These are good times for the gay porn lover, provided he’s got a computer and a modem. Blogs, dozens of them, put up clips of amateurs, amateur jocks, daddies, leather dudes, army men, cops, frat boysm and twinks by the barrelful. All sucking, fucking, moaning and splattering, in an endless stream of video streams.

Most of it leaves me cold. I just don’t find much of modern gay porn erotic. I’m of the ilk that has no patience ‒ and no surging of cock at all ‒ with twinks, with extreme tan lines, and especially with shaved balls. I’ve said it before and I’ll holler it out again: the only excuse for shaving every last pube is if you’re being prepped for surgery. It ain’t, in a word, natural. To me, it’s as far from manly as you can get.

So, when I’m casually perusing the gay blogs of today, I tend to hunt out one word in the lists of links. Vintage. I want the old stuff, the good stuff. I want Roger, I want Bruno, I want Jack Wrangler. I want Gordon Grant. I really want Michael Christopher, if only for that crater of a dimple in his chin. In a perfect world, I’d have all of them in the same, scruffy motel room together.

Now, I’m aware that my age has a lot to do with this. I stumbled onto gay porn in the ‘70’s so, no matter the actual content, the sheer erotic intensity of what was produced in those days remains the ultimate trigger for me. Or the intensity is with me because I invested it in those first, exciting hours of viewing the screen at the Adonis. And that’s what needs looking at first.

It’s easy to forget these days but porn had an invisible existence until the 1970’s. Porn was the beast in a box in the cellar. It was reels of bad tape and stacks of pussy magazines, raw, clumsy, and usually peopled with unattractive…stars.Then, in 1972, Gerard Damiano’s Deep Throat came crashing up from the basement and into chic cocktail party conversation. Suddenly, Harry Reems was a name. Linda Lovelace was a bigger one, and ordinary, nice people were talking about the monster cock of John Holmes. In very nearly record time, a mega-industry was born.

And where were we, then? Interestingly, Wakefield Poole’s The Boys In The Sand preceded the Lovelace clit-in-throat epic by a year. Gay porn? Yes, and not just gay porn; this was nearly mainstream, at least as far as such things could go back then. But it was still an anomaly. The reality is that, as straight sex was the only sex validated by the world, straight porn ruled the marketplace. Those of us into men being with men were left out in the cold. Gay guys jerked off to straight porn, or they found, groped and sucked each other in the dingy theaters where men fucked women on the screen. As gay life was still hugely suppressed, so too was its graphic presentation to us.

This isn’t dry analysis. I was there. New York’s Times Square was packed with straight fuck movie houses, and they advertised in the Daily News when they probably needed no promoting at all. Then one day I saw a different kind of ad. I remember it still ‒ a picture in the paper, small and shadowy, of what looked like male silhouettes, and underneath the words, Joe Gage’s Closed Set. I got a hard-on on the street. Like so many other gay men of my day, I saw this as a miracle. We simply never counted on anything like this, that the lusts we were hiding from family, from work, from friends, were given life. In big movies, with hot studs. Holy shit. I bought a bus ticket to the city that afternoon.

It was all of a piece, you see. For every proudly out gay man in the 70’s, there were dozens of us wrestling with this thing and not very proud at all. Most of us were scared as hell. The greater the taboo, then, the more fantastic the release. The more the need to hide your face and duck really quickly into the gay porno house, the more explosive the sexual release within. I don’t care what the decade or the atmosphere was ‒ straight guys never had this kind of incentive. I almost feel sorry for them.

So, yes, I have to confess that my preference for vintage may well be hinged on where I was back then. In what’s maybe not so bizarre an analogy, it’s like your first love. Nothing afterward rivals the excitement you felt when something outside of yourself first got your blood boiling. Freedom is terrific and civil rights are necessary. But everything comes with a cost, and one price tag dangling from gay emancipation is the diffusing of that matchless thrill of the forbidden.

I’d like to take you with me for a bit. We’re going back to before Disney ate 42nd Street. We’re going back to when hookers peopled every corner of Eighth Avenue, a Marlboro Man blew smoke over tourists from a massive sign, and dirty movie houses thrived. We’re going back to the Adonis.

No, I will never, ever forget stepping into that place for the first time. I was young, I was probably a little drunk, and I was, in a word, overwhelmed. The lobby walls were decorated with huge photographs of the day’s gay stars, and I can still feel the surge to my cock when I looked up to see a larger-than-life Jack Wrangler above me, a towel just barely above his crotch. I think I fell in love on the spot. Across from him scowled the mysterious, perfect Gordon Grant. There were others but my head was swimming already. There was little in the way of gay rights outside of that lobby, that theater. But I had made it into the palace where every last possibility, every denied, unspoken dream, was suddenly exalted. If this was Hell, I was going to stay a while.