One gets used to The Look. These days, The Look only pops up for the briefest of moments, deep in a first conversation, after one has exhausted all other options and must engage in the most American of pastimes: asking the other person about their occupation.
“So, what is it that you do, exactly?”
“Well, I work in nonprofits, and I’m also co-writing a book.”
“Really? A book? What’s it about?”
“Oh–old gay films.”
“Nice, like Boys in the Band?”
“Not quite.”
“Paris is Burning?”
“No, a–”
“To Wong Foo, Th–”1
“Gay adult films.”
“Adult?”
“Porno.”
“Oh-h.” The Look.
The Look is not one of contempt; even the prudes try to act cool to your face these days. Nor is it confusion, per se. There is nothing confusing about saying, “My partner and I work on the history of gay adult films.” What tends to unmoor people, however, even some queer people, is the idea that adult film has much of a history to tell. In the common imagination, the only thing that tends to change are the outfits performers wear and the convoluted scenarios designed to remove them. Pornography tends to exist in a filmic paradoxical state: the styles, fashions, and ephemera you see are often hyperspecific, able to be pinpointed down to a specific month, all the result of rapid-pace filming and production, yet it’s all in the pursuit of showing off acts from time immemorial (handcuffs and belts notwithstanding).2 By this logic, pleasure comes from either basking in the paradox itself or archly making fun of its uncanny register. Of course, all of this rests on an odd premise–that if something is clearly sexual, it has no artistic merit, and, by extension, would not tell us anything about actual history beyond mere aesthetic. It’s the old “I know it when I see it” legal standard for obscenity, extended to judge the entire genre’s lasting social worth.3
Within the actual business of gay adult film, myth isn’t necessarily a problem; the industry has always been a space for fake names, invented backstories, and creative measurements. But when myth takes the place of history, we’re left with flimsy substitutes for ourselves, especially if we come from communities that have faced considerable marginalization. These myths are then fed back to us as stereotypes and strawmen used to divine some boundary for acceptability: the arbitrary line between good queers and bad queers.
While writing our upcoming book Ask Any Buddy, my partner Liz Purchell and I were particularly interested in making sense of the 1980s–the VHS-fueled period in gay adult films between the heady theatre era of the 1970s and the Internet revolution at the turn of the twentieth century, where the politics of liberation gave way to the fight to survive. We were driven to find out how the gay adult film industry thrived amid technological, political, and public health crises. We were surprised how much archival evidence and material culture stands in the face of presumptions about the genre and the era. Three myths persist about gay sex in movies during the 1980s. First, and most prevalent, is the idea that “real” movies did not have real sex–that there was a clear line between what was actual art and sleazy, schlocky prurient content. Second is the belief that video killed the porno star: golden gods gave way to a flock of nameless, faceless actors, each more disposable than the last. Third, and perhaps most damning, is the accusation that the gay adult film industry was apathetic to AIDS activism and Reagan-era porno panics in general, purely and solely interested in the business of escapism.
What’s shocking is not that these myths are easy to bust–who hasn’t been bored to near-coma by an ill-timed “well, actually”?–but that their falsehoods are more than mere technicalities. The emerging gay independent film scene in the 1980s sometimes enabled filmmakers to blur the line between “movies for adults” and “movies with adult content”–most notably, the 1980 West German liberation-versus-libertinism romantic dramedy Taxi zum Klo (Taxi to the Toilets), a film where the main characters’ tumultuous relationship is occasionally depicted through unsimulated sex. The film’s director, Frank Ripploh, received considerable press in gay press for his unbridled views, and the film made enough money to both be listed in Variety’s top-grossing movies during its American run as well as merit a woefully bad sequel (Taxi nach Kairo–in English, “Taxi to Cairo”). Or consider video art pioneer and queer provocateur Ken Camp’s Highway Hypnosis (1984), a glimpse at one man’s violent deed committed between long stretches on the road and overstimulation from the strobing lights of Las Vegas. Somehow managing to be both foreboding and cheeky, the film uses the briefest cuts of unsimulated gay sex to contrast with the overwhelming sameness of western roads, the cresting rush of sudden infatuation, and the churning dread of whether the protagonist will commit an even more heinous act at the end. Even the San Francisco International LGBTQ+ Film Festival (now known as Frameline) held a fundraiser in 1985 by screening Arthur Bressan, Jr’s Daddy Dearest; Bressan was a genius at both documentary and narrative film, but his most daring work came with telling nearly an entire story through a great deal of sex.4
The other core myths fall away just as easily, too. Far from creating a sea of nameless porno drones, the video era both raised the heights certain stars could achieve and allowed artists in certain sub genres to produce material on their own terms. As we stress in our upcoming work, the effect was centrifugal; as gay adult content gravitated toward the hypermasculine strict top–made most emblematic by the truly uncanny superstar Jeff Stryker–producers of Black, lesbian, and fetish content found new markets through home video. Thor Johnson, Christopher Rage, and Fatale Video all forged spaces for storytelling and good hot fun through video, a medium that ironically had a steeper learning curve for those who came from film compared to those who learned their craft on the newer medium. While film had a physical form many people were accustomed to handling–shot on 8-, 16-, or 35mm stock, twenty-four individual frames per second of action, all of which could be edited and reassembled with a splicer, specialty tape, and a good eye–videotape required analog in-sequence editing for nearly everyone outside of a television studio until the 1980s, to say nothing of differences in how videotape and film tend to capture sound and light.5 Even for gay adult filmmakers, videotape could feel a little queer. Many actors and filmmakers who came from the halcyon days of film in the 1970s also had a more difficult time adapting to safer sex practices in 1980s films. The third myth may seem the easiest to uphold, however, many in the industry faced the impending HIV/AIDS crisis by advocating for and creating safer-sex material, including all-time stars Richard Locke and Al Parker.
Some may be inclined to call this all small potatoes, the queer equivalent of insisting some people really did read Playboy for the articles. But that completely misses the relationship between material culture and political culture, how communities navigate their rights and sense of self by forging new acceptable boundaries for existing in the wider world. Al Parker’s Turbo Charge (1988) is, yes, a movie that has a scene in which two men with peak-80s fluffy mullets bond over their mutual love of stick-shift Corvettes by giving each other saran-wrapped pleasure–but it’s also a film icon’s (Parker) attempt to redirect the entire industry toward safer sex pleasure after the years of soft-pedaling. The same could be said for AIDSBUSTERS, the live safer-sex promotional tour for Wakefield Poole’s One Two Three! (1985), or Richard Locke’s print guide to kinky and then-scientifically-sound pleasure, In the Heat of Passion (Leyland Publications, 1987). When videocassettes could cost nearly a hundred dollars (in 1980s money, no less) and homophobia masqueraded as public health policy, some artists understood that incorporating condoms or safer play into movies without sacrificing fantasy was an economic, social, and ethical choice all at once.
Fortunately, many historians and film programmers are working tirelessly to preserve and showcase older queer cinema, including movies that show sexual acts. The historian, archivist, and filmmaker Jenni Olsen has been central to making Arthur Bressan’s work widely available, championing an approach to film and filmmaking that wasn’t always appreciated in his lifetime. Likewise, the filmmaker, producer, and programmer Adam Baran has made his Narrow Rooms series at the Anthology Film Archives a routine space for showing off the golden days of gay adult film. My partner just led a month-long valedictory retrospective of EZTV in Los Angeles, an avant-garde video collective that championed queer moviemaking during its forty-five years of operations, including Ken Camp’s works.
The spirit of these older films also lives on in daring new projects. Castration Movie, Anthology I: Traps is a four-and-a-half-hour ode to self-loathing, a relentless look at several trans women in Vancouver who are just as likely to catch up over lousy pizza as they are to pick scabs from both psychic and physical wounds.6 Louise Weard is unapologetic and unbridled as Michaela “Traps” Sinclair, a sex worker who cyber-bullies dysphoric posters on 4chan, negs her newly transitioning friend, dates a straight man who will never see her as anything more than a weekly fetish hookup, and purchases black-market estrogen from a self-absorbed space cadet named Persephone (the brilliant Vera Drew, fresh from The People’s Joker). Just as importantly, sex is central to Traps’s story–both her actual gig as a sex worker and the sense of worth she creates for herself (and those she bullies) as a woman who gets laid all the time. For Traps, the thrill of the chase–whether for DIY sources for estrogen outside of Canada’s medical system, for men who can offer a night or something to snort but not both, towards frightened hares of women finally understanding themselves–allows her to barely outpace the sheer dread of living in a world that seems amped on hating her more than she hates herself.
I find Castration Movie brilliant for many reasons (its use of music and low-light scenes alone are worth the watch), but what stands out most is the way it makes sex inseparable from the story. There is no way to make Traps a character who avoids sex and there’s no way to take the sex out of the story without risking the story becoming a campy parody of itself. Her motivation is in part her occupation and her core frustration. Like Highway Hypnosis, or Taxi zum Klo, or nearly all of Arthur Bressan’s work, the sex is and makes the story. Like these earlier works, they reflect the fascinations and obsessions and quirks of both their artists and their communities.
Given the state of world affairs, one might question why I have spent so much time defending queer sex in old movies. But I find that to be a loser’s bargain–the negotiating tactic of people who insist there is some magical, always unspecified line at which point behavior and artistic expression is acceptable. When queer peoples’ existences are once again the subject of debate–with right-wing claptrap publications bemoaning the mere presence of artistic nudity, sexual activity, let alone the right to be in public–the ability to express oneself for others’ pleasure, however fleeting, regardless of how warped the tape gets, remains a necessary and heroic act.7 The good queer / bad queer myth always implies we are actually secretly responsible for our own immiseration, that only closet cases are homophobes, that our rights are somehow epiphenomenal to the economy and society, that if we didn’t exist or breathe so goddamn loudly we wouldn’t have become once again an electoral cudgel. Movies allow us our actual mirror selves, much more interesting ones than the straight world can offer.
Collage by the author.
- For the record, I love all of these films, and they are all foundational to film history and queer history. My partner Liz Purchell and I have even screened some bona fide classics for our monthly series at the IFC Center in New York, such as the documentary The Queen (1968). But with our work, whether it’s for the book or our film series, we tend to focus on films that are under-heralded, underappreciated, and under-seen in contemporary queer memory–films that may be hard to find or just don’t plug into current tropes about modern queer film and culture. I call it “The Parting Glances Rule” to signify the hazy boundary when a film may be too well-known for us to screen. We also believe that this is wholly contextual: we’re in New York now, so sometimes films we want to show have been screened within the past year or so, or they’ve been restored and a distributor already has made arrangements with theatres. It’s screwy math, but every city with good theaters has programmers who have to do these calculations. If you’ve never seen Parting Glances or Liquid Sky or High Art, let alone seen them play in your city, you should find a way to make either happen.
- Well, yes and no. It depends on how much stock you place in John D’Emilio’s foundational essay “Capitalism and Gay Identity” and its claims that gayness as an identity is illegible without industrial capital–in other words, who we are and what we want to do with each other makes no sense without the specific social restructuring of the 19th century. One classic case study of that theory that I have always recommended particularly because it hinges on certain homosexual sex acts being understood as class markers is Peter Boag’s Same-Sex Affairs (University of California Press, 2003). I tend to think you can’t make sense of sexuality, in word or deed, without its socio-historical context.
- Okay, but what is pornography? “I know it when I see it” is what Justice Potter Stewart once quipped in his concurring Supreme Court opinion for Jacobellis v. Ohio. Well, sure, we all have eyes, but the pithy remark is actually a legal dodge–or, at least, a willingness to let existing hazy standards for obscenity remain as were previously established in Roth v. United States. The earlier case set up fairly broad protections for art by setting it up in clear counterpoint to obscenity; if art was protected speech and expression, obscenity was “utterly without redeeming social importance” and outside of legal protection. Titillation has rights; straight up fucking does not. These standards would get upended with Miller vs. California (1973), not coincidentally during the “porno chic” era of the 1970s, creating a complicated legal patchwork.
Still: what is it? I look to two definitions, one more technical but rooted in historiography and the other more philosophical and detached from a cisheterosexual lens. In Hard Core (University of California Press, 1989), Linda Williams wades through a thick decade of historiography, Foucauldian theory, feminist debate and Reagan-era culture wars to come up with probably the first decent working definition for video porn: “the visual (and sometimes aural) representation of living, moving bodies engaged in explicit, usually unfaked, sexual acts with a primary intent of arousing viewers […with a medium-based distinction of] the element of performance contained in the term sexual act” (30). Decades later, philosopher, trans writer, and casual provocateuse Andrea Long Chu would define pornography in her meta-manifesto Females (Verso, 2019) as “what it feels like when you think you have an object, but really the object has you” (63). I think the best approach tracks between those two poles (or whatever is a less glaringly phallic metaphor).
- Calm down; Bressan was a moviemaker’s moviemaker, and Daddy Dearest is actually about a young producer (Daniel Holt) who is making a rather schlocky film called, you guessed it, Daddy Dearest, which features a stunning middle-aged man (Richard Locke, truly the original daddy and a Bressan staple), all while both reminiscing about his long-departed love (Johnny Dawes, who was also an opera scholar) and falling for the film-within-a-film’s ingenu (Dean Johnson, a genuine No Wave and New York underground icon). It’s remarkably funny and sweet, a love letter to classic film while technically innovative and, yes, entirely committed to the idea of telling a story through a lot of unsimulated sex.
- Unsurprisingly, the one filmmaker from the 70s scene who welcomed video was Roger Earl, director of the S&M classic Born to Raise Hell; he had spent years working with videotape for The Dean Martin Show and was thus one of the few in gay adult film who had any prior knowledge working with the medium.
- A matter of transparency: my partner now is the distributor of this film. I would’ve gushed about it even if that weren’t the case.
- See: Meg Marie Johnson, “Art Shouldn’t Get A Free Nudity Pass Just Because It’s Art,” The Federalist 22 April, 2025. No, I’m not linking to it; you can give them the traffic if you want. You; not me.
