Let's Go Stag!: A History of Pornographic Film from the Invention of Cinema to 1970

by Dan Erdman, Austin Fisher (Series Editor), Johnny Walker (Series Editor)

For much of the 20th century, the underground pornography industry - made up of amateurs and hobbyists who created hardcore, explicit "stag films" - went about its business hounded by reformers and law enforcement, from local police departments all the way up to the FBI. Rumors of this illicit activity circulated and became the stuff of urban myth, but this period of pornography history remains murky. Let's Go Stag! reveals the secrets of this underground world. Using the archives of civic groups, law enforcement, bygone government studies and similarly neglected evidence, archivist Dan Erdman reconstructs the means by which stag films were produced, distributed and exhibited, as well as demonstrate the way in which these practices changed with the times, eventually paving the way for the pornographic explosion of the 1970s and beyond. Let's Go Stag! is sure to point the way for countless future researchers and remain the standard work of history for this era of adult film for a long time to come.

Genres: Nonfiction, Film

232 pages, Hardcover

Published December 16, 2021

Reviews

[Jack · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a great reminder of why I enjoy history as discipline. Historians are tasked with evaluating source material and constructing a narrative based on what they find. With many subjects, there is ample material — both primary and secondary — to pull from, which makes understanding the contemporary historical landscape easier. With a subject like stag films (pre-70s, illicit pornography), this becomes a challenge because there is almost no record of who made these films, who acted in them, how they were distributed, viewed, or interpreted in the wider culture. With so little material to pull from, it is the job of the historian to get creative and find other ways to get to the bottom of what happened. Erdman does a fantastic job probing through police records, Kinsey Institute archives, and newspaper articles to try and develop a framework for stag movies. He also suggests new approaches to investigating the stag film industry by suggesting a parallel analysis of amateur film makers and how they may have contributed to the production of stags.

I'm fascinated by lost, obscure media and I love stories of rediscovery, of piecing together remnants to remember the lost whole. While some may regard adult films as unworthy of preservation or analysis, the films that remain give us insight into the sexual attitudes of dead generations.