From the Bedroom to the Bijou - A secret history of American gay sex cinema

From the Bedroom to the Bijou -
A secret history of American gay sex cinema
(1997)



Golden age of gay cinema (1997)

At a time when public viewing habits are so thoroughly dominated by a mainstream Hollywood aesthetic, gay cinema is one of the few subgenres of independent film to prosper. It thrives on a nurturing circuit of art-house screens and at film festivals attended by savvy, engaged, and adventurous audiences keyed in by sympathetic urban film journalists. 
(page 24)



The development of gay film culture through the 80s and 90s is mirrored by the growth of Frameline’s San Fransisco Gay and Lesbian Film Festival. (start 1976)
By 1997 gay film had become not only hip but marketable as well. 
Pannel discussion: Selling out: the marketing of queer cinema
(page 24)


This relatively recent “legitimization” of gay film has come only after decades of struggle for the freedom to create, circulate, and acces gay erotic images — a struggle that has culminated in the freedom to view these images in the public environment of the movie theater. In this context, the history of gay erotic film is all about the journey from the private space to the public space, and as such it parallels the history of gay liberation itself. 
(page 24/25)



Gay images appeared on film concurrent with the first “smokers” or “stags”: ten minute black-and-white silent 16 mm films that began to circulate on an underground basis around 1915. Production of stag films continued into the late 60s until theatrical hard-cored pornography— and later the mergence of home video — rendered them obsolete. (page 25)

Always strictly illegal, these stag films were shown after hours in fraternal lodge halls and sundry backrooms to decidedly straight male audiences. (p. 25)



Male homosexuality in these films was almost nonexistent. (page 25) …only five procent of all stag films produced between 1920 and 1967 contained male homosexual scenes and only 1.4 percent of all stag films were exclusively male homosexual; some or most of the latter were probably— as Knight and Alpert surmise— produced as exotica for straight audiences primed to have their liquor-soaked minds blown, or eager to test the forbearance of their fellows. (p.25)

Lesbianism occurred about 19 precent of the time.
These images were constructed by men to serve male desire. (page 25)
… in the typical stags, Lesbianism is employed as a male turn-on. (page 26)


“Gay images existed only as exotica within the heterosexual market.”(page 26) Because in the early years there was no audience, nor market for such a product.

Male gay material would appear throughout the following years. But real genuine lesbian porn as a commodity would not emerge until the 1980s. 
(through lesbian fanzines, sex guides, and sex clubs)
Which boosted a new generation of lesbian writers and film-makers into the limelight.



After World War 2, acces to gay sexual imagery on film became easier. Thanks to military-inspired standardization and mass production, 16mm movie equipment became much more affordable and available. In addition, postwar America was undergoing a period of liberalization; gay magazines like Physique Pictorial and Dance as well as physique photographs of tanned and oiled muscle-flexers began to be commercially disseminated above-ground. (p. 25)



physique photography quickly evolved in physique cinema for the home market in the 50s and 60s.



posing, posing strap film: muscle flexing men in a look-but-don’t-touch-aesthetic > one way fantasies.



Minimal narratives would begin to appear in some films as watching flexing musclemen became boring > the cyclist (1949) by Richard Fontaine, Bob del Monteue, Greek gods (1954).

Another major development in postwar gay cinema came from a very different direction. In 1947 the 20-year-old Kenneth Anglemyer, aka Kenneth Anger, shot an intense and violent 14-minute auto-biographical rough-trade fantasy entitled Fireworks. Steeped in anxiety, trauma, and pain, and rich in metaphorical fantasy “It was considered pornography for the time,” remembers Anger’s friend Ed Earl (Bill Landis, the Unauthorized biography of Kenneth anger p.45) and it was two years before Anger would dare to show it publicly. (page 26)



Fireworks, along with fragment of seeking (1946), by Anger compatriot Curtis Harrington marked the beginning of the American gay Underground/Avant-garde movement. Unlike physique cinema, which was a celebration of surface, a purposeful negation of any deeper psychosexual exploration, the Underground avant-garde was committed to exactly that deeper goal. The two were poles apart. (p.26)



Censorship at this point was effected not only by societal norms and official censorship boards, but by Eastman Kodak, which had a monopoly on developing 16mm film stock. Kodak developers who found questionable nudity or sexual content on processed film often destroyed the film (or took it home). Anger lost a 1949 film, the Love That Whirls, the was. Countless other rolls of film, from risqué home movies to serious art, were similarly destroyed. (page 26)

Physique cinema’s peak in 1958: Bob Mizer’s Athletic Model Guild


https://www.youtube.com/user/bobmizerfoundation

Gay film as a consumer item, if not yet as a theatrical experience, was born here in the late 50’s with AMG. (page 26)



While AMG captured the market share of home-use-only physique cinema in the early 60s, the gay underground merged with the more formalized and pluralistic New York-centered Underground movement (for which Film Culture and the Village Voice served as publicity organs) and made a very public splash with two films destined to provoke scandal: Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures and Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising. (page 27)

….Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising soon crossed over into the commercial sexploitation market as theater bookers engaged in the time-homered practice of trying to disguise art as porn. At Chicago’s Plaza Art burlesque theater, for example, Scorpio was co-billed with Fireworks and a straight, soft-core Radley Metzger import from Europe… (page 27)
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In March 1964, a Los Angeles theater manager showing Scorpio was arrested for lewd exhibition, and the film became enmeshed in a publicized and highly absurd courtroom battle during which boy-scout leaders, anthropology professors, ministers, and rabbis testified. Scorpio was ruled obscene because of a brief snippet of frontal male nudity, a verdict overturned on appeal to the California State Supreme Court. The trial had ben greet publicity for the film, en hanging its controversial reputation, in May 1966 it was playing a hit run at New York’s Bleeker street cinema and being praised in the main stream press. (page 27)

1964: Barbara Rubin: Christmas on Earth
1966: Andy Warhol: My Hustler
1968: Mike Thomas: the meatrack

The commercial viability of Anger’s Scorpio Rising and Warhol’s My Hustler and The Chelsea Girls had clued exhibitors to the fact that there was an audience for theatrically exhibited gay films that transcended the insular lof/art-gallery crowd. (page 28)

At this point precious little separated the Underground “art” film-makers from the commercial sexploitationist pornographers, at least in the view of censors and moralists unattuned to (and uninterested in) the radically divergent aesthetics involved. Indeed, both camps were, for different reasons, engaged in the battle for absolute screen freedom. Middle America, fearing a tidal wave of smut, raised the alarm. (page 28)

The last barricade was breached in late 1969 with the appearance of gay hard-core pornographic features. …it defused the underground’s most potent weapon: its scandalous allure. Films like Flaming creatures, scorpio rising, my hustler, and lonesome cowboys had always been art films masquerading as sex films. Their days as porn impostors were over. (page 28)

1970s gay underground film from west germany: Werner Schroeder, Rosa von Praunheim, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder.

Curt McDowell: between art and porn, gay and straight,

By the mid-80s, gay commercial porn cinema had once again retreated behind closed doors as the emergence of home video allowed private accessibility to product, while the AIDS crisis prompted a police shutdown of public gay-sex institutions and effectively brought about the suppression of gay porn as a public experience. (page 30)

Gay sex cinema […], had passed through its most interesting phases as an agent of gay liberation. It was spent as a (sub)cultural force and reverted once again to a mere consumer commodity. They were more pressing battles to be fought. (page 31)

To modern, emancipated audiences, Kenneth Anger’s Fireworks hardly seems like the milestone of gay liberation that its revered status as the first artistic gay film would suggest. By the same token, contemporary audiences unattained to the significance of works such as Flaming Creatures and Scorpio Rising tend to find the former purely incomprehensible and the latter entertaining pop-rock camp — oblivious to the factors that made these films so scandalous within the context of their times. (page 31)

Gay film-makers are no longer automatically considered soldiers in the battle for gay liberation, but can be creative, apolitical artists making movies that play to wider audiences and which are not even necessarily “gay films”.
Gregg Wild, Ela Troyano, Bruce LaBruce, Gregg Araki, Barbara Heller.