PART 3B: CHANGES IN THE AGE OF AQUARIUS

The 1960’s and 70’s saw a relaxing of what was deemed obscene. To meet the needs of a public whose attitudes and tastes were changing, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) adopted a film rating system to replace the Hays Motion Picture Production Code, thereby opening up doors previously closed to filmmakers and allowing them to produce content that had long been forbidden under the heavy hand of the censorship bureau. Simultaneously, some old movie houses that had lost audiences to television began exhibiting the new films that had been given an X rating. Pornographers had finally found themselves being granted permission to film sex. And they were offered venues in which they could exhibit their films, along with distributors and theatre managers who were anxious for content.

Advances in technology had already made it possible for high-end consumer-grade 16mm movie cameras to incorporate sound on film. Eventually Super 8mm cameras would also record sound, but still most film processing labs would refuse to return films that contained nudity or sexual content, thereby keeping all home movie-makers on the righteous path to moral decency. However pornographers knew where they could get their content processed and have it screened, and this gave the industry the exclusivity it needed to finally become successful. Studios remained loyal to the 16mm format for filming and theatrical screening, and released their movies in the 8mm and Super 8 format for the ever-growing home audience, thereby achieving something Hollywood would only later fully embrace: the simultaneous penetration of both home and theatre audiences.

With the new rating system, new venues to exhibit their films, new public attitudes toward sex coupled with a hunger for more explicit content, and new technology at hand, gay pornographers took on the role of independent filmmakers and went wild producing movies that told stories in the course of which a lot of explicit sex took place. Grass-roots gay porn studios found the ability to reach their audience at long last, and several became the production powerhouses of gay sexual content. Companies with names like Falcon, Mustang, Nova, Laguna Pacific, Colt, and Magnum Griffin became household words throughout the gay culture. Some directors, like William Higgins, Joe Gage, and Fred Halsted became legendary almost overnight. A new breed of performer exploded into being (literally): the Porn Star. Never before had anyone been considered a "star" in pornography, but the gay porn studios of the 70’s made sexual superstars of Al Parker, Jack Wrangler, Kip Noll, Buster, ‘Leo (Ford) and Lance’, Richard Locke, Dick Fisk, Eric Ryan, Clint Lockner, Bruno, Giorgio Canali (aka Rocco Rizzoli), and many others.

And just when the industry thought things couldn’t get any better along came the videocam. As the 80’s rolled in, 16mm film quickly lost favor to video. With video the pornographer could eliminate the long-term cost of the film lab by investing up-front capital in video equipment. The camera equipment was big and bulky compared to the 16mm cameras, but the images it produced were sharper and the colors more true most of the time. The poor little film splicer, a staple of film editing for decades, gave up its ubiquitous status to the big bulky editing machine and duplicating machines. Despite the initial inconvenience, pretty much everyone in the business found the switchover from film to video to be a worthwhile investment. Video proved to be more error-proof (it couldn’t accidentally be ruined by exposure to light), convenient, cost-efficient, and user friendly. It also opened the door to more artistic editing techniques.

On the home front, video proved to be much more convenient than projecting movies. Video eliminated the need for a projector, a screen, and a darkened room to enjoy. And the popularity of porn on video helped make the VHS system the popular choice in the US over the Betamax. Newer gay porn companies, the likes of HIS, Vivid, Huge, and Jocks began showing up on the scene. A burgeoning interest in ethnic performers brought about the creation of specialty studios like Altomar and others. Videotape made the production of porn more achievable to the masses than it had ever been. But video also crippled the XXX Theatre business severely as porn videos found a greater success on the small screens in video arcades and at home.

Through the 90’s the nature of video changed. Cameras went from using VHS cassettes to 8mm video cassettes to mini DV cassettes. The size of the cameras got smaller and more lightweight, and the prices of equipment came down. Digital media did away with the need for editing equipment as the home computer could now handle the job. Suddenly everything changed. Digital technology found its way into the hands of the general population. Anyone with a modest budget could now film, edit, upload, and distribute porn from his own home – his own bedroom – and distribute it to millions of people through the internet without being restricted by the Comstock Act. More ambitious amateurs set up little porn studios in their spare rooms, garages, and basements, or wired webcams in every room of their house. Others found ways to put their content on DVDs and market them to a sex-hungry public. And most of them came into it because they saw how easy it could be to try to get a piece of the porn pie.

Faced with less control over the regulation and distribution of adult content, the US government played its hand at creating a new roadblock: the 2257 record-keeping law. Initially devised as a means of putting an end to child pornography and the exploitation of minors, the laws which were adopted under Clinton were again revisited and reworked under the Bush administration in a conservative effort to seriously wound the industry as a whole. Billed as a ramping-up of child exploitation protections, the 2257 revisions created by former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales were a thinly cloaked attack on adult entertainment and did not do anything new to protect children. The law is still being challenged in court for its unconstitutional provisions at the behest of the Free Speech Coalition.

Even with the 2257 laws as they stand, the industry is still growing. New studios are cropping up everywhere in the US and abroad. With all of the changes that technology has brought to pornography, the hardest part in making porn these days is, perhaps, finding the performers.

Once upon a time, pornography was the domain of the most daring photographers of their day, a handful of individuals who had the vision to create intimate images of the naked human body – images that had the power to stimulate some, seriously offend others, and result in a jail sentence simply for having been taken. And while technology has pushed the art along and given it exposure to whole new realms and greater audiences, technology has also brought with it a menace, commonly known as the mass consumer.

Up next: A Critical Mass of Mass Consumerism.

PART 3A - TECHNOLOGY'S ROLE IN PORN

When you look at the history of modern pornography, you see that the photographic capturing and marketing of the naked human form has had a series of ups and downs, throughout which the realm of the pornographer was very small and covert. Challenges abounded, limiting the acquisition and distribution of pornographic images. It is only very recently that porn has become so easy to produce and access.

The first "camera" came into being in 1827 at the hands of French inventor Nicéphore Niépce, who figured that a metal plate coated in certain chemicals might actually be able to record an image when exposed to light. His first successful photograph was crude and took several hours to expose. But as he was the only man in the world with a camera he was a very exclusive individual. However over the next 30 years, photographic science would take a sufficient number of leaps and bounds that photographers would soon be popping up in every city in every industrialized nation on the planet. And of course, photographers, being artists, began training their new mechanical eyes on the human form in the nude.

In 1841 the invention of the negative allowed photographers to make multiple copies of their images, thereby facilitating mass reproduction and distribution of their work. But the following year the US passed an obscenity law that made it possible for the government to seize pictures it deemed obscene. With the advent of the Victorian era and its accompanying conservative social views, the distribution of nude photos had to be conducted with extreme discretion. And in 1873 the Comstock Act was passed prohibiting the distribution of obscene materials through the mail. This would be a major roadblock for the would-be pornographer for a century to come.

In 1900, Kodak released the first commercial camera for the everyday man. One would think that the market for amateur porn would have opened wide up. But, as the film – in fact the entire camera – had to be sent back to Kodak for processing and the prints then had to be mailed back to the customer, taking nude photos was a very risky pastime for the amateur photographer. Eventually, darkroom supplies would become available to the amateur photographer, allowing him to process his own risqué photographs at home. But that pesky Comstock Act still got in the way of allowing him to distribute his nude photos. Despite demand, the porn business remained very much underground.

In the 1920’s Kodak introduced the 16mm Cine-Kodak home movie camera. But again, as the film needed to be mailed to Kodak for processing, the Comstock Act made amateur porn an undertaking for only the most brazen.

In 1948 Edwin Land marketed a camera that used a proprietary new film that needed no darkroom or outsourced processing to produce photographs. He called it the Polaroid. Now anyone who could afford a Polaroid camera could take his own porn pics. One still couldn’t distribute them easily. But the middleman and expensive darkroom equipment were cut out of the equation, and underground personal porn was finally available to the average consumer. The Polaroid enthusiast would enjoy this new artistic and technological freedom for the next 60 years.

During the Second World War, in order to keep the morale of soldiers high, the Pin-Up Girl made a debut. With the Victorian mores fading in the distant past, not too many eyebrows were raised (although a number of soldiers’ members were) as painted images of dames with their skirts hiked up made the rounds throughout the military barracks. Following the war, a more relaxed atmosphere toward nude images led to a number of photographers, largely in Southern California, taking "professional" pin-up photos. Female models, mostly. But a few bold souls entered the realm by taking beefcake photos of the influx of strapping young men coming to Hollywood for a chance in the motion picture industry.

While all but the most prudish among the public could accept the existence of the pin-up girl, the pin-up guy was another story. A few photographers such as Bob Mizer, Bruce of LA, and Lon of New York were arrested on obscenity charges (under, you guessed it, the Comstock Act). Some, like Mizer, argued in court that their photos were artistic representations of the human form. And to circumvent the Comstock Act, Mizer added literary and educational content to his Physique Pictorial magazine which he marketed at newsstands and by subscription through the mail. Hugh Hefner would follow Mizer’s lead and incorporate articles and nude photography on glossy paper stock that would ultimately make Playboy the leading men’s magazine of its day and garner Hefner a publishing empire.

Mizer and others also began making films of naked men… sometimes the subjects did nothing more than pose in the nude, or lounge around in posing straps. Other times, Mizer had his models act out silly and strange little stories that, through various plot devices, culminated in the models getting naked and wiggling around to rock and roll music. They were tame and goofy films by today’s standards, but they were risqué little shorts in their time. And of course, these movies were shot on 16mm film – which required processing at a lab. Mizer and his contemproaries located kindred spirits in the film processing business who would develop their films and reproduce them on the sly. Because of the stigma against gay porn and the nature of film to degrade over time, few examples of these early gayporn films exist today.

(Part 3B will examine the next phase of technology and how it made porn a common form of entertainment)

Footnote: The current owner of Bob Mizer's Athletic Model Guild (AMG), Dennis Bell, has been re-releasing Mizer's erotic films on DVD. To order, or for further information, go to http://www.athleticmodelguild.com/

PART 2: ORIGINS

"Bareback Porn" got its official start in a garage playroom in Phoenix Arizona when director Michael McKey asked a few friends if they would like to be filmed having sex without condoms. It had been nearly a decade since the gay porn industry almost unilaterally decided to adopt a policy of using condoms in each and every video they cranked out. Such an undertaking on the part of McKey and friends would be controversial. Scandalous. Rebellious. And that is exactly what McKey had in mind.

He had worked as a videographer for gay porn studios in the past, filming in the industry’s widely-accepted paint-by-the-numbers style. Apparently he wasn’t satisfied with the way things were being done in the industry. So Michael McKey made a conscious decision to break every rule he knew about making a porn video. And he set out to challenge the idea that there was only one formula to follow to make a successful picture.

Among his radical changes were the following: No condoms. No scripts. No pretense to tell stories. No cameras on tripods. No elaborate sets. No shaved, buff pretty boys. No disco music to drown out the sounds of sex. No costly overhead. No shooting schedules. No chain of command. Instead, McKey did the whole thing himself, on a shoestring, in his garage with its walls and floors draped in blue tarps and black plastic. His "set" consisted of a sling or two and some wrestling mats strewn around the floor. Lighting was provided by overhead fluorescents for the most part. And his actors… the antithesis of the porn stereotype: leather-clad, hairy, bearish, pierced and tattooed men over 35. But the big selling point was not only that the gents performed without condoms… but also that McKey filmed the cumshots in all their glory – perhaps in a way that had never been done in the pre-condom years. He captured unforgettable images of orgasmic juices as they sprayed, oozed, and dribbled out of every orifice, focusing as much loving attention on the money shot as he did the action that was needed to deliver it.

It’s one thing to film taboo. It’s another to wallow in it.

With that one low budget film (titled simply "Bareback – The Video"), McKey tapped a nerve that inspired several other would-be pornographers who quickly followed suit. Bareback had been born as crudely as if he had given it birth behind a dumpster. And that one little 77 minute garage-porn video colored nearly everything that would follow in its footsteps for years to come.
Initially barebacking became synonymous with leather. And what followed was a slew of barebacking leather daddy pictures from various newcomers to the porn industry.

By mid-1999, I was appealing to Hot Desert Knights, with whom I had developed a relationship and who was the most productive studio in the genre at the time, to consider using performers that were of a more universally (and commercially) appealing type – younger, smoother men. My rationale was that the genre had become bogged down in leather and was limiting its appeal to a much smaller segment of the porn-viewing market than it could be reaching. HDK wasn’t interested, citing that they knew their market and what that market was interested in buying. But in 2000 they released a video called "Boys Club" that featured ten smooth-shaved men in their twenties. It was an immediate success, and fostered a handful of other younger-men bareback videos in the HDK line. Other studios took note, and started offering content that moved away from the leather daddy stereotype.

New companies began popping up here and there. Helix studios, Tipo Sesso, and Cobra debuted with offerings of college-age boys having unprotected sex. Puppy Productions featured men in their mid-twenties to mid-thirties. Gaslamp Video (now SX) had already begun to find an audience for bareback videos featuring mixed-age performers. SX was all over the map, using twinks, daddies, musclemen, men of color, "str8" men, and college jocks (sometimes in leather drag). The only thing consistent in the SX line was the apartment they used as their studio. Whereas their actors’ performances were by-the-numbers, their creative use of the same space from picture to picture was interesting to note – and inspiring to this porn-director-wannabe.

Even with all of these evolutions one thing didn’t change. The shooting model that Michael McKey set up became the model by which nearly all bareback videos since have followed: no scripts, no storylines, hand-held cameras, and low budgets. McKey amputated the fantasy aspect from porn by bypassing the "set-up" and going directly to the sex. He proved his point. But now there’s such a plethora of point-and-shoot bareback porn that it’s become both redundant and mediocre.

Certainly there are standouts among the studios. Treasure Island Media, for instance, has made an art form out of their gonzo-style productions in which the cameramen are as much a part of the scenery (and sometimes the action) as the tops waiting their turns in the background. And newcomer on the block, Slut Machine has managed to create a hybrid between the action style of Paul Morris (Treasure Island) and the visual production style of Owen Hawk (Dark Alley Media) that breathes a bit of fresh air into a stagnating genre.

Today there are dozens of other gayporn companies producing bareback porn on the cheap by adhering the decade-old McKey filming blueprint. And with venues out there the likes of X-tube, it appears that anyone with access to a video cam these days thinks he’s a pornographer. So while there is a never ending torrent of new bareback porn flooding the marketplace, most of it I dare say is not worth watching – unless your entertainment threshold is very very low.

Next up, the history of gay porn, how technology plays into the current state of affairs, and what it promises for the future.