“Sex was probably lived more creatively [in the seventies]… than at any other time in history,” observed Arthur Danto in his book on Robert Mapplethorpe. Gay filmmakers in the 70s —in the art world, among the beefcake mail order entrepreneurs and early commercial hardcore theatrical directors—all looked to one another in order to figure out how sex should be portrayed on film. And the experimental films of Kenneth Anger and Andy Warhol, the beefcake films of Bob Mizer and the early gay porn movies of Wakefield Poole, Jack Deveau, Fred Halsted and Joe Gage captured gay male sexuality as it emerged from the repressive culture of the 50s and early sixties before Stonewall.

Join author Jeffrey Escoffier and his guests, including gay erotic film pioneer Wakefield Poole, who went from dancer at the Ballets Russes to choreographer on Broadway, where he worked with Noel Coward, Marlene Dietrich, Tallulah Bankhead, Liza Minelli, Bob Fosse and Stephen Sondheim, and ultimately to become the director of Boys in the Sand, the first commercially successful porn movie which paved the way for straight porn classic Deep Throat a year later. Over the course of his career, Poole experimented with many different styles of erotic filmmaking, including his classic Bijou. Working in the creative milieu of New York in the 1970s, Jack Deveau (1935-1982) and his partner Bob Alvarez, made a series of erotic movies that drew upon the techniques of experimental filmmaking, Andy Warhol, and 1960s style documentaries. In addition to working with Jack Deveau, Alvarez worked as a film editor for public television and on documentaries such as Woodstock. Joe Gage modeled his movies on the Hollywood B-movie. His trilogy, his first three movies—Kansas City Trucking Co., El Paso Wrecking Corp., and LA Tool and Die—are cult classics that helped capture a unique vision of masculine sexuality. They contributed to a new image of gay masculinity. After a 17 year hiatus, Gage returned to gay porn in 2001 and continued to produce movies that portray men having sex with men. Contemporary porn star, writer, editor and director Owen Hawk, who starred in Jerry Douglas’s award-winning Buckleroos in 2004, and founded his own company Dark Alley Media in 2005, has continued in the tradition of experimenting in the explicit cinematic portrayal of gay male sexuality.

JEFFrEY ESCOFFIEr

Jeffrey Escoffier writes on sexuality, gay history, music and dance. He is the author of Bigger Than Life: The History of Gay Porn Cinema from Beefcake to Hardcore (Running Press/Perseus Book Group, 2009) and American Homo: Community and Perversity (University of California Press, 1998), and he edited Sexual Revolution (Thunder’s Mouth, 2003), a compilation of the most important writing on sex published in the 1960s and 70s. He has also written a biography of John Maynard Keynes (Chelsea House, 1995) and edited, with Matthew Lore, Mark Morris’ L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato: A Celebration (Marlowe, 2001) on the choreography of Mark Morris. He has written for The New York Times Book Review, The Nation, The Utne Reader, The San Francisco Chronicle Book Review, the Journal of Homosexuality, and Qualitative Sociology. He has taught economics, LGBT Studies and sexuality at San Francisco State University, the University of California in Berkeley and at Davis, at Rutgers University, and at the New School University. From 2007-2009 he was a Visiting Scholar at the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality of New York University. For the last decade, he has worked in Health Media, Communications and Marketing in New York City.