Sex in the Seventies: Gay Porn Cinema as an Archive for the History of Sexuality

Authors

  • Jeffrey Paul Escoffier Brooklyn Institute for Social Research

Abstract

The decades between 1960 and 200 were the most tumultuous in the history of gay male sexuality. For many gay men who came out in the period after the Stonewall riots of 1969, the seventies were a golden age of sexual freedom.It was an era that not only opened up the possibility of openly acknowledging one’s homosexuality and fostering a sense of identity and community, it also initiated a period of sexual experimentation. The discovery of AIDS in 1981 changed all that.  

Pornographic photographic media can make a unique contribution to the history of gay male sexuality.In traditional photographic media images are indexical signs: images are produced by the action of light reflected from objects in front of a camera on to a chemical emulsion. This ‘trace’ is recorded at a moment in time and then stored for future viewing.  

During the 1970s a group of gay pornographic filmmakers based in New York sought to document the underground sexual lifestyle that had emerged in the years before and immediately after the Stonewall riots. Like the Italian neo-realist films made after World War II, the queer realist filmmakers of New York created a synthesis of a documentary-like view of the gay sexual subculture and the more psycho-political themes of sexual liberation. These men shot their early hardcore movies in the style of cinema verite – using ‘naturalistic’ techniques that originated in documentary filmmaking, with its stylized cinematic devices of editing and camera work and deliberately staged set-ups to capture the rough and gritty feel of New York City. They were thus both ‘pornographic movies’ as well as ‘documentaries’ about gay male sexuality They all made a point to show the streets and the landmarks of the city’s sexual landscape.  Every one of these movies set sex scenes in public spaces of the city. Some like Arch Brown’s Pier Pieces actually were shot on the piers along the Hudson River, both Jerry Douglas (The Back Row) and Jack Deveau (A Night at the Adonis) shot group sex scenes in theater restrooms, and three of the films were set in bathhouses (Bijou, The Voyeur, and Muscle Bound). Jerry Douglas’ The Back Row and Subway shot erotic scenes in the subway system. Jack Deveau’s last film, Times Square Strip, was shot at the Gaiety, a famous Times Square strip club. Thus homo-realism both confirmed and celebrated the city’s gay male sexual culture.

 

Author Biography

  • Jeffrey Paul Escoffier, Brooklyn Institute for Social Research

    Jeffrey Escoffier is the author of Bigger Than Life: The History of Gay Porn Cinema from Beefcake to Hardcore (Running Press/Perseus Book Group, 2009) and American Homo: Community and Perversity (University of California Press, 1998) and he edited Sexual Revolution (Thunder’s Mouth, 2003), a compilation of the most important writing on sex published in the 1960s and 70s. He has also written a biography of John Maynard Keynes (Chelsea House, 1995). He has taught economics, lgbt studies and sexuality at San Francisco State University, the University of California in Berkeley and at Davis, at Rutgers University, the New School University, and at Barnard College, Columbia University. From 2007-2009 he was a Visiting Scholar at the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality of New York University,  and served on the board of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies, at The City University of New York from 2009-2014. He is currently a Visiting Scholar at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. 

Downloads

Published

2017-02-10

Issue

Vol. 26 No. 1 (2017)

Section

Studies