You Should Watch Gay Porn in a Theater (LA PLAYS ITSELF, 1972)

I am not telling you to go watch an arthouse movie with some sideboob. I am telling you that if you live in a big enough city, there are at least a couple of queer perverts who have talked their way into programming screenings of the best kinds of filth at your local repertory theaters. And if you’re too squeamish to go watch a forty-foot arm get stuck up a ten-foot orifice, baby, you are missing OUT.

Growing up in Ohio meant that I learned about pornography and exploitation cinema by any means necessary. I consumed all the weird media possible via a broken TV/VCR that I duct-taped together, constantly jammed full of a rotating cast of internet tape trades and whatever I could rent or shoplift. 

(There was a single video store where you could rent good shit. North Campus Video was run by an elderly tweaker who loved bootlegs of giallo movies, and strong-arming customers into leaving their cars as collateral for lost videos. His blood-drenched, sleazy taste in film was formative to mine. His demand that I sign over my Tercel to cover the late fees for NUDE ON THE MOON was also oddly educational. Ignoring the pleas and promises of entitled creeps was one of many skills I learned from late-night filth piracy.)

There’s a lot to be said for sending yourself to dirty film school, but I can’t deny that it was lonely. Weird movies can give you funhouse mirrors to see yourself in, but those reflections don’t make up for a lack of genuine company. Is it weird to say I feel like I’m among the people I’ve been seeking when I go to a gay porno screening? I saw someone reading Lou Sullivan’s diary in the line for LA PLAYS ITSELF at the Siskel Center, so even if it is weird, it may still be correct.

That’s why I’m glad I live in Chicago now, where enough people want to watch gay porn that I’m selling plasma to keep up with the screening schedule. Why do screenings of sadomasochistic 70’s porno flicks draw sell-out crowds to modern theaters like Music Box? 

In a society dominated by a straight capitalist lens, we are consistently inundated by boring and ahistorical depictions of queer life. Our identities are only considered palatable when bleached of sex; as a result, the parts of queer history that relate to queer sexuality are hidden, shamed or re-shaped to render them harmless. In the hands of a culture that fears queer sex, sadistic leather hunks are reduced to toothless mascots.

(And listen, I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to be a mascot. How am I supposed to see myself in the goofy cartoon characters straight people offer me as representation? It took me forty years to understand myself. If North Campus had stocked BLOODSISTERS, I might have worked it out in an afternoon.)

Consider the anemic plating of queerness made available to you elsewhere in society, and then you may see why a queer porno screening is a buffet of sticky delights. As Elizabeth Purchell notes, there was a time when gay adult films were the only movies made for and by queer people. Gay art was severely marginalized, but that marginalization protected it from being warped to serve a straight audience. The presence of radioactive gay sex is exactly what makes these fine art objects distinctly and beautifully our own. 

Loosely structured as the story of a naive transplant who finds himself drawn into the seedy underbelly of the leather scene, LA PLAYS ITSELF functions as a time capsule of transgressive queerness. People giggle derisively when films like these are added to the MoMA, but what they capture is vital to understanding queer history and culture. Want to see why queers are known for cruising outdoors? Watch these buff hikers pick each other up in a bucolic setting and plow each other over a super-imposed montage of California’s prettiest wildflowers. Curious about where gay men hustled and fucked in 70’s LA? Watch Halstead’s camera cruise past the theaters and bars that would someday screen his work.

Works like LA PLAYS ITSELF can also help you understand the roots of the fetishes and fantasies that still thrive in queer fetish spaces today. Curious about the man who is the blueprint for the silent, sadistic leather daddy you’ve seen in one-thousand lesser and blurrier clips online? Meet him and watch his lover suffer for him in a lovingly restored HD print. Want to experience the giddy communal thrill of exploring rope, belts, and the red imprint of individual fingertips on a quivering ass with a bunch of other artsy, horny queers? I mean, you’re not curious…right?

Some queer people would tell you that there is value in denying yourself this experience. They would remind you that the right-wingers who hate us watch us in public for evidence of our corruption and perversion, as if there is a version of queerness they don’t find abhorrent in the first place. If trying to earn the approval of the shittiest people alive is a priority for you, you can do that. I guess some people like to lick boots without the release of an orgasm afterward. I’m more of a service top, but it truly takes all kinds. 

Personally, I am not going to let boring people who hate me set standards for our public conduct. Watching vintage gay porn with a modern queer audience is a distinct communal experience, a rejection of social prudishness and an opportunity to champion queer artists that a polite society demands we discard. And it can give you the opportunity to see the word “ANUS” in fifty-foot letters at the Siskel Center, which is its own delight. Give it a try!