Nights in Black Leather

a study in perversion (NSFW but mostly non-explicit archive of gay media and aesthetics)

[nightsinblackleather]

Patrick Cowley’s ominous, avant garde electronic score for Fox Studio’s gay pornographic film Muscle Up from 1981. A year later, Cowley would die from AIDS - one of the early victims of the epidemic.

[nightsinblackleather]

“Gay films have been the unspoken, unheralded leader of the social acceptance of gay men in America, the changing of laws, and the pushing of gay society out of the closet all over the world....and don’t you ever fucking forget that!”

Trailer for the crowdfunded documentary about Chuck Holmes, founder of Falcon Studios who pioneered some of the most iconic early gay pornography, and later became a gay philanthropist. Put together by Jack & Mike, the founders of gaypornblog.com, the intention is to bring more light to the importance of gay pornography’s traditional function within gay society and gay history,

Speaking about the restoration of Falcon’s “seminal” film The Other Side of Aspen and the importance of preserving vintage gay porn (which is still mostly ignored), “It’s not only going to open these films to a new generation of fans, it’s also a project that’s tremendously important to gay history. These early films were some of the first times that gay men were able to see themselves represented in a positive way in the media. Unabashed. Proud. Sexual. These vintage porn films, distributed across the country by mail order, were the original It Gets Better videos of their day, letting people in closets all over the country know that there were other possibilities.”

The problem is that, “Unfortunately, few archives will take them — and the few that are willing to take them, won’t spend money restoring them because it would cause too much controversy.” So the responsibility falls to fans and internet historians like Jack & Mike tto preserve a huge part of gay American culture - and there needs to be a greater push for preservation even from the studios that are still in production like Falcon who hold the rights and resources to do so. So many of these films have a tremendous amount of artistic merit and a definite aesthetic, and we should be learning from them and making sure they’re available for the future, instead of casting them aside as disposable under the confused notion that they were all assembly made like most digital pornography these days. There was time, and context, and style to these films that desperately needs to be saved and brought to new audiences - and a shift in how we culturally understand them is the first step toward ensuring that they are.

[tipsonradiance]

Macho Dancer is a 1988 film by Lino Brocka who was openly gay and contributed some of the most significant films in Phillipines history, many incorporating gay themes. This film in particular (wiki copypaste forthcoming) “explores the harsh realities of a young, poor, rural gay man, who after being dumped by his American boyfriend, is forced to make a living for himself in Manila’s seamy red-light district. Based on a true story, the film’s frank depiction of homosexuality, prostitution, drag queens and crooked cops, porno movie-making and sexual slavery, and drugs and violence caused the Filipino government censors to order extensive edits of the film, forcing an uncensored edition to be smuggled out of the Philippines and shown to a limited number of international film festivals.” and is now part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in NYC. He died in 1991.

3 years after his death, Mel Chionglo continued his legacy with the first in a trilogy of films about “macho dancers”, male strippers in the Philippines. These films are Sibak: Midnight Dancers (1994), Burlesk King (1999), and Twilight Dancers (2006).

[tomakeyounervous]

James Bidgood: Photographs from the 1960s.