Old Journals T2 - A Glimpse into our Recent Past
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At this v moment, there is a freeleech torrent called Old Journals T2 located at https://www.gaytorrent.ru/details.php?id=f7935895a5a7e080721e650ad4175fa3c7ed7419880c04c0&hit=1
It is a collection of old gay magazine-sized photobooks from the 1970s, showcasing work from a range of major studios, stars, and directors. My pleasure and gratitude moved me to post a comment at that location, but it seemed to me possibly worthy of a wider audience, possibly even the kind of topic that could attract comment from others, and thus fill in missing bits of our collective history, the story of all of us individually, taken as a whole until stroking turns into another and ultimately more meaningful social movement, and transforms politics.
Before these magazines, there were ways in which queers found each other, but there is still far too little documentation, too few diaries and love letters in the archives. It's all very well to have an exhibit of Bob Mizner photos in NYC, which there is this fall, and interesting to see what else he did besides his legendary beefcake, but the letter columns and advertisers in physique and bodybuilding magazines that helped build a clandestine community, along with the Mattachine Society, the One Institute, and other brave ventures out of the closet were followed by much more explicit celebrations of raunch amid frisky youth feeling (and spreading) their oats, and brawny, shaggy macho studs doing what grownup men like to do together.
Add in the Boyd MacDonald anecdotes of casual, impromptu sex with random studs, straight and otherwise, the largely untold history of truckers, sailors, and cowboys that is only just beginning to be pulled together, and then revel in these innocently lurid encounters of healthy and uninhibited frolics, and we may someday begin to get a sense of where we were, where we are, and maybe even where we're going. It might even be (just a sudden thought, a partly baked idea or pbi) that each individual youth coming into awareness as a sexual creature interested in men, their sexual parts, sexual interests, and sexual behaviors, reflects in some small way the emerging consciousness of our species that sex is as much a need as food and water, and equally appropriate to accept, guilt free.
There's a wonderful, beautifully written book about the gay disco era, "The Dancer from the Dance," which captures a certain moment of a certain aspect of the period in which these publications appeared, when Warhol's factory was at its height of creative genius, and Times Square was gritty and real, vibrant, and alive. Is there anything comparable about bath houses or less celebrity-packed orgies?
In any case, here's what was posted at the link above. Perhaps others will challenge these remarks and agree, disagree, or add material of their own.
From the first wave of gay porn, often tied to movies that could be seen in now legendary gay porn palaces, where the audience was as busy as the hot young men on the silver screen overhead. Before there was the Internet, before there were DVDs, before there was VHS, there were picture books for those to relive the motion picture in the privacy of their own room, or preview a possible feature presentation.
These first film stars of gay cinema often also made appearances at bath houses or other venues to interactive vigorously with the audience, encouraging mass participation. Good times. These came along just after Deep Throat broke through to a legit audience and got reviewed in major newspapers, so any barriers to explicit sex portrayal were gone. There was color. There was sound, sometimes just music but often synched dialogue.
Also there was a semblance of a story, not just a collection of "loops." The hitchhiker has adventures. The working man has encounters. Truckers, garage mechanics, office boys, deliverymen, all having sex in the course of their normal daily lives, where cock and cum seemed to be readily available everywhere. Also, note that however young these performers were supposed to be, they were men, with untrimmed bushes, unshaved bodies, mustaches that were very much the swinging look of period cool in the days before ink and piercings were required to demonstrate the level of your testosterone.
And there were no condoms, in those innocent days before the plague years, which followed so swiftly (some say suspiciously) after The Pill liberated women for carefree pleasure. It was not called "barebacking" because that is all there was. The word they used in private was not "barebacking." It was "fucking."
And these historic treasures are well worth spending time with. Thanks for sharing them, and for these renewed glimpses of the pioneers of the art form both in front of the camera and behind it, where the first serious waves of liberation began swamping all resistance and eventually led to a political transformation that continues to shake this country (the US of A) to its hidebound foundations and bedrock of false certainties.
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Thank you your thoughts. I still have some of the original mags
