While writing our upcoming book Ask Any Buddy, my partner Liz Purchell and I were particularly interested in making sense of the 1980s–the VHS-fueled period in gay adult films between the heady theatre era of the 1970s and the Internet revolution at the turn of the twentieth century, where the politics of liberation gave way to the fight to survive. We were driven to find out how the gay adult film industry thrived amid technological, political, and public health crises. We were surprised how much archival evidence and material culture stands in the face of presumptions about the genre and the era. Three myths persist about gay sex in movies during the 1980s. First, and most prevalent, is the idea that “real” movies did not have real sex–that there was a clear line between what was actual art and sleazy, schlocky prurient content. Second is the belief that video killed the porno star: golden gods gave way to a flock of nameless, faceless actors, each more disposable than the last. Third, and perhaps most damning, is the accusation that the gay adult film industry was apathetic to AIDS activism and Reagan-era porno panics in general, purely and solely interested in the business of escapism.
What’s shocking is not that these myths are easy to bust–who hasn’t been bored to near-coma by an ill-timed “well, actually”?–but that their falsehoods are more than mere technicalities. The emerging gay independent film scene in the 1980s sometimes enabled filmmakers to blur the line between “movies for adults” and “movies with adult content”–most notably, the 1980 West German liberation-versus-libertinism romantic dramedy Taxi zum Klo (Taxi to the Toilets), a film where the main characters’ tumultuous relationship is occasionally depicted through unsimulated sex. The film’s director, Frank Ripploh, received considerable press in gay press for his unbridled views, and the film made enough money to both be listed in Variety’s top-grossing movies during its American run as well as merit a woefully bad sequel (Taxi nach Kairo–in English, “Taxi to Cairo”). Or consider video art pioneer and queer provocateur Ken Camp’s Highway Hypnosis (1984), a glimpse at one man’s violent deed committed between long stretches on the road and overstimulation from the strobing lights of Las Vegas. Somehow managing to be both foreboding and cheeky, the film uses the briefest cuts of unsimulated gay sex to contrast with the overwhelming sameness of western roads, the cresting rush of sudden infatuation, and the churning dread of whether the protagonist will commit an even more heinous act at the end. Even the San Francisco International LGBTQ+ Film Festival (now known as Frameline) held a fundraiser in 1985 by screening Arthur Bressan, Jr’s Daddy Dearest; Bressan was a genius at both documentary and narrative film, but his most daring work came with telling nearly an entire story through a great deal of sex.