When it comes to gay porn few things have REALLY changed over the years. The physics of it does limit the scope of action.

The changes in technology and now largely free availability via the net are too obvious to discuss.

Your typical 'pretext for sex' narrative did not really change in years. The dorm sex, the gym sex, the party sex, the beach sex, sex after cruising, the backroom sex, the bath/spa sex, the street hook up sex, teacher or coach and student, etc., are just but a few pretext narratives that have been very inherent to the genre since the 80's.

For some reason, I believed that not much would change in this respect.

Enters 2015 and the new crop of narratives emerged.

Here are some of the sites illustrating the shift:

CZECH GAY FANTASY

SketchySex

guy fucks buddy while gaming

The 'old' narratives really all shared at least one common denominator: a guy knew or met another guy (or a group), they went someplace where one thing led to the other... Usually, a less open-minded dude had to be 'persuaded' to join in, admit that he liked it, etc. Occasionally, promises of absolute discretion were made. Even when guys kept on messing around over and over again, no one insisted too much that this was a very lasting, binding arrangement of any kind, with relatively few exceptions.

The recently emerging crop of narratives parted with the past traditions in a radical way.

A dude who got the address via one of the apps enters the flat, and gets a BJ or fucks a guy who he had never seen, talked to, or hooked up for that matter in his life. He shoots his load and goes back to his life.

A guy gets fucked while he is playing a video game.

A few single men enter a club with a new kind of glory holes and enjoy what is aptly called a 'fuckomatic sex'.

I am not one of the guys who goes around insisting that EVERYTHING was better in the 'good, old days'. Quite the contrary, I believe that the societal changes brought about quite a few positives and that the balance of things justifies the use of the word 'progress' when we talk about being gay these days as opposed to being gay 20-30 years ago.

I am wondering what the others think about the new gay porn narratives?

KD

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The early porn seemed like it usually had to have a set up - a bit of a "reason" they were doing it. Back from a date and the girlfriend did not put out - someplace with few women (Navy, all male school, etc.) - this gave an "excuse" for why they were doing it.

There needed to be justification for having gay sex rather than "being normal" and having sex with a girl.

I think these new scenarios show more of the acceptance of gay sex - you don't need an excuse other than it feels good and you are horny.

I know younger when I was just starting to fool around with guys there always had to be adult (straight) magazines or talk about girls or something before anyone would make a move. I think the old video narratives represented that feeling of needing a reason for gay sex.

Another part is the attention span today. They don't want to watch a long set up or story - just get to the action!

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Yup. The first vids (VHS) mostly had the 'justification' element in them. This made it all more palatable for everyone involved, and somehow suggested that the guys were by all means simply str8 fellows like EVERYONE else, trying to get a release of their pent up energies.

Somewhere in the mid-80s, the porn industry started abandoning the old justification cliche, step by step. Think of Falcon Studios' Splash and you'll recognize that the guys are openly enjoying each other, and planning for it, too. The girl talk was on its way out.

Yet, the dudes used to be familiar with each other or at least believed that 'discretion was a matter of honor', so that the stories would not be spreading...

Some, if minimal pretext courting invariably took place.

All of that is out of the windowthese days.

KD

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I confess, I honestly don't have time to watch porn anymore although I did quite a bit back in the 1980s. It almost seems like I've seen everything already and nothing is really new unless there's a new context, story, or characters that seem compelling. Otherwise, it's more of the same.

Back then I really liked the Joe Gage type of things with realistic guys like I might actually encounter somewhere. I'd be driving back and forth between Texas and California and imagining I was in "LA Tool and Die." And in fact, a few times I did re-enact a couple of those scenarios. Al Parker and Surge Studios were also favorites.

My ex also showed me "Boys In The Sand" -- that was sheer sex on the beach -- and some pretty raw hardcore stuff from the New York '70s porn scene. A lot of this was in the old Bijou Catalog. He had several boxes, I have no idea how many tapes, but he was a collector of Betamax porn that he later donated to the UCLA library gay collection along with a Betamax and the Bijou Catalog. We used to joke that some cataloger at UCLA would be having fun with all that.

Anyhow, I dropped in here while reading my email this morning, I get newsletters from our affiliate and advertiser sites about their products, including new porn releases. This one out today is "Hard Drive Daddy" from Dylan Lucas, a studio which is part of a group of studios and sites marketed together.

The scene summary reminds me of some of the early '80s "cable repair" or "cable installer" porn tapes we used to have:
There's also a free video clip which the Message Board probably can't handle the embedding code (or at least I can't spend the time right now to work on it). Here
is a link to the clip instead

Side note: You may or may not have seen me mention that CRUSING for SEX has been losing money this year. From the summer until recently I tried using more embedded videos and links to paid porn sites as an experiment to see if that would generate additional revenue. It has not, at least not directly.

However, I've discovered that showing their clips alongside clips and links to the CRUISING for SEX Theatre that Keith set up has increased revenue for the Theatre somewhat. It had dropped to almost nothing following a change in the reimbursement formula by the provider in January, but now is recovering. I'm planning to rebrand it as "CRUISING for PORN" with a more contemporary design as one part of the larger overhaul of the CFS-related web sites.

There's a lot of other changes and upgrades I hope to do -- really need to do -- but my time is very limited. I'll be posting separately soon, I hope, about possible new funding options and asking for feedback and opinion from CFS Members.

Bob

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I remember when I first went to an adult bookstore back in high school -

The gay section was divided into "Gay" and "Anal" like fucking was extreme even in gay sex. Each booth in the back had a choice of 2 movies to pick from and a switch so you could change them. Thankfully there was always a straight movie playing with a gay movie as I would have been too afraid to go into a gay booth.

What was funny was when you came across a movie that was obviously shot on silent 8MM film and they had dubbed in sound and music. The people not even talking and the soundtrack going "oh yeah suck my dick" - LOL

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Few years ago, a major sex club in San Francisco, CA, (SoMa) showed a number of those 8mm movies, John mentioned above. I was quite amazed. Mostly because, neither my buddies nor I had seen any of those in our time and day. We go back to the Betamax and VHS but the 8mm gay movies have never crossed our radars. (Somehow, the str8 ones did make it into our part of the world, but were deemed totally 'old fashioned' even then...)

Very few of the guys who belonged to our m2m sex coterie actually admitted to having any gay porn. This was a bit too risky to start with, and far too expensive in those days, for most of the college kids living on their rather meagre allowances.

The very few guys who owned the original VHS cassettes of mostly Falcon productions guarded them with their lives. They also made few illegal copies that were given to the guys whom they 'owed' something. Sure, a full-feature gay movie was a valuable asset in an age that did not know of internet, free clips, torrents, etc. The story had it that every good party, i.e. a threesome or a foursome had to start by watching one of those flicks: 'to get the guys going'. Having such an option in your video collection made you a most desirable host who usually had the first pick of the guys, and who usually controlled the play to some extent. Not a trifle thing in those days...

KD

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Take a look at Wikipedia's story about 'Boys In The Sand. It was released in 1971, prior to 'Deep Throat' and was a milestone for all porn movies, not just gay ones.

Made on an $8.000 budget and filmed on Fire Island, it was theatrically released in New York City grossing nearly $25,000 the first week. After being reviewed in 'Variety,' not just 'The Advocate,' it grossed over $140,000 in the first six months and was released nationwide and in other countries. IMDB said it was the only X-rated film reviewed in the 'New York Times." That seems hard to believe, but a quick Google search did not show an NYT review of 'Deep Throat.'

Quite a few of those New York 8mm porn movies did get transferred to VHS and Beta at some point. I remember some of them being especially sleazy, uninhibited, and hot. As for 'Boys In The Sand,' it was sort of a visual poem, meant to be artistic, yet it was also sex-sex-sex.

Bob

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Thanks for the tips & suggestions.

This is where the partial cultural disconnect must have kicked in.

Living in Europe at that time, there was only so much of the commercial porn that made it over to us in the eastern Med.

Naturally, we were the 'new kids' and the 70's stuff sounded and probably must have looked 'old' and rather undesirable to us. The new VHS with bright colors, and very graphic scenes ruled out porn market needs.

KD

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When I first saw the 70's stuff in the mid-80s, some of it was really grainy or poor-quality when transferred to tape. Some things were better, especially if they had been at least a little bit remastered. I don't want to sound like a broken record, but the poor quality went right along with the sleaziness and basic primeval sex of many of those films and added to their appeal for me.

Some of the other studios back then were Bijou Video (like the catalog), Jaguar, and P.M. Productions. I also recall one called "Old Reliable" that typically had straight guys being interviewed and then jerking off on camera. All of this product is a real contrast to the contrived stories that started appearing in the 80's. Some of the bareback and fetish studios (Treasure Island, Dick Wadd, etc.) have scenes or movies that recall the old style, but generally things have moved on.

There was also the increasing abundance of muscle-bound gym bodies. Porn moved on to show a standard of physical appearance that many or most guys couldn't realistically achieve. I suppose gay men have always had some degree of body-image and self-image issues, but it seems accentuated by the way first porn and then the wider culture emphasize more and more "perfect" bodies in advertising, TV, movies, etc.

Anyhow, Jack Wrangler was another big star who work in gay and straight movies then, later worked somewhat in theatre and especially as a producer for his wife, singer Margaret Whiting. Again, the Wikipedia article is fascinating. Wrangler always considered himself gay but not part of what he saw as the "gay lifestyle."

This is a really interesting discussion to me and I wish I had time to write more. There's a gold mine of people and topics here.

~ Bob

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Years ago a used bookstore in the area got in a collection of "vintage" gay magazines - as infopop mentions above - all muscle bound guys in tiny posing straps (so no dick showing) all oiled up and flexing.

It was amazing to me that this qualified as "porn" in the day (the magazines all had articles on exercise so they could say they were informational not porn) but for a gay guy this was all that was available.

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I fully agree with Bob here when he says that the poor quality of the 8mm gay flicks went so well along with the expected sleaziness of the genre. I am actually not sure that I would want to view them in a sort of remastered version.

John has mentioned all the magazines with oiled, super-athletic bodies that embodied t the aesthetics of the 70's. The east Med got very few of those in our time and day. But the gay guys had some limited access to the throve of the pre-WWII porn which only sometimes showed a 'strappin' fellow' here and there.

Every dude I have ever talked to about the gay porn 'loved it'. But the porn was neither cheap nor universally and easily available. The societal environment was however, mostly very sexually positive and permissive. Nude beaches used to be an absolute default for ALL the young guys. Nightly skinny dipping was a most usual thing you and your buddies could do. You wear your best bud's shirt or underwear on all kinds of pretexts, and he wore yours.

KD

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When watching the early gay porn movies the "dirtiness" was part of the fun - the "clean" sex was M/F - when you see those old gay movies it is sneaking out into the woods - doing it in a bathroom - it had the added element of being "bad boys" and doing something that is "wrong". Which just added to the fantasy because as kids we would sneak into the woods....




I don't know much history of gay porn - but looking at old magazines on line, in adult bookstores and the like you can see that suddenly in the 70's there was a breakthrough - they changed from guys posing - dicks soft or covered - to full on porn. So I am assuming some "decency" law here in the US was struck down and the publishers were no longer in fear of arrest just for distributing the magazine. Many of the old posing magazines would also have a section where you could buy "20 naked photographs of Steve for only $10 - sold as collector to collector only" - so they had used that to sidestep the law for awhile.

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I'm not a lawyer but I know enough (B.A. in PoliSci, lawyers in family, etc.) to say "it's complicated." First off, there are separate rules for Federal and State purposes, and States or their localities might ban (or have banned) things that were permitted in other states or in interstate commerce.

Summarizing a lot from Wikipedia again, there was a decision in 1957, Roth v. United States which established the test for obscenity being based on "whether to the average person, applying contemporary community standards, the dominant theme of the material, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest." That was both clarified and muddied in 1964's Jacobellis v. Ohio which had four different majority opinions and two different dissenting ones. The 1960s were such confusing times, weren't they?

Anyhow, that was the case where the idea of an obscene work being "utterly without redeeming social importance" came from, which led some pornographers to include or at least to claim that they were making observations about "free love" or the Vietnam War or whatever. Justice Stewart also famously wrote words to the effect that he couldn't define obscenity but "I know it when I see it." I think this is the decision that opened the floodgates. Starting in the 1960s you started to see more erotic movies and such released as "art films" or low-brow comedy or satire, especially European imports. This was also when Russ Myer was getting into the height of his low-budget "sexploitation" films.

By later in the decade mainstream US films were being a lot more blunt about sex ("Valley of the Dolls," "Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice," "Easy Rider," were just a few) and porn was pushing the edges even more. Myer eventually made the satirical musical "Beyond The Valley of the Dolls," a non-sequel that was disavowed by author Jacqueline Susann - she sued him - which was initially rated "X" and years later changed to "NC-17."

1973's Miller v. California set a three-tiered obscenity test "(a) whether the average person, applying contemporary community standards would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest, (b) whether the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by the applicable state law; and (c) whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value."

This appears to be the general standard still followed in the US. However, how it's applied and enforced varies a lot depending on people and circumstances. Reagan's Attorney General Edwin Meese had a famous anti-pornography campaign which he announced, if I remember correctly, standing in front of a bare-bosomed female "Spirit of Justice" statue.

I could go on, I tend to write too much, but I need to move to my "real" work with CFS's content and programming, not just indulging my own curiosity and tendency to research things.

~ Bob

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Yup. Doing something wrong and forbidden (at that time) AND getting away with it was a point of major attraction.

A few dudes understood that sticking by the book only and playing by the rules alone was not going to get them very far in life, careers, sex or anywhere else in particular. Those who wrote the rules certainly had THEIR best interest in mind and not OURS.

So, to some extent, m2m sex was disruptive, system-challenging, and a training for the young guys to learn how to challenge the systemic order of things.

KD

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The doing something you were not supposed to do was a major factor when we were younger and just starting to experiment.

"You show me yours, I'll show you mine", playing doctor, truth or dare - a big part of the appeal was we knew it was "wrong". We were being rebels - even if it was not much of a rebellion. We were doing something that only adults were "supposed" to do.

It is part of growing up and testing your own independence. The fact it involved being naked was just an added plus!

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