The AIDS years, when gay porn learned to mourn and to teach

In 1981 a short government report described five young gay men in Los Angeles struck by a rare pneumonia, and within a decade the epidemic had taken some of the biggest names in gay porn. The industry argued, resisted and finally put the condom on screen, turning films made to arouse into lessons in how to stay alive.

Atlanta, Friday 5 June 1981. The Centers for Disease Control publish their weekly bulletin, the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. One short item, sent in by doctors at UCLA and two other Los Angeles hospitals, describes five young men treated between October 1980 and May 1981 for a rare pneumonia, caused by Pneumocystis carinii, that normally strikes only people whose immune systems have already failed. The report calls them "all active homosexuals". Two of them have already died¹.

Nobody reading those pages knew that they were the first official record of AIDS. Over the next fifteen years the epidemic would kill tens of thousands of gay men in the United States alone, among them some of the best-known faces and names of gay porn. This chapter tells how the industry lost its stars, how it argued about the condom and finally put it on screen, and how films made to arouse also became a way to teach men how to stay alive.

A cancer with a nickname

A month later, on 3 July 1981, the New York Times reported that forty-one gay men in New York and California had been diagnosed with Kaposi's sarcoma, a skin cancer seen until then mostly in elderly men. More cases followed every week, in the same cities and the same circles.

In the spring of 1982 doctors and journalists were calling the new syndrome GRID, gay-related immune deficiency. The name was wrong from the start: cases were already being found among people who injected drugs, among haemophiliacs and among Haitian immigrants. In September 1982 the CDC adopted the neutral term acquired immune deficiency syndrome, AIDS².

The cause took longer. A team at the Pasteur Institute in Paris isolated a new virus in 1983, and Robert Gallo's laboratory in the United States reported it in 1984. In 1986 it was given the name it still has, HIV. A blood test for antibodies was licensed in March 1985, which meant that, for the first time, a man could find out that he was infected years before he fell ill.

Where the films used to play

By the early 1980s gay porn had a second home in the bathhouses of San Francisco and New York. Besides steam rooms and private cubicles, many baths had video lounges where the latest features played for whoever wandered in. The films and the baths sold the same fantasy: plenty of men, and no consequences.

That made the baths the first battleground of the epidemic. Some gay activists and doctors wanted them closed as places where the disease spread; others defended them as hard-won spaces of freedom and argued that they were the best places to reach men with information.

On 9 October 1984 San Francisco's director of public health, Mervyn Silverman, ordered fourteen bathhouses and sex clubs to close. Several reopened within hours, and the dispute went on in the courts for months².

New York followed a year later. In October 1985 the state adopted an emergency rule that let health officials shut any establishment where "high-risk sexual activity" took place. The city closed the Mineshaft, the most famous leather club in the country, on 7 November 1985, and the New St. Marks Baths on 7 December.

Opponents of the closures pointed out that some owners had already started handing out condoms and leaflets on AIDS to every customer. The New St. Marks Baths was one of them, and it was shut all the same.

Two men with a pamphlet

Long before any law did, gay men started to change their own habits. In May 1983 two New York men already diagnosed with AIDS, the singer Michael Callen and the writer Richard Berkowitz, published a self-printed booklet of about forty pages, written under the supervision of their doctor, Joseph Sonnabend.

It was called How to Have Sex in an Epidemic: One Approach. It did not tell men to stop having sex. It told them how to keep having it while cutting the risk, and it was among the first texts to recommend condoms for sex between men³.

The critic and activist Douglas Crimp later argued that this was one of the great inventions of the gay community: safe sex was not handed down by doctors, it was worked out by gay men themselves, who knew from experience that pleasure was never limited to one act. In his view the culture of sexual freedom built in the 1970s was what made the invention possible, not what had to be destroyed⁴.

A lifeguard and a doctor

The porn industry was slower. In the first years of the epidemic most studios carried on as before, and condoms were simply absent from the screen.

A few producers tried something different. According to the historian of gay video John Burger, the first gay adult film built around safe sex may have been Lifeguard, released by HIS Video in 1985 and starring Cole Taylor. Between the sex scenes the film handed the floor to Robert Bolan, a San Francisco physician and president of the board of the San Francisco AIDS Foundation, who talked about safe sex directly to the viewer⁵.

Burger saw the porn tape of those years as an archive of gay memory and a place where new habits were rehearsed. A scene with a condom, he argued, could teach in a few minutes what a leaflet could not, because it showed safe sex as something men actually wanted to watch⁵.

The boy in the sand

Then the stars began to die. The first great loss was Casey Donovan, the blond former model and Latin teacher who had become the face of gay porn in 1971 with Wakefield Poole's Boys in the Sand, one of the first gay hardcore films to play in an ordinary New York cinema.

Donovan had moved between porn and mainstream acting all his life, including a Broadway run in 1972 with Ingrid Bergman in Shaw's Captain Brassbound's Conversion. His health declined from the mid-1980s. He died in Inverness, Florida, on 10 August 1987, aged 43, of a lung infection related to AIDS. His biographer Roger Edmonson called him an all-American sex star⁶.

The epidemic also took the pioneers behind the camera. Fred Halsted, whose L.A. Plays Itself (1972) and Sex Garage are among the very few gay porn films in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, lost his partner and business associate Joey Yale to AIDS in 1986. Broke and isolated, Halsted took his own life in 1989⁷.

Nobody has an exact count of the performers, directors, photographers and crew the industry lost in these years. Many died under their legal names, in hospitals far from the studios, and their obituaries rarely mentioned the films that had made them famous to strangers.

The clone who changed the rules

No performer of the 1970s and 1980s was more famous than Al Parker. With his beard, moustache and gym-built body he was the living model of the Castro "clone", the masculine look that defined gay men of his generation, and he was one of the few stars who also ran his own business.

In 1980 Parker and his partner Steve Taylor founded Surge Studios, shooting many of their films at their house in Hermosa Beach, California. Taylor handled the business and took the still photographs. He died of AIDS-related complications on 9 September 1986, after thirteen years together⁸.

Parker turned his grief into a campaign. In an interview in 1987 he attacked the gay adult film industry for doing nothing while its performers were dying, and according to his biographer he was one of the first producers to insist that the men in his films wear condoms⁸.

It was not a popular position: many producers believed that condoms killed the fantasy and would kill sales. Parker died in San Francisco on 17 August 1992, aged 40, of complications from AIDS⁸.

Spermicide, and then the condom

The resistance was strongest at the top. Falcon Studios, founded in San Francisco by Chuck Holmes in the early 1970s, was the biggest name in gay porn, and its glossy, all-American fantasy depended on looking carefree.

According to John Rutherford, who later became Falcon's head of production and then its president, the studio's first answer to AIDS was not the condom. Spermicide was injected into performers' bodies before scenes, because some people believed it could kill the virus. Falcon, he recalled, was one of the last companies to adopt condoms, and only from the late 1980s did it treat every performer as possibly positive and make safe sex the rule on set⁹.

Holmes himself tested positive for HIV in the late 1980s. He died of AIDS-related illness in 2000, aged 55⁹.

By the early 1990s the condom had become standard in American gay porn. There was never a law and never a single industry agreement: the norm grew studio by studio, pushed by deaths, by activists, by performers who refused to work without one, and by the fact that buyers had come to expect it. The historian Jeffrey Escoffier describes condoms in gay porn of the 1990s as simply de rigueur¹⁰.

The rule made gay porn a teaching tool. Every scene now showed, without a word of instruction, that a condom could be part of the sex rather than the end of it.

Comics on the Senate floor

The same idea drove the prevention work of the Gay Men's Health Crisis, the New York organisation founded in 1982. Its educators did not ask men to give up desire; they tried to make safer sex desirable. In 1985 it produced Chance of a Lifetime, a 42-minute video in which actors acted out explicit safer-sex scenarios, shown during its all-day safer-sex workshops¹¹.

Its printed material followed the same line. The Safer Sex Comix, pocket-sized booklets handed out in bars, showed muscular men having sex with condoms, drawn in the style of gay erotic art¹².

In October 1987 Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina brought one of them to the Senate. It told the story of two men, Ed and Julio, who meet at the gym and go home together. Helms presented it as government-funded propaganda for homosexuality, although no federal money had paid for the comics. On 14 October 1987 the Senate voted 94 to 2 to ban federal funding for any AIDS education that would "promote or encourage, directly or indirectly, homosexual activities"¹².

GMHC did not stop. In 1989 it launched the Safer Sex Shorts, five-minute erotic videos with titles such as Something Fierce and Car Service, cut like music videos and meant for bars and clubs¹¹. In 1990 the Toronto artist Richard Fung made Steam Clean for the series, set in a steam room and aimed at gay Asian men.

The rules written after the Helms vote were finally challenged in court. In 1992 a federal judge in New York, ruling in Gay Men's Health Crisis v. Sullivan, struck down the CDC's requirement that funded materials avoid anything "offensive" to most people, finding the standard unconstitutionally vague¹³.

Silence equals death

Activism was changing too. In March 1987 a group of activists in New York founded ACT UP, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power. Its posters, its pink triangle and its slogan, "Silence = Death", became the visual language of the epidemic. In 1990 its members occupied parts of the campus of the National Institutes of Health to demand faster research and fairer access to drugs¹².

Much of that struggle was fought with cameras. Activist video collectives filmed the demonstrations and distributed the tapes themselves, and the same cheap camcorders that were changing porn production were turned on the police lines and the offices of drug companies.

On 11 October 1987, during the second national gay and lesbian march on Washington, the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt was unfolded for the first time on the National Mall. It had 1,920 panels, each the size of a grave, each made by friends, lovers or families for one person who had died. When it returned in October 1996 it covered much of the Mall¹².

The man with the tattoo

Some performers chose to be visible as positive men. Scott O'Hara, a star of more than twenty films between 1983 and 1988, became one of the most outspoken writers on gay sex of the 1990s. He edited Steam, a quarterly about public sex, from 1993 to 1995, and in 1994 he had "HIV+" tattooed on his upper arm, cutting the sleeves off his shirts so that people would see it.

His memoir Autopornography: A Memoir of Life in the Lust Lane appeared in 1997. It is a frank account of his life in the industry, of sex as a subject worth thinking about, and of living with HIV¹⁵.

O'Hara had lived with HIV for more than a decade and with lymphoma for almost five years. He died of AIDS-related complications in San Francisco on 18 February 1998, aged 36. He left his collection of erotic art, more than five hundred works, to the Tom of Finland Foundation.

The year the dying slowed

O'Hara died just as the epidemic was turning. In July 1996, at the eleventh International AIDS Conference in Vancouver, researchers presented the results of combination therapy: three drugs taken together, including a new class called protease inhibitors. In many patients the virus fell to levels the tests could no longer detect.

Doctors and journalists spoke of a Lazarus effect. Men who had given away their belongings and planned their funerals got up from their beds and went back to work. The drugs were expensive and hard to take, with serious side effects, and they cured nobody, but in rich countries AIDS began to change from a death sentence into a chronic illness.

The effect was immediate. According to the National Center for Health Statistics, the age-adjusted death rate from HIV infection in the United States fell by 47.7 per cent between 1996 and 1997¹⁶. ACT UP's pressure on regulators had helped bring the new drugs to patients faster than anyone had expected a decade earlier¹².

The heterosexual industry had its own losses, the best known being John Holmes, its biggest male star of the 1970s, who died of AIDS in March 1988. But it had taken another path. It mostly rejected condoms and relied on regular HIV testing, organised from 1998 by the Adult Industry Medical Health Care Foundation in Los Angeles. An outbreak among straight performers that same spring showed how fragile the system was. Escoffier notes that the politics of safer sex played out in opposite ways in the two industries: condoms on the gay side, testing on the straight one¹⁰.

For more than a decade gay porn had been mourning, teaching and arguing about the condom, mostly on videotape sold by mail and rented from shops. How that tape, and then the disc, turned porn into a mass market of its own is the story of the next chapter, from VHS to DVD.