1.) Where do you find these clips and magazines?

I’ve been a fan of garage sales and thrift stores all my life. Back in the 80s or 90s I bought some old Physique Pictorial magazines from the 50s or 60s just because I like collecting things from that era.

When I started my first website in 1995, I needed something to put on it, so I started scanning pictures from my vintage porn magazines because I thought they were cool and kitschy.

About 7 or 8 years ago I saw a box of 8mm gay porn films at a thrift store and bought the whole thing. I went back to the same store the next week and saw another unmarked box behind the counter, and even though it had a lid on, I somehow “knew” there were more 8mm porn movies in it! Sure enough, I was right and I now had two boxes of movies and decided I needed to start a website of vintage porn.

I met an older gay guy that runs a combination comic book/porn store that taught me a lot about vintage porn. I spent an entire day at his store sorting through piles of old boxes stuffed behind other crap in his storage room and came home with another 150 8mm films.

My friends are now on the lookout for old porn magazines and movies for me. One friend tipped me off about a Craig’s List ad that a guy was driving up from LA with a carload of 8mm porn. He left them overnight for me to sort through, and I ended up buying 200 movies that day.

Another friend rescued a stack of old porn magazines from a dumpster when his 80 year old neighbor died.

I also went through a phase of buying up everything I could find on eBay. My largest purchase was a batch of 75 extremely rare magazines from a porn store in the Midwest that went out of business.

At this point, I think I am done with eBay. I only collect obscure movies and magazines that are out of print and not copyrighted. I already own every movie I see on eBay these days and the magazines have all gotten way too expensive. Just like any antique product, the price goes up the older and more rare the item becomes.

Not counting copyrighted movies by companies like Falcon or Colt, I have over 500 8mm movies that have fallen through the cracks and haven’t been seen by an entire generation.

2.) What is your interest in putting them back into circulation?

I look at myself as a curator of the genre.

Porn has always been, and to a certain extent, still is considered “disposable”. At one time, Hollywood thought their product was disposable in the early days, too. Many of the old Disney animation cels seen in museums today were found in dumpsters. It took a long time before mainstream Hollywood took film preservation seriously.

Other art forms aren’t considered disposable if the style is no longer fashionable or technically primitive. We don’t dispose of paintings or sculptures by famous artists when they get old or the artist dies. In fact, they get more valuable.

In the old days, a lot of the adult industry was financed and controlled by organized crime as an extension of prostitution, and producing porn was just another way to make quick money. Many producers made their money and walked away. But over a period of up to 60 years, even those that took pride in their work, many have died of AIDS or natural causes.

The shame of working in the sex industry as well as the illegal aspect of it prevented works of adult media from being properly documented and preserved. Coupled with the fact that many gay porn producers died suddenly and without heirs, much of this rich history has been lost. Gay historical societies are only now taking steps to document the community’s political and social history, but hardcore artifacts are generally dismissed as inappropriate for inclusion in those collections.

I have been the Art Director for Alpha Blue Archives (AlphaBlueArchives.com), a company that re-releases vintage straight porn, for about 9 years. I enjoy cleaning up old pictures with Photoshop, and after making more than 300 DVD box covers for Alpha Blue, I’ve gotten very good at it. When I saw how much money he was making, so along with my curatorial interests, I decided to do the same with gay porn and try to make a few bucks.

3.) What kind of work is required to get them viewable again?

There are only a handful of vendors left that have the equipment to professionally transfer film to video, and most won’t work with adult subjects. The vendor I use is a gay-owned film archive called Oddball Films (OddballFilms.com). They treat the film gently and use products to clean the dust and dirt from the film before making the transfer. To them, it’s a labor of love. Once it’s on digital tape I can process the video for the website or DVDs and make necessary color corrections just like any other video.

The problem with adult film preservation is that it was never intended to be “archival”. They cut corners on the original duplication process which, over time, often causes the film to lose color saturation. The inherent “shame” associated with owning porn along with the disposability of it prevented most of the original customers from properly storing the material away from moisture and dust, hence a lot of movies are in bad shape.

State of the art film preservation in Hollywood movies involves digital correction of each individual film frame. Though that process may be used on movies like “My Fair Lady”, it’s not cost effective in porn. I do the best I can with resources available.

With magazines, I bought a copier that has a 11″x17″ document feeder on the scanner. I just remove the staples and I can scan a stack of pages at a time. From there, I crop and color correct the pictures for my website and put them into a slideshow program so you can watch them with no hands (if you know what I mean…)

4.) What is the appeal of vintage erotica, in your view?

There are many reasons for the appeal besides archival. A hot guy is a hot guy and a photo of him can still be enjoyed no matter when the image was created, in the same way records by the Beatles still be enjoyed 40 years later. Fashion, hairdos and interior design all have kitsch value, too. (I could do a whole scholarly study on 70’s bedsheets and wall paper designs used in porn!) But beyond kitsch factor, some fans link the fashions of the day to their own youth and reminisce about their own sexual past through familiar images, just like someone would recall fond memories by looking at pictures of their old hometown.

Though many modern consumers dismiss any porn made prior to the invention of High Definition cameras, one must acknowledge the popularity of an iPhone application like Hipstamatic (Hipstamatic.com) – a program that purposely filters a high resolution image to essentially “degrade” it to resemble 40 year old technology. The same can be said for the resurgence of vinyl records over CDs and digital files among the hipster music scene.

The concept of vintage gay porn being “pre-condom” may have a small factor in it’s appeal, but with the vast amount of new bareback video being produced, the selling point of it’s scarcity is minimal.

5.) How do you answer those who say it’s not appealing to view clips where the guys may be old/deceased? (I hear this one a lot.)

From my experience, I’ve only heard that in regards to more recently deceased porn performers. Ironically, that’s never mentioned about dead people in other parts of show business. The deaths of Michael Jackson and Whitney Houston actually garnered sympathy, respect and increased popularity. The supposed “creepiness” associated with aging or dead porn star stems from the puritanical shame associated with sexual performance on camera.

6.) Have you ever heard from some of those guys in those clips or layouts?

I did an email interview with COLT man Bruno (CLICK HERE), in 2005 and shortly thereafter Mickey Squires saw the interview and contacted me as well (
CLICK HERE). Though I didn’t realize it until a friend pointed it out to me after it was released, Mickey Squires appeared in my DVD “Vintage Bareback: Hairy Muscle Daddy Collection” (CLICK HERE).

BIOGRAPHY:
Mark Kliem has worked in the gay adult industry since 1994. He won a Cybersocket Award for Best Blog in 2005, he judged the GayVN Awards for 9 years and was Naked Sword’s first webmaster, and founded GayPornBlog.com. He currently shoots fetish video for his website, LavenderLounge.com and curates VintageBareback.com. He has released 4 DVDs of vintage gay porn and 6 DVDs of originally produced material, all available at PornTeam.com. (CLICK HERE)

This is a 2011 parody of the movies by Old Reliable, produced and starring a pair of muscle bear comics called Dick and Duane. It’s not uproariously funny, but it’s pretty accurate to the style of Old Reliable. I could never get into that appeal of rough trade, especially the dangerous types that David Hurles featured in his movies. But in his last remaining days on Earth, there has been an outpouring of support for his contributions to the industry.

I’ve been following the antics of Dick and Duane on Facebook for a while, and they have quite a story. They met when they were kids, joined the military together, became stand-up comics together, took steroids together (allegedly) and have been a couple ever since.

Maybe now someone will have some appreciation for the real vintage gay porn.

READ AN INTERVIEW WITH OLD RELIABLE’S DAVID HURLES

Our April 1960 issue carried a feature called “The Mad Hatters”. Apparently you liked it because you asked for more of the same. Unfortunately, we were hatless at that time and had to pigeon-hole the idea. Then just recently our photographers sent in their monthly collections and in each was at least one hat picture.

Frankly we think someone should pass the hat for our hard-pressed lensmen because it seems they are addicted to the same sombrero. Perhaps we should have called this Variations On A Hat Theme.

Clearly, that straw hat has got to go! Who the hell thought that was sexy? I think the wall of circles is sexier, but with a body like these guys, who even looks at the hat?

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The cast of “Writer’s Delight” was Alex Russell, Bo Jackson, Brad Baker, Don White, George Kipps, Mark Adams, Noel Reed, and Steve Thomas.

In flipping through all these dusty old vintage gay porn magazines, I’ve been seeing a lot of ads for a clothing store that was on Polk Street here in San Francisco. I don’t know much about it, but I believe there were some actual porn scenes shot there at some point.

In any case, I love the outrageous fashions they used to sell there just as the concept of “male plumage” became a national trend. They often used this same young blond twinky model in their ads. He was model-thin, cute and had the kind of pouty lips that are required for fashion models. But oh, that powder blue collar-less suit, stretch pants and ankle boots are to die for!

These are just a couple of the groovy ads that ran in old beefcake magazines in the 1950s and 60s for items like skimpy underwear, hair care products and vitamin supplements. I love the one for “masculine” hair spray created by Mr. Bruce.

Sure, these ads are good for a laugh today, but what are they selling in gay men’s magazines today? UNDERWEAR, HAIR CARE PRODUCTS and VITAMIN SUPPLEMENTS!

Some things never change.

Get a membership to Vintage Bareback and have fun looking at all the old ads – and the naked men!

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This is a trailer for a 70’s gay porn movie that was a parody of “Charlie’s Angels”, this time titled, “Harley’s Angels”. I don’t have the full movie of the “Harley’s Angels”, but this came from a collection of vintage movie trailers that I will be adding to the site, and they are hysterical! It’s mostly the voiceover descriptions and hard-sell marketing that make them funny, but there are plenty of hot guys and visual kitsch, too.

Directed by Arch Brown, it’s described as “a fantastic parody of Charlie’s Angels where 3 hot guys must solve the mystery of Charlie’s missing motorcycle gloves.”

It stars Adam Peace, Jayson MacBride, Jesse St. James, Jonathan West, Justin Thyme,
Ken Darrell, Marty Boyer, Pete Fellows, and Webb Steel as Harley.

I added a preview video of “Junior Cadets – Big Brother” to the blog the other day. Have you seen it? It’s definitely got some camp elements to it, stemming from the voice-over dialogue that was added later. The three actors doing the dialogue may not have been in the same room at the same time when they recorded the voice track. They don’t seem to have any connection to each other, often just talking over the others, and it’s pretty much unscripted.

Some of the unintentionally funny lines that come out it are:

“Hey, what’re you doing to my ass?”
“Why do you care?”

“This guy’s gonna come in my back door. Hope it’s a stiff one.”

But, to me, it’s the thick New York accent of the one guy who is obviously much older than the character he is portraying that is the funniest. Scroll down to the preview clip and see for yourself. And there is more hilarity in the VIP Room!

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TV commercial for the old New York bath house, Man’s Country. My question is, what TV station did that run on? “Come once and you’ll come again and again!”