Hardcore porn—both the straight and gay varieties—entered mainstream American culture in the 1970s as the sexual revolution swept away many of the cultural inhibitions and legal restraints on explicit sexual expression. The first porn movie ever to be reviewed by Variety, the entertainment industry’s leading trade journal, was Wakefield Poole’s Boys in the Sand (1971), a sexually-explicit gay movie shot on Fire Island with a budget of $4000. Moviegoers, celebrities and critics—both gay and straight—flocked to see Boys in the Sand when it opened in mainstream movie theaters in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco. Within a year, Deep Throat, a heterosexual hardcore feature opened to rave reviews and a huge box office—exceeding that of many mainstream Hollywood features.Almost all of those involved in making “commercial” gay pornographic movies began as amateurs in a field that had virtually never existed before, either as art or commerce. Many of their “underground” predecessors had repeatedly suffered arrest and other forms of legal harassment. There was no developed gay market and any films made commercially were shown in adult x-rated theaters. After the Stonewall riots and the emergence of the gay liberation movement in 1969, a number of entrepreneurs began to make gay adult movies for the new mail order market. The gay porn film industry grew dramatically during the next thirty years and transformed the way men—gay men in particular—conceived of masculinity and their sexuality. Bigger Than Life tells that story.
Jeffrey Escoffier wrote on glbtq history, politics, culture, sexuality, music, and dance. One of the founders of OUT/LOOK: National Lesbian and Gay Quarterly, he published widely. Among his books are American Homo: Community and Perversity and a biography of John Maynard Keynes in the Chelsea House series on the Lives of Notable Gay Men and Lesbians. He co-edited (with Matthew Lore) Mark Morris' L'Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato: A Celebration and also edited is Sexual Revolution, an anthology of writing on sex from the 1960s and 1970s. In 2009, he published Bigger Than Life: The History of Gay Porn Cinema from Beefcake to Hardcore. He was also on the board of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at The City University of New York.
Written as a series of interconnected, but also stand-alone, essays, Bigger Than Life is very thorough, but also maddeningly repetitive, explaining some of the same things over and over, and sometimes even reiterating the same stories in several chapters. Also, as it turns out, reading a 350-page book about the history of gay porn isn't all the interesting, particularly when you're as badly in need of an editor as Escoffier is. Typos, and grammatical and spelling errors abounded, seriously, on almost every page. It was really annoying. The book is clearly heavily researched, but Escoffier skips over some of the things that could have made the book far more relevant and engaging. He prefers, instead, salacious details of porn movies and just barely giving the most minimum of lip service to the social movements, controversies, court battles, and government overreach and interference that have marked both porn, and art, in this country for decades.
The problem with this book is that it's just not very comprehensive. It's more gossipy than historical, and its major focus is on the period from about 1983 to 1997. For anyone interested in the Internet's impact on gay adult film, this book was published too early: It just missed the collapse of DVD-issuing studios (like Falcon and Titan Media) and the rise of "gonzo" adult film (simple scenes of non-plot sex) like Corbin Fisher, Randy Blue, and the like.
The book serves as a somewhat decent primer on the history of gay adult film. But it misses out on a lot of the deeper history, which involves prosecutions by the Meese Commission, the economic challenges of digital film, the rise of Bel Ami and European porn (which supplanted the older adult film style of Jean-Daniel Cadinot), and the changing culture of gay adult film and society's larger concepts of sexuality.
What in the world is a married straight guy doing reading a book about gay porn? Well, it's actually quite simple. It's late 20th century history, it's gay rights-related and the HIV epidemic plays a significant role in its evolution - three things that interest me a great deal.
Overall, the book got bogged down in battles between competing studios and names I did not recognize, but I still found it interesting to read of how different the world actually was even 40 years ago. It is also very tastefully written - unlike the book on straight porn The Other Hollywood which I found to be brash and overly graphic and ultimately not very interesting.
Escoffier looks at the history of gay pornography in the United States from the late 1950s to the turn of the century. It is a fascinating study that traces not only changes in attitudes within pornography but how porn helped form desires for gay men.
“Freedom of sexual expression was the necessary condition for the later emergence sexual liberation, the women's movement, and the civil rights of gay men, lesbians, and transgendered people-implying an odd coalition among principled First Amendment activists, porn entrepreneurs, sex radicals, feminists, LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) activists, and sexual minorities.” 2
“Pornography and pornographic films were an integral part of the sexual discourses that emerged during the sexual revolution’s two decades. The sexual explicitness of pornography ranges from soft-core images of attractive models posing or running in the woods to gritty depictions kinky sex acts in alleyways. Pornography can reinforce crudest stereotypes of sex roles, standards of beauty, or power dynamics, or it can contribute to the education of desire. It can be a fantasy machine or a form of discourse about sex-or it can be all those things at the same time.” 3
“Before 1962, homosexual materials, even those without any sexual content, were considered obscene by definition. The emergence of gay hard-core films provided explicit representations of gay sexual behaviour not otherwise available. And the availability are such images help to affirm the nascent gay identity.” 5-6
“Desire, psychologist have found, is not something given to us out of the blur; it is constructed true fantasy-and it is true fantasy that we learn how to desire. Pornographic movies are passports to a fantasy world which sex exists without the every day encumbrances of social convention, endurance, or availability. To imagine a sexual performance in a fantasy or to see one in a porn movie enables us to experience sexual excitement without the side effects of anxiety, guilt, or boredom-and for many of us the erotic excitement is heightened when the fantasy includes an element of risk, danger, mystery, or transgression. Porn let's explore those new fantasies. (Elizabeth Cowie, “Pornography and Fantasy: Psychoanalytic Perspectives,” in Sex Exposed: Sexuality and the Pornography Debate, Lynne Segal & Mary McIntosh, eds.,. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1993)” 6-7
“One of the first American film makers to explore homoeroticism and it's cultural mythologies, Kenneth Anger shot short film called Fireworks (1947), a homosexual dream/nightmare that was inspired by the 1943 zoot suit riots in Los Angeles-in which gangs of sailors attack and beat zoot suit-wearing Latino youth because they were not serving in the Armed Forces.”12
“That same summer [1963] Jack Smith shot Flaming Creatures on the roof of New York's Windsor theatre downtown on Grant Street. Made for a mere $300, it was a transvestite extravaganza rather than an idealization of machismo and violence.” 13
“To some degree, the films Kenneth Anger, Jack Smith, and Andy Warhol took for granted the gay male erotic culture that had begun to emerge in the 1950s. It started as an underground phenomenon, with small magazines containing photographs of almost nude men being sold on newsstands in the larger cities. These “physique magazines” the mail-order businesses based upon them what are the primary source of erotic Male images for gay men.” 16
“A couple of years later, when Mizer was experimenting with grouping the pages together, it occurred to him to create a magazine. He decided to call it Physique Pictorial. It featured photographs of young men wearing only posing straps, bathing suits, or loincloths and almost no editorial content-except that is, for the long and deceptively chatty, highly opinionated captions that often functioned implicitly more like editorials. (Christopher Nealon, “The Secret Public of Physique Culture,” Foundlings: Lesbian and Gay Historical Emotion Before Stonewall. Durham: Duke University Press, 2001: 99-139) 17
“As F.V. Hooven points out in Beefcake, his history of the physique magazine, the magazines were not merely one aspect of a wider gay culture, “they virtually were gay culture,” [F. Valentine Hooven, III. Beefcake: The Muscle Magazines of America, 1950-1970. Köln: Taschen, 2002): 74] One writer estimated that the total circulation of the beefcake magazines in those oppressive times was over 750,00-probably the largest audience of gay male readers and consumer assembled to that point. [Thomas Waugh, Hard to Imagine: Gay Male Eroticism in Photography and Film from their Beginnings to Stonewall. New York: Columbia University Press, 1966: 215-19]” 18
“In 1966, Drum magazine, published in Philadelphia, and the San Francisco-based magazine Butch published photograph of frontal male nudity. Clearly intended as deliberate provocations, they resulted in Clark Pollak, the editor of Drum, being quickly arrested for obscenity. Joined by the American Civil Liberties Union, he fought the case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. After several years, during which Pollak lost control of the magazine, the court ruled that the nude male body is not obscene.”19
“On New Years Eve 1966, for example, patrons at the Black Cat on Sunset Boulevard, many dressed in drag after the annual costume party at New Faces, another gay bar up the street, were attacked by undercover and uniformed vice cops after a number of customers exchanged the customary kissed with one another at midnight…On February 11, 1967, L.A.’s first gay demonstration to protest police brutality took place. Organized by PRIDE (Personal Rights in Defence and Education), an organization of younger gay men and lesbians, this event occurred more than two years before the famous demonstrations protesting a police raid of the Stonewall in Greenwich Village in New York City that launched the gay liberation movement in June 1969.” 48-49
“Mizer and Rocco represented two very different perspectives on the gay male erotic culture that had developed before the sexual revolution of the 1960s. Mizer’s beefcake photos and the illustrations he published in the Physique Pictorial by artists like Quaitance, Etienne, or Tom of Finland focused on the male-figure as sexually desirable: muscles, bulging crotches, dressed in skimpy or tight clothes. Rocco’s movies portrayed gay male romance and love, usually of attractive young men; they downplayed the sexually desirable masculine figure and the sexual aspect of gay relationships.” 52
“Making harder was against the law, according to Captain Jack Wilson of the LAPD: “You cannot make a hardcore film without violating the prostitution laws. When you pay actors to engage in sex or oral copulation, you’ve violated the laws. You’ve solicited individuals to engage in prostitution by asking them to exchange sex for money.” 61
“Halsted seems to have anticipated Foucault’s celebrated view of S/M as a ‘creative enterprise’ that imagined ‘the desexualization of pleasure,’ [Bersani, 19] Halsted believed that the erotic is both transgressive and sacramental. In the erotic encounter the physical barriers between people are breached, if only briefly, through the other’s bodily orifices. ‘Stripping naked is the decisive action,’ wrote Georges Bataille. ‘Nakedness offers a contrast to self-possession…Bodies open…through secret passages to give us a feeling of obscenity. Obscenity…upsets the physical state associated with self-possession.” 76-77
“Gay hardcore films, like all pornography, offer a fantasy of sex without the ordinary obstacles of time, physical availability, and psychological inhibitions. They also serve as a kind of documentary record of actual gay sex. “Gay films, like gay novels, even the cheapest of them,” observed reviewer Jim Kenner, “always tend to be an apology, an explanation, and an exploration of gay life.” 85
“Shortly after it opened, Esquire magazine assigned a writer to do a piece about “the new homosexual.” “[T]jere used be this syndrome of drink, guilt and camp,” he concluded. “Now, its dope, freedom and well, rock and soul.” The new homosexual of the seventies, Burke wrote, was “an unfettered, guiltless, male child of the new morality in a Zapata moustache and an outlaw hat, who couldn’t care less for Establishment approval, would as soon sleep with boys as girls, and thinks that ‘Over the Rainbow’ is a place to fly on 200 micrograms of lysergic acid diethyl amide [LSD].” 90
“Sexual liberation had not waited for gay liberation: gay male sexuality was changing.” 91
“In 1966, more than two dozen peepshows were installed in bookstores around the Times Square area, and by mid-1970s there were more than a thousand.” 92
“Boys in the Sand was a huge hit with audiences and critics. In spite of being a gay hardcore film, it was previewed by Variety and was the first gay hardcore film advertised in the New York Times.” 101
“The year before [1964], Damron had started publishing a small book listing all of the gay bars that he encountered on his extensive travels in the United States.” 120-121
“In 1967, Denmark had abolished all laws restricting pornography-the first nation to do so. When the following year Denmark reported that sex crimes had dramatically declined, de Renzi decided to go to Copenhagen to attend Sex 69, the country’s first porn trade show.” 126
“Brian originated a style of gay pornography, along with type of casting, that eventually dominated the gay porn industry in the 1970s and 1980s-the all-American young man in search of sexual fulfillment, sun-tanned and usually blond, and often set outdoors, in idyllic surroundings that were increasingly exemplified as California.” 128
“Over the course of the seventies a new masculine styled evolved. Rejecting the traditional idea that male homosexual desire implied the desire to be female, gay men turned to a traditionally masculine or working-class style of acting out sexually…The new style of gay men was almost macho-but macho with a twist. Macho and sexually provocative, the new style included denim pants, black combat boots, a tight t-shirt (if it was warm), covered by a plaid flannel shirt (if it was not), pierced ears or nipples, tattoos and beard or moustache. The men who dressed this way were known as clones or, especially in San Francisco as “Castro clones.” 136
“Moreover, the clone style codified-very precisely, the new sexual norms of gay male life. “For gay men,” White explained, “there are three erotic zones-mouth, penis, and anus-and all three are vividly dramatized by this costume, the ass the most insistently so, since its status as an object of desire is historically the newest and therefore the most in need of re-definition.” [White, 46]” 137
“He [Wally Wallace] taught us all what it is to act like a man,” said Arnie Kantrowitz. “He was the set designer for exposing the beautiful darker side of our sexuality.” 148
“The world Gage created in his films was a masculine twilight zone between the closet and a man’s acknowledgement of homosexual desire as masculine.” 156
“While gay porn as a ‘business’ was founded in San Francisco, the centre of gravity began to move south to Los Angeles with William Higgins’s rise to prominence.” 166-167
“Catalina had become the hub of gay porn filmmaking and distribution in Southern California, while Chuck Holmes’s Falcon Studies was increasingly the hub in northern California.” 169
“Since the late seventies, anal sex had become the narrative focal point of gay porn. While it is difficult to document, the shift away from oral sex as the normative activity to anal sex was one of the major changes that accompanied the sexual revolution of the sixties and seventies.” 185
“The AIDS epidemic and the fear of casual sex amplified further the demand for video porn.” 197
“Bob Damron, the creator of Damron’s Address Book, one of the most popular gay travel guides, and business partner/publisher of pioneering gay porn photographer and director J.Brian, died of AIDS on June 20, 1989. He was sixty-one.” 230
A little repetitive, and often dry -- surprising, given that in no other history book have so many sex acts been named so often. The main trouble is just that it seems a bit underfunded, from the page design to the editing, and that's more a reflection on the history publishing industry than the author. If you're trying to do research, it collects a good amount of information and points to a lot of sources. I'd love to see a second edition expanding on the new role of the internet in porn, which is only discussed in the final three or four pages.
'Yo! I know how this looks like but let's get a few things straight. Number one, it is not a raunchy book. Number two, it is actually an interesting, well-researched book on the cultural phenomenon that revolutionized and influenced so much behavior from the 60s to the early 2000s. I also got acquainted with the works of some of the genres most popular figures (Andy Warhol, Robert Mapplethorpe, William Higgins, Falcon, Jeff Stryker, etc.) and the roles that they played. Did I mention the tea about some figures like Oscar Wilde and Truman Capote? It truly is something that you would think of blasé because, well, it is what it is. But when you actually get to know the building blocks that lead to what porn is today, it's just amazing.
Escoffier’s Bigger Than Life is a “Cliff Notes” history of American gay pornographic films. It takes the reader from a time when “homosexual materials, even those without any sexual content, were considered obscene … showing two males kissing was considered daring” to the “bareback” films of today.
Escoffier shows that gay pornography reflects what is going on at any given time. Before AIDS, porn was a hard-going business, mostly consigned to theaters and catalogs. Escoffier writes, “Anything that was in pornography you could have in abundance on the street any day, walk in any gym—more beautiful men, more dick, more available dick—right out the door into their apartment, the party starts in an hour…” After AIDS, not so much. The disease, along with the advent of the video cassette, led to an explosion in gay porn and the closure of many adult theaters. “Between 1985 and 1999, a mood of extended grieving and melancholic nostalgia had settled over the gay male community populated by traumatized men whose sexuality was hemmed in by death, religious bigotry, and homophobia.”
Its no surprise post-AIDS pornography, the versatile guys doing it for a political reasons were largely replaced with gay-for-pay tops who talked dirty. “And in an age when AIDS put limits on the sexual liberty of gay men, Stryker, Idol, and Ryker were designed to be men who would not be infected. They were not anally penetrated, they were not sexually versatile—they were men who would not be vectors of disease.”
It is true that Bigger Than Life focuses on the larger studios — Catalina and Falcon in particular — probably because these firms were the ones who kept records of who produced, directed, and starred in particular films. Also, as a collection of stand-alone essays, some of the points are repetitive, but I didn’t find that too detracting. There are no dirty pictures, but there is frank discussion on what sexual activity was going on in specific films. So, if you enjoy social history with a side of gay porn, Bigger Than Life is a good read.
This was a fun and interesting read in a guilty-pleasure sort of way. Although I don't feel the least bit guilty. It is, after all, a historical study. Aside from satisfying my hunger for, uh, history, there was a certain sense of nostalgia. Having worked in a, um, "history" store in the mid-90s, there was a section of this book that brought back a lot of memories...