In the first of a three-part series, OutRage video reviewer Rod Pounder* looks at the origins, growth and (some say) decline of the gay porn video industry, and asks whether its Golden Age will come again.
(* Here in the privacy of the World Wide Web I suppose it is safe to reveal that Rod Pounder is in fact me.)
One day in 1983 I hired my first gay porn video. It was called Summer Fantasy, and starred a cast of young men with fake blond hair pretending to be surfies when they were rather obviously West Hollywood hustlers making some easy money. But the video also featured a dark-haired, doe-eyed twink called Jamie Wingo, who was a cut above the others in both looks and talent. I was entranced by the sight of Jamie, naked, lying on his belly on a bear-skin rug in front of an open fire. His skin was pale and smooth, his buns were round and white and firm. I was in love. Jamie became my first porn video lover.
Jamie and I were together for several years, and he is still gathering dust at the back of my cupboard somewhere. He would have stayed with me forever, or at least until the tape wore out, but I, faithless slut that I am, soon moved on to other video godlings. There was Kip Noll, a genuine blond surfer with shaggy locks and a versatile sexuality; Leo Ford, a clean-cut blond whose complete lack of sexual inhibition nicely contrasted with his boy-next-door looks; and Bobby Madison, a dark, nuggety little beauty with a huge dick and an aggressive sexual style. Each was discovered, adored for a while, then discarded.
I didn't know it in the early 1980s, but I was riding the crest of a boom, the boom in gay male video pornography, and Jamie and Kip and Leo and Bobby were riding it with me (although they were selling and I was buying). Several things fuelled the boom. The emergence of a mass gay male community, beginning in the early '70s and growing steadily; the invention of the VCR in 1977, making video porn cheap and accessible; the liberalisation of censorship in the United States and Australia; and the appearance of AIDS, creating a market for sex-substitutes for gay men taking a break from the sexual jungle until the all-clear sounded.
The 1980s were also the Golden Age of gay porn, the homosexual equivalent of the Golden Age of Hollywood (generally taken to be the 30 years from the advent of sound in the mid 1920s to the break-up of the studio system in the 1950s). Three of the great names of the genre, William Higgins in Los Angeles, Christopher Rage in San Francisco and Jean-Daniel Cadinot in Paris, established their respective styles: California beach-boys and outdoors sex from Higgins; brooding leathermen and heavy fetishism from Rage; languid French youths in decadent settings from Cadinot.
But the gay porn video industry did not emerge out of thin air in 1983, although I and many other consumers in distant parts of the American cultural empire understandably thought that it did. It grew from a tradition of homoerotic film and photography that had led a shadowy existence for as long as film and photography had existed. There are photos from the 1870s of musclemen in posing-pouches, clearly taken for their homoerotic content. Baron von Gloeden was photographing naked youths in Calabria at the turn of the century. Pornographic stag films date back to 1908, and some of the earliest have homosexual content, though explicitly gay films did not begin to appear until the 1940s. Germany between the wars saw a flourishing gay erotica industry, which was snuffed out by the Nazis in 1933.
The period between World War II, when a gay male subculture emerged in major American cities, and the advent of video in the late 1970s was a kind of pornographic bronze age, with erotic gay films gradually emerging from the underground into semi-respectability. In 1945 in San Francisco, Bob Mizer founded the Athletic Model Guild (AMG) and its magazine Physique Pictorial, which published gay photography thinly disguised as 'physical culture.' In the 1950s AMG went into film, producing camp 'epics' with titles like Aztec Sacrifice. Other filmmakers were already pushing back the limits of censorship, notably Kenneth Anger (who made Fireworks in 1947) and Jean Genet, whose Un Chant d'Amour was made the following year. But the 1950s were a repressive interlude, and the full flowering of gay erotica would have to wait for the following decade.
In the 1960s a series of court decisions found that erotica was a form of free speech protected by the Unites States Constitution ("Land of the Free and Home of the Brave" indeed!), clearing the way for the emergence of homosexual pornography in all its unabashed splendour. Taking advantage of this new freedom, and of the emergence of a new gay audience, The New York artist Andy Warhol began his career in homoerotic filmmaking in 1965 with My Hustler. In 1967 he made Lonesome Cowboys, featuring a willowy 19-year-old with languid italianate looks and cascading hippy hair. His name was Joe Dallesandro, and he went on to star in Flesh (1968) and Trash (1970). Dallesandro was something new: the first gay porn star (not that his films were very pornographic by today's standards). He was known by name to his public and he was not pretending to be straight (although later he decided he was). The modern age of gay porn had almost arrived.
It arrived for real in 1970, the year after the Stonewall Riots launched the political gay liberation movement. Companies like Le Salon and Bijou popped up, making grainy and amateurish film loops showing naked men sucking and fucking. The honour of being the first commercially released gay hardcore film seems to belong to Le Salon's Cycle Studs: the gay equivalent of Birth of a Nation. By 1971 the first generation of real gay porn stars was emerging, with Casey Donovan starring in Wakefield Poole's The Boys in the Sand. Peter Berlin's first film, That Boy, came in 1974. Gay auteurism soon followed: Fred Halstead made Sex Garage and Sex Tool and Roger Earl made the first big S&M classic, Born to Raise Hell.
In this pre-video age, these films were all made to be shown in cinemas, such as Los Angeles's Paris Theatre or New York's Apollo. Gay men with money could buy them by mail order as reel-to-reel home movies. It was not until Sony launched the VCR in 1977 that porn came within the reach even of queens of modest means, and the rapid uptake of home video technology owed a lot to the desire of the masses (straight as well as gay) to watch porn in the privacy of their living rooms. From the early '80s the gay video industry took off, never to look back. Los Angeles became the home of the American industry, with companies like Falcon, Catalina, Laguna Pacific and Vivid putting out up to six new titles a year. In a sort of camp parody of the mainstream film industry at the other end of Hollywood Boulevard, the gay porn biz spawned fan magazines and award nights.
Some of the early gay porn filmmakers thought they were making art films (Warhol certainly did, though his thought processes were always a little difficult to fathom). Others thought they were making gay liberationist political statements, by breaking down the barriers of bourgeois heterosexual morality and liberating gay sexuality, etc. But within a very short time capitalismÕs glittering chariot carried all before it, and the gay porn video industry became what it has been ever since: a means for a large number of gay men, alone or in company, to have satisfying orgasms in front of their TV screens, for a much smaller number of men (not all of them gay) to get paid for having sex with each other in front of cameras, and for an even smaller number of men to get very rich on the proceeds of introducing the first group to the second.
Over the 20 years since the launch of the gay porn video, the industry has had its ups and downs. After the Golden Age of the early '80s, the volume of product increased and, it is generally agreed, the quality declined, as cheapo videos, often dishonestly packaged, flooded the market and undercut those companies trying to maintain standards, forcing the whole industry downmarket. The industry was slow to adopt the canons of safe sex, and came under severe attack from AIDS education organisations in the US and elsewhere. There were a number of well-publicised deaths, from AIDS or drugs or both, among porn actors, and allegations that the mafia or other nasty people were running the industry. Some gay men agreed with feminist criticisms of the whole idea of pornography, and allied themselves with anti-gay porn-suppressors.
But over the past decade there has been a revival of quality and of morale in the porn industry. A specialist industry press has arisen, directing consumers to better product and helping turn back the tide of trash. Some consumers have even sued porn companies for misleading packaging ("See six hours of gorgeous 18-year-old surfies!" when no such delights are to be found, etc). There has been a negotiated peace between the industry and AIDS organisations, and all American videos now insist on condoms for anal sex (some of the European companies, notably in Germany, are not as virtuous). And a new crop of talented video-makers has appeared, bringing a new enthusiasm to the task and putting better product before consumers (and no doubt, more money in the producers' pockets: but that's how capitalism works).
Through all this, some things have not changed. One of them is Falcon videos. This company celebrated its 20th anniversary in 1990, a record that few film companies of any kind get to achieve, let alone in a fly-by-night field like porn. Falcon's early 18mm product, made in the years before AIDS, was extraordinarily uninhibited, and still sells in the re-released 'Falcon video-packs' despite its grainy quality and canned soundtracks. The actors do things no-one with any brains does now even in private, let along in front of a camera. Later, Falcon produced literally dozens of high-quality videos, starring big names like Chad Douglas, Bill Henson, Jon King, Jeff Quinn, Jim Bentley, Rex Chandler and David Ashfield. Just about anyone who is or wants to be anyone in gay porn has worked for Falcon at some time.
Recently Falcon has branched out, with spin-off labels like Jocks (featuring college athlete types), Mustang (more rugged outdoorsy types) and Falcon International, filmed in Eastern Europe and cashing in on the great popularity of boyish European actors (but making them wear condoms). Falcon also had the good fortune to discover the hottest new talent in gay porn for many years, Chad Knight, the ultimate blond sex machine, who first appeared in Falcon's 1991 Someone's Watching. Chad's elfin beauty, obvious enjoyment of his work and incredible sexual talents led a video reviewer to write: "Chad Knight is God. There, I've said it and thereÕs no thunderclap in the distance, so it must be true. Chad Knight is God." Chad's legions of fans would agree.
Other pioneering videomakers have not been so enduring. William Higgins, whose Laguna Pacific company brought us such imperishable classics of the Golden Age as These Bases Are Loaded, Class Reunion and Pacific Coast Highway (the Casablanca and Maltese Falcon of gay porn), faded from view in the later '80s. Jean-Daniel Cadinot, the French master pornographer and maker of such gems as Harem and Cousins Charmants, continues to crank out titles (or at least someone does in his name) but they have grown very formulaic and few think the quality of his recent work comes anywhere near that of ten years ago. Catalina, another of the leading 1980s production houses, has also suffered a decline. The daring YMAC (the Young Male Adult Company), which specialised in very young-looking actors (to put it delicately) has produced only rubbish in recent years.
But as in every other industry, where there is demand there will be supply, and if one producer can't supply it, another will. One of the striking features of the 1990s has been the decline of the traditional American dominance of the field, as gay communities and therefore gay porn industries have risen in other countries. First, of course, came the French, with the Germans and the Dutch not far behind. But the Germans and Dutch seem to have contented themselves with cheap and tacky boy-videos, which we rarely see in Australia because they are refused classification. The real competition to the Americans has come from Kristen Bjorn, based originally in Brazil, and George Duroy and Bel Ami (who may or may not be the same person), a pair of pseudonyms of unknown nationality, but whose videos are made in Eastern Europe, mainly in Prague.
Bjorn started out in the late 1980s making videos like Carnival in Rio in Brazil, but since then he has branched out, making them just about everywhere, including Australia (Jackaroos and A Sailor in Sydney, starring good Aussie boys like the wonderfully named Sean Footlong and a certain well-known Sydney barman who will remain nameless here). Some of his best recent efforts have been in Canada (Call of the Wild), Hungary (The Vampire of Budapest), Russia (Comrades in Arms), Venezuela (The Caracas Adventure) and even the United States (The Anchor Hotel). His trademarks are big, glossy, very butch-looking black and brown muscle studs (who nevertheless roll over at the director's whim), elaborately staged threesome and orgies, and stunning outdoor locations. Bjorn is truly a master filmmaker, and has done a lot to break down the rather racist obsession with blond beachboys that dominated 1980s porn.
The Bel Ami phenomenon has taken the video world by storm in the past three years. Whoever, whatever and wherever George Duroy and/or Bel Ami may be, they have a master's touch when it come to finding, recruiting, training and filming unbelievably beautiful young European men and putting them before the drooling consumers of the rest of the world. Titles like Plowboys, Lukas's Story I, II and III and Frisky Summer I and II have become instant best-sellers, and Bel AmiÕs leading actors, Johan Paulik, Lukas Ridgeston, Dano Sulik and Martin Valko, have won world-wide followings, not only for their stunning looks but for the apparent spontaneity and enthusiasm of their performances. Johan Paulik, in particular, has become a gay porn icon wherever dicks are hard and videos are sold.
This is not to say that the American industry has given up trying. The United States still has more money, more consumers, more outlets and more toothsome young men who want to earn a few dollars by doing what comes naturally for the viewing public than anywhere else in the world (although one has to say that on a per capita basis the Czech Republic seems to be way out in front: it must be something in the water). As recent titles reviewed in this magazine show, quality material is still being produced in Los Angeles, just as Hollywood can still turn out the occasional quality effort among all the rubbish it floods the world with. Veteran directors like Matt Sterling can still produce a gem like Tradewinds, with its breathtaking Kurt Young/Derek Cameron duo, and John Travis can still bring us One Hot Summer, featuring the unbearably beautiful Aaron Brandt. But the competition is, if I may be forgiven the obvious pun, much stiffer than it used to be.
And what of our own wide brown land? Where is the bright and bouncy Australian video industry, challenging the Americans and the Europeans in this as in other fields? Surely a country which can stage the world's biggest gay community festival and win all those medals at the Gay Games and persuade the United Nations to overturn our anti-gay laws can make a decent porn video? Sadly, it would seem not. Although overseas directors like Bjorn and Higgins have come here and made splendid films using local talent, the only home-grown products, such as The Boys of Koala Beach (I kid you not), were embarrassingly bad and sank without trace after being generally panned in the trade press. Since then no-one has had the nerve to try again. Given the fashionability of all things Australian in the United States, this is a bit of a mystery. However, so long as there are Chad Knight and Johan Paulik in the world, we will get by somehow.