VHS to DVD, when gay porn came home on tape and disc

In the early 1990s a few videotapes mailed from a West Hollywood bookshop to Pennsylvania were enough to bring the FBI to the door. Between the first home video recorders and the last VHS tapes, gay porn moved from the cinema to the living room, built studios and stars, crossed into Eastern Europe and fought over the condom all over again.

West Hollywood, the early 1990s. An employee of Circus of Books, a shop at 8230 Santa Monica Boulevard that sells gay magazines, novels, foreign newspapers and pornographic videos, packs a few VHS tapes into a box for a mail-order customer in Lebanon County, Pennsylvania. Some of the tapes are gay, some straight. The customer is part of a federal sting. The owners, Karen and Barry Mason, are indicted for the interstate transportation of obscene material, and FBI agents with guns raid their warehouse looking for copies of what was shipped¹.

The Masons were a married couple with children who had started out delivering Larry Flynt's magazines to newsstands, and they would spend years in court before a settlement kept them out of prison. Their story is the story of this chapter in miniature. Between the mid-1980s and the mid-2000s gay porn left the cinema and moved into the home, first on videotape and then on disc. It travelled by post and was rented from back rooms, it built studios and stars with names that sold, it crossed the Atlantic into the new democracies of Eastern Europe, and it handed out its own awards.

A machine under the television

The Masons took over the West Hollywood shop in 1982, when its owner was being evicted. Barry had been driving round Los Angeles taking orders for Hustler and Chic, and the shop, then called Book Circus, bought hundreds of gay magazines a month and sold out every time¹. Within a few years the best-selling product on its shelves was no longer printed on paper.

Their daughter Rachel Mason, who grew up without knowing what her parents sold, later filmed their story in the documentary Circus of Books (2019). It shows how the couple became major distributors of gay videos, and how their shop was also a meeting place for gay men in the years before apps².

What made it possible was a box under the television. The VHS recorder had gone on sale in the United States in 1977, and in 1980 very few households owned one. Prices fell fast, rental shops opened in every town, and by the end of the decade most American homes had a video recorder³.

For pornography the machine changed everything. A film no longer had to be watched in a public cinema, among strangers, with the risk of being seen at the door. It could be bought or rented, taken home and played as often as the viewer liked, alone or with a partner.

Shot on tape, sold by the thousand

At first the studios simply transferred their films onto cassettes, as Falcon had done in 1978. Then, in the mid-1980s, the adult industry stopped shooting on film at all. Video cameras were cheaper, the tape could be reused, and a feature could be shot in a day or two and be in the shops a few weeks later.

The film historian Peter Alilunas has shown how fast this happened in the straight industry: in a few years shot-on-video features replaced celluloid, the number of titles exploded, and production budgets collapsed⁴. Many critics complained that the films looked flat and cheap. Buyers did not seem to mind.

Gay porn followed the same path. Jeffrey Escoffier, in his history of gay porn cinema, describes how direct-to-video release became the norm by the mid-1980s and how the theatres that had shown gay features in the 1970s closed one after another⁵. The epidemic described in the previous chapter hastened the change, as public sex venues of every kind came under pressure.

A few cinemas survived as cruising places more than as cinemas. In New York a zoning law of 1995 pushed most adult businesses out of Times Square, and by the end of the century the gay porn theatre was a rarity.

Behind the curtain

Videotape created a new kind of shop. Ordinary video rental stores often kept an adult section, separated from the family films by a curtain, a swing door or a separate room at the back, and only adults were allowed through. Some chains refused to stock adult titles at all; many independent shops depended on them.

Alilunas describes how towns and cities across the United States fought these back rooms with zoning rules, licensing laws and prosecutions, and how the shops adapted to each new rule⁴. In 1986 the Attorney General's Commission on Pornography, known as the Meese Commission after the attorney general who appointed it, called for tougher enforcement, and federal prosecutors set up a special unit for obscenity cases.

For gay customers outside the big cities, the back room of the local video shop was rarely an option. They ordered by post. Studios and distributors advertised in gay magazines and sent out catalogues, and the tapes arrived in plain packaging.

That was exactly the trade the federal sting at Circus of Books was designed to catch. Mailing a tape across a state line made a local sale into a federal case. After years of litigation the Masons accepted a pretrial diversion programme and a fine of $20,000, and Barry had to report to the federal court once a month for about a year. The investigators later mailed back the tapes they had seized as evidence¹.

Studios with a house style

The big studios of the 1970s, Falcon and Catalina above all, came out of the transition stronger. Video rewarded brands: a customer choosing a tape by post from a catalogue, without seeing it first, wanted to know what kind of men and what kind of sex he was going to get.

New studios defined themselves by their look. Steven Scarborough, who had been an executive and director at Falcon from 1987 to 1993, left to found Hot House Entertainment in San Francisco in 1993. In 1995 the director Bruce Cam and the cinematographer Robert Kirsch founded Titan Media, also in San Francisco, with harder, hairier men, leather and fetish themes, and the stated aim of making safer sex erotic. Raging Stallion Studios, founded by Chris Ward and J. D. Slater at the end of the decade (1998 or 1999, depending on the source), took the same masculine, high-budget direction.

Behind the cameras, careers lasted longer than in front of them. John Rutherford, who had started as a director at Falcon, rose to run its production and then the company. And a drag queen from Minnesota became one of the most prolific directors in the business.

Chi Chi LaRue had performed in a drag revue in Minneapolis and Saint Paul before moving to California and taking a job as publicist at Catalina Video. LaRue began directing in 1988 and went on to make hundreds of films, for Falcon and many other studios, and later ran a label called Rascal Video. Directors in this business usually worked under invented names; LaRue simply directed under a drag name, and became one of the most recognisable faces of the industry at awards nights, parties and benefits.

Bigger than life

Video also made stars. A tape could be sold for years, so a name on the box that customers trusted was worth more than ever. The man who showed it best was Jeff Stryker.

Stryker was launched in the mid-1980s by the producer John Travis and became the biggest name in gay video with titles such as Bigger Than Life, Powertool (1986) and Stryker Force. In 1999 a writer for Salon called him the reigning king of gay male porn, a name-above-the-title star in an industry where careers were usually measured in months⁶.

He did not stay in one market. Stryker also made straight films, among them Jamie Loves Jeff for Vivid, one of that company's best-selling titles, and he sold his name on playing cards, T-shirts, greeting cards, a music CD and a lubricant. In 1999 he toured a comic stage show, Jeff Stryker Does Hard Time, which reached San Francisco with posters of the star behind bars⁶.

The art world noticed as well. The French photographers Pierre et Gilles, known for their glossy, hand-painted portraits of pop stars, counted Stryker among their sitters, next to Catherine Deneuve and Iggy Pop.

An idol in the mirror

The other big name of the early 1990s came from a magazine. A former sailor and construction worker who had been stripping in New England clubs appeared as Playgirl's Man of the Month in February 1989, and within a year he was making videos as Ryan Idol.

The titles played on his name: Idol Eyes (1990), Idol Worship (1991), Idol Thoughts (1993), Idol Country (1994). In 1994 the British critic Richard Dyer borrowed one of them for the title of an essay, "Idol Thoughts", and used these videos to argue that gay porn constantly shows itself being made: performers who play performers, looks at the camera, sex staged as a show for the man watching⁷.

Idol retired from porn in 1996. In the late 1990s he took a leading role in Ronnie Larsen's comedy Making Porn, which played off-Broadway and toured American cities, and in 2007 he reached Broadway in a small part in a revival of Terrence McNally's farce The Ritz.

Wonder bread and ecstasy

Not every star story ended on a stage. Joey Stefano arrived in Los Angeles in 1989, met Chi Chi LaRue and became, almost overnight, one of the most wanted performers of the early 1990s. He made about sixty films in five years and danced at the Gaiety, the male burlesque theatre in Times Square.

He also crossed into mainstream culture in the most visible way possible: Madonna chose him as a model for her book Sex, published in 1992 with metal covers and sold sealed in plastic in bookshops around the world.

On 26 November 1994 Stefano was found dead in a Hollywood motel room, aged 26. The coroner ruled it an accidental overdose of several drugs. Two years later the theatre critic Charles Isherwood published his biography, Wonder Bread and Ecstasy, a portrait of a young man who was famous to thousands of strangers and close to very few people⁸.

Straight men, gay films

As the market grew, the studios needed more men than the gay world could supply, and many of the performers of the video era described themselves as straight. The trade called it "gay for pay".

Escoffier studied the phenomenon in an article of 2003. Drawing on interviews and on the trade press, he described how straight men were recruited, how they negotiated what they would and would not do on camera, and how the straight man having sex with men became a fantasy that the studios sold in its own right⁹.

The money was real. Ryan Idol later said that at his peak he earned $50,000 a film. Most performers earned a small fraction of that, and few careers lasted more than a couple of years.

Statuettes in a bathhouse

An industry with stars wanted prizes. The first awards for gay video were categories in the AVN Awards, the trade awards of the straight industry run by the magazine Adult Video News, from 1986.

In 1991 Gay Chicago Magazine printed its own list of winners in its year-end issue, with tongue-in-cheek categories such as "Burnout of the Year" alongside "Best Overall Performer". The Grabby Awards, as they became known, added best video and best screenplay in 1992 and best director in 1994.

In December 1998 AVN gave gay porn a ceremony of its own, the GayVN Awards, held for the first time at the Westin Bonaventure hotel in Los Angeles and later in Las Vegas. Its Hall of Fame soon included the names of the video era: Jeff Stryker, the director William Higgins, and stars from studios that had not even existed ten years before.

A photographer in Rio

Video also widened the map. Kristen Bjorn, a photographer who had worked in San Francisco, moved to Brazil in 1982 and spent eight years there working as a fashion photographer and shooting male nudes for gay magazines.

In 1988 he released his first video, Tropical Heatwave, a series of solo scenes with Brazilian men in natural settings. Carnaval in Rio followed in 1989, filmed during the carnival parades, and then a long run of features shot around the world.

Bjorn's films had a recognisable signature: unknown models chosen for their looks rather than their fame, casts of many nationalities and skin colours, beaches, jungles and city rooftops, and long, carefully lit scenes. His films, sold to American and European buyers, were among the first to make gay porn feel international.

After the Velvet Revolution

The biggest change came from the east. When the communist regimes of Central Europe fell in 1989, Prague, Bratislava and Budapest opened to Western producers, with cheap locations, low wages and young men eager to earn in dollars.

In 1993, the year Czechoslovakia split into two countries, a Slovak director working as George Duroy founded Bel Ami in Bratislava. He took his name from the hero of Guy de Maupassant's novel Bel-Ami, the handsome young man who rises through Paris by seduction.

Bel Ami's men were slim, smooth, boyish adults, very different from the moustached, muscular men of the California studios. The look came to be called "twink", one of the body types that the film scholar John Mercer, in his study of masculinity in gay porn, identifies as central to the genre¹⁰. Bel Ami became its best-known brand, with series such as Lukas' Story (1994 to 1995) and Frisky Summer (1995 to 1998), and An American in Prague (1997).

Its first great star was Lukas Ridgeston, who made his debut in 1993 and was soon one of the most famous faces in gay porn. He later moved behind the camera, and in 2005 appeared in the HBO documentary Thinking XXX, about the photographer Timothy Greenfield-Sanders's portraits of porn stars. Ridgeston, his frequent co-star Johan Paulik and Duroy himself were all later inducted into the GayVN Hall of Fame.

American producers followed. William Higgins, the founder of Catalina, moved his production to Prague in the mid-1990s and spent the rest of his career filming Czech men. Falcon later created a line, the Falcon International Collection, shot in Europe with largely Eastern European casts.

The youthful look raised an obvious question, and the law had already answered it. After a scandal in 1986, when it emerged that the straight star Traci Lords had made most of her films while under eighteen, Congress passed a law in 1988 requiring every American producer to keep proof of age for every performer. Anyone producing for the American market had to keep those records, wherever the film was shot.

France had its own tradition. Jean-Daniel Cadinot, a Paris photographer born in 1944, had turned to film in 1980 under the label French Art and made some sixty films, known for their careful lighting and simple stories drawn, he said, from real incidents. He died of a heart attack in April 2008.

Nine angles on one scene

The DVD arrived in American shops on 24 March 1997. For the adult industry it was an easy decision. A disc was cheaper to manufacture than a tape, lighter to mail and did not wear out.

It also changed the film itself. Chapters let the viewer jump straight to any scene, so a feature became, in practice, a menu of scenes. Extras added interviews, photo galleries, behind-the-scenes footage and trailers. The format allowed up to nine camera angles on the same scene, a function that found a niche in two places above all: yoga videos and erotica. In 1998 the straight studio Digital Playground launched interactive discs on which the viewer chose what happened next from a menu.

The change was quick. In 2001 DVD players outsold video recorders in the United States for the first time, and in June 2003 weekly DVD rentals overtook VHS. Studios re-released their back catalogues on disc, sometimes cut or re-edited, and the tape became a collector's item.

Without a condom

The DVD years also brought the sharpest argument in gay porn since the arrival of the condom. By the early 1990s condoms had become standard in American gay video. After 1996, as combination therapy turned HIV into a treatable illness for those who could get it, a subculture of men who chose sex without condoms, and called it barebacking, became visible in personal advertisements, on early websites and in the gay press.

In 1998 Paul Morris founded Treasure Island Media in San Francisco, naming it after his favourite book as a child. It made films without condoms, often with a documentary, unpolished look, at a time when the major studios would not. Falcon, Hot House, Titan and Raging Stallion kept condoms on their sets, and Titan and Hot House made it a point of principle. Health advocates accused bareback films of encouraging the spread of HIV; Morris answered that his films showed men living their sexual lives honestly.

The literary scholar Tim Dean, in a book published in 2009, studied this subculture and Morris's films at length. He did not try to settle the moral argument; he tried to understand why the films mattered to the men who made and watched them, as records of a way of life rather than simple fantasy¹¹. The debate would only grow in the internet age.

The last tape

By 2005 the world of the video era looked solid. It had studios with brands in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Bratislava and Prague, directors with long careers, a star system, a trade press and two sets of awards. Its films were sold on disc by post, from shops and, more and more, from websites.

That last detail was the beginning of the end. The same machines that let customers order a DVD online would soon let them download, stream and share films for nothing, and the internet, the subject of the next chapter, would undo the business that the videotape had built.