before the Internet

[prickles]

Oh, yeah. I remember that ...X_X

What about diallers? A friend had a really awkward conversation after he ran up a £200+ phone bill when the modem dialled an 09 number.

 

[tonka]

The Time went by! ~X( Sometimes it is good, sometimes it is bad, isn't it?!

I wouldn't go back.
Yes, I have fond memories of those days. My friends and I tore it up.

But...we were hated as a matter of course. There was one safe neighborhood, and hostility everywhere. My friend and I took a self defense course, because we needed to.

For the most part, gay people are just people now. I know that's not everywhere. But it's here, and spreading.

This week has been a smack in the face. But know hope, boys.
The future is ours!!!

 

[Shelter]

@Tonka
Don't be sad or desperate or wistful - bad days will come and go. But you know: after every night will follow again a bright morning and that as long as we live and as long as the human kind will exist. Sometimes it lasts a little bit longer until the bright sun will warm us up again. But it will happen!!!!!

 

[wardell]

I love reading all your replys. for me I was born with the net but i lived out in the woods and it took forever for a pic to load with dial-up. it was years before i could even see a video. the internet sucked back then

 

[trencherman]

Gay magazines were available in Calgary in the late seventies but what I wanted was the 8mm films from Falcon and Brentwood, mostly solo trades abusing themselves. I finally got my chance to pick up a couple, I think it was Allen and Doug, when I went to San Francisco. I mailed it from there since I did not want to be caught with them coming back. The long arms of the Justice Department intercepted both anyway and sent me an official letter to inform me that that type of film subject was restricted (as if I did not know). So I had to wait until I moved to Toronto and VCRs came out around the same time while the entertainment media laws were relaxed to bring back porn from Buffalo, NY. It’s just a short two hours drive, so I timed it with my shopping at the outlet malls along the way. I remember getting so much rise from the William Higgins and Matt Sterling stuff until George Durois with his audition series came along and that was twenty years ago.


It is unbelievable the evasions one had to go through just to get your hands on porn before the advent of the internet.

 

[skinjo9]

well I too felt the excitement of travelling weekly to my local mag shop in 1970 - 75 to see what goodies came from below the counter. we were starved in the UK at that time, every paper shop was hit by the police at some time or other, the fines were around 1000 pounds, which was a lot of money in those days but it did not stop the paper shop guys continuing, shows how much profit must have been in those mags even then. lol
now films are banged out every day the mags have nearly died, shame really heheh

 

[dragonscub]

Like most American boys, I had seen a couple of Playboys that my friend's fathers had hidden away now and then. But when the pics didn't give me the huge thrill the same way my pals reacted, I just chalked it up to them being weird and didn't give it a second thought.

Later, my "gay porn" history kicked off in such an odd manner, nobody believes me when I tell them. Back when I was around 12 y/o, I accompanied my mother on a grocery shopping trip. She was in one of her eccentric cranky moods, and impulsively told me "just stay in the car". She walked over to the candy/magazine store that was near the grocery market, and returned a short time later. Instead of getting in, she pulled a magazine out of a brown bag and shoved it in my face thru the car window, saying "here, read this, maybe you'll learn something while I finish shopping".

After she stalked off, I realized the magazine she handed me was "Playgirl" and it was full of naked men! My eyes went wide, my tongue dried up, and I was instantly hooked. The centerfold was then-TV-star Gary Conway, and the travel feature had a tall, lanky, long-haired dude swimming in Cozumel Mexico. He was handsome, hairy-chested, hung to his knees, and his face just radiated confident, easy, sensual masculinity while he held the female co-model in his arms. To this day I've never seen another male face that sensual: I didn't really know what sex was all about yet, but his face seemed to promise something wonderful and secret and a little scary. That day was my first conscious inkling that "hmmm, there's something different about me..."

I still have that magazine (I grabbed it from the trash when she threw it away), but I've never known what my mother was thinking when she insisted I read that Playgirl. We never discussed it, indeed I've never officially come out to her or my father. Everyone else in my family knows, and my parents have met and befriended several of my partners over the years, but we simply never discuss my orientation: we embarked on a "don't ask, don't tell" policy long before the military. If we ever did discuss it, I'm sure she's long forgotten the "Playgirl" incident, which is too bad: I would love to jokingly tell her SHE "made me gay" by that gesture in 1973 Brooklyn.

Anyway, after my first taste, I would turn the house upside down hoping to find similar magazines whenever my parents left on errands. Eventually I discovered my mother bought Playgirl every month, and had a stash hidden in the hall closet (closet-ha ha). For the next year and a half, I had something to look forward to every month, and then she stopped buying it. By then, I was nearly fourteen, looked seventeen, but was still as sexually clueless as when I was twelve: the pics of naked guys got me all worked up, but I truly had no idea why. Until one day, a bodega run by Arabs opened up in my neighborhood, and I noticed they had magazines called Mandate and Honcho. I brazenly tried to buy one along with the newspapers, and they let me!

After that, I amassed quite the collection of Honcho and Mandate, because that was as close to gay porn as a teen could get in the mid-1970s. Its funny to remember that time, because in some minor respects it was much "freer" than it is today. It never occurred to parents or anyone to boycott stores for carrying gay rags like Honcho, Mandate or Advocate Men- even if they were down the street from a church in my Catholic Brooklyn neighborhood. I couldn't imagine anyone besides me was buying those magazines, and I guess thats how they slipped by: if you weren't interested, you probably wouldn't notice them on the rack at all.

Another couple years went by, and I *still* didn't have a clear notion of why I was attracted to men or what they did sexually (the gay mags were all solo pictorials, and the fiction seemed surreal). Finally, I got a job working in an early video store, and they had a small handful of gay porn tapes mixed in with the straight stuff. I waited until I was the only clerk on duty one day, and slipped "Al Parker: Inches" into the store VCR. Suffice to say, that was a fairly comprehensive lesson in what my attraction meant and what men did with that attraction. A couple years later, when Al Parker adopted his long-haired "Hot Gay Jesus" look, it permanently clarified exactly what type of guy turned me on the most.




***********

UPDATE: several of you have contacted me to ask for a pic of the infamous magazine. Unfortunately not much of it is available in web archives, as it is very old now (August 1973), but I did find the front cover and another page, both featuring the man from the Cozumel pictorial. :cheers:

 

[jaykaytooooo]

We had satellite TV, the big huge dishes in the backyard. Anyway, we got adult channels so that was cool! It was str8 porn but back then there were real hot guys like Peter North, Marc Wallice, Eric Edwards (in his later days).

 

[mattla]

Pretty much had to rely on my imagination until I got into college. The college library had a section of erotica literature that had some good reading but I did not want to look as though I was spending a lot of time in the section. Thankfully the internet came about very shortly after that.

 

[haiducii]

@dragonsclub: THANK YOU for sharing your lovely memories and making me smile.

 

[stephenhaines]

Dragonscub

This URL wasn't anonymized, which is sad, because it means someone didn't read the rules, and trip down memory lane.

 

[stephenhaines]

My apologizes. It's been a long time since posting for me. :worried:

Anon URL

For ^ drangonscub

 

[stephenhaines]

before the internet

dragonscub wrote:

Everyone else in my family knows, and my parents have met and befriended several of my partners over the years, but we simply never discuss my orientation: we embarked on a "don't ask, don't tell" policy long before the military. If we ever did discuss it, I'm sure she's long forgotten the "Playgirl" incident, which is too bad: I would love to jokingly tell her SHE "made me gay" by that gesture in 1973 Brooklyn.

As Miss Manners once observed, "It is simply a general rule that romantic love is always inexplicable, and parents are almost as squeamish about their children’s such ventures as children are about their parents’." That would seem to apply equally, het or gay.

"Don't ask don't tell," especially in a family realm, is also sometimes known as 'acceptance without acknowledgment.' 'I know he's your boyfriend/lover, I know you sleep together and have sex with each other, just please don't ask me to get into discussion of it with you.' Hardly ideal, but preferable for instance, to family that is unrelentingly nosy and pester for details that are none of their business. It's not impossible that being gay just might afford some of us a level of privacy our hetero siblings might actually envy.


As for Playgirl I was there too for that and Viva, which both provided male skin for the randy young gay fellow who then didn't know where else to look. Their primacy didn't last long, though. Honcho was on the scene by 1977, and unlike Playgirl, made no pretense their readership was female. By 1980/81 they were sneaking full erections onto the guys, home video was on the horizon, and all the advances since then led right to you and I discussing it here on this friendly board.

 

[Habukaz]

When I was maybe 12 or 13 I was on dbna and a guy messaged me. He said he was an older guy. He asked me some questions and told me he was writing a novel about two gay teenage boys. I was so stupid. I gave him my phone number. I told him my address. He send me a package with two copies of... I think it was Du&Ich or something like that. I don't know. We stopped talking. He did get that novel published in the end. Anyway, those magazines had naked guys.

Gay porn on the internet in those days was usually blocked. Mostly with a thing called Ugas.

 

[peter123]

The mail-order catalogues with underwear......

 

[Shelter]

The mail-order catalogues with underwear......

Really???????:blushing:

 

[peter123]

Really???????:blushing:

Grown up in ordinary cirstances (no negative Feelings witht this) there was nothing more in the countryside in the beginning 1970th for a 12 yo boy

 

[ihno]

Grown up in ordinary cirstances (no negative Feelings witht this) there was nothing more in the countryside in the beginning 1970th for a 12 yo boy

Oh yeah, weren't those great?

It was a little later and I was a little younger than 12 but I was very insterested in the male underwear section of the Neckermann and Otto Katalogs that my grandmother had.

I also remember watching the movie Fame at my Grandpa's and there was Leroy, a black dancer, who fascinated me very much.

 

[gorgik9]

Oh yeah, weren't those great?

It was a little later and I was a little younger than 12 but I was very insterested in the male underwear section of the Neckermann and Otto Katalogs that my grandmother had.

I also remember watching the movie Fame at my Grandpa's and there was Leroy, a black dancer, who fascinated me very much.

Ah, yes!!!!

Leroy...

...the one and absolutely only Gene Anthony Ray (1962-2003)! This natural supertalent from Harlem could MOOOOVE! It's a cliche to talk about someone as Sex on Legs - but in this case the cliche is the truth...

He acted as Leroy first in Alan Parker's 1980 movie "Fame"...

...and then in the TV series with it's first season 1982-83.

Shorts in the 80's were SHORT!!!