The history of gay porn cinema.

[gorgik9]

I don't think I'm "the worlds greatest authority on gay porn history", but it's definitely true that I'm very fond of Antonio da Silva's movies - just as I'm very fond of Robert Mapplethorpe's photography, Gio Black Peter's paintings, W.H. Auden's poetry and Samuel R. Delany's novels and his non-fiction writing.

Those great artists work in very different artistic media and genres, but they all have some important things in common, and that's not that they all are gay men. No, the important thing they all have in common is that they all use explicit sexuality as a central theme in their own works of art. I'm very grateful to haiducii for having made it possible for me to look at da Silva's art more clearly and to see the usefulness of comparing his movies with other artistic expressions.

My favourite da Silva is a tricky question and I don't think I can give a definite answer, but I know why I'm very fascinated by "Bankers" and "Bankers Extra" - it's the powerful statement that bankers are...well...wankers. Just like everybody else...

But many of the da Silva-links have expired, and maybe they should be re-uploaded?

 

[gorgik9]

Sorry to interfere but please remember oil-based lubricants, like baby oil and vaseline, are NOT safe to use with latex condoms. Water-based and silicone-based lubricants are safe and recommended.

Of course you're correct as long as you presuppose that the lubricant is to be used for latex condoms. But since I'm not much of a buttfuckologists but rather the proverbial oralist and wankologist I have very scant use for latex condoms - just like Samuel R. Delany.

 

[haiducii]

But many of the da Silva-links have expired, and maybe they should be re-uploaded?

We have to contact stonecold...all shorts posted by me are ONLINE

 

[mikk33]

Great post haiducii, antonio da silva is a good artist, to me he is following peter de rome's work and attitudes. you can use beautiful images to make that which is not always accepted easily, likeable and sexy. my favourite short is 'Gingers', which is a case in point. people with red hair are bullied and seen as different, so ADS celebrates their difference and makes it attractive and stimulating. let's face it he can even make 'bankers' tolerable and that is a real achievement!.

 

[gorgik9]

@mikk33

Very good point about Peter de Rome!!!

 

[Hyp]

Interview with a classic star...

​

 

[nysander]

I really like Antonio Da Silva works. My favorite is probably "Lymanakia", but they are all really good. His works show that somatimes the line between what's considered pornography and what's considered art is quite thin and blurry. I think it's probably because he starts from a concept, instead of just trying to put together something people can masturbate to (not that there is anthing wrong in putting a movie toghether for masturbatory purposes, or masturbating to art!).

 

[Hyp]

​

 

[W!nston]

Thank you Hyp for the Jack Wrangler and Al Parker articles. They brought back memories of my hay-days.

:cheers:

 

[gorgik9]

Stereotypes of the dangerous gay, part 2.

This post is part 2 about the stereotype of the homosexual man as dangerous psychopath (if you like, Leopold-Loeb part2). And it'll be a hodge-podge of assorted ingredients.

While the first part of this post is an extension of my discussion of Hitchcock's movies in my earlier post, the second part will turn the discussion around so to speak: not about the stereotype in various movies, but rather some possible consequences of the application of the stereotype in real life contexts.

The third part is about what could happen when some gay men use the stereotype to scapegoat other gay men.

1. Some more movies.

The first two movies are made by well-known directors who could be considered two of Hitchcock's Hollywood-sons : Brian de Palma and William Friedkin. Both movies are very well made with great actors, but also quite controversial.

Brian de Palma's movie is Dressed to kill (1980), and you wont have any problems recognizing the inspiration from Hitchcock's Psycho : shower scenes and a murderer going bloody at it with a knife:


The Friedkin-piece is also inspired by Psycho but maybe not in such an obvious way as the de Palma film. It's the still controversial Cruising (1980):


The third movie is rather cheap and shitty. It's from a genre that got very popular in the 1980s, the TeenGore-genre. It's Robert Hiltzik's Sleepaway Camp (1983):


I think "Sleepaway Camp" got two real "assets": First that the boy's shorts around 1980 were REALLY short and, second, the TeenGore version of the Psycho shower scene 64 minutes into the movie.

I don't think it's fully to the point to say that "Dressed to kill" and "Sleepaway Camp" are both homophobic. It's about something broader and more fundamental; these movies can tell us, that all kinds of people characterized by non-normative sexuality and/or gender non-conformity are (or at least could become) dangerous.

Concerning "Dressed to kill" and "Cruising" they both became very controversial, but while "Dressed to kill" got quite a lot of praise from critics, "Cruising" was almost only reviled for a very long time. It took many years before some kind of serious discussion - ler alone sympathic discussion - would occure.

Gay American activists in 1980 were harshly negative about Friedkin's movie, but they (gay activists) weren't the only: Straight mainstream critic Leonard Maltin wrote in his "Cruising"-entrance in Leonard Maltin's Movie and Video Guide 2004 that it's a "...distasteful badly scripted film. Gay world presented as sick, disgusting and ritualistic."

I beg to differ. While it's true that Friedkin portrays the Gay S/M world as "ritualistic", the talk about it being "sick, disgusting" - well, that's not Friedkin talking. That's straight mainstream critic Maltin telling us what he thinks about gay boys and putting the blame on Friedkin for it.

Maybe you'd like yet another full movie? Here's James Franco's imaginative comment on "Cruising" : Interior. Leather Bar. (2013) :


2. Sture Bergwall, the worst Swedish serial killer ever...or not???

Still in 2008 Sture Bergwall (a.k.a. Thomas Quick) was considered the worst Swedish serial murder of all times, with 39 confessed murders and 8 convictions. He lived in the clinic for forensic psychiatry at Säters mental hospital where he had been staying since April 1991 because of the bank robbery he had commited in December 1990.

In summer 1992 the doctors in the clinic started talking about discharging Sture from the clinic and help him fix a place he could live and a job, and this was a future he very much feared. Sture Bergwall in the early 1990s was a very lonely homosexual man who had been a heavy drug addict and alcoholic for many years, and with few connections to his family, siblings and friends left. He feared - probably very rational - he would soon be dead from some kind of drug overdose.

So he started asking people in the hospital staff what would happen if he started confessing really serious crimes, let's say if he confessed a murder or two? What happened was that the doctors and psychotherapists responsible for Sture's program at the clinic got very interested in what he was saying; Sture got lot's of attention from highly educated people and he got lots of addictive drugs. His doctors proscribed very potent drugs (in particular benzodiazepines) in astounding quantities. Sture and his doctors used drugs as candy and chocolate.

But in many ways he was very naïve. He didn't really understand that being a patient in a forensic clinic and starting telling stories about people he had alledgedly murdered, sonner or later someone would get in touch with the police. This happened on 1 March 1993 when Sture - now using the name Thomas Quick - had his first inteview with a police officer concerning the murder of 11 year old Johan Asplund in 1980.

So is there a problem? The problem making the Bergwall/Quick case by far the worst scandal in Swedish legal history is that having been convicted for 8 murders - EIGHT!!! - he was still innocent. He hadn't murdered anyone but got convicted in six trials without a slightest shread of technical evidence and not even a single reliable witness.

Today Sture Bergwall at age 65 - born in 1950 - is a free gay man thanks to the work of two dedicated journalists Hannes Råstam and Dan Josefsson and an even more dedicated lawyer Thomas Olsson. All convictions have been overturned, so the gay guy from the province of Dalarna - the same province where I was born and raised - is a free man, and that's just great! But howe did 8 convictions become possible? What happened?



The YouTube-clip above is journalist Dan Josefsson giving a 30 minutes public lecture in English on the chronology of the Thomas Quick case. Few have a more deep and detailed knowledge of the case and Josefsson's particularly good with the psychotherapeutic ideology governing Säter mental hospital in the 1980s-90s. If you want the gruesome story in full detail I can recommend Jofefsson's book recently published in English, The Strange Case of Thomas Quick. (2015; swedish original "Mannen som slutade ljuga", 2013).

I think Josefsson did a fantastic job and wrote a spectacular book, so I feel quite shitty now when I engage in my criticism of his book - but I think it's necessary...

The problem isn't that Josefsson tries to cover up Bergwalls's homosexuality, which he doesn't. He talks a lot about Sture's homosexuality and in particular in chapters 5, 7 and 10 (in the swedish edition), but the problem in my opinion is that Josefsson doesn't really focus on Sture's problematic relation to his own homosexuality and the homophobia in the Swedish society in the 1950s-1970s as a fundamental cause of his psychological and social problems. The fact that Sture's parents and siblings were evangelical christians didn't make anything better.

To me it's quite obvious that Sture - just like the Swedish society until 1979 - thought about his homosexuality as an illness to hopefully be cured, and this was one of the more important reasons why he got so interested in psychoanalysis. Sture Bergwall understood psychoanalysis as a method to hopefully cure him of his homosexuality.

Josefsson writes at leangth about the two central concepts of the therapeutic ideology surrounding Bergwall: First the concept of repressed memories and their retrieval in therapy. The basic idea was that a consequence of traumatic experiences - in particular in childhood - could become that all your memories of what had happened got blocked out, but that blocked out - repressed - memories could be retrieved during psychotherapy.

The second central problematic concept was the concept of murder as re-interpretations of the murderers childhood trauma. The idea was that Sture's murders were kind of a symbolic storytelling in bloody action, telling the world about his childhood traumas.

In my opinion the central problem of Dan Josefsson's analysis is that he doesn't focus on the central content of Bergwalls alledged childhood traumas : It was a matter of childhood homosexual incest rape, starting at age 4 and stopping at age 13. So the story was that Sture was raped again and again for 9 years by his own father, and he started "re-interpreting" his trauma when he at age 14 murdered his first boy.

All of this being pure bullshit conjured up by the storytelling group of psychiatrists, psychotherapists, police officers and State Attorney. Sture Bergwall got deeply entangled in the worst kind of homophobic slime, and I think it's about time someone clearly stated that this is the case.

So I think there's a tough question to ask, that hasn't really been asked before: - Did the Quick/Bergwall scandal fundamentally happen BECAUSE the legal team and the psychiatric team were governed by the myths of the homosexual man as a dangerous psychopath?

3. Gay men's own scapegoating: Randy Shilts and Gaëtan Dugas.

Chances are that the ultimate source of your knowledge of the AIDS epidemy in the 1980s is journalist Randy Shilts 630 pages book And the Band Played On. published in autumn 1987 and - as far as I know - never been out of print; HBO made a movie based on Shilts' book a few years later.

When Shilts book had recently been published in autumn 1987 the most prestigious network TV news magazine in the US, Sixty Minutes, had a 20 minutes section on Shilt and his book, and here it is in two parts on YouTube:

 

[Hyp]

another star from the past...

​

 

[gorgik9]

Some shitty tech problems...well let's have another try on the 3rd part, starting with the Sixty Minutes interview:





It's important to notice what topics the interview starts with and ends with:

It starts with the discourse on gay men's promiscuity and a specific gay man - Shilts tells us his name was Gaëtan Dugas, a french-canadian airline steward - claimed to be the Patient Zero of the American AIDS epidemy.

Just a couple of minutes before the end of the interview it shifts topic and starts talking about the irresponsible policies of the Regan-administration.

In his book Shilts was pretty effective making his special portrait of Gaëtan Dugas. Let's read a paragraph from the book - it's on page 198 in the 20th Anniversary Edition 2007 - where Shilts depicts Dugas as a distant cousin of the Devil. It's about a visit to the Club Baths in San Francisco:

"Back in the bathhouse, when the moaning stopped, the young man rolled over on his back for a cigarrette. Gaetan Dugas reached up for the lights, turning up the rheostat slowly so his partner's eyes would have time to adjust. He then made a point of eyeing the purple leisons on his chest. "Gay Cancer", he said, almost as if he were talking to himself. "Maybe you'll get it too.""

Did Shilts have enough facts behind his statements? Did he have ANY real facts behind his portrait of Gaëtan Dugas? Did Randy Shilts ever meet Dugas?

To me it seems pretty obvious that Shilts' famous book is still an alienating book provoking anger and sadness among other gay men, and in particular among Gay Canadians who actually knew Gaëtan Dugas...

 

[haiducii]

To me it seems pretty obvious that Shilts' famous book is still an alienating book provoking anger and sadness among other gay men

AND the perfect way to spend a winter evening. Download -> HERE

What better way to spend a cold winter evening than a warm fire, a cup of hot tea, a stack of books, and ...

 

[gorgik9]

Thanks haiducii! You're always on the look out for things to make our thread better!

 

[Hyp]

Report of Stonewall riots (1969) from a local newsletter.
The September feature film STONEWALL has been heavily criticized for not matching the true facts of the incident.



click to see it larger. I only have the first page.

 

[haiducii]

LGBT characters on US TV

From films to books to newspapers, gays have a long history of being excluded from mass media representations. As critic Caryn James put it: "Anyone who does not watch television cannot possibly understand mainstream American culture. That may be disappointing news to art collectors who wish we lived in Renaissance Italy, but there it is. We have a messy society and television mirrors who we are in all our contradictions, complexities, and uncertainties."

There are endlessly debated questions: Does TV reflect our realities or create them? Does it mirror the entire culture or only that part of it that is white, straight, and economically advantaged? In the case of American television, the answer may be that it both reflects and creates cultural expression as well as political, economic, and social realities. In 21st century life, television has the power to define who we are, because even as the explosion of channels creates a more fragmented television universe, what we know and how we know it is shaped more than ever by television.

In its early years, television told us, its audience, that gays did not exist. In news, entertainment, talk shows, and public affairs programs, gays were rarely seen, heard from, or even referred to. In the wake of the civil rights movement for blacks and the women's movement, an initiative for gay rights began to gather strength and coalesce. One of its first goals was to gain media visibility, an effort aided in large part by a social and political climate in which many long-established norms and values were being aggressively challenged. By the 1970s, gays were beginning to get some media attention, although most early portrayals and discussions showed gays in negative or stereotyped ways.

In 1978 television producer Norman Lear offered one of the first primetime portrayals of a lesbian character and storyline on his enormously popular situation comedy, All in the Family. The "Cousin Liz" episode revolved around the death of Edith's cousin, a lesbian whose long-term sexual relationship with her roommate, Veronica, had been kept secret from the family for years. But the final lines of the script revealed that Veronica can and should simply stop being a lesbian.

Archie: ''You're a good-looking woman. Why don't you go out and get yourself a goodlooking guy and turn yourself around?''
Veronica smiles, then gives Archie a hug.
Archie: ''Well there. Didn't you get something out of that?''



I couldn't say for sure who was the first LGBT person I ever saw on TV. If I had to guess, it was probably one of the queens who showed up in sitcoms from the '90s. As the '90s wore on and cable increasingly pushed the boundaries of acceptable viewing fare and brought in huge numbers of viewers along the way, the networks were under pressure to respond. In terms of gay representation on prime-time network television, the door was pushed open ever wider. The '90s saw the emergence of several recurring and regular gay characters on hit shows. Some were sexual deviants in police procedurals, some were swishy queens, and one or two were treated with something like respect. But in the latter half of the decade LGBT characters started to make bigger inroads, most notably in sitcoms, such as Roseanne, Friends, Spin City, Will & Grace, and NYPD Blue. The most noted event in this respect came in April 1997, when the central character in the situation comedy Ellen declared she was gay.

The fact that comedian Ellen DeGeneres, who played the part, also came out in real life as gay made for a news event of major proportions, the biggest gay media event of that year. ''Now, I feel completely comfortable with myself, and I don’t have to be fearful about something damaging my career if it gets out, because now I’m in control of it — sort of'', she said in an interview with TIME.

As we enter into the new millennium, a change occurred. For me, it was a time to graduate on time. For TV, it was the rise of premium cable channels. Free from advertisers and censors, channels like HBO and Showtime could present LGBT characters who actually had sex. For a certain age group of gay men, it wouldn't be a stretch to say that ''Queer As Folk'' functioned as porn before we found real porn. Russell T. Davies brought guy-on-guy anilingus into people's living rooms with the original U.K. Queer as Folk. While his groundbreaking 1999 drama didn’t face censorship problems in the U.K., the writer says the series had trouble selling internationally. ''There was a bar in Hawaii selling VHS tapes of the show to people all around the world — it had a black-market life,'' Davies says. ''I would get letters from Russia, from Pakistan, India, from people who were not allowed to see it, but had seen it on black-market VHS.''

As LGBT people were making their way into scripted television, it was only natural they would be included in shows like The Real World, Survivor, and Big Brother. Think Richard Hatch in Survivor. If you read the recent report from GLAAD, you know that there are currently more LGBT characters on TV than ever before. The US pressure group GLAAD (formerly the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) has released its 20th annual report, which tracks the number of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender characters on scripted, primetime television. The report this year shows strides being made in the number of LGBT characters on TV, while shining a spotlight on the need for greater diversity in those representations. Broadcast TV’s representation of LGBT characters this year stands at 4 percent (or 35 out of 881 series regular roles), an increase of a tenth of a percent vs. the previous measuring period. GLAAD's report points out that while LGBT representation is up slightly, it is still dominantly white. GLAAD’s president, Sarah Kate, said that TV programmers needed to work harder. ''Each of us lives at the intersection of many identities and it's important that television characters reflect the full diversity of the LGBT community'', she said. ''It is not enough to just include LGBT characters; those characters need to be portrayed with thought and care to accurately represent an often tokenised community.''

And there are other exciting developments: LGBT characters portrayed on TV are no longer strictly adults or conflicted and confused teens. Teen shows like Teen Wolf, Pretty Little Liars, and Awkward regularly feature young, happy LGBT characters, a phenomenon that was simply nonexistent just 20 years ago. LGBT visibility has certainly become a hot-button issue in entertainment. Today, we understand the importance of allowing the humanity of LGBT individuals and couples to shine through the blight of stigma and ignorance. Shows such as Modern Family, Orange Is the New Black, and Looking have rightly been praised for authentic depictions of same-sex couples and trans individuals in loving and functional relationships. But long before actors such as Jesse Tyler Ferguson and Laverne Cox were around, the path was laid out as part of The ABC Movie of the Week. Just three short years after the Stonewall riots took place in New York ABC made television history when they aired That Certain Summer (1972), the first gay-themed made-for-TV movie. It became the first TV movie to offer a sympathetic portrayal of homosexuality. Over the decades, TV movies and shows have brought gay couples into viewers homes and humanized their struggle for equality.

The cultural invisibility of gays in the most powerful and pervasive of our public arenas for discussion denies gays status and hence power in society. It deprives them of cultural heroes and role models. In addition, it denies the culture at large the opportunity to explore the goals, needs, definitions, aspirations, and contributions of gay people. It further isolates an already isolated group.

It is my hope that examining television's treatment of all minority groups will reveal much about how the industry and the groups with which it interacts function and why. This may uncover strategies for change that could benefit all marginalized groups who have also been symbolically annihilated by television for decades.

 

[Hyp]

Brad Peters
featured in These Bases are Loaded, A Few Good Men, and Brothers Should Do It
among many other classics...

 

[gorgik9]

What a truly great idea for a post! It gave me so much to think about and it inspired me to think about maybe to get into some comparative business early next year: You've written a great post about gay characters in American TV, well what about British TV (hrmm..."Little Britain", and of course the British original version of "Queer as Folk") or Scandinavian TV? Just something we could think about when we digest our Christmas dinner...

I think that the first explicit gay character in some kind of TV serial/show I can remember is probably the American serial "Soap" starting in 1977 (I think).

My absolute favourite is HBO production "Six Feet Under" (2001-2005) - nothing compares in my opinion. Michael C. Hall (playing David Fisher) is an absolutely fantastic actor and he's really handsome! And his black boyfriend Keith...oh boy...

 

[W!nston]

Simply wonderful, haiducii!

What a blast from my past, Hyp!

I love this thread!

Please keep 'em coming guys!!!

 

[haiducii]

You've written a great post about gay characters in American TV, well what about British TV

I remember that BBC character Tinky Winky from the pre-school show ''The Teletubbies'' was under attack from America's religious right...he was accused of being gay...he was purple and had a triangle on his head; symbols of gay pride

I think that the first explicit gay character in some kind of TV serial/show I can remember is probably the American serial "Soap" starting in 1977 (I think).

Yes, Billy Crystal played the first openly gay character on TV in Soap when audiences met Jodie Dallas in 1977. Though advocates initially worried that the character played into negative stereotypes—dressing like a woman and alluding to suicidal thoughts—Crystal eventually won fans over with a emotional portrayal.