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November 3-9, 2016 • BAY AREA REPORTER • 33
From the Godfather of gay porn by Brian Bromberger
I
f anyone doubts that pornography is an important part of gay culture, the new DVD Seed Money: The Legend of Falcon Studio, just released by Breaking Glass Pictures, will purge any misgivings. While Seed purports to be a documentary on the life of Chuck Holmes, the founder of Falcon and godfather of gay porn, it is really the story of porn’s evolution in gay male identity from the 1970s to the present. A big hit at last year’s Frameline, the film highlights the role San Francisco played in allowing gay men to be more comfortable, less apologetic and inhibited about their sexuality. The archival footage of gay San Francisco in the 1970s-80s is one of the gems of Seed. Porn meant freedom, and in graphic detail it showed how it was okay to be gay at a time when society said that was not true. Holmes, born on an Indiana farm, was one of the legions of gay men who arrived in San Francisco in 1970 to escape oppression and find sex following the Stonewall revolution. Holmes wanted to make movies, and created Falcon Studio in his home in 1971. In 1972, writer John Karr arrived in San Francisco and began reviewing porn for the Bay Area Reporter. Karr offers insightful commentary throughout Seed. At that time, porn was mostly 8mm loops of short scenes shown in peep shows. Holmes felt he could do better, and began to improve the craft of the medium by looking for attractive
“models” and shooting in beautiful locations, especially outdoors. As Karr points out, Holmes/Falcon were filming their sexual fantasies (very anal-oriented, as was Holmes) “filtered through what a little old man in Peoria wanted to see.” They were also translating gay life in the cities into a historical record, as well as creating porn stars (Casey Donovan, Al Parker, Don Fisk) who became heroes in the gay community because they were out when many could not be, whie facing the risk of being arrested by vice squads. In 1978 Holmes, who loved to ski, took some performers and a skeleton crew to film a few shots in Aspen so he could write off the trip as a business expense. He later added some additional scenes, producing the landmark The Other Side of Aspen, inventing the gay porno full-length feature. Friends with designer Calvin Klein, in 1979 Holmes adopted his clean-cut, muscled, smooth, mostly bleach-blond tighty-whitey look that quickly became the norm for all porn. African-Americans were not allowed in Falcon porn unless there was a reason in the plot for the person to be black, and then they could only be tops, reinforcing old racial stereotypes. Holmes was rich, spending it on sex parties and recreational drugs, starting to drag Falcon down with him. Diagnosed with KS in the early 1980s he cleaned up his act, but the VHS revolution resurrected Falcon as they transferred their 8mm films to video for home use,
making a fortune. By the mid-80s AIDS was casting its shadow over porn, and Seed poignantly features a brief montage of the Fade Out obituaries of all the Falcon stars who died of AIDS. To its discredit, Falcon was among the last of the studios to let their actors use condoms, at first advocating non-oxynol 9 use, which actually made transmission of the AIDS virus easier. The few still-alive stars insisting on condom use amd a possible action by ACT-UP finally convinced Holmes to change policy. But because many men were afraid to have sex, even safer sex, because of AIDS, porn became their only sexual outlet. Years later, customers would approach Holmes thanking him for saving their lives. Worried about his legacy, beginning in 1993 through his participation in the March on Washington for LGBT rights, Holmes became involved in politics to protect his business, gain respectability, and advance gay politicians (SF’s Carol Migden and Mark Leno, who comment favorably) through his philanthropic donations. His generosity made him a strategic player on the board of HRC, though some politicians, such as Tammy Baldwin of
Wisconsin, rejected his money. He died of AIDS-related liver failure in 2000. Even in death he remained controversial, as he had given $1 million to fund the SF LGBT Community Center. When it was named after him, people (mostly women) protested at its opening. Holmes remains a cipher. Because he didn’t like pictures taken of him, he appears in only three small clips, a total of three minutes. Yet perhaps
the best record of his life are the many clips (all soft-core) of the movies he produced. A genius at marketing, he was a Type A tyrant at the office, where a paper clip on the floor could send him into a flying rage. Suave and debonair (with a conservative look), he had complicated personal relationships. He didn’t allow the men in his life to express themselves. He was a lonely person, not satisfied with his vast wealth, and never felt accepted by his society friends. He was not proud to be a pornographer. When asked how he made his money, he replied he was in videotape replication or the mail order business. Yet despite his flaws and complexities, as Elizabeth Birch, former chair of HRC, said at his memorial service, “He never forgot the need to make a better life in this country for young gay and lesbian people.” Through interviews with Holmes’ colleagues, porn stars (Jeff Stryker, Jim Bentley), observers of the period (Chi Chi LaRue, John Waters), this winning documentary reveals the crucial role Holmes played by not only setting standards for porn and teaching gay men how to have sex, but in shaping ideas about masculinity and what it means to be gay.t
Punk royalty
Frank Pettis, courtesy of Amazon Studios/Magnolia Pictures
Iggy Pop, Scott Asheton, Ron Asheton, and Dave Alexander in director Jim Jarmusch’s Gimme Danger.
by David Lamble
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ame the outlandish rock star whose claim to fame rests on an odd relationship to the world of gold albums, drugs, party-til-youdrop and that timeless line, “Die young and leave a pretty corpse.” Give up? The name James Newell Osterberg Jr. will probably be of little help in identifying the career trajectory of proto-punk recording artistsinger-songwriter Iggy Pop, the subject of the new bio-doc Gimme Danger. Its director Jim Jarmusch describes it as a “love letter to possibly the greatest band in rock-n-roll history.” Jarmusch, whose resume features such hard-to-define American
New Wave classics as Stranger than Paradise, Mystery Train, Night on Earth, Dead Man, and his recent vampire black comedy Only Lovers Left Alive, has with Gimme Danger truly outdone himself. The boy born James Osterberg, Jr. was a 2010 Rock-n-Roll Hall of Fame inductee. His high school graduation picture presents the image of a clean-cut downright sweet-looking kid who should have been running for Congress from his Ann Arbor birthplace rather than representing the lower depths of the late-60s, early70s mosh-pit-diving, sweaty teen club decadence. Jarmusch, with the full support of his 69-year-old subject, provides a raunchy non-cautionary
tale of how to succeed in the rock business despite being at one point dropped from his major-label recording contract by a recording industry “suit” who was unimpressed by the payout from hanging onto The Stooges as a business proposition. Gimme Danger is essentially a 108-minute talking heads film where the music passes by almost subliminally for those not intimately familiar with The Stooges’ playlist. The real reason for shelling out for this one (opening Friday at Landmark’s Embarcadero Cinemas in SF and Shattuck Cinemas in Berkeley) is Iggy’s unique gift for gab, and his impressive physical state. Except for the turkey neck, this guy seems good for another 100,000 high-decibel miles belting such Stooges classics as “Asthma Attack,” “I Wanna Be Your Dog,” “TV Eye,” “Kick Out the Jams,” “Your Pretty Face is Going to Hell,” “November 22, 1963,” “I Got a Right,” “I’m Sick of You” and my fave, “Cock in My Pocket.” Why isn’t Iggy queer? Neither the filmmakers nor your reviewer have a clue, and Iggy ain’t saying. Perhaps the best clue to where this bundle of raging hormones is coming from is contained in the lyrics to “Cock in My Pocket”: “I’ve got a cock in my pocket, and I’m reelin’ down the old highway./I’m gonna whip it out on you, honey/Gonna whip it, truth or dare?/Gonna get up, turn around, try it anywhere./I got a cock in my pocket, and I’m shoving it through your pants./I got a cock in my pocket, and I don’t want no romance.” The lyrics to Iggy’s songbook give credit to all members of the original Stooges band, some of whom are now deceased. As Iggy puts it, “Back then, we were communists.” The only other hairpin in the Iggy Pop saga is the brief time Iggy and bandmates spent in England as guests of Ziggy Stardust himself, the notably bisexual David Bowie, another rock trickster known for playing stealth games with identity, all in the interest of career longevity.t
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