealthy and powerful patrons behind their backs, the collective behind L'Ecole des filles hadn't. They had no intention of reflecting the aristocratic literary taste of a non-existant patron, and were un-interested in using sexually transgressive literature as a vehicle of socio-political satire. Neither were they interested in using "whores" and "nuns" as central literary voices in their book - all of which had been central for the transgressive literature of the Italian Renaissance.

L'Ecole des filles was populated by middle class boys and girls next door: Robinet, Fanchon and Suzanne. Here we have the original book illustration:

The transgressive literature we're dealing with in this book maybe don't look particularely transgressive to readers living and reading in the early 21st century, but it was to its early readers. It's a literature relentlessly focusing on sexual pleasure among middle class people, and to be more exact - heterosexual pleasure and womens talk of this pleasure. The young man Robinet doesn't take center stage, he's rather effectively to dwell in the margins. No, the important voices in the novel belongs to Fanchon - who is to be educated - and her elder cousin Suzanne, who will be Fanchon's teacher.

L'Ecole des filles gives us the basic pattern of heteronormative literature to be reproduced in innumerable obscene books from 1655 until our own time. Two 17th century followers almost as influential as L'Ecole des filles were Nicolas Chorier's latin novel Aloysia Sigeae, probably published in 1660 or 1665 and with it's first French translation L'Académie des Dames in 1680. (Aloysia Sigeae is the only exception to the rule that modern obscene literature never was written in latin.)

A third French 17th century classic was Jean Barrin's Vénus dans le cloître (1682).

These three books became great bestsellers that could be bought on the European book market still a hundred years after they were originally published, and this is a kind of knowledge we owe to the American historian Robert Darnton and his followers. On Darnton's list of 74 bestsellers in his book The corpus of clandestine literature in France 1769-1789 the L'Ecole des filles ranks as no 25, L'Académie des Dames as no 42 and Vénus dans le cloître as no 51.

If we accept the idea, that the concentration on sexual pleasure in erotic literature is a sign of it's modernity, then we must accept that the 17th century obscene literatur was more modern than 18th century proto-pornography. But this - and the greatest literary buttfucker of all times, marquis de Sade - is for the second part next weekend

 

[W!nston]

Wonderful post gorgik my friend.

 

[W!nston]

Okay, here's a bigger challenge for all the Classics majors out there...



THIS MONSTER MEAT BELONGS TO:

a) Jeff Stryker
b) Dick Masters
c) Tom Brock
d) John Davenport
e) Margaret Cho
f) none of the above

bonus points if you can name the movie this clip is from...
​

I think it's Dick Master's cock but not sure of the movie ...

 

[gorgik9]

Wonderful post gorgik my friend.

Thanks my friend

 

[gorgik9]

17th and 18th century libertine literature: Part 2.

"God's existence is an abomination!"

No, I'm not quoting myself. I'm quoting Donatien Alphonse Francois, marquis de Sade, born 1740 and died in 1814.

Or to be more precise: im quoting madame Delbène, nun and abbess of Panthemonts nunnery school and teacher of the two sisters Justine and Juliette in the first part of de Sade's novel Juliette, ou les prospérités du vice published in 1797/1801. (1801 is the date of the actual publication, but 1797 was the publishing date printed in the first edition.)

I immediately want to present what's going to be my main point-of-view on de Sade in this post: No, he wasn't a monster, and neither was he the incarnation of an abstract late 19th century psychiatric concept, "sadism".

He was a writer, a novelist, a loving and caring father and husband, who - when he passed away 74 years old - had been inprisoned and/or put in mental asylums for almost 30 years - without ever having a trial.

He was an outspoken atheist and a fierce anti-clerical, an avid buttfucker and sang so many eulogies on all pleasures of cock-in-ass, but - hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable - who (among GH members) doesn't like buttfucking? And yes, it seems he was a pretty rowdy and even violent man in his youth, but deserving almost 30 years in prison? Without trial?

If de Sade was cruel, then what kind of cruelty had been done unto him?

Second wave proto-porn of the 1740's.

If we consider the obscene books of the second half of the 17th century as the first wave of proto-porn, then the secon wave hit the French and European book market in the 1740's with popular writers like Jean-Charles Gervaise de Latouche's Histoire de dom B..., portier des Chartreux published about 1745 and marquis d'Argens' Thérèse Philosoph 1748, but the most popular bestseller was actually the French translation of a book written in English, John Cleland's Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasures 1749, today probably better known as Fanny Hill; the French translation La fille de joie was published 1751.

The third wave: proto-porn 1770-1800.

The third wave happened in the times directly before and after the French Revolution with writers like Réstif de la Bretonne, comte de Mirabeau and "our" marquis, and I think it necessary to start talking a bit about the connections of de Sade's life and his writings.

De Sade was inprisoned during three distinct periods and under three very different political regimes:
First he was in prison for about 13 years under the l'ancien régime of Louis XVI (in Vincennes 1777-84; in the Bastille 1784-89 and in the mental asylum Charenton 1789-80);
second he was inprisoned for about a year 1794-95 under the revolutionary republic accused for "moderatism" - a wonderful example of how a modern language of political "justice" is forged in these years;
and third he was put in prison for 13 years by none less than the man who was soon to be crowned emperor of France, Napoleon Bonapart (in Sainte-Pelagie & Bicêtre 1801-03; in Charenton 1803-1814).

He had written a few plays and travelogues before his first period of inprisonment, but the first of his black novels - The 120 days of Sodom, or the School of Licentiousness - was written on a narrow but very long scroll of paper which he managed to hide from his guards in the Bastille in 1785. De Sade feared his manuscript was irretrievably lost when the angry mob stormed the old prison in 1789, but it wasn't; de Sade never had a clue that it had been found and it wasn't published until 1904 by the German scholar Iwan Bloch.

The first download link in this post is Pier Paolo Pasolini's last and most controversial movie from 1975 Salò, or the 120 days of Sodom.
http://www.gayheaven.org/showthread.php?t=510991

It's not a straight forward filmatization of de Sade's novel; I think it's better to say it's loosely based on de Sade and in many respects a very free interpretation. In Pasolini's movie the story is set in northern Italy in the time just before the end of WWII in the fascist Salò-republic, and not in 18th century France.

De Sade's other black novels are:
a) the three different versions of Justine, ou les Malheurs de la vertu (first version written 1787, published 1930; second version written 1788, published 1791; third version published 1797/1801 an in tandem with Juliette);
b) the second part of the diptych of the two sisters Histoire de Juliette, ou les Prospérités du vice published 1797/1801;
c) Philosophy in the Bedroom published in 1795.

The black novels - however! - weren't de Sade's only writings. He was a very prolific and mulifaceted writer: a great many other novels, novellas and historiettes, plays, literary critique and political pamphlets. Much of his works have been destroyed or lost.

De Sade following and diverging from the proto-porn tradition.

My idea in this chapter is to compare de Sade's black novels to the libertine literary tradition and trying to assess on what points and in what aspects he confirmed the tradition and where he notably diverged. Of course, this must be a matter of "more or less", not "yes or no".

The female voices in the novels.

As I already stated in the earlier post on obscene literature, one of the most central characteristics of the novels in this tradition is the dominance of female voices, often with two women - one younger, one older - taking center stage while the male voices are pushed more or less to the margins.

Does de Sade confirm or diverge from this trait? I'd say it differs from his different novels. If we look at the last two black novels - Justine and Juliette - they powerfully confirms the tradition, while The 120 days of Sodom is rather a novel dominated by four male voices.

Sade and the sub-tradition of Venus in the cloister.

Venus in the cloister - published in 1683 - would have an immense importance to 18th century proto-pornographers, among them de Sade.

First of all, Jean Barrin's novel introduced a rigorously closed space - let's say a cloister - as the favourite type of space in proto-porn novels. De Sade doesn't use a cloister in The 120 days of Sodom, but another type of closed space, Chateau Silling.

Secondly it introduces a vehement anti-clericalism and more or less outspoken atheism in proto-porn. Radical consequent atheism is all over in de Sade's black novels, just as priests and monks are depicted as liars, hypocrites and whoremongers.

Thirdly, the religious violence, and in particular the deep catholic love of flagellatio - for whipping your own back raw and bloody. Ah, all the pious gore...

Venus in the cloister inaugurated the potent mixture of sex, catholic religious violence and libertine anti-clericalism that would explode in de Sade's mind and novels, and the importance of religious violence supported by catholic institutions and collective tradition is one of the most important reasons to why I'm very scepic towards interpreting "sadism" on individual and psyckopathological terms à la Richard von Krafft-Ebing (the Austrian psychiatrist who coined the concept of sadism as a sexual perversion in the 1880's).

Sodomy and de Sade.

De Sade diverged vehemently from the tradition when it comes to sodomy, to buttfucking; he sung innumerable eulogies on the cock-in-butt pleasure in his novels and it seems buttfucking also was his favourite sexual pleasure also in real life.

We know that his fellow pornographer Réstif de la Bretonne wrote an angry book against de Sade titled Anti-Justine where he in particular complained against all the sodomitical operations in de Sade's novels. As so many other contemporaries, Réstif couldn't stand the juicy buttfuckology.

Masturbation was as prohibited as sodomy in catholic theology, but while sodomy was reviled by so many proto-pornographers, masturbation was explicitely recommended (marquis d'Argens' novel Thérèse Philosophe is a good example). So de Sade seems to have been the only porno king of buttfuckology in the 18th century.

De Sade becomes a sexual perversion: sadism.

The noun "sadism" occured for the first time in 1834 in the French lexicographer P.C.V. Boiste's Dictionnaire universel de la langue francaise, telling the reader that sadism is "the most abominable delusion of lechery; an un-natural and anti-social mode of operation against nature (from Sade, proper name)" and in 1886 it became the name of a sexual perversion thanks to Richard von Krafft-Ebing.

I think it's the decent thing to do, to end this post with a few of de Sade's own words from one of the many letters to his wife while in prison. The letter is from 1781:

"Yes, I am a libertine, I confess, and I've thought out everything there is to think about in this area, but I've certainly not done everything I've thought, and I'm sure I'll never do it.

I am a libertine, but I'm neither a criminal nor a murderer."


*******************************

The second download link in this post is Roger Earl's movie "Like Moths to a Flame" from 1988.
http://www.gayheaven.org/showthread.php?t=513314

Weather Gay BDSM got something or nothing substantial to do with de Sade and his novels other than the word "sadism", well, that's up for y'all to ponder...

 

[haiducii]

Great insight into life of the notorious Marquis de Sade :thumbs up:

 

[gorgik9]

Great insight into life of the notorious Marquis de Sade :thumbs up:

Thanks haiducii!

The only portrait of de Sade which maybe, maybe could be authentic is this small drawing from his younger days:

But nobody knows for sure...

And then the original manuscript scroll for "The 120 days of Sodom":

 

[haiducii]

Back soon!

 

[gorgik9]

We sure will :thumbs up::cheers::thumbs up:

 

[gorgik9]

AIDS & Gay Porn, part 1.

Hello everybody!

We're back on track after the long summer break! We'll start with a two part post, where I'm doing the first part and haiducii will post part two next weekend!

But I'm sorry to say that I've had a lot of strange computer problems this afternoon and evening, and I really don't know whats gonna happen. I can only hope for the best, so keep your fingers crossed!

My post will have three chapters, of which the first will be quite personal about when and how it happened that I heard about the strange rumours about what they called "the gay cancer", and what happened later on in Swedish media, politics and society.

The second chapter is about to make kind of a clash between the understanding I had in the 1980s and the perspective on AIDS which modern scientific research from the last 20 years can give us.

The third chapter contains a couple of movies, one porn one non-porn.

Chapter 1: "So have you heard about the gay cancer?" How I heard about a scary rumour and what happened after that.

"- So have you heard about the rumours from America about this scary thing they call "gay cancer"? They say it's only gay men who get it, and some doctors think it could be caused by "poppers""

The guy who did the talking in the dark autumnal night (probably september or october) in 1982 was Bosse, a guy one year my elder, who recently had become sort of my gay elder brother, teaching me so many things I didn't know about. The reason we had become aquainted and befriended each others was, that both of us had refused to do the military service and did our civil service as an alternative, together with about 25 other guys in the same predicament.

We we're doing the first part of the service which was a 14 weeks long civil defense course, which happened at the Civil Defense School at Rosersberg, about 20 kilometers north of Stockholm. When my and Bosse's schoolday ended after 5 p.m. we often took the local train in to Stockholm to go to the cinema or theater or just had a beer and chatted about boys and sex and other nice things.

It was one of these evenings when Bosse started talking about the scary rumours. We we're walking around in Stockholm, and my answer to his question was: No, I haven't!

Compared to Bosse, I was so much more of the country bumpkin. I had quite a lot of boy-on-boy sex experience from early on, but it was just juicy sex with boys my own age in the country village where I had lived all of my young life, and I hadn't reall thought much about the famous "gay identity". As long as I could a cock to lick and suck on, the abstract notion of identity didn't really matter much.

And things like "gay magazines" - which Bosse of course read now and again, giving him quite a lot of important information myself had no idea about. Well to be honest maybe I had looked into a single edition - probably the gay magazine Revolt, which was the biggest and most influential in the early 1980s - but I knew so very little of gay matters compared to him.

*******************************************

The first time the strange illness was mentioned was in a couple of medical newsletters (Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, MMWR) published in the US by Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and written by doctors Michael Gottlieb in 5 June 1981," Pneumocystis Pneumonia - Los Angeles", and Alvin E. Friedman-Kien on 3 July 1981 on homosexual men in New York diagnosed with the unusual type of skin cancer, Kaposi's Sarcom.

The disease didn't get its official name Aquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome / AIDS published in MMWR until september 1982 (about 15 months after the first publications), but it got so many un-official names in the early period, most of which were connected to "homosexual" or "gay". Some examples: Gay related immune deficiency/GRID; Gay compromise syndrome; Gay lymph node syndrome; Gay cancer; Gay plague; Homosexual syndrome. Some of these early names stuck, and the Swedish press followed the same patterns. They talked about "homosexsjukan" and "bögsjukan" ("homosex disease" and "faggot disease").

A much more fundamental problem was, that doctors and scientists and everybody else didn't really know if AIDS was an infectious disease or something completely else.

A group of Scandinavian doctors (of which not so few were gay themselves) wanted to believe in unhealthy lifestyle and drugs as a more probable cause than infection, but to be honest the idea that "poppers" could be the cause behind Kaposi's Sarcoma / AIDS was actually pretty stupid to have come from experienced doctors. Why this harsh verdict? Because the active substance in poppers was amyl nitrite which had been used as a medication for angina pectoris for generations without people getting AIDS. Anon URL
I think that the big discussion on poppers and AIDS was a symptom of how scared everybody was, including the doctors...

In May 1983 the renowned scientific journal Science announced, that two international groups of scientists had declared, that they had found a pathogen that could be the cause of AIDS: according to the French group under Luc Montaigner it was a retrovirus given the name LAV, while the American group under Robert Gallo found a virus given the name HTLV-III. So there was a new problem with names, but in 1986 an international committee decided on a new name: HIV, while also stop using LAV and HTLV-III.

After my conversation with Bosse in autumn 1982, I didn't personally read or hear much about the "strange disease" during 1983 and 1984 and this for two complementary reasons:

The first reason was that I became a university student in 1983 in the city where I've lived ever since. I had the narrow economy typical of the uni student; I could afford my own telephone, but not buy my own TV set and I bought newspapers very seldom. I had a couple of regular lovers giving me a meaningful sexlife, and an active imagination, but of course I couldn't afford a VCR and buying video porn - much to expensive.

The second reason was, that even if I had bought newspapers more regularly, during the years 1982-84 the interest of the Swedish media for the AIDS epidemy must be described as fairly modest. So I wouldn't have found particularly much to read and watch anyway.

But that would surely change radically from January 1985.

Homophobic shit hitting the medial fan big time.

Most of this changed in dramatic ways from 21 January 1985, when Expressen - Sweden's biggest paper at this time - started a long series of articles with the title AIDS - världsepidemin som angår oss alla ("AIDS - the global epidemy concerning everybody"). Expressen became the leader of the pack of the big national papers - Aftonbladet, Dagens Nyheter, Svenska Dagbladet - all of which started substantially expanding their coverage of the AIDS epidemy.

A few months later - 9 May 1985 - the Swedish government appointed the AIDS Delegation, soon to become the central actor for anything and everything concerning AIDS for many years ahead, with its chariman, Social Democratic minister for social affairs Gertrud Sigurdsen. The most fundamental and controversial decision made by the Delegation on 1 November 1985 was to classify AIDS as a generally dangerous disease according to the very strict Swedish Law of Infectious Diseases, which meant that persons who had become HIV positive and/or diagnosed with AIDS could actually be treated as a criminal by the doctors and the police.

This decision paved the way for a Swedish AIDS policy much more characterized b authoritarian measure and state control that would be the case in neighbouring Denmark, and at the same time the public debate in papers and other media got more and more into a dicotomous rhetoric telling all and sundry the difference between "US" responsible heterosexual swedish citizens, and "THEM", the female heroin addict/prostitute and the super-promiscuous homosexual man.

The gay boys weren't much more than shit and vermin. But nothing was so bad it couldn't get worse!

Chapter 2: AIDS is a zoonotic disease, what that means and why it matters.

I'm pretty sure that most of you - just like myself until the last few years - have had an understanding of AIDS / HIV which connects the disease with homosexuality in an almost essential way and maybe also thinks about the disease as something closely connected to the US and big cities like New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles. And maybe you have heard of Patient Zero, the gay Canadian flight attendant who brought AIDS to north America in the late 1970s? (He definitely didn't)

The guy who more than any other person has helped me to more modern and scientific perspecives on the origins, biology and ecology of HIV/AIDS is writer and science journalist David Quammen and the cohort of doctors, veterinarians, evolutionary biologists, molecular geneticists and ecologists behind Quammen's powerful book Spillover: Animal infections and the next human pandemic (2012)

When it comes to the history of HIV/AIDS I would also like to recommend a specific article on english Wikipedia:Anon URL

David Quammen's book is a book on zoonosis and zoonotic dieases, so what the fuck is that?

Zoonosis is an animal infection transmissable to humans, and if this transmission occurs we get a zoonotic disease. Spillover - the title of Quammen's book - is the term denoting the actual moment when a pathogen passes from member of one species, as hosts, into members of another.

A reservoir host is a living organism that carries the pathogen, harbors it chronically, while suffering little or no illness. Nearly all zoonotic diseases are caused by infection by one of six kinds of pathogen : viruses (AIDS, influenza, rabies, yellow fever etc), bacteria (bubonic plague, Lyme disease etc), protists (some varieties of malaria), prions (mad cow disease), worms and fungi.

About 60% of all infectious diseases in the human world today are zoonotic diseases, and among the we find some of the worst killers of all times: bubonic plague / Black Death, and the influenza of 1918-19, killing about 50 million people in not much more than a year.

The dominating image of AIDS in the 1980s.

Why did we have the kind of image of the AIDS disaster we had in the 1980s and in many ways still in the 1990s? Was it because the image of the essential connection between AIDS, male homosexuality, the US big cities and the ideas of moral decadence reflected the famous thing called reality?

Before making a judgement, I think its necessary to think about the fundamental fact, that the numbers of doctors, hospitals and other medical institutions that could take and analyze blood test and other tests, and the numbers of scientific journals and newsletters able to communicate the doctors findings of strange, unusual symptoms were very high in the US and western Europe. In central Africa it was comparatively very low.

If we add a good dollop of vicious homophobia in the European and American perspective, I think we could get to a more realist judgement on why the image was what it was.

Monkeys, apes and Simian Immonodeficiency Virus, or: from SIV to HIV and back again.

Groups of scientists made two fundamental discoverieas already in the second haf of the 1980s: the first was, that the Human Immunodeficiency Virus/ HIV had its animal anchimpanzeesalogy in some grougs of monkeys and apes, like the African Green Monkey, the Sooty Mangabey and - a bit later - chimpanzees, so there was a Simian Immunodeficiency Virus / SIV.

These results opened up a very unexpected perspective on the question of the origins of HIV/AIDS: What if AIDS was a zoonotic disease?

The second was that HIV wasn't a single unified thing. There were two substantially different varieties HIV-1 and HIV-2 (and in its turn HIV-1 had several different subgroups with important differences between them).

In 1989 found concerning the variety of SIV living endemically in Sooty Mangabeys, that the most probable interpretation of what they could report was that in the past 30-40 years SIV from a Sooty Mangabey successfully infected a human and evolved as - HIV-2. And if HIV-2 was zoonotic, there would be a strong probability that HIV-1 would also be zoonotic.

But the epidemiological difference between HIV-1 and HIV-2 is huge: while HIV-2 is a pretty nasty disease making trouble mostly among people in west Africa, HIV-1 is the killer behind a global disaster.

It took years before the first reports in 1989, suggesting that a variety of SIV endemic in Chimps probably was the zoonotic root of HIV-1, could reach scientific consensus. That didn't happen until the early 2000s.

What the molecular geneticists told us.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, scientists managed to obtain archival specimens dating from 1959 and 1960 from Kinshasa, Congo, which after analysis turned out to be the actual remains of the two first persons we actually know of having been infected with HIV-1.

But this knowledge was just the start for another quest: When had the actual spillover from Chimp to humans occured? Just before 1959/60? Or generations before?

Molecular geneticists like Michael Worobey and Beatrice Hahn have managed to show, that the spillover happened in the early decades of the 20th century, and it happened in Central Africa.

The first known death from AIDS in the US is a teenage boy who passed away in 1969. Years before Gaetan Dugas started his sexually active life.

Chapter 3: Movies.

Thanks to all my computer problems it's very late or very early. I had hoped to write a bit on the two films, but I'll actually have to go to bed.

So I'll just give you the links to the movies:
Bill Sherwood's "Parting Glances" (1986) http://www.gayheaven.org/showthread.php?t=516062

And the porn: "Oversize Load" (1985) with the one and only Scott O'Hara. http://www.gayheaven.org/showthread.php?t=517225#9222702868609778

 

[waistingmytime]

Gorgik9 a simple thanks for such an in-depth informative post seems so small ! Thanks for this useful and educational post...It is very appreciated ...

 

[Shelter]

Gorgik9 a simple thanks for such an in-depth informative post seems so small ! Thanks for this useful and educational post...It is very appreciated ...

:agree::agree::agree::agree::agree:

 

[gorgik9]

I thought I should try to complete my AIDS & Gay porn, part1-post on three points!

The first point is in my opinion also the most important: Why did the 80s become as bad for gay men as it was? I think you'll understand from what I've already written that "it got so bad because AIDS was so bad" is definitely not a good enough answer. It would be like answering the question why Jews in 14th century catholic Europe got lynched with the answer: "because the bubonic plague was so bad" or "because Jews actually poisoned wells".

No, AIDS doesn't explain why gay men in many ways got excluded from society and treated as a threat to society. It definitely doesn't explain the powerful rhetoric surrounding gay men as "guilty victims", while other victims implicitly or explicitly were looked upon as "innocent". Don't you dare putting the blame on AIDS; Western culture is what's to blame.

From the perspective of 30 years later, I'll make a bid for a clash of two powerful modern western myths as the cultural cause why things got as bad as it did:

On the one hand, the myth of modern western medicin, which for generations had been looked upon as totally competent to take care of health problems in general and specifically competent to take care of infectious diseases. If your problem is infection caused by bacteria the doctor got penicillin to take care of it, and is your problem could be infection caused by virus, well then, the good doctor got a vaccination program. We live in MODERN times, so nothing is really dangerous! Soon enough, we'll all live for ever and death will be just a bad rumour!

And then came AIDS. What could modern medicin do? Nothing. People were just suffering and dying. Medicin suffered a severe loss of social and cultural potens; and doctors got collectively impotent.

Now most doctors I know are intelligent and very humane people with lots of empaty with their patients, and they know that there's ALWAYS something a doctor can do: give comfort and support. But this presupposes, that the doctors looks upon their suffering patients as fellow humans.

All doctors did not consider gay men as fellow humans. Some doctors - like Swedish doctor Lita Tibbling - thought that persons infected with HIV should be strictly separated from the society of ordinary descent healty heterosexuals and be left to die.

On the other hand, ever since the 1920s and the infamous case of Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb from Chicago, USA, two intellectual boys in love and lust with each other who decides to commit the perfect crime and - hence - murders 14 year old Bobby Franks.

This gruesom murder case and the media reports surrounding it constructs the modern myth of the homosexual man as a potentially extremely dangerous and violent creature. The modern myth says, that the murderers Leopold and Loeb didn't just happen to be homosexual. They became murderers BECAUSE they were homosexual.

The Leopold-Loeb case became the foundation for hundreds of novels, plays and movies from the late 1920s on, all of the telling the story of the gay boy as the violent dangerous psychopath.

And in the wake of the impotence of modern medicine during the early AIDS epidemy, the myth of the dangerous homosexual was ready to step in, and gave of a collective version of Leopold and Loeb. The gay community consisted of men who were violent and dangerous BECAUSE they were homosexual. Every gay man could be considered a potential brother of Norman Bates.

My second point is much simpler and about who dared to tell the story of AIDS in movies in any reasonably honest way.

First of all a small group of independent film makers with - in my opinion - Bill Sherwood as the most important made a handful of powerful AIDS movies, but network and cable TV companies also did their share of made-for-TV movies about AIDS and some of them pretty good.

But the high and mighty Hollywood with all the tens of millions of dollars behind so many movies didn't - at least not from a gay perspective - manage to tell a useful story. Hollywood wouldn't make a serious AIDS story until 1993 with "Philadelphia", 7 years after Sherwood's "Parting Glances". At rock bottom I think Philadelphia is a pretty awful movie - a movie telling us about how difficult Hollywood directors and actors thought depicting gay intimacy would be.

A third point is, that obviously AIDS changed gay porn in America if for no other reason more than 100 performers in gay porn died of AIDS from the mid-80s on, including several of the most well known and popular performers like Casey Donovan, Al Parker, Chris Burns and Jon King.

But the tricky thing is, that gay porn changed in the 1980s for so many other reasons not related (or at least not directly related) to AIDS: In 1980 gay porn movies were produced on celluloid film, mostly 16 mm film but sometimes on 35 mm film. The typical gay porn studios in 1980 produced something like 5-6 feature length porn movies in a year, but in the period 1982-85 gay porn studios stopped using film and started using video tape as the production medium.

Gay porn production sky rocketed and in 1990 most studios were sending out 25-30 new videos per year. More and more gay porn was something to be watched at home, not in porn theaters.

But there also were other more subtle changes: the number of gay-for-pay performers grew which changed the emotional atmosphere.

Maybe it would be more correct to say, that influential porn producers and directors (like Matt Sterling and John Travis) didn't really like performers who obviously loved to have sex with other men. The new ideal constructed by Travis and Sterling was a performer who would fuck and liked to get blowjobs, but who never got fucked or give a blowjob, and also didn't kiss.

This new ideal had the name of the porn persona constructed by Sterling and Travis: Jeff Stryker.

One of the reasons I like Scott O'Hara so much is that he could be described as the polar opposite of Jeff Stryker. Scott didn't like the new trends; he loved to have sex with other men and it shows.

Scott O'Hara was born in 1961 and died of AIDS related complications in 1998. He made 26 gay porn movies from 1983 to 1992, but he was multi talented, writing and publishing several books and founding his own sex magazine.

 

[dargelos]

People used to say 'you always remember where you were when you heard the news that Kennedy had been shot'. Then they said the same about the day Elvis died. Today they say it about the moment the plane hit the World Trade Center.
For us there was that moment when you first got an inkling of the nightmare that was to come.
I was in Heaven, the London one, not the celestial paradise, 81 or 82, in my shiny black disco shorts when I saw in the cloakroom an article torn from a newspaper describing a strange new gay cancer in America.
I thought 'greatest country in the world, tons of money, best scientists in the world, they'll find a cure won't they? 'Course they will, Stop worrying. Back to the dance floor, Ian Levine was playing 'So Many Men, So Little Time'
How prescient was that?
Who would ever thought it possible that instead of doing everything to find a cure for the new illness or at least try to stop it spreading, the US govt would do as little as possible. Who would ever thought that the president, not content with doing absolutely nothing himself to try to help the situation, would actively place obstacles in the way of those who actualy were. I couldnt believe it then and I still cant believe it today. To be clearer about what I can and cannot believe; I can easily understand how Reagan was too cowardly to say boo to the christian fundamentalists who were telling him that it was gods will that fags should die, I can easily understand how he was too cowardly to risk soiling his acting performance as the avuncular regular guy, what I can't understand is, in a country with so many checks and balances in the governmental system, he could get away scott free with a criminal dereliction of duty. All Bill Clinton did was enjoy a blowjob but he was punished for that. Ronnie smiled for the camera as thousands of gay men were dying and instead of punishment he enjoyed a nation's love.
In my country, the best the Thatcher govt could come up with were posters and tv slots which said;
"Aids- don't die of ignorance" and that was all. No useful information of any sort.
No clue as to how to avoid this strange disease called ignorance. Lot of help that was. Still it was judged a success, as nobody in fact did die of ignorance, they died of KS and pneumonia instead.
Thatcher and Reagan both had the same mantra, 'leave it to market forces'
While market forces were busy working out how best to monetise this, the reaper was working overtime.