"Making It Big：The History of Gay Adult Film (Documentary)" Transcript

Hardcore porn - both the straight and gay varieties - entered mainstream American culture in the 1970s as the sexual revolution swept away many of the cultural inhibitions and legal restraints on explicit sexual expression. The first porn movie ever to be previewed by Variety, the entertainment industry's leading trade journal, was Wakefield Poole's Boys in the Sand (1971), a sexually explicit gay movie shot on Fire Island with a budget of $4,000. Moviegoers, celebrities, and critics - both gay and straight - flocked to see Boys in the Sand when it opened in mainstream movie theaters in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco.

Within a year, Deep Throat, a heterosexual hardcore feature, opened to rave reviews and a huge box office exceeding that of many mainstream Hollywood features. It was quickly followed by The Devil in Miss Jones and Behind the Green Door. Variety reported that between June 1972 and June 1973, these three movies earned more - on a screen-by-screen basis and in terms of gross revenues - than all but a handful of mainstream Hollywood releases. This was the era of "porn chic." Ironically, 1972 was also the year of The Godfather and the beginning of Hollywood's renaissance.

Though the sexual revolution was at first largely a heterosexual phenomenon, it also had a profound effect on homosexual men. The intense stigma attached to homosexuality before Stonewall blocked any open discussion of gay male sexuality and forced gay men's sexual expression deep underground. Consequently, the increasing acceptance of pornography during the sixties and seventies played a significant role in the sexual lives of gay men, even more than it did among comparable groups of heterosexual men. The increasing social acceptance of pornography helped to legitimize visual representations of homoerotic images and gay sex as well. Before 1962, homosexual materials, even those without any sexual content, were considered obscene by definition. The emergence of gay hardcore films provided explicit representations of gay sexual behavior not otherwise available. And the availability of such images helped to affirm the nascent gay identity.

Since most gay men become adults without learning the social and sexual codes of their community, film pornography contributes, as film critic Richard Dyer has observed, to their "education of desire." Erections, orgasms, and the performances of sexually desirable, masculine, and energetic performers helped to create positive images of gay male sexuality and identity. Gay hardcore also reinforced the new style of gay masculinity - it recorded (almost like a "documentary") and codified the new masculine sexual ethos that was emerging among gay men. Gay porn, as a genre, portrayed "straight" men engaging in homosexual acts. It thus served to situate homosexual desire within masculine territory irrespective of heterosexual or gay identities. The commercial success of gay porn emerged from the cultural and economic significance of gay identities, and not - however widespread it may be among males - homosexual desire.

Desire, psychologists have found, is not something given to us out of the blue; it is constructed through fantasy - and it is through fantasy that we learn how to desire. Pornographic movies are passports to a fantasy world where sex exists without the everyday encumbrances of social convention, endurance, or availability. To imagine a sexual performance in a fantasy or to see one in a porn movie enables us to experience sexual excitement without the side effects of anxiety, guilt, or boredom - and for many of us the erotic excitement is heightened when the fantasy includes an element of risk, danger, mystery, or transgression. Porn lets us explore those new fantasies. [Cowie, 132-52]

Beefcake

To some degree, the films of Kenneth Anger, Jack Smith, and Andy Warhol took for granted the gay male erotic culture that had begun to emerge in the 1950s. It started as an underground phenomenon, with small magazines containing photographs of almost nude men being sold on newsstands in the larger cities. These "physique magazines" and the mail-order businesses based upon them were the primary source of erotic male images for gay men.

Bob Mizer, an amateur photographer living in Los Angeles, played a major role in developing the business of publishing homoerotic images. At the time, most photographs of nude men or drawings of erotic scenes were available only through private networks or to "select mail-order customers." Long aware of his attraction to men, Mizer had taken nude photographs of attractive male friends since he was a teenager and developed the film in a closet set up as a dark room.

In response, Mizer suggested to the other physique photographers that they pool their mailing lists and send out their catalogues jointly-thus minimizing the Post Office's opportu- nities for harassment. A couple of years later, when Mizer was experimenting with grouping the pages together, it occurred to him to create a magazine. He decided to call it Physique Pictorial. It featured photographs of young men wearing only pos- ing straps, bathing suits, or loincloths and almost no editorial content - except that is, for the long and deceptively chatty, highly opinionated captions that often functioned implicitly more like editorials. [Nealon, 99-139]

As F. V. Hooven points out in Beefcake, his history of the physique magazine, the magazines were not merely one aspect of a wider gay male culture, "they virtually were gay culture." [Hooven, 74] One writer estimated that the total circulation of the beefcake magazines in those oppressive times was over 750,000 - probably the largest audience of gay male readers and consumers assembled to that point. [Waugh, 215-19]

The cult of male beauty that the physique magazines fostered helped shape gay men's physical ideals before there was any common culture. "A minuscule magazine featuring a bunch of guys with their clothes off but not completely naked may not seem like much of a revolution in the history of sex," argues Hooven. "But to the men who bought them, they were something new and daring. It took courage to purchase one of those little magazines in 1955." [Hooven, 52]

By 1958, Mizer decided to branch out and began to shoot short 8mm black-and-white films of the same young men cavorting by the pool or dressed in Greek tunics. Made in Mizer's Los Angeles home-based studio, a fortress-like com-pound of seven buildings protected by fences lined with razor wire and numerous attack dogs, the films employed simple story lines in which the youthful performers usually played stock characters - athletes, sailors, prisoners, and blue-collar workers. Cowboy and Indian motifs, leopard-skin loincloths, and Grecian pillars were frequent costumes and props. The wrestling film in particular was an AMG staple. [Waugh, 255-73; Watson, 237-38]

By the mid-sixties Mizer had photographed more than five thousand male models, many of them street kids, hustlers, body builders, actors, soldiers, and sailors. One young man who showed up on Mizer's doorstep in 1965 was Joe Dallesandro, a young runaway from upstate New York.

Only sixteen years old, he had escaped from a juvenile home in the Catskills and hitchhiked to California where he supported himself by hustling. Taken in by an African-American man who lived in Watts, Dallesandro also worked as a dishwasher in a pizza parlor. He was an attractive and well-built youth. Apparently, "an admirer" had suggested that he contact AMG to earn a little extra money posing. He told Mizer that he was nineteen years old and gave his occupation as "short order cook." His greatest ambition was to own his own Italian restaurant. Mizer taught him how to oil his body, comb and part his hair, and thrust his hips forward in order to show off his abs. In Dallesandro's one session with him, Mizer shot twenty minutes of film as well as numerous stills.

By the mid-sixties, virtually all of the physique studios, many of them based in Los Angeles where models were plentiful, had faced legal prosecution for obscenity. Mizer was extremely cautious and declared publicly that he had never photographed frontal nudity and had managed for a long time to avoid any legal problems. After his death the man who bought the AMG archives revealed that Mizer had actually photographed men frontally nude and made hardcore sex films.

Prostitution and nude modeling for artists and photographers have a long shared history. Mizer regularly recommended AMG models to other photographers and to "collectors" even though he must have realized that the young men were probably being hired for sex. But since he had never directly benefited from the exchange of sex for money from any of his referrals, he did not consider himself vulnerable. At the same time, over the years he had developed an elaborate set of codes to summarize information about each of his mod- els: temperament, honesty, and physical traits, as well as sex- ual characteristics and interests. He offered the key to the code to various "trusted" customers. Nevertheless, the secret code seemed suspicious to the LAPD Vice Squad, which arrested him for running a prostitution ring. He was convicted and, though he never revealed it to anyone, he seems to have spent some time in 1968 in jail-the very profitable Physique Picto- rial failed to appear throughout most of 1968. By the time he returned to his studio, the world of gay male pornography had dramatically changed. [Hooven, 124]

For years, homosexuals in Los Angeles had lived lives of secrecy, pervaded by fear. The LAPD had systematically harassed, entrapped, arrested, and brutally beaten the city's gay men and lesbians. On New Year's Eve 1966, for example, patrons at the Black Cat on Sunset Boulevard, many dressed in drag after the annual costume party at New Faces, another gay bar up the street, were attacked by undercover and uniformed vice cops after a number of customers exchanged the customary kisses with one another at midnight. Numerous patrons were brutally beaten and more than a dozen arrested and forced to lie face down on the sidewalk until squad cars arrived to take them away. Several plainclothes officers chased one patron back to New Faces, where they trampled the woman owner and beat the bartenders unconscious; one was hospitalized for more than a week. The hospitalized bartender was charged with assault and the men who kissed were charged with lewd conduct. A jury found them all guilty.

On February 11, 1967, L.A.'s first gay demonstration to protest police brutality took place. Organized by P.R.I.D.E. (Personal Rights in Defense and Education), an organization of younger gay men and lesbians, this event occurred more than two years before the famous demonstrations protesting a police raid of the Stonewall in Greenwich Village in New York City that launched the gay liberation movement in June 1969. [Dawes, 60-61; Faderman & Timmons, 154, 156-57]

In early 1969, Tom DeSimone, a young film professional in his early thirties, went to see the gay program at the Park. A graduate of the UCLA film program, he had worked for several years in the film industry as an editor and had directed a low- budget exploitation horror movie.

"I was very disappointed" with films shown at the Park, he recalled later. "I remember seeing a lot of young kids in them jumping around on pogo sticks and other such nonsense. The quality of the films was terrible. They were badly photographed and the projection was lousy.... I wanted to make one of these films and really show some quality work." [Siebenand, 50] Sayles suggested that the young man shoot a pilot short to see if he could handle shooting sex.

DeSimone's first film for Signature was The Collection. Far beyond the sentimental style of Pat Rocco's movies or the boisterous boyishness of Bob Mizer's wrestling films, it told the story of a gay man who kidnapped young men and kept them locked in cages for his sexual pleasure. While there was nudity and simulated sex, there were no erections. Nevertheless the theater was routinely harassed by the police because of the S/M-styled subject matter. Later it was even cited by the very liberal U.S. Commission on Obscenity and Pornography in 1970 as an unhealthy example of pornographic films. [DeSi- mone, Manshots, 6/93, 12]

The shift to hardcore raised another challenge: developing the professional technique and conventions for filming explicit sex acts. The gay soft-core films shown in the Park and other theaters had barely moved beyond frontal nudity and kissing. Some of the physique photographers such as Bruce of L.A. or Bob Mizer had made 8mm hardcore shorts for special customers with oral and anal penetration - but they were not shown in theaters.

Making hardcore was against the law, according to Captain Jack Wilson of the LAPD: "You cannot make a hardcore film without violating the prostitution laws. When you pay actors to engage in sex or oral copulation, you've violated the laws. You've solicited individuals to engage in prostitution by asking them to exchange sex for money." [T&Z, 127-28]

Because hardcore producers in the early seventies operated outside the law, many were fly-by-night operations. "Stories [were] written on matchbook covers and dialogue is made up by performers more noted for looks than talent," one producer observed at the time. "Filming takes place on a single day, and the results are sometimes little more than records of sexual activity framed by the collective sexual fantasies of the peo- ple who film and edit one film a week, every week of the year." [T&Z, 127-28]

The switchover to hardcore dramatically altered how sex movies would be made. Tom DeSimone believed that having to perform "real" sex changed who would be cast in hardcore movies. "When you get into hardcore," he noted, "you are dealing with a different class of people. You can't get actors or actresses anymore, but pimps and whores." [Siebenand, 85] Sex films were no longer merely products made on the margins of the Hollywood film industry - they were both outside the law and outside the film industry.

Late one night in 1970, after a rehearsal for a new show, director and choreographer Wakefield Poole, Poole's boyfriend, the show's composer, and its lyricist decided to go the Park-Miller Theatre to see an all-male porn film. The Park-Miller was the New York outpost of Shan Sayles's chain of porn theaters- where some of the hardcore movies produced in Los Angeles were shown.

It turned out to be a disappointing evening and for Poole a somewhat jarring experience. Unlike the dark and cruisey theaters that screened straight porn, the lights inside the Park-Miller were bright enough that the theater's customers could actually read; indeed one patron, Poole reported, was reading The New York Times. According to Poole, there was no sex going on between the patrons because the policę repeatedly patrolled it. Highway Hustler was the main feature that night. It portrayed a young man hitchhiking, who is picked up and taken to a motel where he is fucked while being held at knifepoint.

Afterward they wondered aloud whether it was possible to make a hardcore film that was more erotic and that wasn't degrading.

"Hell," Poole exclaimed, "I've got the camera Peter gave me. Maybe I should try. Just for the fun of it. Who wants to be in it?"

No one volunteered, but Poole wouldn't forget about it.

Sex on the Beach

Like many other gay men, Wakefield Poole had come to New York "in search of something." He was a "settler," to use New Yorker writer E. B. White's term: "It was the settlers who gave New York its passion."

Poole grew up in the South, but moved to New York City as soon as he could to pursue a career as a dancer. For a number of years he toured with the Ballets Russes, the American-based successor to Serge Diaghilev's famous Paris-based original. In New York's highly competitive theatrical and dance world, Poole achieved middling success performing in and choreo- graphing Broadway musicals. He had worked with Noel Coward, Marlene Dietrich, Liza Minelli, Bob Fosse, and Stephen Sondheim.

When his lover Peter gave Poole a 16mm movie camera as a gift, almost immediately he began to experiment with it. Inspired by several amateur movies made by Stephen Sondheim shown at parties and other social occasions, Poole created a series of multimedia dance events using light projections and film in addition to more traditional stage elements. He had also shot a short film in homage to Andy Warhol after finding a painting of himself in one of Warhol's shows.

Several months after their outing to the Park Miller, Poole and his lover Peter were invited out to Fire Island Pines to stay with friends. A narrow strip of sand and shrubbery along the southern coast of Long Island, Fire Island was in the process of becoming a mythic landscape. "Fire Island was for madness," wrote Andrew Holleran in his novel Dancer from the Dance, "for hot nights, kisses, and herds of stunning men: a national game preserve annually replenished by men each summer arrived from every state in the Union..." [206-7] In Faggots, Larry Kramer's portrait of gay life in New York City during the early seventies, his protagonist is overwhelmed by Fire Island Pines: "He wasn't ready for such beauty, such potential, such unlim- ited choice. The place scared him half to death." [Kramer, 224] Outdoor cruising and al fresco sex were endemic.

Cherry Grove on Fire Island, the tiny neighboring community to the south of the Pines, had been a well-known holiday destination of homosexual actors, writers, and artists since the 1930s and a predominantly gay community, making it "America's first gay and lesbian town." The poet W. H. Auden and his partner Chester Kallman regularly came out to the Grove in the early forties. They were joined by an array of famous gay and lesbian artists and writers, among them Carson McCullers, Janet Flanner, Benjamin Britten and his partner Peter Pears, Christopher Isherwood, Lincoln Kirstein, Patricia Highsmith, Jane Bowles, Tennessee Williams, and Truman Capote. [Newton]

Poole and his partner made plans to spend several months on Fire Island, and it was during this time that he decided he would make his erotic movie that summer. The acute sexual tension on the island and its stunning beauty provided Poole with the germinal idea. [...]

Once he had formulated his idea and begun to script it in his mind, he also thought about the casting for it. At first he asked Tom and Michael, the friends with whom Poole was staying, if they would play the two men in the first scene. They agreed, but almost immediately had second thoughts. Hours later Poole ran into a man named Dino who worked in a little gift shop at the hotel in the Pines.

"The three of us had been flirting for weeks," Poole recalled. "I suddenly turned to him and asked if he'd like to be in a film with Peter. They both looked a bit startled, but moments later we agreed to shoot the next day at 6 a.m. I spent the rest of the afternoon thinking about what I was going to do the following day. I rolled a few joints, loaded my camera and I was ready." [Poole, 150]

Over the next few months, Poole edited the scene into a fifteen-minute movie. When he showed it to a group of friends, they claimed that it was the best porn movie they'd seen. Marvin Shulman, his business manager, offered to invest into expanding it into a feature-length movie. As he began to sketch two new scenes, Dino decided that he wanted to be paid $2,000 for his participation. Poole chose to recast the scene and reshoot it.

The First Gay Porn Superstar

Boys in the Sand owes a large degree of its success to Casey Donovan (Culver's nom de porn) - not only because of his outstanding sexual performances; in the opinion of many viewers at the time, his physical charm, poise, and acting ability contributed to the movie's success. His performance and stage presence on top of his role behind the scenes - his engagement with the whole project, his casting suggestions, and the support he gave to the other performers were decisive.

Boys in the Sand catapulted Casey Donovan into a unique position as the first gay porn star. Characterized as a "gay-liberated Robert Redford, the all-American male," he resembled and aptly symbolized the newly liberated gay man living in New York City during the 1970s. Blond and blue-eyed, with a well-toned body and absolutely radiant smile, Donovan exuded sex appeal and communicated an almost irresistible charisma. Once the film opened in other cities across the country, he quickly became a national celebrity. No other performer, in gay soft-core or hardcore films, had succeeded or even approached the renown that he had so quickly achieved.

Soon after Boys opened, in February 1972, After Dark published a headshot of Donovan and brief mention of his appearance in Boys in the Sand; then in March it offered an upper body shot of Donovan while referring to a recent theatrical appearance; finally in July, Donovan appeared on the cover with a spread inside. "It was the talk of New York," Donovan told friends. [Edmonson, 108] After Dark was an essential bridge that allowed Casey Donovan to cross over from the pornographic fantasy world of Boys in the Sand to that of fashionable show-biz glamour - and back again.

Within weeks of Boys in the Sand's premier, Jerry Douglas, a young playwright and off-Broadway director who had directed a couple of nude plays (a somewhat unique 1960s specialty), was approached by a director of TV commercials to make a gay pornographic film. Producing a hardcore film was still considered such a taboo project that the film's backers asked Douglas to not reveal the production company's name to anyone, to memorize the firm's address and telephone number, and to never put anything in writing. Though Douglas went on to shoot the movie, the contract he requested was repeatedly promised but never delivered.

Because theaters showing sexually explicit films were not quite legitimate, and since making hardcore films for theatrical release was still a new business, there were few established firms without Mafia ties distributing the movies. There was no guarantee that the filmmaker would be paid his share of the box office, and there was no way to prevent the theater owner from duplicating the print, returning the original, and continuing to run the film without the filmmaker's knowledge. Moreover, the wear and tear on the prints meant expensive repairs to them each time they were returned-if they were returned. All contributed to the difficulty and high cost of scheduling features theatrically. With no reliable distribution, producers like Poole and Douglas were at a distinct disadvantage compared to theater owners who produced their own hardcore films.

Falcon Takes Flight

Chuck Holmes moved to San Francisco from Indiana when he was promoted to the position of western sales manager for a company that manufactured prefabricated homes. During the recession of the early 1970s the market for prefabricated houses experienced a downturn and when the company closed its San Francisco office in 1972, he was out of a job. John Summers, whom he had met through J. Brian, suggested that he start a mail-order business selling gay hardcore films.

He borrowed $4,200 and purchased a handful of already-made films from John Travis (mostly his Telstar shorts) - one of which was a gay short with legendary straight hardcore performer John Holmes and launched Falcon Studios in April 1972. To give Holmes a customer base, Summers sold him a copy of John Travis's mailing list. [Manshots, Summers 3/89, 4] Chuck Holmes, as it turned out, had been one of the customers Travis had met on his road trips. When they met in Cincinnati, Holmes was selling prefabricated houses.

Holmes decided to call to call his company Falcon Studios.

"I wanted something that had an image of ... fierceness and power and grace and was natural.... I thought a falcon represented that. It was a bird of prey. With sexual acts - at least the way we make 'em here at Falcon - there is generally someone who is is the predator and someone who's the prey. Now I don't mean that in a harmful way, but by the end of a Falcon film, somebody has snatched someone and given it to 'em good." [Douglas, Manshots, 1/89, 22]

Business was slow at first- in part because the supply of new product was limited. He relied on the loops other companies and producers made. But soon he was producing his own 8mm shorts. After Travis closed down his own business, Holmes, who called Travis "one of the best natural gay sex videographers born onto this earth," offered him a job shooting the 8mm hardcore loops for Falcon. [Douglas, Manshots, 1/89]

Travis shot the first movie Falcon made-a two-part loop called Muscle, Sweat and Brawn (Falcon 508, reissued as FVP010), which featured one of the early stars of gay porn, Dean Chasson. As someone who'd grown up in the Midwest, Holmes wanted to recreate his own fantasy by shooting a scene of sexual action outdoors in California. Holmes shot the stills while Travis handled the 16mm camera. In Holmes's words, "I was a baby in this business. I kept my mouth shut and my ears open." [Douglas, Manshots, 1/89, 19]

Along with Chassen, Muscle, Sweat and Brawn starred Ray Todd, who also went on to become a first-generation gay porn star. Chasson (sometimes spelled Chasen or Chassen) had appeared in Brian's Seven in a Barn (1972) as well as numerous loops for Matt Sterling's Dimension. He also made many low-budget "all-male beaver films." Holmes also hired him for two other early Falcon loops: Fourgy (FVP 012), Taste My Love, Parts 1 and 2 (Falcon 504 and 505), and Ace in the Hole (FVP 055). He was one of few models of the period to do well for himself financially, saving money from his appearances in porn and escort work and investing in real estate. By the end of the eighties, he owned a vineyard in southern California and rental property. [Douglas, Manshots, 1/89, 19]

Ray Todd appeared in Jaguar's epic dramatic feature film The Light from the Second Story Window, which also featured gay porn star Jim Cassidy. In addition to stars like Dean Chasson and Ray Todd, Holmes also hired Jimmy Hughes before the latter's arrest and prison sentence, as well as big-dicked straight porn star John Holmes (no relation to Chuck) for several of his rare all-male hardcore scenes. Most of Falcon's loops starred handsome and sexually energetic young men who went by nondescript names like Tom, Dan, Gary, Dave, Kenny, Rod, Phillip, Michael, Bill, and Pete. Since there were few publications that reviewed 8mm loops, most of the young men who became porn stars in the early seventies achieved their fame through theatrical releases, not via 8mm mail-order purchases. Theatrical shows of gay hardcore movies were much more likely to be reviewed in the new gay newspapers that emerged in the early seventies.

Falcon followed the erotic formulas developed by J. Brian, John Travis, and Matt Sterling - perhaps stressing sexual action even more than Travis or Sterling. Most of the Falcon loops portrayed sex scenes in a straightforward manner with simple production values. Lighting, always the most difficult-to-manage production factor, varied greatly from film to film; there were almost never expensive or exotic locations; and the loops rarely showed dramatic or sexual action that extended over a long period of time. These were, after all, only short movies, consisting of one scene no more than fifteen or twenty minutes long. For the most part, they were built around an anecdote, never a full-fledged story. They merely provided a setup that created a charged atmosphere in which the sexual action could unroll. The sex almost always involved fellatio and anal penetration. The cum shots were not yet formalized as the ending of a scene, nor did they always take place after fucking - but sometimes the performers might have several orgasms at different points in the film.

From the beginning, Holmes clearly envisioned the Falcon brand of sexual action to be "fast, urgent, desperate sexual contact between two or more persons, as desperate as we can capture on film or video." And that remained his goal: "The basic formula at Falcon has not changed ... and I do not foresee it ever changing." [Douglas, Manshots, 1/89, 19] Casting and the performers' grooming were also important to him:

"Nobody could have dirty feet in a Falcon movie. Because I come from the Midwest, and they'd have these VFW stags where they'd have these porno movies and all the men and all the women would always have dirty feet. And I always thought, 'Those lazy bastards, why don't they wash those people's feet? It's distracting."

Holmes wanted to see the boy next door "who looked like they wouldn't ever do anything but be the best little fellows, the little businessmen, the good members of their community, and all of a sudden, they'd just kiss each other, and all hell would break loose, and they'd just try to fuck one another to death."[Unzipped, 21]

Holmes adopted a business model built on aggressive pricing and marketing policies. Falcon set its prices considerably above those for other companies' 8mm loops. The high prices Falcon charged for films, and later for its videos, went far beyond what was necessary to support its costs of production.

From the beginning, Falcon operated strictly as a mail-order business. Though hardcore theatrical releases garnered publicity and prestige, theatrical distribution was both more expensive and riskier than the production of loops for mail-order distribution. "We didn't want to let sixteen millimeter prints out of our hands," he explained, "that's all you needed to make an inter-negative and make all the eight millimeter and Super 8 copies you ever wanted. And back then, there were a lot of people in this business who did a lot of illegal duping." [Manshots, 2/93, 72]

Falcon's policy stressing its mail-order business catered to customers who were older and wealthier than the audiences who attended theater showings - more closeted as well. They were also more likely to live outside the metropolitan areas that had large and growing gay communities.

Blockbuster

Throughout the seventies John Travis, Matt Sterling, Falcon Studios, and numerous other producers of gay male porn incorporated a great deal of San Francisco's gay sexual culture. The scale and intensity of the city's sexual scene had created a distinctive world of shared experience. Anonymous sex in a communal setting - in a sex club or a bathhouse or at an orgy - led to a community based on pleasure rather than politics.

Performing in porn was merely an extension of the communal sex in which so many men took part. The city's pornographers often took their scenarios and images from the city's gay sex life. They recruited performers from the community and they translated their own sexual experiences to the screen.

In the fall of 1977, Chuck Holmes met with his production and marketing staff to discuss upcoming projects. Falcon's cameraman of the moment, Colin Meyer, a recent graduate of the film program at San Francisco State University, suggested that they make a series of short loops putting "all the biggest porn icons at that time into one movie" - three "generations" of the top gay porn stars.

Very quickly the Falcon team decided that Al Parker, who had been a huge hit as a Colt model and whom they had already used in Weekend Lock-up (Falcon Nos. 610-11, FVP 004) and Rocks and Hard Places (Help Wanted, FVP 019), should be one of the three. They also chose Dick Fisk, a young performer who had recently also made a number of loops for them: Steam Heat, One to One: The Runner (Falcon Nos. 621-22, Steam Heat, FV018), and Help Wanted (FVP 019). Finally, the third choice was obvious to Holmes: "We knew we'd have to have Casey Donovan, because of Boys in the Sand. He was the original first gay porn icon."

If Casey Donovan was the linchpin, Al Parker was the top dog. Donovan and Parker had never met, but Donovan considered Parker one of his "porno dream men." Almost ten years younger than Donovan, Parker was born Andrew Okun in 1952. Parker seemed destined for porn since the day when as a fifteen-year-old he stumbled across a tattered magazine that included beefcake photos from the legendary Colt Studios. Around the same time, Parker attended the famous concert at Woodstock, where he spent practically the entire weekend in the back of a hearse having sex with a hairy Hells Angels biker and though barely in attendance at the concert itself, he managed to show up on the poster for the movie.

The Other Side of Aspen had started out as a series of loops, but once Holmes decided to create a framework linking the scenes it quickly morphed into Falcon's first feature film. It resembled Boys in the Sand in some ways - four sexual scenes with no plot set in a vacation setting. And ironically, once again Casey Donovan played the same role linking the scenes together by his sexual presence and energy.

Falcon ramped up its marketing strategy by sending out a "pre-mailing" with reservation cards to its best customers. Reservations poured back in. Then a brochure was mailed; the response to the brochure was also phenomenal, producing the highest revenues in the history of the company up to that point - five to seven times greater than ever before. By 1993, 45,000 copies of The Other Side of Aspen video cassette had been sold - making it the best-selling gay porn film up to that time.

The Other Side of Aspen was Falcon's first blockbuster, and like all blockbusters it accounted for the lion's share of Falcon's earnings. Its explosive impact marked a turning point for a company selling its films only through mail-order transactions - unwittingly preparing it for the coming age of the VCR. The success of Aspen transformed Falcon into a different sort of company - one that began to increase its production values and adopt other policies such as signing performers as exclusives - that made it into the powerhouse of gay porn companies. With Aspen, Falcon discovered the Midas formula; it went on to produce four sequels in its Aspen series - often starring the most popular performers of the day.

Falcon Studios was built on the gay macho fantasy in the shorts and feature length films it made in the 1970s. The studio eschewed anything that appeared campy or less than rigorously masculine. But The Other Side of Aspen was a milestone for the gay porn film industry as well. It signaled the culmination of the gay macho sexual ethos, the confirmation of the ideal gay male body - young, a swimmer's build, no tattoos, and little hair - and the codification of gay porn movies as a genre.

William Higgins was a late bloomer. He was approaching thirty-five and had never had sex with either a man or a woman. He was running a stained glass business in Houston where he taught housewives how to make stained glass decorations for their homes. He explored his sexuality by going to theaters to watch gay porn, but he thought the movies were so bad that he decided he wanted go to California and try to make better ones. To prepare himself, he bought a copy of Stephen Ziplow's recently published The Filmmaker's Guide to Pornography (New York: Drake, 1977), which provided a checklist of the various sexual acts that should be included in a "straight" porn film (masturbation, penis-to-vagina sex, lesbianism, oral sex, three-ways, orgies, and anal sex) along with instructions on how best to film them. He also purchased a secondhand 16mm movie camera. But before going he also thought he should start having sex, so he started cruising the gay clubs. He especially liked the Midtowne Spa, a popular bathhouse in Houston.

In early 1978, Higgins set out for San Francisco, though he only got as far as Los Angeles. There, he headed for Hollywood because someone had told him that that was the gay area of town. As he drove down Santa Monica Boulevard, lined with hustlers "hitchhiking," he knew he was in the right place. Finally he touched down at the French Market, long one of the most popular restaurants for gay men in the West Hollywood area.

At the restaurant, Higgins met a man and told him he'd specifically come out to California make a gay porn movie. The man encouraged him: "Well, okay, let's go do it." The man helped Higgins to find a cast, and they shot the film in his apartment. They also brought in Steve Scott, who'd made some straight and gay hardcore films, to edit it - in the credits Scott was listed as the director. The film was called A Married Man. It starred Jack Wrangler - one of the leading stars at that time.

The filming went badly in many ways. None of the three principals got along. They disagreed about shooting, performance, and editing. Higgins had virtually no previous experi- ence with photography or filming. The film had been loaded backwards in the camera; it was also underexposed and shot with a red filter to simulate a gaudy set that was not available. Nor did he have enough sexual experience - he had never seen two men fucking close up until he directed A Married Man. Though Monroe Beehler's Century Theater booked the film, the owner of New York's Adonis Theater declined because he thought Jack Wrangler was "overexposed."

It was such an unpleasant experience that Higgins decided to call it quits. He then took a job as a clerk at a bathhouse in the San Fernando Valley and settled down in Venice Beach with a young man he'd met. Venice Beach, with its scantily dressed surfers and shirtless young men roller skating, proved to be too titillating a sexual scene for Higgins to ignore: "I was walking around Venice Beach and I said, 'Oh, this would really be an interesting movie.'... And I started shooting some footage with film we had left over from making A Married Man." [Hig- gins, Manshots, 12/90, 8]

The footage shot sat on the shelf until Monroe Beehler called.

"Wow! We really liked A Married Man, and I'm looking for a picture as my big Christmas feature which is, you know, an important thing. Why don't you make another film?" [Higgins, Manshots, 12/90, 8]

Higgins quickly agreed and put together a film he called The Boys of Venice (1979), the film that launched him as a director. Set along the beach in Venice, the movie was built around the youth culture that had emerged there during the sixties. Higgins incorporated the roller-skating fad into the movie. The opening scene of the film takes place in a small bathroom with two performers having sex and fucking with roller skates on - a virtuoso performance.

The Boys of Venice was a tremendous box office success and decisively launched Higgins on his career. He set up his own companies to handle production (Laguna Pacific) and distribution (Catalina), and went on to become the most prolific gay porn filmmaker in the United States. Over the next five years, he made twenty movies - most of them major moneymakers. He set new production standards for gay pornography. His films codified the California aesthetic - called "the William Higgins tradition" in promotional copy on box covers - of slender, generally blond young men in the outdoors, hiking, surfing, at rodeos, or on the beach: the look that J. Brian had initiated with his publication of Golden Boys. And he launched the careers of a whole new generation of major porn stars in the 1980s among them Kip Noll, Leo Ford, Lance, J. W. King, Jon King, Derrick Stanton, John Davenport, Jeff Quinn, and Kevin Williams.

Though Boys of Venice was filmed without a lead, Kip Noll emerged as the star of the movie. He was the first major "twink" porn star. In fact he personified the twink - an attractive young gay man with a slender build and little or no body hair.

Originally recommended to Higgins by Monroe Beehler, Noll was not new to gay porn. He had performed before in a series of loops for director Mark Reynolds. Generally assumed to be straight, Noll actually seduced Reynolds on their first meeting.

"When Kip Noll got off the plane, he really didn't look that good. He had a look about him that was kind of butch, but not that attractive. Part of it was his having a little moustache that just didn't work.... Overall, he just didn't look like he would photograph that well."

Reynolds was about to send him back home,

"But ... [I thought] I ought to at least interview him.... The first thing he did was say, 'Let me show you what I look like.' And he dropped his pants, which made me take a second look at him.... He had one of the prettiest cocks I've ever seen. Really. He wasn't hard, but was hanging about six or seven inches soft. At that point, he said, 'Why don't you take your clothes off?' Now I try to keep these things very aboveboard and businesslike - but he insisted, mainly I think because he wanted to show me how he could perform. So reluctantly, I took my clothes off. Now, I've been around-but he proceeded to do things to me that were erotically exciting.... And of course he had the right equipment. It was an incredibly hot scene that to this day has not been topped." [Reynolds, Manshots, 11/88, 7]

For many, Kip Noll was the iconic William Higgins star. Over the next three years they made five other films together: Kip Noll and the Westside Boys (1979), Pacific Coast Highway (1981), Class of 84, Part 2 (1981), Brothers Should Do It (1981), and Kip Noll, Superstar, a compilation of scenes from the first five movies that included a new scene with butch power bottom Jon King, one of Higgins's latest discoveries. Over the course of these movies, Noll's appearance ranged from the twink at the disco club to the somewhat rougher and scruffy wild boy of West Coast Highway. One of his most famous scenes in the film finds him hiking along a dirt road in the wilds of California. Jeremy Scott and Jack Burke drive by in a jeep. They stop to invite him to join them for a joint and some sex. Scott and Noll take turns fucking Burke on the front of the jeep. Burke comes all over the windshield, which he then cleans off by turning on the windshield wipers.

In 1983, Higgins released Class Reunion. Modeled on J. Brian's Pool Party (1972), Higgins's favorite porn movie, he decided to use "all the stars from the past that happen to be around" and capped it off by giving away a motorcycle in a raffle. Invitations were sent out, but Higgins had no idea how many performers might eventually show up for the shoot.

"We shot on a Saturday afternoon at this big mansion out in Glendale. We hired buses and everything. And actually there were some people in there who snuck in that I'd never shot before or seen since. We had three cameramen. Well you didn't wait for a hard-on. Everybody paired up with someone else. They sort of found their own element and they went off and did their own thing. So when you got enough footage on someone, or his dick went down, then you just looked over: 'Oh well, that's interesting,' and you turned the camera over there.... [W]e shot the whole thing in six hours.... [I]t was a real party, fun atmosphere. It was the funnest film I ever shot. And also, I had the most criticism of any film I've ever done, because right after that the AIDS crisis hit. It didn't hit during the film, it hit after the film came out and they said, 'He's promoting AIDS by having these big orgies." [Higgins, Manshots, 2/91, 32]

The sheer joy and sexual abundance of Class Reunion perfectly summed up the era of sexual exuberance that existed before AIDS struck. Orgies are communal events. The social conventions and distinctions that normally constrain the sex- ual free-for-all disappear. Potentially, everyone present is sexually available. Class Reunion celebrated a special moment in American gay life, though with tragic irony it was one that was about to end. In early 2006, Unzipped magazine commemorated Class Reunion in its list of the "Unzipped 100: The Greatest Gay Porn Films" as "one of the greatest all-male orgies in skin flick memory." [Unzipped, 25]

Chapter Six: Sex in the Ruins

[...]

The discovery of what eventually became AIDS, a new sexually transmitted disease, a disease that destroyed the very mechanism that normally protected the body from diseases, created a concatenation of crises - medical, social, and political.

The AIDS epidemic also provoked a crisis about sex itself within the gay male community, not only a crisis about sex in general, but also about the kinds of sex gay men in particular engaged in - fellatio, fisting, anal intercourse, casual sex with strangers and with multiple partners. However, even before the identification of the virus that causes AIDS, sexual promiscuity was believed by many both within and outside the gay community to be the most likely aspect of the gay lifestyle responsible. Was the sex gay men engaged in "inherently" dangerous or bad? Could gay men continue to engage in sex at all if they risked death from AIDS? How could gay men have sex in an epidemic of a sexually transmitted disease? The debates both inside and outside the gay community produced fatal displacements - many of those most concerned failed to address either the practical actions one could take to prevent spreading the disease or how best to defend gay male sexuality in the situation. As Leo Bersani pointed out, attention "turned away from the kinds of sex people practice to a moralistic discourse about promiscuity." [Bersani, 220]

The crisis about sex also created a profound sense of paranoia. "Sex is just a completely different thing now," porn star/director Al Parker exclaimed.

"The entire time you're having sex you're thinking: 'I'm having sex with everybody this person ever had sex with. I wonder what he's done and where he's been and if he's positive or negative. I wonder if I'm giving him anything,' If you can keep a hardon while all this is going on in your head, you're better than I am." [Fenwick, 36]

Since the AIDS epidemic had begun in 1981, the public debate about gay men's sexual activities had grown increasingly virulent - their sexual promiscuity was often targeted as a public menace: in particular, the danger posed by men engaging in anal intercourse and the possibility of multiple orgasms with many partners who spread the disease by switching roles in anal sex from the man penetrated to the one who penetrates - the sexually "versatile" man who was, erotically, the ideal man of the seventies.

Since the late seventies, anal sex had become the narrative focal point of gay porn. While it is difficult to document, the shift away from oral sex as the normative activity to anal sex was one of the major changes that accompanied the sexual revolution of the sixties and seventies. And one of the most notable developments of gay male sexuality since the Stonewall riots was the dramatic increase of sexual versatility - of moving from being the one penetrating to the one penetrated, from top to bottom.

By 1985, the growing furor over gay men's sexuality - explicitly promiscuity and more implicitly their sexual versatility - caused many producers of gay porn to re-examine how sex between men should be represented in erotic videos. AIDS activists and gay leaders argued that porn should help "eroticize" safer sex. Porn stars could serve as role models for condom use.

By 1985, the growing furor over gay men's sexuality explic- itly promiscuity and more implicitly their sexual versatility- caused many producers of gay porn to re-examine how sex between men should be represented in erotic videos. AIDS activists and gay leaders argued that porn should help "eroticize" safer sex. Porn stars could serve as role models for condom use.

Directors and producers of porn videos hesitated to use condoms because they believed that showing performers taking precautions and using condoms would inhibit the sexual arousal porn films were meant to provoke. Of course, the debate over whether oral sex without a condom was risky or not also made the companies hesitant to portray safe sex extensively. Nevertheless, they paid some lip service to these concerns. In 1988, Chris Mann, the vice president of Catalina Videos, announced that "AIDS became a factor about three years ago. We've really taken a hard look at the situation. We've had to. This is something that drastically affects the entire nature of our business." [Fenwick, 36]

Directors and producers of porn videos hesitated to use condoms because they believed that showing performers taking precautions and using condoms would inhibit the sexual arousal porn films were meant to provoke. Of course, the debate over whether oral sex without a condom was risky or not also made the companies hesitant to portray safe sex extensively. Nevertheless, they paid some lip service to these concerns. In 1988, Chris Mann, the vice president of Catalina Videos, announced that "AIDS became a factor about three years ago. We've really taken a hard look at the situation. We've had to. This is something that drastically affects the entire nature of our business." [Fenwick, 36]

For activists and community leaders, the importance of porn stars acting as role models for safer sex blended with concerns that sexual activities on the set posed risks to the performers. Most people in the industry believed that the sex that took place on porn sets was relatively safe. Since performers must pull their dicks out for the obligatory cum shot, there was no need for performers to come inside someone's ass or mouth. Nonoxynol-9 - then widely believed to be an effective safety precaution - was widely utilized whenever anal sex was performed. Industry insiders frequently argued that most performers understood the risk and willingly chose to take it in order to create fantasies that would encourage many viewers to stay home rather than engage in high-risk sex with another person.

As Mann explained,

"What we would like to do is have the erotic industry be a positive influence... not a negative one. The public knows there's a health crisis. We show them how [to have sex safely] and still make it a fun, joyous experience. But part of the celebration of being gay is the celebration of your sexuality. If we did only safe-sex films, the erotic value would truly be gone. After all, when you watch a regular film you don't go out and drive your car the way those people do in the street chases: It's a fantasy, not real life. I would not want to create videos that depict truly unsafe sex - the exchange of bodily fluids. And we do employ safe-sex techniques in the production of our videos. We just don't depict it as such." [Fen- wick, 37]

For twelve or thirteen years, sex among gay men - as well as the sex, both portrayed and actually engaged in, in gay hardcore porn movies - had experienced only the limits set by a sexually repressive society. There were no "natural" limits that threatened anyone's life; it almost seemed that in sex, everything was possible. AIDS suddenly put on limits. Now sex, especially anal sex, had potentially fatal consequences. Porn producers seemed loath to accept those limits; to portray safer sex in pornographic movies was to accept those limits. Did risking death make sex without a condom more sexually exciting? So producers of porn seemed to think.

Various studios countered with claims that they screened the actors who appeared in their movies and used only "healthy" performers. "We use healthy people," Mann said.

In an effort to avoid losing their audience with performances that only consisted of safer sex, studios first tried a more didactic approach. Starting in 1987, both Catalina and Falcon Studios put a three-minute instructional trailer produced by Gay Men's Health Crisis (GMHC) on their video tapes. Catalina also included a note that stated: "Laboratory studies have shown that using a lubricant with a concentration of 4-5% or higher on nonoxynol-9 can kill many viruses and greatly reduce the chance of infection from sexually transmitted diseases." Even as late as 1988, condoms are evident in only a minority of the gay pornographic movies released. Most producers of hardcore videos relied on nonoxynol-9 for protection from HIV and other STDs. [Douglas, R.W. Richards, Manshots, 9/88, 23]

Many producers and studios left safe sex up to the performers themselves. Director J. D. Slater, who adopted the laissez-faire approach, said,

"As far as safe sex in my work is concerned, I will not preach or morally judge. I am simply a documentarian of sexual incidents. What an actor does is completely his own decision. I let an actor do exactly what he wants any way he wants to do it. Some directors think it's their job to instruct the public on safe sex, and for them, that's great, but that's not my responsibility." [Burger, 79]

There had always been a group of gay men who were ambivalent about porn. They believed that porn promoted certain stereotypes of masculinity and represented commodified forms of physical desirability - but with porn increasingly considered a safe alternative to casual sexual encounters, they had come to believe that the AIDS epidemic had to some extent legitimized porn. Porn became another form of "safe sex."

Ironically, while discussions among gay porn producers were taking place, a fierce debate raged in Congress over funding for "AIDS education, information, or prevention materials." [Crimp, 259]

On October 11, 1987, over half a million lesbians, gay men, and their supporters, one of largest demonstrations ever to take place in Washington, D.C., marched both for their civil rights and to protest the Reagan Administration's failure to act promptly to address the AIDS epidemic. The Names Project presented its memorial quilt on the Washington Mall, in which the names of people who had died of AIDS were inscribed in over two thousand panels. It covered the equivalent of two football fields.

Days later, in his introduction to the debate, Senator Jesse Helms from North Carolina dismissed the demonstration as "this mob over here this weekend." He then proceeded to introduce legislation guaranteeing that no AIDS prevention literature or efforts would go to gay communities. The amendment he proposed adding to a Labor, Health and Human Services and Education bill allocating a billion dollars for AIDS research and education sought "[t]o prohibit the use of any funds provided under this Act to the Centers for Disease Control from being used to provide AIDS education, information, or prevention materials and activities that promote, encourage, or condone homosexual sexual activities or the intravenous use of illegal drugs." [Crimp, 259]

Safer for Sodomy

Nevertheless, some insiders were critical of the porn industry's stance. Terry le Grand of Marathon Films declared,

"Producers are very wrong when they say 'We must produce a fantasy for the viewer.' I say 'Bullshit! Fantasy time is over. Fantasy has to stop.' I think the biggest message we can give to people is through videotapes, as long as it's subtly done.... If they see enough movies where people are getting screwed with condoms, then maybe it will become part of their own lives." [Fenwick, 37]

After 1985, commercial producers attempting to be "responsible" and activists and public health educators wanting to be effective adopted similar approaches - they produced explicit safe-sex videos.

As Dave Kinnick, a gay porn reviewer/videographer noted: "The anti-sex backlash of the '80s" in response to the fear of AIDS "had a devastating effect on the nation's bathhouses and x-rated theaters, but it fueled profits in the video industry. People may have stopped having sex, but they certainly hadn't stopped wanting sex. Like bathtub gin during Prohibition, the popularity of videos soared..." [Sadownick, 153; Kinnick, 45]

Casey Donovan was actively involved in several of the early attempts to develop safe sex videos, but otherwise, he saw no need to change his way of life. He continued to hustle and perform in porn movies where condoms were not used.

While sex was the basis of Donovan's professional life, it also continued to be one of the most important activities in his personal life. He seemed to be almost insatiable and would frequently engage in casual sex between appointments with his escorting clients.

Toward the end of 1984, Donovan and Wakefield Poole decided to return to Fire Island and shoot Boys in the Sand II. They both hoped the sequel would revive their sagging fortunes; neither had achieved any great success independently of their first joint venture.

Donovan hoped the sequel might again put him on the covers of magazines and give him national recognition. One friend recalled that "[h]e was more ebullient than ever, and I could clearly see that he was trying to keep in check his fantasies of becoming the man of the moment all over again." [Edmonson, 217-18] But the film wasn't released until two years later - the producer had died of a heart attack on the day Poole started shooting the film, and the ownership of the film stock was the subject of legal battles lasting over two years.

By the time it came out in 1986, there was no buzz or anticipated excitement, no moment of renewed celebrity. The world it came into was quite different from the one the original Boys in the Sand had entered - it was more competitive, in a field created by the new technology of video, and it offered a vision of sex that seemed outdated. In the era already dealing with AIDS, it seemed innocent and naïve.

Boys in the Sand II opens with Donovan and another man having sex in the shrubbery. In the second scene, the famous scene from the first version of Boys in the Sand is reprised, in which Donovan emerges from the bay - only in this film a young Pat Allen emerges from the bay as Donovan returns to the waves - to disappear, almost forever.

Donovan died on August 10, 1987. He never openly acknowledged to anyone that he had AIDS. He appeared to function up until a few weeks before he died. [Edmonson, 224-26]

On March 10, 1987, Larry Kramer stood before a large audience of gay men at New York's Lesbian and Gay Community Center in Greenwich Village. Kramer was the country's most vocal critic of both the federal government's and the gay community's failure to address the AIDS crisis. In 1983, he had founded Gay Men's Health Crisis to provide support and social services for the gay men stricken with the disease; two years later he wrote The Normal Heart - one of the longest running plays ever at the Public Theater - to dramatize the situation behind its establishment.

On that March evening, Kramer read from his 1983 AIDS manifesto, "1,112 and Counting": "Our continued existence depends on just how angry you can get." Four years later, the number of AIDS cases had reached 32,000. While any number of issues spurred his wrath that evening, the tipping point was the overly restrictive drug testing policy of the federal gov- ernment's Food and Drug Administration, which thus far had prevented the development of any medicine to treat HIV/AIDS. He was also exasperated by the failure of Gay Men's Health Crisis to lobby or take an advocacy role.

He appealed to his audience.

"Do we want to start a new organization devoted solely to political action?"

A huge "yes" rose up from the audience.

Two days later more than three hundred people met to found the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power - ACT UP. Their first political act was a large demonstration on Wall Street to protest the lack of corporate initiative on development of drugs to treat HIV/AIDS. In the years that followed, ACT UP gained thousands of members in seventy chapters in the United States and abroad. [Andriote, 185-87].

Requiem

[...]

Joey Yale, who appeared in LA Plays Itself, and who was the lover and business partner of Fred Halsted, died of AIDS on April 18, 1986. He was thirty-six.

J.W. King starred in Brothers Should Do It and These Bases are Loaded with his fictive brother, Jon King. One of the most popular gay porn stars of the late seventies and early eighties, he died of AIDS in Los Angeles on December 5, 1986. He was thirty-one.

Gay porn film director Arthur Bressan died of AIDS on July 28, 1987, at forty-four. His film Pleasure Beach, starring Johnny Dawes, won the first annual Gay Erotic Film Award in 1985.

Casey Donovan died of AIDS in Florida on August 10, 1987. None of his friends or family had known he had AIDS. He was forty-three.

John Holmes, who boasted that he had had more than 1,400 sex partners, died of AIDS on March 13, 1988. He was forty-three.

Photographer Robert Mapplethorpe died of AIDS in a hospital in Boston on March 9, 1989. He was forty-two. After his death, "The Perfect Moment," a controversial retrospective exhibition of his photographs, opened in 1989.

Johnny Dawes, the star of Arthur Bresson's prize-winning Pleasure Beach, died of AIDS on July 25, 1989. He was thirty-four.

As the AIDS epidemic devastated the lives of gay men, more gay men were choosing to stay at home and watch pornography than go out to cruise for sex. At the height of the epidemic, in the fall of 1988, Jerry Douglas launched the first issue of Manshots, a new magazine devoted to covering the gay porn films. [Douglas, Manshots, 9/88, 65] One of the articles in that issue was about safe-sex videos and another was an obituary for porn star Eric Stryker, a fictive brother of Jeff Stryker, who had died from complications of AIDS. It was the first time any publication devoted to erotic photography and porn had published an obituary of a porn star. It was to be a regular feature of Manshots. Douglas felt that it was time for the adult film industry to acknowledge that many performers were dying of AIDS.

In the editorial introduction, Douglas compared the origins of mainstream filmmaking with the development of gay porn:

"During the Twenties, when silent filmmaking was at its zenith, few of its practitioners thought of their work as an art form or imagined one day their 'flickers' would be treasured in museums and archival vaults. Silent filmmaking, if we are to believe the memoirs of Griffith, Chaplin, and especially Sennett, was a carefree, chaotic business in which people were delighted to be paid for being a little bit crazy. Today historians dig with the intensity of archeologists to reconstruct the days and data of this era. We suspect in time the output of the carefree, chaotic business of 'skin flicks' will also achieve the status of treasures, and future historians will likewise try to reconstruct the days of early porn. To that end, this magazine attempts to give some order to the first quarter century of gay erotic filmmaking." [Stallion, 3]

It was the launch of Manshots that set in motion the third phase of Jerry Douglas's career in adult films. In the course of putting together the first year of Manshots, Douglas arranged to interview Dirk Yates, the owner of All Worlds Video. When they met for the interview, Douglas found that Yates was familiar with The Back Row-and Yates offered Douglas the chance to return to directing. Douglas agreed immediately- and he began to plan his first film in fourteen years.

For his first project, Douglas wrote a short script about two brothers and their sexual obsession with each other. Since it was his first film in fourteen years, he sought to make it as "contained" as possible, both thematically and practically; all of the film's action takes place in one house, and only two performers appear in it. Tim Lowe, the lead, was one of the period's most popular stars. Though primarily straight or bisexual, and most frequently a top, Lowe was sexually versatile. Douglas considered him an exceptional performer.

It was unusual for a pornographic film to have only two peformers, but the movie was an immediate hit. A master had returned. The film was nominated for AVN awards in Best Gay Picture, Best Gay Actor, and Best Gay Director, with Lowe winning in the actor category. Yates was especially thrilled because no All Worlds film had ever previously been nominated for, much less won, an AVN award.

More of a Man

The success of Fratrimony inspired Douglas to make another film. Almost immediately, the germ of a new idea began to grow. While at the annual AVN award show in Las Vegas, Douglas had seen Chi Chi LaRue - the drag persona of up-and-coming porn director Larry Paciotti - perform and was stunned by her flamboyant presence and style. Larue was a lavish personality who frequently emceed and sang at industry events. Though they had long had a telephone relationship while Douglas was a magazine editor and LaRue the marketing and promotions manager at Catalina, Douglas had never seen LaRue perform. She had recently left Catalina to direct videos for In Hand Productions. After seeing her performance in Las Vegas, Douglas wanted to build a movie around LaRue, but he asked himself "How do I build a gay porn movie around a large drag queen?"

It came to him over a lunch with LaRue, who brought along a handsome brunette performer named Joey Stefano. It was clear that Paciotti was very much in love with Stefano, while Stefano clearly looked up to LaRue/Paciotti as a mentor.

At lunch that day, Stefano talked about the difficulties he had had coming to terms with his sexuality because of his Catholic background. Stefano's struggles gave Douglas an idea. Just a month earlier, ACT UP had staged a mass demonstration at St. Patrick's Cathedral to protest Archbishop Cardinal O'Connor's outspoken opposition to gay rights and condom use. "During high mass inside the church, angry protestors," as ACT UP members Doug Crimp and Adam Rolston recounted, "forced O'Connor to abandon his sermon."

Within weeks after returning from L.A., Douglas had written a script about a young man's coming to terms with his homosexuality against the backdrop of the Catholic church and AIDS activism. Douglas incorporated some aspects of the relationship between LaRue and Stefano as well.

Douglas felt that More of a Man was "[t]he first real film I made. I think that's the first time I really hit my stride and got it right." All the elements came together: not only Douglas's extensive experience as a playwright and theater director, his pioneering role as a director of erotic films, and his wealth of knowledge of the gay world as a journalist and observer, but also the strong erotic appeal of the actors, and above all the exact and delicate appreciation of the historical forces sweeping across the gay world.

More of a Man sets the sexual action in the actual context of gay male life in the late 1980s - a time overwhelmed by the AIDS epidemic, filled with the fear of sex, and riddled by doubts that AIDS could be stopped. The main characters represent the two poles of gay male sexual life: one, a construction worker, a young man torn by guilt and self-hatred, overwhelmed with a sense of sin and unwilling to identify himself as gay; and the other a jock and a bartender, a self-accepting gay man in a long-term relationship, an AIDS activist. The young construction worker engages in risky sexual encounters with strangers, anonymous sex in public toilets; the activist uses a condom even during sex with his long-term partner.

The film was made within an industry that had hesitated for years to portray explicit sexual action using a condom. Douglas showed that, within the grim historical setting, pow- erful and arousing sex could take place. More of a Man won four awards at the 1990 AVN awards show, including the Best Gay Video, Best Screenplay, Best Performer (Joey Stefano), and Best Non-Sexual Role (Chi Chi LaRue). It was also the first time a major gay film in which condoms were explicitly used had won a major award since the beginning of the epidemic in 1981.

After leaving rehab, Nick put together a modeling portfolio with a photographer in Upper Darby. In 1989, he encountered and impressed gay-porn actor Tony Davis at a Manhattan dance club; Davis would become his mentor in the business. A boastful student of ’70s and ’80s porn megastars, Nick was instantly excited by the prospect of joining the adult-film elite. He dove headfirst into the porn industry after meeting on-the-rise director Chi Chi LaRue during a trip to L.A. with Davis. He relapsed with a bottle of peach schnapps about a year into his new career, which would span five years and more than 35 adult films.

“He had these timeless looks to him,” says Robert Prion, a New Jersey–based porn director who shot three flicks with Stefano. “He looked like Tom Cruise, only his eyes were much nicer.”

[...]

Beyond that, Stefano earned a reputation — particularly through the 1991 film More of a Man — as a more believable actor than most other porn boys. Former theatrical talent agent David Del Valle continues to lament his failed attempt to tap into Stefano’s acting potential after meeting him at an L.A. “salon” (read: drug party for actors and entertainment gurus) in 1990 — the year Stefano was also diagnosed with HIV. “I’ll always wonder whether I could have gotten through to him that night, whether he could have believed what I was telling him,” Del Valle says. “Could he have had an acting career? Because let me tell you, he really had ‘it.’”

p27 In the summer of 1994, Nick splurged on a big family vacation to Wildwood, even paying a limo service to escort them all down the Shore in style. Such beach vacations had become routine over the years, but this time, after shipping his furniture, dishes and feather bed to Linda’s house, Nick put into action a plan to leave L.A., and porn, for good. When he arrived at her doorstep, he was ready for the family vacation — and a clean slate. Linda says he was “willing to mop floors” if that was what it took to reboot and embark on a “normal” life.

p28 Before leaving Linda’s house that summer, he told her, rather forebodingly, that he had “unfinished business” in L.A. He had to go back, he said. She begged him not to do it. “The last words I remember saying to him were, ‘Don’t go,’” says Linda. “I had a gut feeling when he left that something would happen.”

Four months later, Joey Stefano was found nearly lifeless in a Hollywood motel room, his ashen body spread across sweat-soaked sheets, garbed in a red hoodie. He was pronounced dead later that day at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. Cause of death: an overdose of cocaine, morphine, heroin, and Special K.

Beyond that, Stefano earned a reputation—particularly through the 1991 film More of a Man—as a more believable actor than most other porn boys. Former theatrical talent agent David Del Valle continues to lament his failed attempt to tap into Stefano’s acting potential after meeting him at an L.A. “salon” (read: drug party for actors and entertainment gurus) in 1990—the year Stefano was also diagnosed with HIV. “I’ll always wonder whether I could have gotten through to him that night, whether he could have believed what I was telling him,” Del Valle says. “Could he have had an acting career? Because let me tell you, he really had ‘it.’”

Bryan Kocis spent the last day of his life working the phones, shades drawn, trying to save his porn empire. Only a few years before, Kocis had been an unemployed medical photographer in Dallas Township, a small community in eastern Pennsylvania, so strapped for cash that he had been forced to declare bankruptcy. Now he was one of the most successful producers of underground gay pornog­raphy in the country. The garage of his two-story home on Midland Drive over­flowed with expensive rides: a BMW, a Maserati, an Aston Martin. Most of his wealth came from filming ”twinks” — young boys who are the age of consent but don’t look it. And in his stable of boys, none was more of a star — and more respon­sible for paying for those cars —— than Sean Lockhart.

But like a true amateur, Kocis couldn’t resist mixing business with pleasure. Only a few months after getting into porn, he almost scuttled his new career. In the spring of 2001, Kocis met a young Pennsylvania boy in an AOL chat room who used the screen name Superboy 298. Although the boy was only fifteen, Kocis picked him up two times near his home and took him back to Midland Drive. Each time, he had sex with the boy —— including once on camera— — after promising him a job packaging Cobra videos for online orders.

The boy eventually spilled the beans to his parents. Police and the FBI raided the house on Midland Drive and took away pornographic material, au­dio equipment and cameras. Initially charged with several felonies — including the sexual assault of the boy whom he had videotaped — Kocis was allowed to plead guilty to a lesser charge when prosecutors realized that the boy had lied about his age. With the exception of the sex tape Kocis made, prosecutors were forced to return every item they had seized from him, including 600 porn videos. Placed on probation for a year, Kocis served no jail time.

Bryan Kocis spent the last day of his life working the phones, shades drawn, trying to save his porn empire. Only a few years before, Kocis had been an unemployed medical photographer in Dallas Township, a small community in eastern Pennsylvania, so strapped for cash that he had been forced to declare bankruptcy. Now he was one of the most successful producers of underground gay pornog­raphy in the country. The garage of his two-story home on Midland Drive over­flowed with expensive rides: a BMW, a Maserati, an Aston Martin. Most of his wealth came from filming ”twinks” — young boys who are the age of consent but don’t look it. And in his stable of boys, none was more of a star — and more respon­sible for paying for those cars —— than Sean Lockhart.

Kocis, a reclusive middle-aged man with a paunch who liked to troll the Internet for boys, had discovered Lockhart online. The kid was a rare find — a dead ringer for Zac Efron, with a seven-and-a-half-inch penis, an unquenchable avidity on camera and a diva-like attitude away from it. While Lockhart was still a junior in high school, Kocis made and distributed films that featured the seventeen-year-old performing “bareback”— having anal sex without using a condom. During shoots, on location in Hawaii and California, Kocis also had sex with Lockhart, enjoying the perks that come with directing. Off the set, he wielded obsessive control over the teenager’s life, desperate to know, at all times, where Lockhart was and who he was talking to.

The DVDs and downloads of Lockhart — who went by nom de screen Brent Corrigan — quickly became top sellers in the industry. One film, Schoolboy Crush, was the most downloaded gay video in 2004. “Brent looks like a fifteen-year-old boy, which is what a lot of the older men who buy gay porn like,” says Chris Steele, a veteran director. “On set, he always acts like a brand-new porn star, with great energy and charisma. He has a pretty dick and a great ass, and even though he looks underage, he’s no innocent boy. A lot of boys just show up to a shoot and ask, ‘Where do you want me to stick it?’ and ‘When do I get my check?'”

But as Lockhart’s fan base expanded, Kocis faced a problem: The young star wanted to strikeout on his own. Kocis was paying Lockhart only $2,000 per sex scene — about the industry standard — for a handful of scenes each year. Kocis, by contrast, reportedly cleared $2 million a year.

Lockhart looked sweet onscreen, but being in porn had hardened him. “Sean has all the elements of a lovable villain,” says Jason Sechrest, host of an adult-industry radio show in Los Angeles. “Think Catherine Tramell in Basic Instinct.” Lockhart and Kocis began a bitter public feud, which culminated last year in the director filing a $i million lawsuit against his star for breach of contract.

Sean Lockhart came from the kind of background that funnels young boys into the world of bareback porn. Born in Idaho on Halloween 1986, Sean grew up in the Seattle area. As he tells it, his mother, an alcoholic with a temper, left him with his stepfather and three siblings when Sean was in the third grade. Lockhart never knew his bio­logical father and never sought him out. “My mother never wanted to tell me anything about him,” he says now. “Her flawed philosophy of parenting was to give me the ‘space’ I needed to live my life.”

When Sean was a junior in high school, he moved to San Diego to live with his mother in a shabby house in a rough neighborhood. He was interested in film, and the move enabled him to establish state residency so he could attend college in Southern California. “It was a fresh start,” says Lockhart, who enrolled at Kearny High, an inner-city school. Being gay made him unpopular, so he took refuge in the drama society. He also became a regular in Hillcrest, San Diego’s wealthy gay enclave. Sexually active at sixteen, he was soon fending off men left and right.

It wasn’t an easy time. Sean’s brother called him “faggot,” and his stepfather, who drank, ran into trouble with the IRS. “Growing up in my family, it wasn’t encouraged to show a lot of love to each other,” Lockhart wrote later. “I just re­member a lot of hate, fighting and yelling. I don’t recall ever having a positive adult role model.” At sixteen, he began spending his weekends in Los Angeles with his new boyfriend, a twenty-one-year-old he called Jake. The two had met online, and Jake became the first in a series of older lovers eager to exploit Lockhart’s looks.

In 2003, Jake, an aspiring porn star himself, applied for a job at Cobra Video, a porn company that specialized in young boys. He was turned down — too old. But Sean, who looked twelve, was exactly what Cobra was looking for. Considering how hand-to-mouth he and his mother were living, Sean was willing to give porn a try. In an online chat, Jake gushed about Lockhart to Cobra’s owner, Bryan Ko­cis. “I have the hottest new boyfriend who is seventeen, about to turn eighteen!” he wrote. To prove it, he slipped off Sean’s shorts and turned on his Webcam to give Kocis “a live dose” of Lockhart.

Kocis was hooked. Sensing the massive following Lockhart could have, he con­tacted Sean almost every day, chatting online and on the phone for hours. Kocis sent Lockhart a video camera, which Sean used to film a “casting tape” of himself masturbating. “Bryan was good at talking at my level,” Lockhart says. “He asked a lot of questions. He wanted to know about my family situation and about how inattentive my mother was. He sort of took the place of my father, and I thought he was looking out for my best interests.”

A bland-looking man of forty-one with big ears and a pug nose, Kocis was old enough to be Lockhart’s father. Raised in the small town of Plymouth, on the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania, Kocis had the kind of childhood that Lock­hart could only dream of. As a boy, Bryan rose to the rank of Eagle Scout and won a nationwide photography contest as a senior in high school.

In February 2004, nine months before his eighteenth birthday, Sean began shooting movies for Kocis, performing alone and with other models. Under two contracts he signed with the director, Lockhart was to receive an unspecified amount for each action scene he shot. In addition, he would be given a 2002 Volkswagen Jetta, a set of four rims and tires, insurance premiums worth $2,100, a cell-phone plan and an unspecified signing bonus. To a teenager living on the edge, this was significant money. Lock­hart chose a stage name — Brent Corrigan — by flipping through a telephone book on a shoot in Florida.

“I could easily disappear for four days, for a shoot, and lie to my mother about where I was going,” Lockhart says. “I was in it alone.” In an online col­umn he wrote later for a gay-porn gossip site, Sean said, “I promised myself I would do the work to get what I needed and then turn my back on it. I was still somewhat ashamed of my homosexuality, let alone having participated in gay porn.”

Despite Lockhart’s misgivings, Brent Corrigan became a star. DVDs featur­ing him sold briskly at sixty dollars per copy, as did online downloads at eight cents a minute. Corrigan was awarded a “Best Overall” prize by the Adult Entertainment Broadcast Network —— an acrylic trophy with a black base that today gathers dust in Lockhart’s bedroom. “I felt like a sexual icon,” he says. He gained even more notoriety when Schoolboy Crush and three other Cor­rigan titles were pulled from store shelves and Internet sites after it became clear that Lockhart had been underage during their production. The scandal earned Lockhart a nickname —— “the Traci Lords of gay porn” —— and gave him something rare in the industry: name recognition beyond the market of men who purchased his videos.

Then one day in August 2004, a woman who lived next door to Kocis ap­proached Lockhart, who was painting Bryan’s house. “How old are you?” she spat, denouncing Kocis as a pedophile and threatening to call the police. Afraid he would be arrested, Lockhart packed up his belongings and headed back to the San Diego suburb of Point Loma, where his mother was living with her latest boyfriend in a crummy one-bedroom apartment. Sean moved in with them and graduated from high school, working for $100 a week at a local Sam Goody. With few job prospects, Lockhart needed cash — and he found it the way he always did.

One night, at a party in the Hillcrest neighborhood, Lockhart looked across the room and saw Grant Roy, a local trucking executive. Like Kocis, Roy had a thing for young boys: At thirty-eight, he was more than twice as old as Lockhart, and, like Kocis, he took both a personal and a busi­ness interest in Sean. Roy, who had seen Corrigan on Cobra’s Web site, was impressed. He invited Lockhart, by then barely eighteen, to move into his house in San Diego, which featured a clifftop pool and hot tub.

To take control of Lockhart’s career, the couple would have to find a way to cut Bryan Kocis loose. They set up a Web site to promote Lockhart and formed a new porn company with money from Lee Bergeron. Kocis sued, charging Lockhart with trademark infringement, claiming to own the Brent Corrigan name. In a countersuit, Lockhart alleged that Kocis had engaged in fraudulent business practices, which left him in emotional distress.

The lawsuit created further difficulties for Lockhart, who had left Cobra to film The Velvet Mafia with Falcon Studios, the MGM of gay porn. It was the biggest-budget porn film he’d ever done, and Falcon had agreed to pay him $10,000 for his two sex scenes — far above the industry standard. But as soon as legal threats arrived from Kocis, Falcon refused to bill Lockhart as Brent Corrigan, calling him Fox Ryder instead.

A few months before Bryan Kocis was murdered, Grant Roy was trolling for models online one afternoon when he came across a picture of a buff young man with short dark hair and a large penis. Harlow Cuadra was a Navy veteran who made his living as a male escort in the military town of Virginia Beach. The job had never been his first choice for a career. “I am not proud of what I do,” Cuadra wrote in an online post. “The only reason I got into this was because I was discharged from the Navy for my injured back (Afghani­stan, we were chasing bad guys) and needed to make money, and then all of a sudden shit explodes and it becomes very profitable.”

Now Cuadra wanted to move beyond escorting and make even bigger money in online porn. A Brent Corrigan fan, he struck up an e-mail correspond­ence with Lockhart and Roy, which led to talk of forming a porn partnership. Cuadra and his boyfriend, Joseph Kerekes, made plans to meet them on Janu­ary 11th at a gay-porn trade show being held in Las Vegas.

When the foursome sat down for dinner at Le Cirque, in the Bellagio casino, Lockhart and Roy weren’t impressed. “Harlow and Joe were deeply in debt,” Roy claims. “That’s why they wanted to do a deal with us.” Lockhart also viewed Cuadra with disdain. “He was silly and immature,” Lockhart says. “It was clear to me that he was trying hard to project an air of class and wealth.”

The conversation quickly turned to business. Cuadra and Kerekes came on strong, wanting to strike a deal right away. Big numbers were tossed around: Cuadra offered Lockhart $20,000 for their first movie together and $30,000 for the second. “It sounded ridiculous,” Lockhart says. “I didn’t take it seriously.”

Whatever reservations Lockhart and Roy had, everyone at the table knew that there was a major impediment to any deal: Bryan Kocis. As long as Cobra had Lockhart tied up in court, the star could not film under the name Brent Corrigan. For both Lockhart and Cuadra, their fame and future livelihood seemed to hang on a single, middle-aged man back in Pennsylvania. So Cuadra made a proposal that struck both Lockhart and Roy as strange. “What if Bryan left the country?” he asked. “What if he went to Canada?”

Lockhart, drunk on the wine being served with every course, missed the implication of the questions. Kocis, he replied, “would only come back.”

So Kerekes drove home the point. Cuadra, he said, “knows someone who would do anything for him.”

Roy understood exactly what was being suggested. “We don’t need Kocis to leave the country,” he said, changing the subject.

When dinner ended, Lockhart stumbled back to his hotel room and passed out. Neither he nor Roy called police. Within days, their lawsuit with Bryan Kocis was settled. Brent Corrigan was now a free agent — something that Harlow Cuadra and Joe Kerekes apparently never knew.

A day after the trade show ended, according to police, Cuadra used his Discover card to run a $39.95 background check on Bryan Kocis with an online firm. The check turned up the address on Midland Drive. Two days later, on January 22nd, Cuadra created a new e-mail account, dmbottompa@yahoo.com. The first message sent from it went to cobra@cobravideo.com, an account used by Kocis. The sender introduced himself as Danny Moilin and said, “Would like to model:)”

The next evening, as Kocis was speaking on the phone to his attorney in California, Danny Moilin arrived. The director said he had to go; he sounded on top of the world. It would be the last time anyone heard from Bryan Kocis. The day after the killing, Sean Lockhart received a phone call from his would-be business partner. “Go to the WNEP Web site,” Cuadra said, referring to the ABC affiliate in nearby Scranton, which was reporting the murder of Bryan Kocis. Lockhart was shocked. Cuadra, for his part, seemed to acknowledge a role in the carnage. “I guess my guy went overboard,” he told Lockhart.

Less than two hours later, Kocis had been brutally hacked to death. The killer or killers left little to chance. Kocis’ neck was slashed, nearly decapitating him. His hyoidbone, trachea, left carotid artery and left jugular vein were severed. After he died, Kocis was stabbed another twenty-eight times. Then his house was torched, his body lying on the living-room couch. The fire was so devastating that Kocis had to be identified using dental records.

The next evening, as Kocis was speaking on the phone to his attorney in California, Danny Moilin arrived. The director said he had to go; he sounded on top of the world. It would be the last time anyone heard from Bryan Kocis. The day after the killing, Sean Lockhart received a phone call from his would-be business partner. “Go to the WNEP Web site,” Cuadra said, referring to the ABC affiliate in nearby Scranton, which was reporting the murder of Bryan Kocis. Lockhart was shocked. Cuadra, for his part, seemed to acknowledge a role in the carnage. “I guess my guy went overboard,” he told Lockhart.

It didn’t take long for the trail to lead police to Cuadra. The cops tracked down a fussy photo of Danny Moilin, which matched the online photo that the Navy vet had posted on his MySpace page. A wit­ness reported seeing a white or silver SUV leaving the crime scene as the fire broke out. And records showed that a prepaid cell phone was used — not far from Cuadra’s home in Virginia Beach — to call Bryan Kocis two days before the murder.

As police closed in on Cuadra and Kerekes, the two used their newfound infamy as suspected killers and arsonists to improve their business prospects. They promoted their start-up film-studio site, boybatter.com, on gay-porn gossip sites that ferociously debated the murder. They even offered Cuadra’s escort clients in Virginia Beach a special brand of role-playing: “Harlow’s not a killer,” Kerekes promised, “but he’ll act like one if you want him to.”

Cuadra and Kerekes also made it a point to keep in touch with their potential business partners. At 10:14 a.m. on March 3rd, Grant Roy received an e-mail: “Hey Grant, it’s Harlow. So when we gonna start filming? U know we had an agreement.” Three minutes later, Roy received a more ominous message: “We all know what u said to us at the AVN in Vegas and we have it on tape recorder and our conversation at Le Cirque is recorded as well. Don’t fuck with us.”

To cement their deal, Cuadra and Kerekes came to San Diego for another meeting. By now, however, Roy and Lockhart were cooperating with the police. They had come under intense suspicion after Kocis was killed, and they wanted to clear their name. So both agreed to wear a wire when they met with Cuadra and Kerekes. “This was our only chance at getting concrete evidence proving we had nothing to do with the death,” says Lockhart. “I was scared shitless, but the meeting wouldn’t have happened without me.” Before the sting, a lead investigator in the case warned Roy, “If you or Sean were in any way involved in this murder, I’ll be coming after you both.”

On April 27th, as a police helicopter whirred nearby, the foursome reunit­ed over lunch at the Crab Catcher restaurant in La Jolla. But it wasn’t until the meal was over and the group walked outside that investigators caught a break. Roy asked Cuadra if Bryan Kocis had felt any pain when he died.

“Don’t worry,” Cuadra said, leaning over to Lockhart. “He went quick.”

The four men agreed to meet again the following day at Black’s Beach, a cloth­ing-optional spot north of San Diego. Cuadra seemed to think that no clothes would mean no wires, promising to tell Lockhart and Roy everything when they were on the beach, nude. Roy once again was outfitted with a wire.

The talk eventually turned to the day Kocis was murdered. This time, Cuadra was more forthcoming. He admitted being present when Bryan died: “He never saw it coming.” Later that afternoon, Cuadra went even further. “Seeing that fucker going down, actually it’s sick, but it made me feel better inside,” he said. “It almost felt like I got revenge, and I know that sounds fucked up.”

On May 15th, four months after the killing, Harlow Cuadra and Joseph Kerekes were arrested in Virginia Beach and charged with homicide, robbery and arson. Both have pleaded innocent. “I didn’t do it,” Cuadra said while exit­ing the courtroom. “I didn’t kill that man.” To pay for his defense, Cuadra is selling FREE HARLOW CUADRA teddy bears, tote bags and thongs online.