Stag films, the secret reels where men first filmed men

For half a century, anonymous crews shot illegal sex films that travelling projectionists showed to men only, in lodges, fraternities and brothels. Hidden among some two thousand reels are the first gay porn films, and they survive mostly because the police seized them and Alfred Kinsey kept them.

Bloomington, Indiana, a summer in the early 1980s. In a screening room at the Kinsey Institute, a Canadian film scholar, Thomas Waugh, is working through the institute's collection of old sex films. He has asked permission to record the screenings with his VHS video camera. One reel, a silent film from around 1929 called The Surprise of a Knight, excites him so much that his recording drifts off the screen¹.

What Waugh was watching is the oldest known American film in which the sex is entirely between men. It belongs to a lost world: the stag films, short illegal reels made in secret from the First World War to the 1960s and shown to men only. This chapter tells who made them, who watched them, how the law hunted them, and how a handful of them, the first gay porn films, survived long enough to be found.

A plumber, a doctor, a girl by the stream

The name comes from the stag party, a gathering of men without women. The films were also called smokers, blue movies or just reels.

A typical stag lasted five to fifteen minutes. It was silent, black and white, with jokey intertitles and a plot that barely existed: a plumber called to a house, a doctor visiting a patient, a farmer finding a girl by a stream. Then it moved as fast as possible to what the audience had paid to see.

The first people to try to count them were Al Di Lauro and Gerald Rabkin, whose illustrated history of 1976 took the life of the genre as 1915 to 1970². Working from their list and the Kinsey holdings, Waugh later estimated that about 2,000 American stags were made between 1915 and 1968, perhaps 300 hours of film in all³.

The film scholar Linda Williams called the stag a cinema of "genital show". It did not tell stories or build private fantasies, as later feature pornography would. It put bodies on screen for a room full of men who watched and commented together⁴.

Directed by A Wise Guy

The oldest American stag that survives is usually said to be A Free Ride, also known as A Grass Sandwich. A motorist picks up two women by the roadside, stops in the countryside and has sex with them in the grass.

Di Lauro and Rabkin dated it to 1915, and most historians still do, though some archivists place it a few years later, at the end of the 1910s². A few European films may be older, among them the Argentine El Satario and the German Am Abend, but their dates are just as uncertain.

The credits of A Free Ride set the tone for fifty years. Directed by "A Wise Guy". Photographed by "Will B. Hard". Produced by the "Gay Paree Picture Co.".

The joke was also a disguise. Everyone involved was committing a crime, and false names protected directors, performers and the laboratories that developed the film. Waugh opened his essay on the genre with the equally rude fake credits of another reel, Wonders of the Unseen World (1927), and pointed out that in almost every case nothing at all is known about the real people behind the camera³.

The performers are just as silent. Some were sex workers, some probably friends of the crew. Only a handful have ever been identified, and for the first films with sex between men, not one.

A projector in a suitcase

In the United States you could not buy a stag in a shop. You booked a showing. A projectionist arrived with a portable machine and a case of reels and put on a programme for the evening.

The venues were the back rooms of male America: smokers of the American Legion or the Elks, fraternity clubhouses, bachelor parties, hotel rooms. Di Lauro and Rabkin described these small-town screenings and the travelling projectionists who ran them².

In the late 1960s, as the tradition was dying, two sociologists at the Kinsey Institute, John H. Gagnon and William Simon, studied who sat in those rooms. They found men of the upper working class and lower middle class, and a ritual more than a turn-on: forced laughter, loud jokes, and the need to prove to the others that you belonged⁵.

Waugh built on their work to argue that the stag was really a cinema about the bonds between men that happened to be filled with images of women³.

In Europe and Latin America the circuit was different. In the 1920s explicit films were often shown in brothels, as an overture to the business of the house. Waugh noted that this world, with a price for every taste, was more relaxed than the American lodge, and that sexual contact between men turns up in European stags far more often than in American ones³.

The man who burned the pictures

The law that hunted these films was older than cinema. In 1873 Congress passed an act against obscene literature pushed by Anthony Comstock, a dry-goods salesman turned crusader and secretary of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice.

The Comstock Act made it a federal crime to send obscene material by post, and Comstock himself was made a special agent of the Post Office to enforce it. By his own count he seized and destroyed millions of pictures, postcards and books. The historian Amy Werbel has shown that his raids did not kill the trade in obscene images: they pushed it underground, into exactly the kind of market the stag films would later fill⁶.

Later came the Tariff Act of 1930, which banned the import of obscene material. A stag could now be seized at every stage of its life: in the laboratory, in the post, at the border, in the projectionist's car, in the room where it was shown.

Arrests of projectionists and dealers were local affairs, a few lines in the newspaper, and nobody has ever counted them. But the police kept what they took, and that detail would turn out to matter.

Keep your trousers on

Most American stags kept the male body out of sight as far as they could. Waugh found men who never take their trousers off, men who undress off camera or vanish in a jump cut, and men who perform in masks, glasses and false moustaches. The camera went looking for the woman's body and did its best to ignore the man's³.

Yet many of the films are really about men and other men. Men share a woman, watch a friend with her, help each other seduce her, procure her for one another. On the screen, Waugh argued, the films mirrored the room: men getting aroused together while pretending not to notice each other³.

In his book Hard to Imagine, the first full history of gay erotic photography and film before 1969, Waugh gathered the rare stags in which men do touch each other, usually as a moment inside a scene with women⁷.

These moments were probably not made for gay viewers. In a lodge they worked as a freak show, something to laugh at. Whether any of the men who made or performed in them thought of themselves as homosexual is, in almost every case, impossible to know.

Butterfly in Paris

The film most often named as the first to include sex between men is French. Le Ménage moderne du Madame Butterfly is a six-minute parody of Puccini's opera, usually dated to about 1920.

An American naval officer in Japan marries Butterfly while her maid watches, and a male servant spies on the women in turn. It ends with all five characters having sex together, men with women and men with men. Waugh reads it as one of the earliest surviving films to show sex between men, but in a scene that stays heterosexual in its logic⁷.

It survives with two sets of intertitles, French and English. The American titles add crude racist jokes about Asian people that the French ones do not have: the same reel, reworked for a different room³.

Who made it is a story in itself. In 1993 the American media historian Joseph W. Slade attributed Madame Butterfly and about twenty other French sex films of the early 1920s to Bernard Natan, and claimed that Natan also appeared in several of them. His evidence was largely the resemblance between one performer and photographs of Natan⁸.

Natan was no ordinary suspect. Born in Romania, he built a film business in Paris and in 1929 took control of Pathé, the largest film company in France. Antisemitic newspapers attacked him through the 1930s, he was arrested for financial fraud in 1938, and in 1942 he was handed over from prison to the Drancy camp and deported to Auschwitz, where he died.

The rumour that he had started out as a pornographer was already being used against him in his lifetime. The 2013 documentary Natan, by David Cairns and Paul Duane, set stills from the films beside photographs of Natan and argued that the performer is not him⁹.

What can honestly be said is this: Madame Butterfly is French, it was probably made around 1920 by a Paris producer of erotic films, and the attribution to Natan is unproven.

The lady was not a lady

Back to the reel that made Waugh's camera wander. The Surprise of a Knight is American, silent and about ten minutes long. It is usually dated to 1929; some catalogues say 1930, and Waugh himself described it as late 1920s³.

A performer in an elegant evening dress receives a gentleman caller. The two have sex. Then the performer reveals male genitals, dances for the camera and ends the film in a man's business suit, winking at the audience. The "surprise" of the title is that the lady was not a lady.

How to describe the lead performer has changed with the language of each generation. Writing in 2001, Waugh called the character a drag queen and read the film as a spectacle for a straight audience to laugh at³. In Hard to Imagine he also looked at how the costume plays against the basic rule of hardcore, that everything must be shown⁷.

Interviewed in 2026, he put it differently: the performer was a trans sex worker, "very much in possession of herself"¹. The film may belong as much to trans history as to gay history. Both readings rest on the same few minutes of film, and on nothing else: nothing is known about the people in it.

"I am not like that"

A Stiff Game, an American reel usually dated to the early 1930s, is the other early film that turns up in every history of gay porn. Its sex scene between men is interracial: a Black man performs oral sex on a white man. According to later descriptions, the intertitles give the Black character a racist nickname.

Waugh counted only about a dozen Black performers in all the American stags he had seen. He paired A Stiff Game with The Surprise of a Knight as examples of how the genre put sexual and racial outsiders on display. For the white spectator watching such a scene, he wrote, the meaning is "I am not like that"³.

Nothing is known about where the film was shown or who made it. Other titles with sex between men are mentioned in the specialist catalogues, among them a Three Comrades usually dated to the 1950s, but they are poorly documented.

Across more than forty years of American production, only a very small number of stags show sex between men. Those that do were almost certainly made for audiences who did not see themselves in them.

From the lodge to the living room

For men who desired men, the lodge reel was never the main source of erotic images. The bigger trade, Waugh showed, was in photographs: male nudes sold as art or as models for painters, postcards passed from hand to hand, and small sets of explicit prints from the same underground trade that made the films, sold under the counter or by post⁷.

Every step of that trade broke the Comstock laws. Many of the photographs that survive come, like the films, from police seizures and from collections that surfaced only after their owners died.

Then technology changed where the films could be watched. In 1923 Eastman Kodak launched 16mm film for amateurs, cheaper and safer than the flammable 35mm nitrate of the cinemas, with a camera and a projector for the home. In 1932 came 8mm, cheaper still.

Old stags were copied onto the small gauges and new ones were shot directly on them. A reel could now be bought, kept in a drawer and shown in a living room, without a projectionist and without the lodge.

That changed who was in the audience. In 1949 the novelist Glenway Wescott, a friend of Alfred Kinsey, described in his journal a programme of stag films he had just seen. He had watched it not at a smoker but at a private party of gay men, and he wrote about it with open delight¹⁰.

Evidence for the professor

The reason these films can still be studied is a zoologist from Indiana. Alfred Kinsey founded the Institute for Sex Research at Indiana University in 1947 and set out to collect every kind of sexual material he could find, including film, as data.

The police helped him. Kinsey had contacts with police departments across the country, and, according to the Indiana University film archivist Rachael Stoeltje, they sent him copies whenever they confiscated such films. Today the institute holds about 2,000 stag films from the 1920s to the 1960s, the largest collection of the genre anywhere¹¹.

A large part of what survives, in other words, survived because it was once evidence.

The collection also had to be defended. In 1950 United States Customs seized a shipment of erotic material sent to the institute from Europe. The case, United States v. 31 Photographs, dragged on past Kinsey's death in 1956.

In October 1957 Judge Edmund L. Palmieri of the federal court in New York ruled that material held for scientific research was not obscene in the eyes of the law, and the institute could keep it¹². That decision protected the vault in which the first gay films survive.

Access has always been restricted. The films are shown only to qualified researchers, at the institute and by appointment, which is exactly how Waugh came to see them.

Three books that took the reels seriously

For decades the only writing on stags was journalism. Di Lauro and Rabkin's Dirty Movies, published in 1976 with an introduction by the critic Kenneth Tynan, was the first real history: a catalogue and picture book that tried to date the films and reconstruct how they were shown².

Linda Williams's Hard Core (1989) treated the stag as the first chapter of film pornography and criticised earlier writers for ignoring what the films say about men and women⁴.

Waugh's Hard to Imagine (1996) placed the few stags with sex between men inside a much larger story of gay erotic images before 1969, next to art photography, physique magazines and private snapshots⁷. His essay of 2001, later reprinted in Williams's collection Porn Studies, is still the fullest account of what these films meant to the men who watched them together³.

Copies of copies

Outside the archive, stags have always lived as copies of copies. From the 1970s they were sold on video in compilations of "vintage" reels, and they still turn up at film society screenings and online, usually in blurred transfers many generations away from the original print.

What survives is a small, damaged and anonymous body of film. Its value for gay history lies less in the few reels with sex between men than in what the whole genre shows: men gathering to watch sex together while forbidding themselves to look at each other, and desire between men allowed on screen only as a joke, a surprise or a freak show.

After the Second World War that desire found a new way to be seen, not in illegal reels but in magazines and films sold openly by post under the cover of bodybuilding, and the physique era, the subject of the next chapter, would put the male body at the centre of the picture for the first time.