Score! (1973): Porno Chic Brings Everybody Together

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Boys in the Sand (1971): A Gay Coffee Table Porno

Boys in the Sand (1971)

Dir: Wakefield Poole

From a distance, it seems unnatural for the world of the 1970s porno chic to have seemingly caught popularity with a low budget gay hardcore pornographic film that featured no dialogue to go with its trilogy of sexual adventures. However, Boys in the Sand is a gorgeously shot amateur feature that fills the screen with fantasia and matters of cultural and political import.

Comparing the film to the early works of Andy Warhol isn't just a compliment, it's a given. Poole was one of Warhol's contemporaries, and seems to have been inspired by Warhol's earlier works of objectification and voyeurism, such as those featured in both My Hustler and Chelsea Girls. The main difference between the Warhol/Morrissey pictures and Boys in the Sand, other than the hardcore sexuality that Poole was now able to deal in, is that Warhol's films present a sense of jaded detatchment, while Poole is fully engaged in his scene, and hopeful for the next steps to come.

Boys in the Sand is a trilogy of short films featuring Casey Donovan (nee Cal Culver), a blond hairy and toned sort with a sizable phallus, who would go on to be one of the first gay pornographic superstars. All three are presented as fantasias of secret desire and lust.

Bayside begins with a dark haired Peter Fisk walking down a long boardwalk, hopping off at an unmarked location, wandering through a long path of sorts through the forest and ending up at an isolated nude beach, where he strips down to catch some rays and contemplate the water. Casey Donovan magically appears out of the water, and walks up to him. They engage in some beach sex before leaving for a more secluded area in the trees, where they get down on a blanket. When both have came, Fisk puts his leather bracelet/cock ring on Donovan's wrist and wanders out into the water to disappear. Donovan, now alone, dons Fisk's clothing and walks down the beach.

Poolside is a Donovan showcase, where he stars as a richer gay man who is trying to pick up guys on the boardwalk by using the gay newspaper as a signal he's gay. Unsuccessful, he wanders home to sunbathe by the pool, when he finds an ad that he mails about. Time goes by, filled with swimming and wandering the beaches, when he gets his package in the mail. Inside, is a tablet that, when thrown in the pool, becomes Danny DiCoccio. They get it on, and once finished, they get dressed and go out as a couple. On the boardwalk, they meet another lonely gay soul with the same paper.

Inside features Donovan lounging in a treehouse-styled house, when he spots Randy Moore, a power employee setting up a long pole to fix the cables. After taking a shower, he fantasizes about Randy Moore, first laying naked in his sunroom, then out on the deck, then on his landing, and finally in his bed. But, Randy is just his imagination, as he huffs poppers and fucks himself on a large black dildo. After he climaxes and cleans up, he wanders back downstairs to find Moore waiting for him outside his front door. He smiles, and they go inside, closing the front door.

These stories feature gay life in a way that's a blend of fantasia and reality. Bayside features a fantasia of the real phenomenon of cruising, where a blond god comes out of the sea. Poolside blends the reality of gay bar busts with the fantasia of being able to mail-order a boyfriend who comes in a tablet without ever having to be worried about being raided. Inside is about fantasizing about men who may actually be straight, but you can't proposition them because of gay panic, then the hopefulness of the object of your fantasy being attainably gay.

There are no judgments here. Gay is good and beautiful, and gay life comes with its own desires and wants and needs. Gay men have dogs too. They're respectful of straight borders. They lust, they need fulfillment. And, their lust has no borders. Not only is this a gay male fantasia, but the last of the vignettes features an interracial coupling, which features Moore as a power figure with many of the same stances seen in Bayside.

But, Poole is also making comments on the daily life of a gay man. There are reasons why he has the closeups of the raided bars in 1971, 2 years after Stonewall. These were everyday worries of the gay man in a political sense. You couldn't actively go after men for fear they would kick your ass, which is why the majority of Inside is a fantasy about the unattainable until he is attainable. You could go hookup and meet people on beaches that were secluded and distanced and out of the public eye, but you probably had to know about them. These were regular bits of knowledge that have been passed down through the generations.

But, what makes Boys in the Sand so essential is the cinematography. Shot on a handheld, which is reminiscent of the Warhol shorts, Poole manages to create a lush and richly photographed film about gay sexuality. In movies that had preceded it, and would follow it, frequently the films would eschew quality imagery just to have hard raw sexuality featured in a raw light. There was nothing romantic or beautiful about it. But, looking at the images in this, you come to realize that Poole's main limitation was the quality of film stock. While the handheld nature of the film leads to periodic shaky cam pans, it's forgivable for many of the stills that he created which were framed as deeply as any mainstream film would before it. Sometimes it was random luck, and sometimes it was static shots that were purely intentional, but Poole's films frequently had a gorgeousness to them that is rarely seen in pornographic filmmaking.

Is Boys in the Sand essential? Is it good? Well, it's erotic, and it's beautifully shot. To say it is just a gay pornographic film is so reductive of the qualities that are in it. But, it is primarily a pornographic film. It's place in the history of porno chic is undeniable, and its place as a gay time capsule of the post-Stonewall worries of 1971 also render this to be a must watch for those who want to see what people were thinking and worrying about. I enjoyed watching it, and it is romantic in an anonymous way.

Prison Girls (1972): Sexuality is Complicated

Prison Girls (1972)
dir: Tom DeSimone

Prison Girls originally had a gimmick: it was a 3D porno. It wasn't the only 3D porn to be made in the 70s, but watching it in 2D makes it seem like a useless exercise. The other adult movie in 3D from the 70s that I've seen, The Lollipop Girls in Hard Candy, had the inverse problem, it seemed like a useless exercise in porno.

Prison Girls was directed by Tom DeSimone, a director who had got his start directing gay porn under the name Lancer Brooks, some of it quite rapey and forced, a sensibility which would bleed into Prison Girls in a now-squicky way. of course, DeSimone hates Prison Girls, saying that it was a compromised vision, and all the behind-the-scenes arguing makes it not his film.

In the 1970s, porno chic was in full force, as was sexploitation, in which women were physical fodder for the grindhouse. Prison Girls is just one among many of these sexploitation/porno crossovers which had sleaze on the mind under the guise of exploiting the new found sexual revolution. Even with the downer ending, it never is honest about its intentions, and leaves a lot of the morals of the film up for grabs.

The concept of the film is ludicrous, even for porno chic terms. 6 female prisoners are given weekend passes in order to start organizing their lives since they'll be getting out of prison soon. In the beginning, the women are having shower fights, and talking about beating each other's asses with bars of soap. As they see the prison shrink, she espouses a lot of clap trap about how some of the women are frigid, and others need to get a deep dicking in order to be more placid prisoners. It's all under the guise of the new sexual revolution morality, but its all hooey anyways.

The first girl goes to her old pimp in order to get her clothes. But, her pimp slaps her around then screws her on some fantastically deep shag carpeting that looks more like the back of a Sasquatch than an actual carpet. The pimp slapping is problematic, as it is total domestic abuse. The girl eventually does give in to screw, but she fought the scene until past the point where its not comfortable. But, there is deep shag carpeting to consider.

The second girl goes to her husband, who has werewolf sideburns, and has sex with him in a peaceful place for once in order to experience her first orgasm. Because she was frigid before, or something. She has a wonderful orgasm, and everything is peaceful.

The third girl visits her brother-in-law, when a biker gang shows up and forces them to have sex. This isn't like a cutesy have sex in front of us thing, this is full on rape and violent sexual abuse. And, it goes on for a long fucking time. Even for a sleazy porno, I don't know how many people signed up for extended rape sequences that just fall out of the sky. Here I was, enjoying the hell out of terrible carpeting, when suddenly a biker gang comes in and sexually assaults a girl and forces her to have sex with some guy.  Jesus fuck.

The fourth girl meets up with her rich artist ex-boyfriend or something. He's busy painting flowers on paid model/prostitute's tits, because he's rich. But, when the girl shows up, he's pleased, and they happily shag. Then, the fifth girl shows up, who was the fourth girl's prison girlfriend, and is all possessive. She beats the guy, and then the girls shag a little until the guy joins in, and its a merry MFF threeway once all the sexual freedoms are figured out amicably.

The sixth girl has a boyfriend who is on the lam himself. And, they finally meet at some hiding place, and shag. But, then the cops come in, and shoot her in the back while trying to arrest him. But, at least they shagged happily until the cops broke it up.

As it turns out, in the denouement, the prison shrink had set up the weekend passes to catch the boyfriend, and the last girl was just in the way. So, while everybody did get to have a bit of fun, it was a To Catch A Thief type scenario, except the sixth girl didn't know it, and ended up dead in the end.

But, OMG, the sexual politics in this movie are all over the fucking map. And, it doesn't help that Tom DeSimone is a gay man who probably likes S&M, based on his first few movies, like Assault, where men kidnap other men and sexually abuse them, but then turnabout's fair play. One of the ongoing topics of feminism is what to do with fantasies of power exchange. Rape fantasies are actually valid forms of fantasy for both men and women. Some men have fantasies about being raped, some women have fantasies about being raped. Some men want to hold the power, so do some women. These are just facts of humanity that have existed since the dawn of time. Power exchange turns people on.

Sexploitation and porno chic exploit these fantasies for the male dominant side, consistently. They're always by men and mainly for men. Prison Girls is no exception. It's a movie which is constantly exploiting the female body for the man's pleasure, and never once do we see wang (at least in the current version which has an MGM logo on it!). A knee-jerk feminist reaction to this movie would be that it frequently removes agency from women, so it's not a healthy form of expression.  Especially since there are two extremely problematic scenes, neither of which are presented as completely problematic. At the end of the movie, the raped girl, we are hinted, ends up in the hospital...but she'll survive and recover, according to her prison mates.

But, Prison Girls gives agency to the married girl, the girl with the rich painter (who fully asserts her individuality to both the painter and the prison girlfriend), and to the final girl who ends up dead. These three girls all have full control over their sexual expressions, and who they're hooking up with. Even if it is for the male camera, the girls are making decisions in the story.

With three stories of girls with agency, and 2 stories of girls without, what are we to say about Prison Girls? What does it say about the society it was constructed in? It doesn't seem to have any problems with the sexual revolution. At all. In fact, the downer ending has nothing to do with damning female sexuality and everything to do with how fucked up the system is. And, the male in the rape story is also forced into having sex with the girl, so its a rape of both parties. A dual gender rape scene is rather unusual.

This is looking too deep into a crappy movie that is all but disowned by its director (who would go on to direct things like Reform School Girls with Wendy O. Williams, Heavy Equipment with Jack Wrangler, and Hell Night with Linda Blair). The sexual politics are squicky. The dialogue and plot is ludicrous. The sense of pacing is awful. It's not XXX in its current state. It's now in a very ugly 2D (though, I can't help but imagine what the 3D shag carpeting would look like). And, there's not that much going for it. It's a throwaway picture, but it has a lot of weird gender politics in it, which makes it one of the more interesting pictures of the 70s porno chic films.

Kink (2013): Sexual Politics Documentary as Advertisement

Kink (2013)
dir: Christina Voros
pro: James Franco

San Francisco is home to The Armory, a Moorish Castle which now serves as home to Cybernet Entertainment, the proper name for the company that owns Kink.com, an internet-based adult film company which specializes in...wait for it...kinky videos.  They've owned the Armory since 2007, which had been empty since the '70s.  This movie isn't about The Armory itself, but the building itself is a fascinating creature.

Kink.com makes both hetero and gay oriented kinky films.  The majority of Kink.com's content is in the traditional female submissive oriented films, but there are categories for femdom and for gay male videos.  This is also a movie directed by a woman, Christina Voros, who is trying to seem interested in sexuality and the reasons behind why these models would want to be exploited or degraded.  Christina Voros mainly is interested in female sexuality, who dominate the film's all too short 79 minute run time.  More than that, Voros is interested in justifying kinky porn and female participation in it.

At one point in the middle of this female dominated documentary, a woman ironically comments, "I guess females have this sexuality thrust upon them."  She is implying that women in porn is completely taboo compared to it being acceptable for men, and this focus is a type of slut shaming.  Then, the movie proceeds to focus on women for the majority of its length, in an effort to say that women in porn shouldn't be so stigmatized.

Given that Kink wants to legitimize porn, for the most part it avoids the tough questions that linger around the whys and wherefores.  Some of the women are legitimately into kink, but some of the submissive models seem like they're OK with it but mainly doing it for the money.  And, the audience probably notices this up until a hard interview with an experienced dominatrix towards the end of the movie.

This interview, I believe it was with Matrisse Madeline, confessed that the industry runs through people fairly quickly.  Sometimes it is empowering to people who want to try it as a lark, and some people are doing it because they're down on their luck, but most, in the end, don't stick around for long.  She also confessed that if her children wanted to get into the industry, she would probably have a problem with it because it might mean they were in a tough place.

This was a fleeting moment of realism in an otherwise really shiny documentary about a company that pushes its image of being a porn studio that checks, double checks, and triple checks its validity with its models.  In certain videos that depict sex committed against the model's will, the videos are frequently preceded and followed by interviews with all models involved stating that they happily and willingly were participating in the videos. Kink.com is trying to go the extra step to say that these depictions are acceptable displays of sexuality and objectification of men and women by men and women is OK as long as it is wanted and accepted by all participants in said behaviors.

That's not to say that Kink is all about women.  The film is bookended by behind the scenes of gay BDSM videos, whose category is generally produced by, and sometimes starring, Van Darkholme.  There are some interviews with a hetero male submissive and a couple hetero male dominants. There is also an interview with a set construction guy, secretaries, and directors. The majority of these interviews are, obviously, supportive of the behaviors and justifying the morality of Kink.com.  And, many of these interviews are about the female submissive behavior that director Voros is so fascinated by.

Kink serves almost as a pro-sex primer into the world of female sexuality, BDSM, and porn.  It is practically made to tear down the sex-negative and objectification-negative aspects of some tenets of feminism.  Kink wants to show you that it is OK for women to own their sexuality and to willingly submit to men or women if that's what they really and truly want to do.  Whether it succeeds in these lofty goals is hard for me to judge, as I have always supported women in owning their sexuality and being able to act like men without the repercussions that women who act like men generally face.  But, what it does succeed in doing is being a great advertisement for Kink.com.

Final note, to those that were wondering, yes there is hardcore sexuality featured in this documentary.  There is full frontal nudity (male and female), some penetration, toys, and explicit kink in fair amounts.  If you are not able to handle homosexual sex, kinky sex, female nudity, male nudity, or graphic depictions of non-romanticized sexuality, this movie is not for you.

Fasinatingly, the only still of five in the press kit that has a woman as a submissive is the one shown below the break.  The other four stills are male submissive, and only one of those is male submissive in an explicitly femdom scene.

Ed's note: As of 8/16/2013, I believe that Kink has not found a distributor.  It is not a poorly made documentary, and should probably be seen by many people.  I believe that it's explicit content is what is keeping Kink from finding a theatrical, or even a VOD/streaming distribution.  Kink's official website seems to have been created exclusively for Sundance festival, and maintained through Sundance.  I saw the film at SIFF in 2013.