Bel Ami, George Duroy's Bratislava studio and the look that conquered the video store

In 1993 a Slovak director who had borrowed his name from a Maupassant novel turned a trade name into a studio in Bratislava. Bel Ami's slim, smooth young men and its star Lukas Ridgeston changed what gay porn looked like on both sides of the Atlantic.

Bratislava, autumn 1993. Slovakia has been an independent country for less than a year, and a Slovak director who calls himself George Duroy has just finished shooting his first film, Tender Strangers. He has been using a trade name since May 1991, borrowed from a French novel. Now, with a film in the can, he turns it into a company: Bel Ami¹.

Within a few years Bel Ami was the best-known gay porn brand to come out of the former Eastern bloc, and its slim, smooth young men had changed what customers in America and Western Europe expected to find on the shelves of the video store. This page tells who founded it, how it found its models, how one of them became the most famous face in gay porn, and what the studio said when it was asked about condoms.

A name from Maupassant

The founder never worked under his own name. He took his pseudonym from Georges Duroy, the hero of Guy de Maupassant's novel Bel-Ami (1885), a handsome young man who climbs to the top of Paris society by seduction, and he gave the hero's nickname to the company².

According to a report on the Czech and Slovak porn business published in 2010, Duroy had worked as a television director in Czechoslovakia and, after the fall of communism in 1989, went to study filmmaking at the University of California, Los Angeles³.

The same report describes how the business began. Duroy placed advertisements in Czechoslovak newspapers asking for male models for erotic photography, and the response was overwhelming. From photographs he moved to film³.

Scouts, exclusives and three weeks on the road

In the early years the models came through those advertisements and through word of mouth. By 2010, Duroy said, Bel Ami had four full-time scouts working only for the studio and others working with it, and some young men still made contact directly¹.

About eighty per cent of the models were exclusive. Looks, he explained, were taken for granted. What decided whether someone was kept was personality, reliability and a reasonable level of wholesomeness: the studio often took its models on long trips abroad, so the question was whether he could live with the man for three weeks, whether he got on with others, whether he had a drug problem and whether he would turn down offers from escort agencies¹.

Duroy also said that on average his models stayed with the company for at least five years, that many were university students from ordinary middle-class families, and that several former models worked in the business behind the camera¹.

The king from Bratislava

The first great Bel Ami star was born in Bratislava in 1974 and made his first film in 1993. His stage name, Lukas Ridgeston, was not chosen by him or by the studio. It was invented by the editors of the American magazine Freshmen, who wanted something that sounded less Eastern European, and Bel Ami adjusted the spelling.

The series Lukas' Story (1994 to 1995) made him famous, and fans and the gay press came to call him simply "the King". He was inducted into the GayVN Hall of Fame in 2000, and his frequent co-star Johan Paulik and Duroy himself followed him there.

Ridgeston crossed into the art world too. The New York photographer Timothy Greenfield-Sanders included him in XXX: 30 Porn-Star Portraits (2004), a book of large-format portraits of performers photographed once clothed and once nude⁴.

The Bel Ami look

What Bel Ami sold was a type. Its men were slim, smooth, boyish-looking adults with natural bodies, a world away from the moustached, gym-built men of the California studios of the 1970s and 1980s. The look came to be called "twink", and the film scholar John Mercer identifies it as one of the body types that organise gay porn as a genre⁵.

The films had a recognisable style as well. Scenes were often set outdoors, in summer, by lakes and on holiday, and the men were shown as friends as much as partners.

Many of the models did not call themselves gay. Duroy argued that gay porn should more accurately be called all-male porn, and that the young men of Central European cities had learned to experiment without taking on a label¹. The historian Jeffrey Escoffier had already described the American version of this phenomenon, straight men working in gay porn, in a study published in 2003⁶.

An American in Prague

The studio's best-known films came in the second half of the 1990s: the Frisky Summer series (1995 to 1998), An American in Prague (1997) and, from 1998, the long 101 Men series. Duroy later said that An American in Prague was the only film he ever shot exactly as he had planned it¹.

The Czech capital became the centre of the business that Bel Ami had helped to create. By 2010, according to the same report on the industry, around fifty gay studios were working in the Czech Republic, drawn by low production costs and a large pool of willing young men³. Bel Ami itself came to have offices in Bratislava, Prague and Budapest.

Books, calendars and the internet

Bel Ami sold more than films. With the Berlin publisher Bruno Gmünder it produced calendars and photo books, among them volumes by the American photographer Howard Roffman such as Private Moments: Bel Ami (2009)⁷. Its models toured gay clubs in Europe, North America and Australia.

When the DVD market collapsed, the studio moved online with BelAmiOnline and kept collecting trade prizes, including XBIZ awards for best gay site in 2013 and 2014. In 2010 Duroy said that half of his customers were American and another fifth spoke English as their first language¹.

Condoms, rules and controversy

Bel Ami spent most of its history shooting with condoms. In 2010 Duroy said that he had promoted safe sex in his films for seventeen years and still used condoms in about ninety per cent of his production, but that the studio had by then released twelve to fourteen condom-free episodes¹.

His defence was controversial. He argued that HIV was far rarer in Slovakia than in the United States, said that if he lived in California he would not shoot without condoms, and complained that promoting safe sex had cost him customers and earned him no credit from the gay press¹. Health campaigners saw any condomless film as a risk to performers and a bad example to viewers.

The youthful look raised another obvious question. Anyone producing for the American market had to keep proof of age for every performer under the federal record-keeping law passed in 1988, wherever the film was shot, and Duroy said that the company was run according to American regulations, with all its systems in English¹.

From a single film shot in 1993, Bel Ami became one of the few studios of the video age to survive into the internet era under the same founder. The wider story of how the videotape and the disc carried it into homes across the world is told in the chapter on VHS to DVD.