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You might say that Jeffrey Escoffier thinks a lot about sex. His writings onthe subject have appeared in such scholarly sources as Qualitative Sociology,the Journal of Homosexuality, and the Encyclopedia of Prostitution and Sex Work. Well known for books like American Homo and Sexual Revolution, Escoffier this month marks the publication of his newest book, Bigger Than Life: The History of Gay Porn Cinema from Beefcake to Hardcore. The following is an excerpt from the second chapter, which covers the birth of the gay adult filmindustry.

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'A Most Unusual Film Festival' blared the marquee of the Park Theatre in the Westlake area of Los Angeles in June 1968. The program published in the Los Angeles Free Press listed Jack Smith's Flaming Creatures, Andy Warhol's MyHustler, and a Kenneth Anger trilogy. Other films billed for the series included gay soft-core titles like Pat Rocco's Love is Blue, Nudist Boy Surfers, Boys Out to Ball and 'Warhol's B-J (call theatre for title!).' This 'most unusual film festival' was the first theatrical screening ever -- in the United States, or even the world for that matter -- devoted to all- malesexually explicit (although not yet hardcore) films.

The Park's film festival was the first public evidence of gay erotic filmmaking. It predated the Stonewall riots that sparked the gay liberation movement by one year and it drew upon the local physique photographers to show their 8 mm short films theatrically. Its origins lay not so much in a gay political or cultural awakening, but in the economic troubles of the movie industry caused by the rise of television.

Like other theaters, the Park was not doing well financially.

A number of other theaters in that part of town were also playing soft-core films. But there was a gay community in the Westlake district and neighboring Silver Lake -- and no one anywhere, either in LA or anywhere else, was showing erotic movies for them. Ed Kazan, the theater's manager at the time, was aware that soft-core gay porn had often been screened in the back rooms of local bars. He suggested running gay soft-core to Shan Sayles and Monroe Beehler, thePark's owners.

Beehler was enthusiastic about the idea. 'Hey, we can get a whole new audience. All I need is to find some filmmakers.'

At the time there weren't many gay-oriented films that included an explicitly sexual component. Sayles and Beehler immediately set out to find local gay filmmakers to supply the Park and the other theaters they owned with gay-themed soft-core pornographic movies. They faced a considerable challenge: only 1.4 percent of the thousands of stag films made between 1920 and 1967 were exclusively male homosexual. What was available were the films of Kenneth Anger, Jack Smith, and Andy Warhol -- the first films with homoerotic imagery to be shown in public. Yet most of these films had been made in the context ofavant-garde art scenes, and none of them showed explicit sexual action.

However, Sayles and Beehler soon found a number of local photographers and filmmakers who had already made erotic films. One was Pat Rocco, who had workedas a physique photographer before he started shooting three-minute short films of his models posing. He soon undertook more ambitious and sophisticated narrative shorts that he sold by advertising in the Los Angeles Free Press, and built up a substantial mail-order business.

Sayles and Beehler asked to see his work. Sayles told Rocco, 'These don'tbelong in a private collection, these belong on the screen. They're good enough to show, and we'd like to start the Park Theatre with them.'

In contrast to the sexually charged symbolism of Kenneth Anger or the rough-hewn bohemianism of Warhol, Rocco's movies were more conventionally sentimental. His films usually showed attractive boys holding hands, walking through shady woods, and kissing behind chiffon curtains. They rarely even showed simulated sex. Nevertheless, showing two males kissing was considered daring. One of Rocco's favorites was called Discovery. Made in 1968, it wasshot entirely in Disneyland and followed two young men, naked and kissing on Tom Sawyer's Island. The movie ends with them walking out of Disneyland hand in hand.

The Park screened more than sixty of Pat Rocco's soft-core homoerotic shortfilms -- 'naked boys on the beach films' as director Jerry Douglas later characterized them -- in the first year of its gay programming. Business wasvery good that first year. The theater was pretty full no matter what was showing. Altogether, Rocco made more than a hundred films over the next few years -- for the Park and other theaters.

Another local filmmaker was the legendary Bob Mizer of Athletic Model Guildfame. 'Most of Mizer's films,' noted Advocate film reviewer Jim Kepner, 'had guys wearing trunks or briefs getting out in the yard to do their daily exercises. Then eventually they took their briefs off and then what they did,while looking like ordinary muscle exercises, was actually intended to get the maximum of flopping.' These films were called 'danglies' or 'backyard cock danglers.'

Mizer and Rocco represented two very different perspectives on the gay male erotic culture that had developed before the sexual revolution of the 1960s. Mizer's beefcake photos focused on the male figure as sexually desirable: muscles, bulging crotches, dressed in skimpy or tight clothes. Rocco's movies portrayed gay male romance and love, usually of attractive young men; they downplayed the sexually desirable masculine figure and the sexual aspect of gay relationships.

Initially the gay programs at the Park did very well, but over the next 12 months interest in the soft-core movies began to wane. Audiences wanted to see more explicit sexual activity on screen, though even full frontal nudity was still relatively rare. '[T]here was grumbling from two sides.' Kepner recalled,'As the stories developed, some complained that too much time was being wastedon meaning less action and the actors should get their clothes off and get to itas soon as they could. The others wanted more storyline and more sentiment.'

Going Hardcore

By 1969, distributors and exhibiters clamored for movies showing explicit sexual acts, desperate to bring audiences back to their theaters. San Francisco was the first city where hardcore features were extensively played -- more than 25 theaters offering hardcore movies.

The Park's owners set out to find hardcore material for their gay audiences. Most straight porn filmmakers refused to make gay films, and gay filmmakerslike Bob Mizer and Pat Rocco were not willing to take the risk. Many had suffered legal persecution at one time or another. Mizer had been arrested in the mid-sixties on prostitution charges, largely because of his referrals of models to other 'photographers.'

Sayles and Beehler realized that they would need to produce new movies if they wanted to hold on to their gay audience. They set up Signature Films as a production unit and gutted one of their theaters, converting it into a soundstage. They became the founding fathers of the gay porn business in southern California, and sought to establish it in the image of the Hollywood movie studio. Sayles modeled himself on the studio boss; Beehler was the practical head of production.

What degree of nudity a film had and how sexually suggestive the behavior accompanying it could be were changing very quickly. Early soft- core films had strict but informal 'guidelines' governing what could be shown -- the penis had to be soft, not be even slightly enlarged. No one was allowed to touch his own penis. According to Bob Mizer, it changed week by week. But by the middle of 1969 Sayles wanted 'heavy, hard stuff.' At that point Mizer chose to bowout.

One day in June 1969, Sayles called everyone into Signature's conference room and announced that the company was changing its production policy. From that point on they would make hardcore movies and that if anyone was uncomfortable with that, they should leave then. For those who choose to remain, Sayles said that he would stand by them and get them the best lawyers, but, as he told his assembled staff, if he were asked he would deny any knowledge of what they were doing.

'When the decision came that we should switch to hardcore,' recalled Tom DeSimone, one of Signature's gay directors, 'it was like: stay with it or getout. And of course, we all knew that we'd have to go even further underground, because everything was getting busted.'

'You cannot make a hardcore film without violating the prostitution laws,'according to Captain Jack Wilson of the Los Angeles Police Department. 'When you pay actors to engage in sex or oral copulation, you've violated the laws. You've solicited individuals to engage in prostitution by asking them to exchange sex for money.'

Because hard-core producers in the early seventies operated outside the law, many were fly- by-night operations. 'Stories [were] written on matchbook covers and dialogue is made up by performers more noted for looks than talent,' one producer observed at the time, 'Filming takes place on a single day, and the results are sometimes little more than records of sexual activity framed by the collective sexual fantasies of the people who film and edit one film a week, every week of the year.'

'We had always made our films very carefully.' DeSimone remembered. 'Evenwhen they were only simulated, we did them quietly and out of the way because I didn't want people nosing around. So I felt confident we could make the switchover without too much problem. But I didn't like having to switch to hardcore. I knew it meant the quality of the film and everything else would go down. We had been making decent films, I thought, and even though they were sex films they were nicely done.'

Sayles had been reluctant to make the switch, but Signature began to shoot hard-core sex scenes to replace the simulated sex scenes in its soft- core features to compete with the San Francisco and New York exhibitors.

The director's role changed from that of directing actors in simulated sex scenes that included dialogue and had some character development to that of directing and choreographing sexual performances, which required coaching theperformers through a series of sex acts, offering them encouragement, monitoring erections, and eliciting and photographing successful cum- shots.

As Tom DeSimone explained at the time: 'You have to be a real psychologist.'

'Your mind is constantly clicking about how to solve a million and one problems,' he said. 'You realize what they are going through on the bed. We try to treat it as gingerly as possible. When it is time for the scene we try to introduce the two people, because lots of time they don't meet each other until the day of the shooting. I introduce them and tell them to go over in the corner and run over the scene -- not the sex scene -- and they generally work the chemistry out, if they know they are going to have to get it on.'

Casting also became much more complicated with the shift to hardcore. Hard-core production in California always took place in the shadow of the state's tough pandering law, under which a paid performance of sex was considered to be prostitution and it carried a three-year prison term.

'The vice squad used to send people out there posing as models,' DeSimone recalled. 'Very sexy guys. So you had to be very careful when you interviewed these people what you said, because you were hiring them to perform sex for money and that was pandering. And that was how they used to get you.'

For the most part, casting for a film relied on the personal grapevine of the filmmakers. Once a film was cast, the performers were assigned to a designated spot and then driven to the location of the shoot. No one was allowed to make phone calls from the film's location.

'There was always that fear when you were starting to do a scene,' DeSimone remembered, 'because stories were that these people would pose as models and just as you were about to do the sex, you'd get busted. So, there was always that moment or turning point before they actually got into the action. Once they started kissing and fondling and got erect, you pretty much knew that they were into the scene.'

Having to perform 'real' sex also changed who would be cast in hardcore movies. 'When you get into hard core,' DeSimone lamented, 'you are dealing witha different class of people. You can't get actors or actresses anymore.'Instead, they were drifters, bodybuilders, and hustlers.

Sex films were no longer merely products made on the margins of the Hollywood film industry, they were outside both the industry and the law.

The New York City Lesbian,Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Community Center is sponsoring an event for the book on June 17.

For details call 212-620-7310.

Curtain up. In 1968, the Park Theatre's series of gay erotic features wasbilled as the 'world's first homosexual film festival.'

H IDDEN FROM HISTORY

A lot of people wonder what goes on behind the scenes in the movie business.Jeffrey Escoffier is no exception.

'When you're a fan, you're never quite sure what is real, and what isacted,' says Escoffier. 'That always struck me as very interesting.'

Escoffier's area of interest is the part of filmmaking that started off 'outside both the industry and the law.' He chronicles its history in his book Bigger Than Life: The History of Gay Porn Cinema from Beefcake to Hardcore.

'Basically, I've always been interested in the world of porn,' Escoffier says. 'A lot of my curiosity came from the fact that over the years I would have a crush on a particular star for a while. It made me wonder what it's liketo be a porn star, to make these films, to be a part of this industry.'

Writing about sex is nothing new for Escoffier, who edited the groundbreaking anthology Sexual Revolution. He has tackled other subjects --from jazz to modern dance to identity politics -- but he keeps returning to this particular topic.

Escoffier says he envisioned the book as a behind-the- scenes look of the industry. But as he did his research, he kept uncovering fascinating bits of history. For example, who remembers that before the phenomenon of Deep Throat,gay and straight audiences flocked to see the 1971 gay porn film Boys in the Sand when it was released in mainstream movie houses?

'As I was working on it, the book evolved almost by itself,' says Escoffier.'Before I knew it I realized that I was writing a history of the industry.'

Since there were few books dealing with the history of gay porn, he had tofind other sources. One of Escoffier's most important finds was Manshots, a magazine about gay adult films published between 1988 and 2001. It was edited by Jerry Douglas, who in 1972 had directed one of the first significant gayporn films, called The Back Row.

'The interviews in the magazine were great sources of material,' says Escoffier. 'I couldn't have written the book without the magazine.'

One of the interesting things about the book is the way Escoffier puts things in perspective. The hyper masculinity in the films made by Joe Gage inthe '70s, for example, were a reflection of the rough-and- tumble sex lives ofgay men in places like New York and San Francisco.

'Writing the book, I always put the developments in porn in context with what was happening with sex among gay men,' says Escoffier. 'After all, the history of porn is also the history of sex.'

Porn again. Jeffrey Escoffier says writing about the adult film industry is important because 'the history of porn is also the history of sex.'