The studio age, when Colt, Falcon and the clone turned gay porn into an industry

In ten years gay porn went from anonymous 8mm loops sold by post to studios with brands, catalogues and stars whose names sold films. Colt, Falcon and Joe Gage's working men gave the industry the masculine look of the Castro clone, and a videocassette released in 1978 showed where its future lay.

San Francisco, November 1978. A small mail-order company called Falcon Studios releases a new film, The Other Side of Aspen. Its sex scenes were shot at Lake Tahoe, its dialogue scenes in San Francisco, and it runs for thirty-nine minutes. The cast is led by Casey Donovan, the blond star of the early 1970s, with Al Parker and Dick Fisk. Customers can order it on standard 8mm, Super 8 or sound 8mm film, as most of Falcon's buyers always had. Or, for the first time, they can order it on videocassette, VHS or Betamax¹.

That choice, a reel or a tape, sums up the studio age. In ten years gay porn turned from a cottage trade of anonymous loops into a business with brands, catalogues, contracts, house styles and stars whose names sold films. This chapter tells who built it, the men who made the money and the men in front of the camera, and how one masculine look, born in the bars of the Castro and Christopher Street, became the face of an industry.

Five thousand dollars and a mailing list

Chuck Holmes was a business graduate from Terre Haute, Indiana, who came to San Francisco in 1971 to work in construction sales. Within months he had started a film company. He named it after the bird of prey and later explained the choice: in sex, he said, someone is usually the predator and someone the prey, though not in a harmful way.

The money was modest. According to interviews gathered for the documentary Seed Money (2015), Holmes started Falcon with $5,000 he had borrowed, and paid a man called Vaughn Kincey for his contacts and his mailing lists of buyers, in exchange for a fee and a small percentage².

The product was the loop: a short 8mm film, often around ten or fifteen minutes long, silent, with one scene and no plot. Men in the trade later remembered the early loops as poorly lit and rough. Falcon's advantage was service. Customers answered small advertisements in men's magazines, joined the mailing list and ordered from a printed brochure, and Falcon shipped within a day, when competitors took two weeks³.

It paid. John Rutherford, who directed for Falcon and later became its president, recalled that each loop sold for upwards of $150 and that the company was taking in tens of thousands of dollars a day³.

The law noticed. In 1973 Holmes was indicted for sending obscene material through the mail. Defended by Michael Kennedy, a radical lawyer who had represented the Black Panthers, he never stood trial³.

Rip Colt's men

Falcon sold sex. Colt sold a man. Its founder, Jim French, was born in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, in 1932, studied art in Philadelphia and worked in New York as a fashion and advertising illustrator, drawing for Neiman Marcus and album covers for Columbia Records.

In the mid-1960s he began selling erotic drawings of men by mail, signed Kurt Lüger. In December 1967 he and his partner Lou Thomas took out a licence for a new company, Colt Studio, and French began photographing under the pseudonym Rip Colt⁵.

Colt's first magazine, Manpower!, appeared in 1969, and the first book, Man, in 1972. When Thomas left the business in 1974, French bought his share and moved the studio to Los Angeles. Calendars followed, then short films on 8mm at the end of the decade, later transferred to video. Over thirty-six years French photographed more than 800 models⁵.

The Colt man was big, built and unmistakably adult: broad chest, body hair, often a moustache, posed against a ranch fence, a pool or a plain studio backdrop. French insisted for the rest of his life that pornography did not interest him. What interested him, he said, was photography, and making good-looking men look their most impressive⁵.

Colt also named its stars. A young man from Massachusetts who had worked as a butler at Hugh Hefner's Playboy Mansion West was photographed by French, who gave him the name he would make famous: Al Parker⁶.

The clone on Castro Street

The Colt man did not come from nowhere. He looked like the men in the bars.

In the years after Stonewall, gay men in the big city neighbourhoods, Greenwich Village and Christopher Street in New York, the Castro in San Francisco, West Hollywood in Los Angeles, adopted a look of deliberate, almost uniform masculinity. Short hair, a thick moustache or a trimmed beard, a flannel shirt or a tight white T-shirt, Levi's 501 jeans, work boots, a body built in the gym.

The sociologist Martin P. Levine, who did his fieldwork among these men in the Village in the 1970s, called them by the name they gave each other, half joking: clones. He read the style as a rebellion against the old stereotype of the effeminate homosexual. Gay men, told for a century that they were failed men, answered by dressing as lumberjacks, cowboys, soldiers, construction workers and bikers⁷.

Levine also described the life that went with the look: the gym, the bars, the discos and the bathhouses, where sex was easy to find and had no strings. In his account it was a culture built around sex and good times, and it ended with AIDS⁷.

The studios gave this body back to its owners, enlarged and on glossy paper. By the end of the decade the moustached, hairy, hard-bodied star was the house style of most gay porn, and Al Parker, with his beard and gym-built frame, was its most famous example⁶.

Trucks, sweat and three company names

If one director put the working man on the gay screen, it was Joe Gage, the pseudonym of Tim Kincaid. In October 1976 he released Kansas City Trucking Co., produced in San Francisco, the story of a veteran trucker called Hank, played by Richard Locke, who takes a young driver on the road. Jack Wrangler and Steve Boyd were also in the cast.

Two more films followed. In El Paso Wrecking Corp. (usually dated 1978, though some lists give 1977), Hank and his friend Gene, played by the Los Angeles director Fred Halsted, lose their trucking jobs after a drunken fight and drift from one blue-collar job to the next. L.A. Tool & Die closed the trilogy in 1979.

What made the films different was not the trucks. Earlier gay films often paired an active, masculine partner with a younger or more passive one. Gage's men were rugged, rural and working class, and they met as equals. The archivists who catalogued his papers singled out exactly this: sex between men who related to each other as "equal partners"⁸.

The trilogy became the best-selling gay porn series of the years before condoms, and later critics have treated it as a cornerstone of the genre. The film scholar John Mercer argues that the masculinities on show in gay porn are more varied and ambiguous than they first seem, and the tough guys of the trilogy are a good example⁹.

The cowboy from Beverly Hills

Gage's casting brought together the decade's first real stars. Richard Locke, bearded and muscular, became the face of the trilogy. Jack Wrangler, the other big name of Kansas City Trucking Co., had the most unlikely background of all.

He was born John Stillman in Beverly Hills in 1946, the son of Robert Stillman, a Hollywood producer who had worked on the television westerns Bonanza and Rawhide. He acted on television as a child, studied theatre at Northwestern University and moved to New York, where he worked as a bartender and go-go dancer before making his first gay film in 1970¹⁰.

His screen name and his look, cowboy hat, moustache, open shirt, made him the most recognisable gay porn star of the late 1970s. In 1978 he also began making heterosexual films, which he continued until the mid-1980s. He published an autobiography in 1984, later produced cabaret and theatre, and in 1994 married the singer Margaret Whiting. He died in New York in 2009, aged 62¹⁰.

Al Parker went another way: from model to owner. After starring in films such as Inches (1979), he founded his own company in 1980, Surge Studio, with his partner Steve Taylor, and shot many of its films at their home in Hermosa Beach, California⁶.

A night at the Adonis

New York had its own industry, and it liked to argue that it was smarter than California's. Hand in Hand Films, founded in 1972 by Jack Deveau, Robert Alvarez and Jaap Penraat, had already shown that gay sex films could have scripts, sets and a regular team, and kept producing through the decade¹.

In 1978 Deveau went to shoot inside one of the places where his audience actually watched films: the Adonis, a 1,400-seat cinema in the Times Square area that showed gay films. A Night at the Adonis, with Jack Wrangler at the head of the cast, opens with a Steadicam shot wandering through the corridors of the theatre, one of the earliest uses of the new camera rig in an adult film.

Jeffrey Escoffier, the historian of gay porn cinema, counts it among Deveau's best work and the most elaborate film of the period about the tension between casual sex and gay men's everyday lives¹.

The joke was that the audience watching it at the Adonis was doing much the same as the men on the screen. Theatres like the Adonis were not only cinemas but cruising places, where sex happened in the balconies and back rows as well as on the screen.

Five dollars at the door

Every big city had them. In San Francisco the Nob Hill Cinema at 729 Bush Street, which had opened in 1969, was showing only gay films by 1971 and stayed in business until 2018. Wakefield Poole had shown his films there in the early 1970s.

A man who went to the Strand on Market Street in the 1970s remembered the price: five dollars, which felt expensive for anyone without much spare money. The programme was a double bill, changed every two weeks².

The theatres needed a steady supply of features, and that pushed the studios beyond the loop. A loop could be sold by post. A feature with a story and a star could fill a cinema for a fortnight, be advertised in the gay press and be sold afterwards by post as well.

Nova, Catalina and the West Coast look

New studios crowded into the market. In Los Angeles a director working as Scott Masters founded Nova Studios around 1976 or 1977. Like Falcon, Nova sold silent hardcore loops by direct mail, with sixteen-page brochures full of thumbnail pictures of its models, before moving on to features. It survived until 1986.

In Florida, William Higgins began making films in the 1970s because, he said, the gay porn he saw was so bad. His company, Catalina Video, founded at the end of the decade, became one of the major names of the 1980s with titles such as Pacific Coast Highway (1981) and Sailor in the Wild (1983).

Together with Falcon they defined what the trade came to call the California or West Coast look: sunny locations, swimming pools, smooth or lightly hairy athletic bodies, and good lighting. Escoffier describes the 1970s as the decade when hardcore, gay and straight, moved from the margins into American popular culture, and the West Coast studios were where that change became a production line¹.

On the newsstand

The magazines grew alongside the films and carried their advertisements. Blueboy, bought in 1974 by Donald Embinder, a former advertising manager of the arts magazine After Dark, was based in Miami and called itself the national magazine about men. By 1978 it claimed about 150,000 copies a month, with writers and interviewees such as Truman Capote, William S. Burroughs and Christopher Isherwood next to the nude photographs.

Mandate, founded in New York by the publisher George Mavety in March 1975, became one of the few nationally distributed magazines with full-frontal male nudity, with a circulation of more than 100,000 at its peak. Mavety launched Honcho in April 1978 for a rougher, more macho taste.

The most influential of all was Drummer, founded in Los Angeles in 1975 by John Embry and Jeanne Barney for the leather and S&M scene. After its move to San Francisco in 1977 its editor was the writer and photographer Jack Fritscher, who has argued that the magazine helped invent the masculine gay popular culture of the period¹¹.

The tape that changed everything

Which brings us back to Lake Tahoe. When Falcon put The Other Side of Aspen on videocassette in 1978, home video recorders had been on sale in the United States for only about three years, and they cost a great deal of money. Many producers thought it was a gamble. For Falcon it paid off, and according to a history of the company published in the Bay Area Reporter, the decision rewarded it with massive sales⁴.

The film itself reportedly went on to sell around 45,000 copies by the early 1990s, more than any gay porn title before it. Its success also set a new standard: higher production values, a recognisable house look, and feature-length releases built around stars.

Video changed more than the format. A tape could be watched at home, alone or with a partner, without the risk of being seen entering a theatre. It could be copied, rented and edited. The historian Whitney Strub has shown that when films of the 1970s moved to video, and later to DVD, they were often cut and re-edited, so that what we watch today is not always what audiences saw in the theatres¹².

By the early 1980s the theatres were losing customers to the videocassette, and the loop was disappearing. The full story of how the tape conquered the industry belongs to a later chapter.

Last call

By 1985 gay porn looked like an industry. It had studios with brands and house styles, directors with signatures, stars with fan mail, magazines that reviewed the films and sold them by post, and a technology that took them out of the theatres and into the home. Falcon, Colt, Nova, Catalina and Surge had made a business out of a look, the masculine, moustached, working-class or all-American man, that gay men had first invented for themselves in the bars and on the streets.

But the bars and the bathhouses where that look was born were already emptying. In 1981 doctors had begun reporting a strange new illness among young gay men, and within a few years it would take many of the stars, directors and audiences of the studio age. That story, the AIDS years, is the subject of the next chapter.