by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The feature film in the 10 p.m. time slot was Seed Money:
The Chuck Holmes Story, a documentary about
the pioneering Gay pornographer and founder of Falcon Studios, Chuck Holmes,
framed with footage showing protesters (most of them Lesbians) picketing the opening
of the “Charles E. Holmes Campus of the San Francisco LGBT Community Center”
and protesting that the board of the Center had named their newest building
after a pornographer — albeit a pornographer who had given them a hell of a lot
of money. The film was directed by Michael Stabile, who turned up at the end
for a question-and-answer session that focused mainly on the difficulty of
obtaining material for the film — by the time they started work on it Chuck
Holmes was dead (he tested “HIV positive” in the late 1980’s and held up until
2000, and his exit was probably hastened by his high consumption of
recreational drugs in the 1980’s and experimental and highly dubious AIDS
“treatments” in the 1990’s), his associate and director Matt Sterling was also
dead, and at least two of the people from whom Stabile and his crew got major
interviews — including Vaughn Kincey, a major figure in the early days of
Falcon and one of Holmes’ closest associates — died while the film was still in
post-production. The film was a fascinating slice of Gay history even though
the story of Chuck Holmes and Falcon Studios is somewhat less than the metaphor
for Gay life in general and Gay sexuality in particular Stabile was presenting
it as: the standard history of the Queer movement is that it all began with the
Stonewall Inn riots of June 1969 in New York City (I’ve made it a particular
cause of mine to debunk that, to the point of putting Harry Hay on the cover of
Zenger’s #1 just to make the
point that there was an active Gay movement in the U.S. 19 years before Stonewall), that the 1970’s were an explosion of Gay
sexuality (particularly Gay male
sexuality) and a rejection of conventional values of monogamy and fidelity
among many Gay men — maybe not all, or even most, Gay men, but a significant
portion of them and the ones that tended to be most “out,” most open in the
community and in particular most open about their sexuality. The master
narrative of today’s Queer movement is that we’re just like straight people
except that we’re attracted to members of our own sex instead of the other, but
in the 1970’s that couldn’t have been further from the truth; the Gay lifestyle
was presented as a conscious rejection of straight models of relationship, commitment and fidelity (though
the hippie movement had offered young heterosexuals a similar rejection of
conventional morality in general and monogamy in particular).
Stabile and his
crew basically present the early Gay porn as a sort of unwitting documentary of
those heady early days of Gay liberation — though, then as now, the scenarios
enacted in porn films (straight or Gay) look very little like the ways people,
even the least monogamous among them, actually come together and have sex.
What’s most interesting about the Gay porn of the 1970’s (at least to me) is
that it was filmed before the conventions of the form had hardened (pardon the
pun) into clichés and there was still room for genuinely inventive and creative
directors like Wakefield Poole and Peter Berlin to shoot movies whose sex
scenes reflected what turned them
on rather than what a marketing department thought the paying customers would
want to see. If anything, Chuck Holmes and Falcon Studios were key players in
the move away from a creative auteur
vision of Gay porn to a more industrial model; they marketed their early films
the way everyone else did — as 8 mm reels of film, about 10 minutes, which were
also cut up and shown as “loops” on coin-operated players (and if you didn’t
have an 8 mm projector Falcon, like its competitors in both the straight and
Gay markets, would offer to sell you one) — until the advent of the VCR enabled
them not only to copy films more cheaply and thereby sell them to a mass market
(though seeing the early “Falcon Video Pak” ads and noting how expensive the
tapes were — $89.95 and up in 1980’s dollars — I wondered how many of them they
actually sold, and to whom) but also to make longer films. Chuck Holmes’
breakthrough into feature-length production came about with a film called The
Other Side of Aspen, which according to
Stabile’s account happened pretty much by accident: Holmes was an amateur
skier, he wanted to take a vacation to Aspen, and he thought of bringing along
a couple of performers and a skeleton crew to shoot a couple of scenes so he
could write the trip off as a business expense. When he brought back the
footage, his staff encouraged him to add more scenes — including an
introductory one showing the participants in the Aspen footage preparing to go
on their own vacation to “the other side of Aspen” — and increase the film to
feature length. What Chuck Holmes did with Falcon was not only run the company
in a businesslike manner (though that started to fall apart in the 1980’s as he
got heavily involved in sex parties and recreational drugs, and only the shock
of learning he was “HIV positive” brought him back to his senses, led him to
clean up his act and rebuild Falcon as a going concern) but put out a
standardized product.
His models (the term used in the industry for porn participants
— it’s revealing that they don’t
call them “actors,” and as porn star Michael Brandon told me when I interviewed
him for Zenger’s, “I’m not paid
to act — I’m paid to fuck!”) were
all carefully cultivated: slender, boyish, blond (if their hair wasn’t
naturally blond, they were told to bleach it), and above all smooth-chested
(one former Falcon model remembered that he was ordered to keep his chest
shaven at all times even though he was only called for three shoots per year,
and in the late 1970’s, with the hairy-chested “Castro clone” look the “in” one
in San Francisco, Holmes’ clean-shaven edict got in the way of his ability to
find people willing to have sex with him off-screen) and with squeaky-clean
feet. (Holmes himself said that the reason he got into making his own Gay porn
in the first place was that when he first came out, the models in the crude
reels then available had dirty feet, a big turn-off for him.) Though it isn’t
mentioned in the movie, Stabile said during the Q&A that the Falcon models
were also surprisingly short — Holmes and his casting people apparently
reasoning that the shorter the man, the bigger his dick would look by
comparison. Holmes was also big into sex scenes that took place outdoors, in
spectacularly beautiful locations, and he was a good enough businessman that he
realized the key to success was turning out a standardized product so anyone
who ordered a Falcon video would know what they were getting. One of Stabile’s
most interesting filmmaking decisions was how he handled the effect of AIDS on
Gay porn, documenting how Falcon was the last holdout against allowing their
models to use condoms (instead they promoted non-oxynol 9 lubricant until the
AIDS mainstream decided it actually made HIV “transmission” easier, not harder — ironically Falcon’s models were
actually shown inserting non-oxynol 9 into their own or each other’s asses)
until the models themselves started dying en masse and the few that were left insisted on wearing condoms during shoots. (One thing the Gay
porn industry never did was eroticize safer sex; while AIDS prevention
educators were trying to convince people to make putting on the condom an
integral part of their foreplay, porn producers who did show condom use on-screen simply had the condoms
magically appear. Even Michael Brandon, who as a matter of principle refused to
do a bareback fuck scene, told me he thought the director’s call to “cut for
condom” and its magical appearance on his cock, without any depiction of how it
got there, was ridiculous.)
Another point the film made was that the AIDS
epidemic greatly increased the
market for Gay porn; with many Gay men so scared of AIDS they stopped having
sex altogether, porn became an outlet for sublimation not only among people in
rural areas who’d have a hard time finding a partner for actual sex but people
in San Francisco and other “Gay Meccas” scared shitless of doing the real
down-’n’-dirty and jacking off to porn as the next best thing. Alas, when the
film reaches the 1990’s it pretty much abandons any depiction of the creative
history of Gay porn and its cultural importance, and instead shifts its focus
to Chuck Holmes’ attempt to buy himself respectability by donating large sums
to Gay-rights causes — it dates his transition from entrepreneur to philanthropist
from his participation in the 1993 March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay and
Bisexual Rights (note that Transgender people weren’t yet included in the
laundry list — that came later even though Trans people have been part of our
struggle from the get-go), and in one of the few scenes in the movie actually
depicting Chuck Holmes himself, he says he’d always been apolitical and this
was the first time he had actually marched for a cause. Chuck Holmes gave a lot
of money to the Human Rights Campaign and to individual politicians like Carole
Midgen and Mark Leno in San Francisco (both of whom are depicted here), and he
generally didn’t have a problem getting organizations to take his money but did get some turn-downs from individual candidates — the
filmmakers depict this as a mystery both to Holmes and to themselves but it’s
really not hard to figure it out: an organization that doesn’t have to go
before voters could take money from a pornographer but a candidate would have
to worry that a donation from someone like Chuck Holmes would end up
prominently featured on a last-minute hit-piece mailing or TV ad after the
other candidate’s opposition-research team dug his name out of campaign-donor
disclosure lists and put two and two together about where that money had come
from. It’s not clear from this movie What Made Chuck Run — his friends and
associates (none of whom seem to have been romantically or sexually involved
with him — he seems to have totally compartmentalized his life so the people he
slept with had no connection with the people he did business with or socialized
with non-sexually) describe him as hurt when politicians turned down his money,
and they show pictures of his house and yacht that indicate he indulged the
sybaritic lifestyle available to the rich in the U.S. pretty much to the max
permitted by his resources, but in a film nominally about him he remains a
pretty maddening cipher. He doesn’t seem ever to have given a filmed interview
about himself and his career, nor was there a Widower Holmes available to
explain him.
Seed Money — I like
the clever pun of the title — is an interesting film, though some of the clips
from Holmes’ productions included here reminded me all too vividly of what I didn’t like about Gay porn back then, including the
carefully maintained tan lines on the performers (another Holmes trademark that
became standard, his way of saying these were healthy, athletic people who
lived a good deal of their lives outdoors) and the overall bleached-blond look
— and there’s at least one implied criticism of Holmes in what’s otherwise a
pretty hagiographic look at him in which his policy towards using
African-American models is detailed: he said he wouldn’t put a Black person in
his movies unless there was a reason in the plot for the person to be Black,
and he would never cast a Black man as a bottom in a scene — it always had to
be the Black man topping the white one, fulfilling the racialist (and arguably
racist) stereotype of the super-hung Black guy ripping apart the white boy’s
ass and leaving him terminally unsatisfied with anything less from then on.
Holmes also was impatient with long expository scenes and extended depictions
of foreplay, though compared to what passes for porn today — in which the
models are shown in medias res
without even any attempt to
establish these folks as human beings and explain why they would be having sex with each other — his films
seem almost respectful in making at least a passing gesture towards letting us
know who these people are and what attracts them to each other before we see
them have at it. Michael Stabile explained during the Q&A that Falcon
Studios has been sold several times since Holmes’ death, and a lot of the
archives from the Holmes years were either thrown away or salvaged from
dumpsters at the last minute — though the current owners of the company
cooperated with the project and allowed Stabile to go through what’s left as
well as to include enough clips from the Falcon movies so we get the idea of
what they were like and what sort of fantasy they were selling. It might have
been a more fascinating movie if it had had a postlude about what’s happened to
the Gay porn industry since — the advent of the Internet, which has made
distribution of porn even easier than it was on VHS tapes or DVD’s but has also
made it considerably easier to pirate porn and no doubt has been a big hit to
the bottom lines of the producers; and also the advent of digital video, which
has made it easy for almost anyone to shoot their own porn and upload it to the
Internet, and has largely returned porn to the aesthetic level Holmes was
trying to raise it above: crudely filmed depictions of uncharismatic amateurs
in single scenes about the length of the old loops.
