The Surprise of a Knight, the first gay porn film made in America

A lady in an evening gown receives a gentleman caller, and the last intertitle says only "Surprise". Made around 1929 and credited to a writer called "Oscar Wild", it is the oldest known American film with sex only between men, and nobody knows who was in it.

A woman in an elegant evening gown stands in a bedroom, finishing her toilette before a visitor arrives. Her hair is cut short, in the fashion of the late 1920s. She checks herself, lifts her long skirt for the camera, and goes through to the drawing room, where a gentleman in a well-cut suit is waiting. An intertitle names the author of what follows: "Oscar Wild"¹.

This is the opening of The Surprise of a Knight, a silent American reel of about ten minutes, usually dated to 1929. It is the oldest known American film in which the sex is entirely between men, and it is the title most often given as the first gay porn film. That label needs one honest caveat, and the film itself has been read in very different ways over the past forty years.

Ten minutes in a drawing room

The plot is the plot of a hundred stag films. The lady offers her caller a drink. He refuses, she drinks it herself, and they talk, then kiss.

Each time his hands move to her breasts or between her legs, she pushes them away, and at one point she gives him a playful slap. By way of apology she performs oral sex on him. Then she lies face down on the sofa and he has anal sex with her, twice, until both reach orgasm. Penetration itself is never clearly shown².

The gentleman walks out of the frame. The lady stands up, lifts her skirt again and reveals a penis. The second and last intertitle appears: "Surprise".

What follows is a short dance. The performer, now half undressed, shows off for the camera; the gentleman comes back, helps remove the skirt and dances briefly with his naked partner. After a jump cut the performer returns in a man's business suit, winks at the audience and leaves³.

That is the whole film. Nothing in it is hidden from the viewer for long, and nothing in it is explained.

Written by Oscar Wild

Stag films never carried real names. Directors, performers and laboratories were all committing a crime, and the credits that did appear were jokes, as the genre's first historians, Al Di Lauro and Gerald Rabkin, showed in their survey of the stag film⁴.

The only credit on this reel is a joke with a target. In 1895 Oscar Wilde had been convicted in London of gross indecency with men and sentenced to two years of hard labour. He died in Paris in 1900, ruined, and for the next generation his name was the most famous shorthand in the English-speaking world for a man who loved men.

Spelling it "Wild" kept the joke deniable and made it a little ruder. The title plays the same game: the knight is the gentleman caller, and the night is when such visits happen. For an audience in on the joke, the credit gave the ending away before the lady had even reached the sofa.

1929, or thereabouts

Because nobody signed it, the date of The Surprise of a Knight has to be guessed from the film itself: the clothes, the haircuts, the furniture, the film stock. The year usually given is 1929.

Earlier accounts placed it in 1930, and some catalogues still do. Thomas Waugh, the film historian who has written most about it, has preferred a looser formula, "late 1920s"⁵. The difference is small, but it matters for one claim: whether the film comes before or after A Stiff Game, the other early American stag with sex between men, usually placed in the early 1930s.

The country is also an inference. The English intertitles and the place where the print survived point to the United States, and historians treat it as an American film⁵.

The first gay porn film, with a caveat

Search for the first gay porn film and this is the name that comes back. The claim is true in a precise sense: The Surprise of a Knight is the oldest known American film in which the sex is only between men, with no woman in the scene at all³.

It is not the oldest film to show sex between men. That distinction usually goes to a French reel, Le Ménage moderne du Madame Butterfly, dated to around 1920. In that parody of Puccini's opera, men have sex with men, but in the middle of a group scene with women, and the men remain firmly heterosexual characters. Waugh counts it among the earliest surviving examples of sex between men on film².

So the honest version runs like this. Madame Butterfly is earlier. The Surprise of a Knight is the first known film, anywhere, in which the whole erotic action takes place between two people who are not women in the eyes of the camera, and so the first that later generations of gay viewers could recognise as their own.

A joke for the lodge

For a long time scholars read the film as a gag made for straight men. In Hard to Imagine, his history of gay erotic images before 1969, Waugh looked at how the costume works against the basic promise of hardcore, which is to show everything².

The film scholar Linda Williams had called that promise the "frenzy of the visible": the stag and its successors exist to put bodies and sex in plain view⁶. A lady in a long gown, whose secret is kept until the last minute, turns the logic upside down. The spectacle is the costume, and the payoff is a revelation rather than an act.

In his essay on the American stag film, Waugh put the performer alongside the Black man in A Stiff Game as a "sexual other" displayed for the lodge audience. For the men watching, he wrote, the meaning of such a figure was "I am not like that"⁵.

John R. Burger, writing on gay video in 1995, noticed another ambiguity. The film never makes clear whether the gentleman knows the truth before the encounter, and Burger saw the result as a kind of make-believe homosexuality. He also noted that the film breaks a habit of the stags, in which the man on the receiving end of anal sex between men is usually shown as a victim or as being punished. Here, nobody is punished at all³.

"Very much in possession of herself"

The same few minutes of film have since been seen with new eyes. In 2026 the writer Jake Hall published a long article on the reel in the Canadian magazine Xtra, and noticed what the caller's face does at the end: no sign of disgust, no sense of having been tricked, just a goofy, contented grin¹.

Interviewed for that article, Waugh described the lead performer in terms he had not used in 2001. She was, he said, a trans sex worker, "very beautiful and very much in possession of herself", and the film was frank about her sex, her costume and her revelation alike¹.

Emerald Vaught, a researcher at Indiana University who studies the history of trans women in pornography, has placed the film at the start of that history. In an article in the journal Porn Studies, she argued that its gender play works above all as comedy, built for rooms where men teased each other about being fooled⁷.

None of these readings can be proved. Nothing is known about the performer: not a name, not a city, not how she or he lived. The film may belong as much to trans history as to gay history, and calling the lead a drag queen, a man in a dress or a trans woman says as much about the person describing the film as about the film.

A print in Indiana

Like most surviving stags, the reel owes its survival to the Kinsey Institute, which built the largest collection of these films in the world. The institute's film archive is open only to qualified researchers, by appointment, and that is how almost everything written about the film came to be written.

Outside the archive, the film has lived the life of all stags: copies of copies, transferred to video and passed around, then posted online in blurred versions many generations away from the original print. Hall found that, even today, a good copy is hard to track down¹.

The scholar Mireille Miller-Young, who spent years tracking down collectors for her history of Black women in pornography, explained to Hall why so little of this cinema survives. Some reels were seized by the police and some given to the Kinsey Institute, but others were thrown away by relatives who found them after a death. "There's a disposability to this history," she said¹.

The Surprise of a Knight escaped that fate. It survives as ten anonymous minutes that each generation has watched and named in its own way. The wider story is told in the chapter on stag films, the secret reels where men first filmed men.