A History of Gay Porn: 'Bigger than Life: The History of Gay Porn Cinema from Beefcake to Hardcore'

October 4, 2009 Posted by TheBoss in Inside Gay Porn, Special Reports

To many gay men, porn is more than a hobby. It’s a way of life. We all have our favorites, and there are enough variations out there to please every stripe on the zebra of diversity. So what’s more interesting than porn? A book about porn. Jeffrey Escoffier’s Bigger than Life: The History of Gay Porn Cinema from Beefcake to Hardcore, is a highly readable examination full of behind-the-scenes dish as well as socially significant contextualizing. Join author Jeffrey Excoffier and legendary porn filmmakers Wakefield Poole, Jerry Douglas, Bob Alvarez and Chi Chi LaRue as they discuss the history of the porn. Hardcore porn – both the straight and gay varieties – entered mainstream American culture in the 1960s and 70s as the sexual revolution swept away many of the cultural inhibitions and legal restraints on explicit sexual expression.

Bigger Than Life follows the history of gay porn from the early days of beefcake in Los Angeles, New York and San Francisco to the introduction of hardcore in the golden age of gay sexual freedom in the 1970s, through the crisis of AIDS in the 1980s, up to the Internet in 1990s. The Bay Area Reporter recently offered the following review of the book:

Jeffrey Excoffier
Jeffrey Escoffier covers the emergence of the gay film from an underground activity to a full-fledged industry. His story begins somewhat ironically in the art films of Kenneth Anger, Jack Smith and Andy Warhol – the first films with homoerotic imagery to be shown in public, yet none of which showed explicit sexual action. As such films evolved, Escoffier chronicles the rise of theatres and peepshows in New York City – although he doesn't tell where their films came from, or what they were. He makes the point, however, that key and explicitly gay films such as Fred Halsted's L.A Plays Itself and Wakefield Poole's Boys in the Sand preceded and paved the way for the heterosexual Deep Throat, which has been mostly credited with launching porn of any sort into the huge industry it became. Much of Escoffier's prime source material comes from Manshots magazine, which for many years ran lengthy interviews with nearly all of the industry's filmmakers and many of its stars. That means the book's viewpoint is largely one already rendered safe for public consumption; a little more hard-nosed investigation would have been telling. Yet as a social historian and arts writer, Escoffier can be brilliant, as when he plumbs the true depths of the field by pointing out the strange doubleness of porn: "It is both a fantasy created by actors and an enactment of the fantasy through real sex (that is to say, real erections, real penetrations, and real orgasms)." Ponder that one. Yet if much of his thoughts are deep, he doesn't dig too deep beyond already public record. And he can stop frustratingly short. The shift from oral to anal depiction in gay porn, he says, is "difficult to document." So he makes no further attempt. And while he seems to come up-to-date, with an extended chapter on Falcon Studios, there's only one mention of Bruce Cam (he made an unnamed film for Falcon) and not a word about Titan Media. And there isn't even a single mention of Chris Ward or Raging Stallion Studio. The renegade film artist Christopher Rage appears only to talk about Casey Donovan. And what's this curious mistake about Bob Mizer's mother knitting posing straps for AMG models? Have you ever seen a knitted posing strap? They're sewn! READ THE COMPLETE ARTICLE AT THE BAY AREA REPORTER