Hand-in-Hand films was one of the first studios to make gay porn, at a time when there was no home video, and the only way to see their work was in movie theaters. The 1972 release "The Back Row" is currently available on this site for the first time since the glory days of gritty life in the hard city where it is entirely possible viewers would have seen this picture in one of the theaters featured in the action. Check out:
https://www.gaytorrent.ru/details.php?id=0af44f7aba478b1f721e650ad4175fa359cb2fa097c7ae50
Following the release here of "Gay Sex in the 70s"
https://www.gaytorrent.ru/details.php?id=b11fb8755a783322721e650ad4175fa3c114bdb8b2dc2947
there is actually a chance that young people today might get a little glimpse of history before fruits, fairies, and fags were all over the electronic television machine, and never under such antiquated labels– and often just doing their jobs, being good neighbors, getting married, having children, and living the good life as if sexual orientation were a matter of no particular interest, and certainly not a topic for discussion.
At the above link for "The Back Row," I posted the following extended comment, now offered here in hope that others may be moved to comment and share their memories or tales they have heard from others who were there. Like the San Francisco Bay area in the politically tumultuous psychedelic era of drugs, music, and the emerging Electronic Social Transformation finally coming into its own again. no one who was not there will ever know....
I wrote:
Makes me think of a hardcore version of that charming little movie "Trick," where two guys have serious
trouble hooking up. Little glimpses of a couple of porn theaters west of 7th Ave. in the Times Square area,
which has been completely Disneyfied and Sanitized for Tourists who prefer Manhattan as a theme park
than a place where people actually live and work and eat, drink, have sex. But Casey Donovan is as splendidly
handsome as ever was, and this early gay porn is like a vision of another era, where explicit sex was integrated
into an attempt to tell a story via images rather than what Hitchcock called "photographs of people talking."
As such, it does not actually matter that there is no dialogue, panting, moaning, groaning, or heavy breathing
and gasping. Like a lot of gay movies from that period, people wanted to SEE the action, soi money spent on
synched sound was often considered money wasted. And with all the grit of a city in decline that sounds a lot
more scary than the vibrant street-level life of Times Square that actually existed, people somehow managed
to find each other, and besides the tubs and backroom bars, tea rooms and peep shows were also locations of
opportunity for gay men and str8, to the point where this picture might almost be considered a documentary. Thanks
for sharing this historic documentation-- "only a fadograph of a yestern scene."
The thing is, for all the talk about all the manifestations of same-sex desire, pursuit, and fulfillment in terms of psychology,
military, religion, discrimination, marriage, sociology, and so on, there is not necessarily a lot of talk about what people actually
DID. Porn stars of the day participated in life sex shows with audience participation at the tubs or porno theaters, for example.
They could be seen on the streets, met with in discussion groups, perhaps even hired as what is now called an "escort."
The role of peep shows, the hustler bars and pickup spots, was significant. Straight men browsing porn on 42nd St. could also get
off in the same location, with no one complaining as long as quarters continued to drop in the slot. The piers, the trucks,
The Ramble, and bars like The International/Stud and clubs like The Mineshaft played a role. There was no need to travel to
Fire Island from Grand Central Terminal or up to P'town to be surrounded by like-minded potential playmates. And despite the
film title, the back row (of strait theaters or gay) was barely even a hint of the available area for active relief, inspired by
the larger-than-life sex acts played out on the silver screen.
I was once told that in the 50s, more or less, it was customary for people to show their apartments for possible renters. At least,
that may have been the excuse. What really happened was that each host you encountered provided a drink and a blow job. It
was apparently as well known as tea rooms. But who talks about such things? If you have not read STH or the rag catering to
long-haul truckers and the men who wanted to serve them, it is almost impossible to get a sense of how men hooked up with each
other.
And since "the club of induction" was still enforcing social policies, influencing careers, channeling men into college or nationally
approved vocations-- yes, I mean the draft to which all men were subject starting at age 18-- there were, as seen in the movie,
servicemen on leave prowling the streets in search of nookie. Coming from a closed society of sexually aroused men at their peak
of physical activity, when they were released from group showers, latrines without compartment doors (or separating walls, for
that matter), they were ready for action and, like US Marines in the legendary videos made around Camp Pendleton and featuring
enlisted men willing to be paid to get off and not only feel their oats, but spread them, they often were sufficiently secure in their
orientation that they were unafraid-- hesitant, maybe, but not at all panicked-- to be persuaded after a few drinks, to accept a
little discrete relief.
Another glimpse of a basically unmentionable tradition turns up in one of Andy Warhol's sensational nudie movies with Joe Dallesandro,
where he plays a hustler. When a kid asks him where to get picked up by a man, he suggests hanging out on E. 54th St., around
the corner news stand. Like much else, that seems to be all in the past now, but it certainly was a convenient place for students
from Brooklyn and Queens to stop by to pick up some quick cash so they could take their girl on a date later that night. Heaven
knows where they get pocket change these days.
Of course, as usual, maybe I'm just wrong about what I think of as the invisible history of gay sex, largely unwritten in terms of
specifics rather than changing mores and attitudes. There is some pre-Stonewall documentary footage available, interviews with
our founders and elders, the pioneers who opened the way. And there are some stories about same-sex action in the military
based on diaries and personal accounts going back well over a century, and slowly being accumulated and put into print. Gay
pirates are one thing, but gay cowboys are another. (Not that "gay" was necessarily a concept ordinary people had in those days,
when what mattered was getting off, not claiming a label....)
The Gay Archive in Los Angeles asks that diaries, memoirs, love letters, photos all be preserved and donated. That's a start, and what
may seem perfectly obvious and uninteresting to someone in the midst of things may be startlingly new information to others. I remember
my surprise a few years ago when a campus historian where I went to school asked about life in the dormitories. Now that college
dorms have male and female students mingled, not necessarily even in separate wings or on separate floors, there is probably a lot more partnered sex going on now that no one has to sneak someone in the back and put a sock on their doorknob to warn their roommate
to keep their distance. And there must certainly be no more walking naked down the hallway to take a shower, flaunting your endowment proudly, in case anyone happened to be looking.
But it had not occurred to me, silly me, that the period I knew was now just another bland and undetailed part of history, not worth
noticing. But if something as mundane as student housing has transformed since then, what of the impact of The Pill, the plague, and idle social talk of S/M in novels and sitcoms? Think of all the WWII movies you have seen, from the time, where Everyone smokes tobacco, and then compare that reality with contemporary fictions set in the same period, where no one smokes. The Temperance movement and its anti--drug hysteria has now subsided to the point where casual use of a certain flowering weed can not only be discussed and taken for granted and considered as a topic for humor, but where chat show guests can show up heavily under the influence and not be censured for doing so.
And yet, how much US television shows people drinking alcohol? Pretty much none. In the wonderful William Powell/Myrna Loy detective movies about "The Thin Man," they are soused from start to finish, and almost never without a drink in hand. "You've already had two martinis, so I need to catch up with you." And once, a small, handy collection of available bottles of hard liquor was within convenient reach in every upper class living room for the entertainment of guests. You would not know it today, but just as everyone smoked in hospitals, elevators, restaurants, and food markets, everyone drank cocktails. When "Anna Christie" came out with its famous promotional line, "Garbo talks," her first words were, "Gimme a whiskey."
Just saying that little things change and get overlooked. In a digital age, what direction is "clockwise"? How do you use a "dial telephone"? When was the last time you saw a large communal ashtray on someone's coffee table? One of the funniest moments in the first "Back to the Future" movie is when they arrive at a filling station for gasoline and are inundated by a crowd of lackeys to supply gas, check their water and oil, clean their windshield, and perhaps offer them S&H Green Stamps for "valuable prizes." Also, likely, free road maps and a collectible free tumbler as a customer incentive.....
This is what happens when I free associate while downloading stuff. It's all right. Pretty much nobody seem to read my vaporings anyway, but all this inchoate mis-rememberance is meant to suggest that just because you may have vivid memories of using public bathrooms and noticing dicks in use for their Other function, doesn't mean your experiences are universal. And while jock straps and changing rooms are part of memories for many adolescents, others were terrified to be seen naked by their cohort-- especially if they had yet to achieve some of the more popular and obvious signs of puberty. These kinds of things may be nearly universal, like the first time you got drunk, or stoned, or got to first base (if that is where you wanted to go).
But like the ways of men with other men, their reserve and their depths of bonding, it's mostly not stuff that gets talked about. And other than "butch bluffing" and braggadocio, one's first sexual encounters and successes are not really talked about. Do you know when your closest friends began to masturbate? How they did (do) it, how often (then and now), or when they first ejaculated? You might know about someone's first time getting laid, but then what? Did they repeat the experience with the same partner? How long did it take before they did it again with someone else?
Some perfectly strait men have discovered they like to finger their butthole or shove a candle up their ass to intensify orgasms. Largely undocumented behavior, undiscussed. Everyone knows students jack off, even when they live with roommates in an apartment, dorm, or fraternity. But what arrangements to people make, and do they simply covertly pretend they never think of such a thing, or...?
In another forum around here, I asked (no answer) whether anyone recalled when they first noticed having "morning wood" and whether they still have that happen or find that it eventually faded away without notice? Maybe it's just a matter of being queer and different, an outsider, "a stranger and afraid, in a world I never made," that left me not knowing any of this stuff about what other boys did, what other men do, and the kind of arrangements and accommodations people make at various ages in order to deal with at least the physical pressures of what I call "the biological imperative."
Others may be similarly mystified, though. Note the topics on wet dreams, spitting or swallowing, ass hair pro and con, public sex, outdoor sex, sex with more than one person (or gender) at a time, and even how your dick is oriented inside boxers-or-briefs..... Those are not controversial matters, like barebacking, but routine things that every man has personal knowledge of, and likely very, very little awareness of what it is that others know or think or do.
Gay men may all have tasted cum at some point, but it may still have come as a surprise when they realized they could taste their own. Yes, people actually do that, at least as part of the discovery process. Except, naturally, for those who don't, have no such interest, and never had the slightest curiosity, no matter how much they wanted to suck cock.
The world is full of mysteries, and I contend that the M word that just appeared in this sentence has a silent T. Most of us barely know ourselves, much less what is standard or normal or typical for anyone (or everyone) else. Which brings me back where I sort of began, wondering about how people had sex in decades past, without mobile phones and aps, with no ubiquitous internet porn. Not that I am fool enough to think I know what "you kids today" get up to. I just think everything could be a lot more explicit and that enough personal histories, a la Kinsey's surveys, would be useful as well as interesting, perhaps even prurient and inspirational.
There IS beginning to be sexual history written. John Boswell on how the Roman church, for centuries, had no animus for same-sex friskiness. What men did on long voyages of exploration in tiny ships without women. How Pizarro freaked out at the unabashed anal sex he found prevalent among the Peruvians (which is apparently one reason why he tried to wipe them out). What song the Sirens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among women. And so on. Today there are jests about hairdressers; a century ago the same snickering applied to "ribbon clerks."
Proper Victorian men in England got laid often, despite having to remain at a distance from any possible marriage candidate. Sam Johnson's biographer picked up hookers in the park for about the price of a bottle of gin. Oscar Wilde sucked off stable boys. What if all this were investigated, documented, written down, known and discussed with no more shame or embarrassment than society's changing preferences at the dinner table? Mort main, the dead hand of the past, afflicts us still, even though we have come a long way from a time when the one true god decreed that any woman who was not a virgin when she got married could be put to death, just like a parent dealing with a disobedient child.
Bloodthirsty, right? But the blood-stained marital sheet was expected as documentation, and in parts of the US there was a happy tradition of the chivaree, in which the happy couple's drunk friends would show up on the wedding night to make a hell of a distracting racket until they would come to the window and display proof hymenal penetration for the edification of the assembled throng of licentious revelers and well-wishers who all wanted to be sure he had his dick in her and was the first to do so. Yay!
So the barbarism of Leviticus and other "holy" books is still upon us. Perhaps letting a cleansing breeze sweep through the closets and bed chambers of the past will freshen the air in the darker spots of our architecture today.
Checking out available documentaries about San Francisco's pre-Stonewall Compton's Cafeteria riots, how "homosexual" officially stopped being a mental disorder, and similar investigations of the recent past can help spread the word, and it might even be that such knowledge leads to more spreading of the legs and more possible partners once the stigma is removed and what is left is simply interest or lack of it, opportunity or lack of it. Perhaps eventually, not only will same-sex intimacy become normalized and unremarkable, but so will hetero sex be lifted from its stigmas, tabus, and inhibitions and our society, like many "primitive" cultures, will welcome more and better orgasms for all, leading to more of what that book calls "lovingkindness," and what Freud's follower Wilhelm Reich said was the cure for the mass psychology of Fascism.
