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Thanks dargelos my friend for having shared your memories! It means a lot! The Swedish government made up tough shit with other metods than the British and American administrations, not the market shit but the authoritarian state shit; I really don't know what was worst.
Before the AIDS crisis in the 80s, I had a very, very naïve view of the Swedish society I was born and brought up in. I thought that the Swedish society maybe was a bit clumsy and not particularly sophisticated, but that doesn't really matter because it was one of those places on earth were nothing really bloody and bad could happen to its citizens. Yes, I was incredibly naïve.
And then came AIDS. And then prime minister Palme was murdered in 1986.
And I found myself living in a society so much colder and scarier than before.
If there ever was a politician who didnt deserve what happened to him it was Olaf Palme, that was a shocking sinister murder.
Amazingly, someone has kept a copy of the ultra useless British aids advert, I'd forgotten how bad it was;
Hello! Our original plan for this weekend was, that Haiducii should have posted, but he's been extraordinarily busy lately, so he asked me if I could hop in and post something today. He'll be back posting in this thread next weekend!
So compared to so many of my earlier posts, this one is going to be short and simple...
It's going to be about a film-within-a-film. The "outer" film is Jack Deveau's porn movie Hot House from 1977 starring - among others - Jack Wrangler, who probably was one of few to seriously compete with Casey Donovan to the title of Mr. Gay Porn Star of the 70s.
Dallesandro, Warhol and Morrissey.
But to me, the big star in this movie is the star in the movie "within": Joe "Little Joe" Dallesandro (b. 1948).
Joe had several different shorter or longer careers in film and other media, and the first happened when he as a teenage hustler in New York took off to make a cross-continental trip to LA and met physique photographers Bob Mizer and Bruce Bellas (Bruce of Los Angeles).
Back in New York again it just so happened that Joe met the Warhol-crowd when they - in 1967- were filming the movie The Loves of Ondine, and here's a couple of photos of the Warhol gang in the late 60s by fashion photographer Richard Avedon.
Andy Warhol had started making 16 mm movies in 1963-64, and you could say, that those early movies - movies like "Haircut", "Sleep", "Blowjob" and "Empire" - didn't really look much like ordinary movies: No storytelling, just a static camera registering slow movements and totally un-eventful things happening, like Warhol's camera registering John Giorno's body sleeping for hours in "Sleep", or the camera registering the lights going on and off in the windows of Empire State Building for more than 8 hours in "Empire".
But things changed when Warhol met director-wannabee Paul Morrissey in 1965. Their first co-operative project became My Hustler which was made on Fire Island. Suddenly the Warhol/Morrissey movies were telling stories, maybe not precisely telling the kind of stories Hollywood would have told, but storytelling movies...kind of...sort of...
Dallesandro starred in no less than 6 movies made by Morrissey and Warhol 1967-1972, and in my opinion there's no question that the most important work was and is the great Flesh-trilogy: Flesh (1968), Trash (1970) and Heat (1972).
Here's some pics of Joe in these movies!
"Flesh" 1968:
It's a movie with kind of a circular composition, ending as it starts: with Joe's naked glory in bed. The opening shot is several minutes long and I think the movies title is totally adequate: Flesh!!! Male flesh!!! The male flesh IS the protagonist in this movie!
At the same time I also think that the long opening shot is Morrissey's wink at the static camera in Warhol's early movies. Maybe it's Morrissey's way of winking at John Giorno in Sleep.
The stag movie in "Hot House".
However! The most important thing in this post (at least in my own opinion) is the 1960s gay stag starring Joe Dallesandro, which Jack Deveau put into his gay porn movie from 1977 Hot House:http://www.gayheaven.org/showthread.php?t=518379
(The b/w stag begins about 24 minutes 30 sec into "Hot House" and ends about 36 minutes into the movie.)
American stags with man-on-man sex was what stags had always been since the earliest decades of film history - a b/w silent short with people fucking, sucking and wanking. The number of gay stags produced in the 1950s-60s was quite limited and I think film scholar Tom Waugh didn't manage to find more than a bit over 100 movies from this period.
Much of it was produced by New York mobsters; it was difficult to get hold of, cost a minor fortune, and the technical quality often was nothing but awful.
It seems much was produced with street hustlers like Joe Dallesandro starring in this doent of bygone times. I hope you enjoy!
The HIV/AIDS epidemic was first reported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention back in 1981. In April 1984, Dr. Robert Gallo officially announced his discovery of the AIDS virus to the scientific world. The topmost AIDS researcher quickly explained that the new virus originated in darkest Africa. Perhaps the strange virus had been there for decades, or for centuries, or even millenia. No one could be sure how long it had been lurking in Africa. Gallo and other leading virologists claimed the virus originated in the African green monkey. In a freak accident of nature, the green monkey virus jumped species and infected millions of African Blacks. Almost immediately, rumors began to spread like wildfire that the deadly virus was concocted to destroy the Black race. But how could such a theory develop?
From the time HIV/AIDS hit the mainstream news, many Blacks believed that it was created in a laboratory and spread by the CIA with the goal of killing Blacks. Filmmaker Spike Lee told Rolling Stone magazine in 1992: "I'm convinced AIDS is a government-engineered disease [...] They never realized it couldn't just be contained to the groups it was intended to wipe out." However, round-the-way Black folk weren’t the only ones to believe in this conspiracy theory.
Case in point, post-apartheid South African President Thabo Mbeki once accused the U.S. government of manufacturing the disease in their military labs and world-renowned Kenyan ecologist, Nobel Peace Prize winner Dr. Wangari Maathai used her international spotlight to give credence to the conspiracy theory about the creation of HIV/AIDS. After accepting her prestigious honor, the first African female Nobel laureate used her acceptance platform to state, that the deadly virus was created as a biological weapon by the west to wipe out Africans.
Even passionate preacher Rev. Jeremiah Wright was rebuked by his former congregant President Barack Obama for giving sermons in which he blamed the government for creating a racist state and ''inventing the HIV virus as a means of genocide against people of color''.
Watch Rev. Wright discuss HIV/AIDS here:
As soon as AIDS came to the public’s attention in the eighties, skeptics alleged that it was less a public-health crisis than evidence of institutionalized evil. The most popular theories suggested that the disease was engineered by the government or military contractors and released into the population via vaccinations, drug tests, and even routine checkups.
The theories persist in part because of how information travels and mutates around the world, when anyone with a few letters after his name can seem vaguely authoritative. Many such theories trace back to a 1985 article by a German biologist named Jakob Segal that detailed how military researchers at Maryland’s Fort Detrick accidentally disseminated the virus via experiments on prison inmates. A retired dermatologist and internationally known scientific researcher in the field of cancer and AIDS microbiology named Alan Cantwell (born in NYC in 1934, he now lives in LA) self-published a series of books advancing a similar thesis in the late eighties. These ideas found a zealous audience among marginalized communities that were disproportionately affected by the disease.
Can cancer and pneumonia be ''gay''? Does homosexuality lead to a weakened immunesystem? Can viruses be ''gay-related''? Is AIDS a ''homosexual disease''? Of course not. The worldwide statistics clearly show that most people who get AIDS are straight. But Alan Cantwell doesn't think so. In memory of his gay friends and brothers murdered in the AIDS holocaust he wrote a highly provocative and controversial book called ''Queer Blood: The Secret AIDS Genocide Plot''.
Queer Blood is the shocking story of the genetically engineered AIDS virus that was created in a laboratory and now threatens the entire world. The author debunks the African green-monkey theory of AIDS and explains how AIDS started as a covered-up genocide experiment, using gays and blacks as guinea pigs. He argues, convincingly, that AIDS is not an accident of nature caused by green monkeys, but a deliberate man-made creation holocaust of unspeakable evil. In Chapter 1 of that book, he writes: ''The AIDS biologic experiment is a replay of the medical terrors of Nazi Germany, but few people realize that another man-made Holocaust is occurring in front of our eyes [...] As I watched so many gay men die agonizing deaths, I remained totally unaware that they were being systematically murdered, just like the millions exterminated by the German Third Reich.''
Dr. Alan Cantwell says that HIV is a genetically modified organism developed by U.S. Government scientists, and that it was introduced into the population through Hepatitis B experiments performed on gay and bisexual men between 1978-1981 in major U.S. cities. Cantwell claims that these experiments were directed by Dr. Wolf Szmuness, and that there was an ongoing government cover-up of the origins of the AIDS epidemic. Matilde Krim, a cancer virologist, AIDS expert, and the co-chairperson of the American Foundation for AIDS Research, has also suggested that Dr. Wolf Szmuness' hepatitis B vaccination experiments of the late 70's caused the AIDS epidemic. Unlike Cantwell, however, she attributes this to accident rather than conspiracy. Cantwell believes that the government is hiding a lot of information about the AIDS epidemic, and argues that his research on Kaposi’s sarcoma, a tumor caused by infection with human herpesvirus 8, was ignored during this AIDS epidemic because the government was trying to hide or cover up this outbreak of this disease.
Maybe there's a conspiracy about AIDS, maybe there isn't. And maybe there are little green men concealed in the moons of Jupiter, and maybe there aren't. Conspiracy theories are well known throughout many cultures. Of course this doctor's belief is one of the popular theories in the weird world of conspiracy theories, popular with the fringe crowd. On the other hand, I have to admit that Cantwall has some unique insights, perspectives and ideas that make sense of the history of HIV and the related AIDS drama. It's interesting to note that he also miraculously has been a "pioneer" in another common conspiracy theory, the idea that cancer may be caused by microbes. However, I'm pretty sure that after reading this book, you will never again look at AIDS the same again.
Before I end this post, I would like to recommend you to see that movie. ''The Normal Heart'' chronicles the terror of the HIV-AIDS crisis in New York in the early 80's and the resolve shown by a group of gay men who fought ignorance, panic, prejudice — and sometimes each other— to raise awareness and spur treatment of a disease that would eventually claim millions of lives. The story of that struggle remains important today, especially for younger people who may not be familiar with the era, says Julia Roberts, who plays Emma Brookner, a doctor and activist who treated and advocated for patients.
I thought I should make a comment in which I touch upon things I've already briefly mentioned earlier, and my point-of-departure will be to urge you to remember what Western medicine had become for half a century before the AIDS epidemia in Europe and the US in the 1980s and 90s.
In the Victorian age thanks to the knowledge of bacteria as the ultimate cause of infectious diseases, medicin started becoming the new secular theology and doctors became the new secular priests in white (to be distinguished from the traditional priests in black). The doctor started figuring as the hero in so many novels and plays from the 1870-80s on: we have doctor Relling in Henrik Ibsen's play "Vildanden" (The Wild Duck) and doctor Borg in Strindberg's novel "Röda Rummet" (The Red Room), doctor van Helsing in Bram Stoker's "Dracula", Sherlock Holmes well meaning side-kick doctor Watson in Conan Doyle's novels, and shiploads of literary doctors in Flaubert's and Zola's books.
The late Victorian doctor became the literary hero of his age because of his superior knowledge, but to be frank - his therapeutic competence concerning infectious diseases was still pretty weak. He knew the reasons why you would soon be coughing blood and die of tuberculosis, but he couldn't really do very much about it.
This changed profoundly in the 1930s - 50s with the advent of penicillin and other powerfull antibiotics, and to fend off diseases caused by virus successful vaccination programs were launched (Jonas Salk's polio vaccine is an important example). So now doctors and the medical institutions didn't just have supreme knowledge. Now they had supreme therapeutic competence. They could DO so much. They could almost save us from...death...
And then came AIDS. And in some ways we were violently thrown back to the Middle Ages, to the time of the Black Death. So what could the doctors do? What kind of therapy could medicin offer?
As we all know the sorry answer in the 1980s and still in the early 90s was: NADA.
This wasn't just a fundamental existential crisis in medicin, it was a serious crisis for Western society.
What did very scared people do in the 1980s? Well at rock bottom we did just about the same thing as very scared people did in the 14th century : We went out to do some scapegoat hunting, of course! We started pointing fingers at the people we should blame. The number of conspiration theories concerning AIDS in the 1980s came in the dozens, and dozens with 17 in it.
In the 14th century everybody in the know "knew" that the plague was Gods punishment for human sins, so said the theologians and priests, so said also the representatives of Scholastic medicine, but this answer had its own problems - it was to general and abstract, and why on Earth had God become so much more vindictive in 1347 than he had in 1345 or 1343?
Ordinary people wanted more concrete answers, so soon everybody "knew" that the cause of the plague was - evil people doing evil things, such as poisoning the wells in the villages or spreading poisonous powders with the winds.
Ordinary mediaval peasants living in ordinary medieval villages didn't hurl out accusations totally at random. The accusations followed some basic patterns, of which the xenophobic pattern probably was the most general: Just entering a village as an unknown stranger during the years 1347-51 could be enough to be accused to be someone out to poison the village well.
And then there was the strongest pattern of the all: the anti-jewish pattern. Lots and lots of ordinary medieval people thought it was a very good idea to go butcher and burn some jews in a nearby village!
YEAH! LET'S FINALLY DO SOMETHING!
I think reading about medieval European history and the history of the Black Death is of great importance if you want to get to the deeper human understanding of why the AIDS epidemia in the 1980s-90s became what it became.
And another point: Bubonic plague was a zoonotic disease, just like AIDS.
There is now a danger that has become a threat to us all.
It is a deadly disease and there is no known cure.
The virus can be passed during social intercourse with an infected person.
Anyone can get it, man or woman.
So far it has been confined to small groups, but it is spreading.
So protect yourself.
Unless you ignore it, it could be the death of you.
It's name is P.A.R.A.N.O.I.A.
This post will be about a British gentleam and one of the earliest pioneers in gay porn who very much followed his own trajectory: Peter de Rome (1924-2014).
During WWII Peter volunteered for the RAF and started an acting career after the war with the Birmingham Repertory Theatre, then switched to become a publicist in the British film industry but emigrated to the US in 1956.
He started as a salesman in Tiffany & Company, New York, but then decided in 1963 he should join the Civil Rights movement in the deep American south. His main motives of course were political, but he had complementary motives: his strong erotic affection for the black male body: It's symptomatic that it was during his years in the south that he bought an 8 mm film camera and started making his own movies. His first film was a short doentary called New Orleans (1964).
Making and showing gay erotic shorts in New York.
Back in New York he started working in publicity for Paramount Pictures which he continued doing until he retired in 1989. More important to us, he also continued making gay shorts and it became a popular habit among his many friends to ask if Peter couldn't come to their party and bring along a film projector and a bag of new shorts.
If I would point to any particular source of inspiration other than his own vivid imagination and cinema, art and poetry in general, it must be Jean Genet's homoerotic classic Chant d'Amour from 1950 :http://www.gayheaven.org/showthread.php?t=493411 .
They are in chronological order: "Scopo" (1966), "Double Exposure" (1969), "Hot Pants" (1971), "Fire Island Kids" (1971) and "Underground" (1972).
"Hot Pants" is a short of particular importance : Peter sent this short as his contribution to the "Wet Dream film festival" in Amsterdam, Holland, where he won a prize which was noticed in the press in both the US and Britain. The press coverage was instrumental for making new friends and getting new aquaintances, one of which was commercial porn producer Jack Deveau who recently had set up his own company (Hand in Hand Films) together with his lover and business partner Robert Alvarez.
So Deveau approached Peter and said he thought Peter should blow up his 8mm shorts to 16mm and show them in movie theaters. De Rome's answer was he didn't have the money needed, and Deveau replied: - Well I've got the money, but if we're going to blow up a collection of your shorts you must make a new hardcore short to be included in the collection. Hardcore is the thing to do if the gay audience is really going to like it!
The hardcore short Peter de Rome made at Jack Deveau's request was "Underground" (1972) and Hand in Hand Films released "The erotic films of Peter de Rome" in 1973.
Making hardcore features with Jack Deveau as producer.
It's a piece of gay porn of course, but it's a lot more complicated and sophisticated than that. It's a movie showing us Peter de Rome as a lover of art and cinema in general and I want to give some examples:
First of all, several longer sex scenes can be considered as pastisches of famous movies and / or hommages of great actors. The first sex scene - starting 7 minutes 20 seconds into the movie - can be viewed as an extended allusion and gay version of a successfull movie pretty contemporary to "Adam and Yves", namely Bernardo Bertolucci's "The last tango in Paris" (1973) with Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider.
Another example is the scene starting at 42 minutes sharp and ending 52 minutes 20 seconds into the movie; it could be considered a pastisch of a famous scene in director Rouben Mamoulian's classic "Christina" from 1933 with Greta Garbo and John Gilbert.
But it's more complicated than this! Inside this pastisch there's a "micro movie" edited in, starting 42 minutes 45 seconds and ending 43 minutes 27 seconds. It's a "micro movie" shot by Peter de Rome from the window in his First Avenue appartment when he by chance happened to spot Greta Garbo strolling along the pavement of First Avenue, New York. So this "micro movie" edited into "Adam and Yves" actually became Garbo's last appearance on the silver screen.
"It was a sping day, a day for a lay..." : WH Auden and the Platonic Blow.
In between the pastisches of "The last tango in Paris" and "Christina" we've got something even more special: Starting at 20 minutes 7 seconds and ending 30 minutes 13 seconds Peter de Rome gives us a dramatization of W.H. Auden's porno-poetic masterpiece "The Platonic Blow" - "It was a spring day, a day for a lay, when the air / smelled like a locker room, a day to blow or get blown" - all 34 four-lined stanzas! I mean you just must have a link to this long fucker of a poem :Anon URL
You could discuss weather it was meant to be a piece of horror-porn or porno-horror. Anyway it's pretty much one of its kind and an odd mixture of Gothic horror story (supposedly based on a story by Edgar Allan Poe), catholicism, hippie ideology complete with hallucinogenic mushrooms, and a big dollop of gay sex. As far as I know its the only gay porn movie ending with the protagonist masturbating on a grave!
Thanks a lot for the appreciation! About a Peter de Rome, part 2 : well anything is possible, in particular if we can find some more shorts to download from the net. I don't think he made any more feature length porns, and when he retired from his work at Paramount in 1989, he had already stopped making porn totally. The AIDS epidemy had a lot to do with the decisions to stop making porn.
I haven't really planned for a part 2, but I really like the old sweetie (yeah, I know he's dead since a year ago; he passed away just a few days before his 90th birthday...what a pity...) and more importantly: I'm very fond of the shorts I have watched, so maybe...
But I can't promise if and when, and there's actually pretty little I can promise right now because of a shitty kind of computer problem that turned up last night. This is the reason why I had to shorten the post quite a lot and I was afraid I maybe had to refrain from posting totally last night. Maybe I'll have to buy a new laptop...I don't know, I hope not... Right now I'm working on my old laptop, with it's own problems...
So the summa summarum is: it could be fun to make a Peter de Rome, part 2, sometimes, but I can't really promise much...
it was back in the late 90s and i was doing my post grad thesis on race and representation in gay porn, i had interviewed Mike Arlen a photographer from the 60s and 70s and he introduced me to Peter and we sat down for tea.
He was charm personified and loved to gossip though there was a lot of stuff i couldn't use as it was totally libellous!
one story i can mention is Peter told about a conservative Lord with an insatiable lust for very well hung black men, who had a series of them employed at his London and country homes.
Well, Shelter my friend, I've never been a Lord and I've never had a stately mansion in the English countryside, but my working class background has never stopped me from sucking lots of cock, and to love what I do...
One of the reasons why I felt emotionally close to Peter de Rome after watching Ethan Reid's doentaries (though I've of course never have met Peter, as iltman has) was what he said about his guiltless childhood and youth sexuality and his many sex partners from very early years. My thought was "- WOW! I found my spiritual older brother!"
ent of bygone times. I hope you enjoy!
