A Really Dirty History of Gay Porn

PHIL ST. JOHN (performer and director): San Francisco was wild when I got there in ’71. We went to San Francisco because we had had it with the rest of America. We wanted to be free. We wanted to have sex. We wanted to be gay. We wanted to be queer, and we wanted to take a lot of drugs and party and listen to really good music… And porn was part of that. Porn is freedom.

I just started going back to school and one day I was walking on Market Street. And some woman came up to me and she said “Do you want to be in a porn movie?”

And I said “A gay porn movie?” And she said “Yeah, yeah, gay, gay.” I said okay. And I was in film school so I thought I kind of owe it to myself to see what it’s like on the other side of the camera. And much to my embarrassment, there was a guy right from film class, one of my straight buddies from film school, who was the cameraman.

He had the lens shoved up right on my ass with me getting fucked on camera. It was wild.

— LOL *clutches pearls* oh my.

These are some outtakes from Seed Money: The Chuck Holmes Story, which is an honest-to-God documentary about Falcon Studios and the early gay porn industry.

The porn industry got nabbed by mail order stings — shipping indecent materials across state lines. The prosecutions were pretty easy! Porn director Steven Scarborough:

They showed an interracial scene in the courtroom and one of the prosecutors said “Ladies and Gentleman of the jury — this could be your son!” and one of the women in the jury box threw up. And they went to the judge in chambers and said “Judge we don’t feel like we’re getting a fair trial.” And the judge said “Fair trial? Fair trial? Hell, not too many years ago we’d have taken those old boys out behind the courthouse and hung ‘em!” That was what the legal climate was like.