Sex for Sale~Prostitution, Pornography and the Sex Industry (14 page)

The chapter is based on an extensive review of the literature on gay pornography and analysis of a number of videos produced since the 1970s. Part of this chapter focuses on the historical development and stylistic evolution of the videos. It also examines the economics and culture of gay video, both in the industry and in gay life.

H I STO RY

The history of gay male pornography in motion pictures falls into several overlapping periods. The pre-Stonewall era encompasses material through 1969. These were mostly stag films (short features designed for viewing at specialized arcades or at all-male “stag” parties) along with a sprinkling of underground films and a few short movies derived from “physique” pornography (the popular softcore male pinups from mid-century). Much of this early
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material is not “hardcore,” lacking images of penetration. The film era dates from around 1970 through the early 1980s. During this period, traditional 16mm celluloid film dominated the industry, both in short “loops” in arcades and in theatrical features, and hardcore became common. The advent of home videocassette recorders during the early 1980s marked the beginning of the video era, which lasted until the millennium. After 2000, digital formats (DVD and on the Internet) came to dominate the industry, creating the digital era. While technical changes in medium seem largely to define this period-ization, changes in content and context often accompanied them.

The earliest surviving filmed depictions of gay sex date back to the 1920s.

Thomas Waugh’s research showed that about 8% of surviving stag films from this early era contained some sort of gay content, usually bisexual.5 During the 1960s, gay sex films were largely limited to softcore posing and wrestling movies made for home projection, along the same lines as the older stags.

However, the number of sexually explicit films did increase in the decade; Thomas Waugh has documented about 100 explicit all-male stag films from the 1960s (in contrast to a handful from earlier years),6 but most of these were amateurish at best.

Gay subjects did not, however, share in the surge of popular “sexploitation” films characteristic of the 1960s. Instead, while straight viewers were subjected to an onslaught of “nudie” and “nudie-cutie” films from prolific producers such as David Friedman, gay viewers found their own tastes reflected in relatively highbrow underground art films. Many of the prominent underground filmmakers in New York in the early 1960s were gay (Kenneth Anger and Andy Warhol), and their avant-garde works, while generally non-narrative, often contained suggestive or overtly homosexual content. Anger’s
Scorpio Rising
(1963) was a dreamlike, impressionistic, homoerotic montage involving a motorcycle gang; Warhol’s
My Hustler
(1965) told the story of two bitchy queens who fought over a handsome young prostitute. What made these rather esoteric art films appealing to a gay audience was their open representation of the eroticized male body presented within the relatively safe (for closeted gay viewers) context of avant-garde art.

And according to Richard Dyer, the precedent of such avant-garde underground films often provided important formal and narrative models during the early days of gay porn in the 1970s.7

Developments in jurisprudence also contributed to the growth of gay pornography. John d’Emilio and Estelle Freedman described how a series of U.S. Supreme Court rulings between 1957 and 1967 helped to open the floodgates for increasingly explicit sex movies. The famous
Roth v. United States
case of 1957, which sustained the conviction of a bookdealer for selling
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pornography, paradoxically cracked open the door for more explicit materials by proclaiming that “sex and obscenity are not synonymous.” By 1967, the infamous book
Fanny Hill
was found not to be obscene because it was not

“
utterly
without redeeming social value.”8 Although these two court decisions laid the initial framework, the early 1970s’ explosion in sex films was likely triggered by the Supreme Court victory of the Swedish film
I Am Curious
(Yellow)
in 1969; a startling number of erotic film festivals followed.9 A simultaneous growth in eroticism in mainstream media was exemplified by Hollywood productions such as
Midnight Cowboy
, which chronicled the story of a male prostitute; as Hollywood moved into new sexual territory, the sex film industry moved from cheap stags to more lavish and explicit productions.

The growing commercial exhibition of gay pornographic movies marked the beginning of the film era in gay porn. John Burger has traced commercial exhibition of hardcore gay sex films in cinemas to at least as early as 1968, when the Park Theater in Los Angeles began screening the features of pioneering filmmakers Pat Rocco (
Sex and the Single Gay
) and Bob Mizer (the creator of the famous Athletic Model Guild porn production company), along with avant-garde underground films.10 Pornography became a widespread, popular phenomenon in the early 1970s, with the unexpected popularity of the hit movie
Deep Throat
. In a significant change from the earlier sexploitation movies,
Deep Throat
was reviewed by all the famous movie critics, and by the end of 1973, it was among the top 10 money-making films of the year.11

However,
Deep Throat
’s emergence as a hugely popular hardcore phenomenon actually followed the earlier example of the first widely distributed, hardcore gay release:
The Boys in the Sand
. While its potential audience was naturally smaller, it nevertheless grossed $800,000 shortly after opening in December 1971 in New York at the 55th Street Playhouse (with a production cost of only $8,000).12 Directed by Wakefield Poole, it starred soon-to-be gay superstar Casey Donovan, also known as the professional actor and model Cal Culver. Vaguely episodic, the movie had a dreamlike quality that betrayed the influence of the earlier underground films of the 1960s.

The Boys in the Sand
showed the enormous market potential of gay porn, and the production of gay porn films continued to expand during the 1970s.

Companies such as Jaguar and P.M. Productions began producing a stream of hardcore features for release in a limited number of gay porn theaters. As the industry diversified, it also became increasingly commercialized. Gay porn lost its early formal references to art films and its occasional aspirations to being something more than “just pornography.” In many ways it converged with straight pornography: both genres began to minimize narrative and aesthetic content in favor of increased explicitness.

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In 1981 there were 20,000 adult bookstores and 800 sex cinemas in the United States.13 However, the proliferation of home VCRs during the following decade made video pornography readily accessible, and video soon became the primary medium. As prices of home VCRs fell during the 1980s, the market became increasingly lucrative, and producers began shooting films directly on video, aimed at the growing market of home viewers. From 1979

to 1988, the number of Americans with VCRs rose from under 1% to almost 60%.14 Simultaneously, porn theaters (both gay and straight) largely disappeared.

The pioneering early 1970s’ gay porn films often used whatever models were available. Later in the decade, companies such as Colt produced a few silent shorts with especially handsome, beefy men (which became their specialty), but most of the decade’s production suffered from man-on-the-street casting—a definite problem when representing sexual fantasies for an audience of gay men highly attuned to particular standards of physical beauty.

In contrast to the everyman of average 1970s’ films, or the bodybuilders of Colt, gay movies during the first half of the video era were dominated by exceptionally young performers, smooth and sleek. The performers’ body hair was minimal, the “swimmer’s build” predominated, and models’ ages never seemed to exceed the early twenties. Youth was at a premium. Directors William Higgins and Matt Sterling set the standard for the new 1980s’ gay porn model. Higgins’s work, ranging from
Sailor in the Wild
in 1983 to
Big
Guns
in 1987, epitomized this change from the gay porn of the 1970s.

Higgins’s films generally starred a cast of slightly built, smooth-skinned, youthful men with an occasional muscular, mature performer. Matt Sterling’s work, such as 1984’s
The Bigger The Better
, also starred boyish performers but with more emphasis on muscularity. The change to younger models was seen in print pornography as well: during the 1980s more than 90% of the oldest models appeared to be only in their teens or twenties; in the early 1970s almost half had appeared 30 or older.15

Videos of the 1980s also tightly defined actors’ sexual roles as “tops” or

“bottoms.” The top was the insertor in anal sex, and the bottom was the recipient. The top might occasionally engage in a little oral sex with his partner, but that was not typical. John Summers’
Two Handfuls
was a good example, as Brian Maxon was serviced by three different men, but hardly lifted a finger himself until the final scene. One could usually predict what roles the performers would play only a few seconds into the scene. The top was usually the more muscular, tan, and athletic; he also had the bigger penis. Exclusive tops held a privileged position both within the industry and in the narrative of the video;16 most of the major porn stars of the 1980s were exclusive tops.

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C H A N G E S S I N C E 19 9 0

During the early 1990s, the industry began to change in certain respects. The performers no longer looked alike; the image of the Calvin Klein underwear ad was no longer the single canonical standard of beauty in gay pornography.

Moreover, production values improved, especially editing. For instance, in productions from reputable studios, viewers were no longer subjected to a 6-minute, continuous close-up of anal sex. Lighting became more sophisticated; and following the lead of straight porn, exotic and more expensive locales began to appear.

The trend toward professional refinement in videos may have been due to Kristen Bjorn’s arrival into porn production in the late 1980s. A former performer, Bjorn’s work possessed an unusually distinctive, signature style. He was said to film everything himself, without a large crew, and to spend days or weeks shooting each feature17 (when most of the industry considered a 2-day shoot an extravagance). His longer shooting schedule enabled him to create the illusion that his performers were multiorgasmic, sometimes climaxing as many as five times in one scene. Each film usually focused on an exotic locale with exotic men. Early works such as
Carnaval in Rio
(1989) and
Island Fever
(1989) were shot in Brazil; later videos moved to the beaches of Australia, the forests of Canada, and the newly accessible cities of central Europe. More often than in straight films, gay porn was usually racially segregated into all-black and (more commonly) all-white features. Bjorn broke decisively with this convention, mixing attractive men of various races and ethnicities, and especially multiracial performers.

Bjorn’s high production values threw down the gauntlet for the rest of the industry and set a new, higher technical standard. As a former still photographer,18 Bjorn carefully framed every scene, using props extensively.

Combined with his carefully chosen sets and locations, his meticulous productions resulted in lush, visually striking videos that consistently have been among the most popular rentals reported by video outlets. Probably as a result of Bjorn’s efforts, production values, especially photography and editing, improved immensely across the industry in the 1990s as the other high-end studios attempted to compete with him.

The 1990s also saw a continuing expansion of the market.19 Increased diversity among the models and experimentation with new approaches contributed to this expansion. In most top-of-the-line productions (often from Catalina or Falcon), the actors were more professional and actually seemed to enjoy their work. They represented a much broader range of ages and body types than in the 1980s. Although young performers were still frequently
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seen, it was no longer uncommon to find performers in their thirties and even early forties. Realtor Cole Tucker began appearing in videos in 1996 at 43.20

Body hair began to make a major reappearance with the success of models such as Zak Spears and Steve Regis.

In their performances many actors of the 1990s were sexually versatile, overturning the porn conventions of the 1980s. Superstars of the 1980s such as Jeff Stryker were nearly always tops; rarely did an actor change his role from one feature to another, and almost never in the same scene.21 In the late 1990s, however, many videos from Falcon (then the largest producer of gay porn) as well as from most other companies contained at least one scene with mutual anal sex.

Similarly, sexual “types” in general were less pronounced in the 1990s videos. A big bruiser like Steve Regis surprisingly turned out to be primarily a bottom. The late bodybuilder Steve Fox usually bottomed as well, defying the 1980s’ stereotypes of “bigger build on top.” Even the straight “trade” tops of later years (such as Ty Fox and Ken Ryker) were active participants in sex, even giving oral sex to their partners before proceeding to their standard top roles in anal sex. In
Playing with Fire
(1996) Fox did everything except passive anal sex, including kissing; the same went for Ryker in
Matinee Idol
(1996).

More tops in the 1990s actually seemed to be gay men as opposed to “gay for pay,” that is, straight men in gay porn films. Brad Hunt or Aidan Shaw were never penetrated on camera, but performed their roles with relish, kissing, sucking, and doing everything else short of anal penetration.

Another 1990s’ development was the increase in foreplay, kissing, and caressing. In the 1980s, performers dropped their drawers and went straight for the dicks. With some notable exceptions, 1980s’ videos showed little kissing or affection. In the 1990s, by contrast, actors commonly kissed even before removing their clothes, and kissing frequently continued throughout the scene. Both Kristen Bjorn and Falcon Productions were notable in this regard. In fact, extensive kissing would seem to distinguish gay porn from straight porn, which has rarely included such romantic content.