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My Magazine > Editors Archive > cat4 > That ‘70’s Blow: the Golden Age of Gay Porn, Part II
That ‘70’s Blow: the Golden Age of Gay Porn, Part II   by Jack Mauro

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The Adonis Theatre. I think it was on Eighth and 51st Street, a formerly grand old movie house revamped for stud romping, a cinema palace that survived by giving Doris Day and Rock Hudson (ironic, no?) pink slips and bringing in Jack Wrangler and Roger.

I have since found online clips of films I saw premiered there. The manner in which these take me back is beyond nostalgic, and way beyond erotic. Malibu Days and Big Bear Nights. I recall how the thing made no sense as a film of any kind, let alone decent porn. I recall too seeing this William Higgins epic on that huge screen and finding only the absurd spanking of the surfer boys a little hot. The rest was, for me, too much of a twink fest.

Then there was a minor masterpiece called New Zealand Undercover. This had going for it a strange reality-show feel, the star presence of Leo Ford notwithstanding; genuine footage of jocks after a game–by no means all buffed, either–was in there, along with a coerced sex scene that knocked me out, despite the tiny cock on the roughly seduced dude. The passion didn’t seem fake. I rather think it wasn’t. It got me up, to be sure. So I’d watch, then wander.

What you did in these enormous, dim places was stroll up and down the aisles, glancing to right and left to see whose legs were splayed out and whose cock was up and needing attention. Or you paused to watch attentions being given. If nothing much was happening in the seats, there was a curtained alcove off to the left of the screen. This was the Adonis version of the bathhouse cave. There was virtually no light, and anything went. Yes, it was scary. And geared for the unstoppably horny.

Not fully that desperate yet, I’d take the stained, carpeted stairs to the mezzanine level. I can see it still: another lobby-like space, a huge drawing in black and white ink of a parade of naked and/or jockstrapped studs at a bar, and the men’s room. Ah, that men’s room. No walls were ever so adorned with scrawled telephone numbers and expressions of need. No tiled floor was ever more laminated by layer upon layer of cum.

And what made the whole scene all the more exciting, of course, is where this massive theater was. New York. The nexus of the world. Anyone could come in any time, hot as hell and eager to blow a load. This, as many of us know too well, is not the case in the more isolated dirty movie houses, where the same regulars patrol the same aisles.

So, encouraged by the traffic you knew was heading in all the time, you’d hold off. I know I did. I’d cruise, then take another seat. What was playing? Hot damn. Joe Gage’s Kansas City Trucking Company, starring that burly cumslut Richard Locke and my adorable Jack Wrangler. Watching Jack in action, in fact, struck me as preferable to actually getting some. The celluloid intensity was better than real.

I must say it again: there was a quality to that porn distinctly absent from what’s produced today, and that isn’t my nostalgia talking. As we on the streets and in the world were more repressed, so too were the guys making these films. There were no big budgets and there was most assuredly no sophisticated attitude of gay porn as a valid outlet, another thriving business in the adult entertainment sphere. You had the sense, always, that the movie-making was done quickly, that the locations were not secure, that the sucking and fucking had to be captured on the first take because everyone had to get the hell back into the truck and get out of there. Fast. It was the cinematic equivalent to the action we could get in the real world. Make contact, unzip, cum, and see you later, buddy.

Even the real lives of those porn stars of the old days ‒ you just knew they were much like your own. They weren’t cultural heroes, interviewed by chic magazines and regarded by the straight community as respectable practitioners of a specific and valid genre, as the boys are today. They existed in their cliques of gayness, sure, but their larger worlds had to be as circumscribed as our own were. Hell, you even knew they weren’t making a whole lot of money. It was a dangerous and risky scene, often peopled by…actors who couldn’t last and who died from drugs and/or mysterious causes. Like Lee Ryder, like Jon Vincent, like a hundred others.

The erotically powerful reality is gone from most of modern gay porn because the greater reality is different. Today, shaved muscle studs robotically pump into smooth twink asses. It’s lifeless. All right, Michael Lucas continues to bravely–and perhaps misguidedly–infuse his films with actual storylines, thus compensating for with motivation what got lost through increased acceptance. You go, Michael. But I’m not very sanguine about this direction, because even romantic plot can’t replace the thrill of doing what you shouldn’t be doing.

Witness: I remember finally seeing Closed Set, most likely at the Adonis. A lot of this classic doesn’t get me hard; there’s too much male sluttiness, too many gaping holes, a few too many leather trappings. Yet there’s a scene at the end with a mustached, beefy man whore getting splattered by the multiple cocks he’s been greedily sucking. And what you become aware of is that some of those cocks belonged to some of the cameramen filming the scene. You can see it happening, the unbuttoning of Levi flies well into the action, the what-the-hell, gotta-shoot-too ambience. It may not have been professional, as gay porn filming goes. Which is exactly why it was so fucking hot.

Thus, my views on what was and what is, in regard to gay porn. It isn’t as monumental a subject as the falling of the Berlin Wall, granted, but it does touch most of our lives, at least for a few minutes a day. Thankfully, too, the world today is so connected, we can even go back. By scrolling down to find the ‘vintage’ category on the hippest gay blogs.




Jack's new book, M4M: For an Hour, or Forever - The Gay Man's Guide to Finding Love Online is out and it looks great! Check out excerpts and more at M4M.

You can write to Jack directly at www.jackmauro.com.