FVP057_Glamour 23.tif

By Mark James.

The gains of the gay liberation movement in the late 1960s rode the back of a gay culture that, in part, came together watching porn. Though erotic images of men have sold as long as pictures were for sale, court cases allowing images to be sent through the mail paved the way for films that showed men having sex with each other to gain a wider underground audience. Adult theaters became centers of male-male sexual activity, screening gay porn for eager and often closeted audiences. In the 1970s and 80s, no porn studio flew higher than Falcon Studios, founded by the hard-driving entrepreneur Chuck Holmes. Holmes had had a buttoned-down career before he entered the porn industry, and he used his business sense to his advantage — he was the hustler who hustled the hustlers. He revolutionized the business, moving from mail order and theatrical distribution, then mail order to videocassette; from one-off shoots with prostitutes to building up the first gay porn stars; and from lean, mustached hippie-types to clean-shaven, preppier guys. As Holly Woodlawn, the Warhol-era superstar, says, “Any gay man who says he doesn’t like porn is a liar. And Falcon was the MGM.”

Michael Stabile, a documentary film-maker, is in the process of making a documentary about Chuck Homes, titled Seed Money: The Chuck Holmes Story. As the acknowledged king of a pivotal era in gay porn, Holmes is an important subject for historical assessment. But the film also takes a look at his financial role in some of his era’s defining political causes — in particular, he provided the seed money for the HRC (Human Rights Campaign). I spoke with Stabile over dinner the night before he was to do another round of interviews for the documentary. “I want to capture what Falcon meant to a whole generation of gay men,” says Stabile. “Gay porn is part of our history. We shared a common bond over our sexuality, and I wanted to show how that bond was created. In part, it was created through the visionary efforts of Chuck Holmes.”

Seen 2Seed Money evokes the era of sexual liberation, which was at its most heady in San Francisco, where Falcon Studios was located. Today, gay men often see porn as one-off clips on the Internet, but in his day, Holmes fostered a full-fledged studio that had a cohesive aesthetic. His actors could be seen out and about in the bars and clubs, and the Falcon look fanned out organically from the soundstage throughout the Castro. There was a time when any gay man could be shown the image of an adult model and know right away if he was a Falcon Man.  Stabile sets the tone for the era with rich archival footage of gay life from the 70s and beyond, not just the now-somewhat-comical early Falcon films with their corny dialog.

Chuck Holmes achieved success by deftly interpreting the popular culture, using its dominant images for his porn films. In the tradition of Bob Mizer or Bruce of Los Angeles, Holmes started off producing cheap Super 8 films, showcasing the likes of Al Parker, a bearded working-class tough from Boston. In these films, Holmes was able to mine the familiar imagistic tropes of the mustachioed, super-macho hero, giving an extra erotic charge to the male-on-male sex he showcased. As the 70s gave way to the 80s and working-class men lost some of their cultural supremacy to financiers of the “new class,” Holmes was also the first to clean up his models and mirror this shift in porn.

The Falcon man of the 80s perfectly captured the new era. Holmes had his models shaved smooth, with neatly styled hair. Chuck even used to demand that the bottom of the models’ feet had to be scrubbed clean — they were in the air enough during shooting. He also moved the action from places that seemed dangerous to far more glamorous locales: ski lodges, tennis clubs and palatial homes. In moving gay male fantasy into more upscale surroundings, Holmes widened the scope of gay fantasies. No longer were our porn fantasies confined to straight street trade looking to make a quick buck. The Falcon male was self-assured, led a glamorous life, and enjoyed male partners who desired him, too. It was the perfect companion to an era of Reagan and Dynasty. By moving gay sex into a glam locale, he made gay sex less dirty but perhaps less interesting.

Seed 3Holmes, a businessman above all else, revolutionized gay porn by adopting the old studio system pioneered by MGM in the golden years of the film industry. This meant exclusive, multi-picture contracts with stars in exchange for upping their profiles. For Holmes to make more money, his performers would have to attain icon status. This was a new and potentially risky development for gay porn — it was still effectively illegal — especially so recently after the sea change of Stonewall. But investing in his men meant that gay consumers would invest their money in them, too. By creating the new image of the desirable gay man, Holmes not only ensured that he’d be the one gay consumers would have to turn to satisfy these desires, but the culture would reflect his elite preferences. However, “Chuck Holmes was a businessman first and foremost,” Stabile says. “Money rather than egoism drove his decisions. For instance, he was very reluctant to use condoms in his films, and only did so after he became convinced ACT-UP would start harassing him.”

Holmes appeared indifferent to AIDS until he himself and those around him became afflicted. His philanthropy was a sort of final-act conversion, perhaps with an eye towards securing his place in the gay community. But that late arrival doesn’t mean he didn’t help. Chuck Holmes was one of the most generous philanthropists in the gay community, due to the fortune he amassed selling men their fantasies. Some recipients of his largesse felt uncomfortable with where the money was coming from. “Many powerbrokers in the gay community were happy to get their share of Chuck’s money, but they never wanted to disclose where it came from,” Stabile says. Holmes’ millions went to groups like the HRC and the AIDS Memorial Grove, as well as politicians such as Bill Clinton, but it had to be downplayed for fear of the charge of accepting “dirty money.”

This contributed to Holmes’ ongoing sense of exclusion. “Even today, some of the icons of the gay rights movement have issues with gay pornography and view it as dirty. Many would only speak with me off camera,” Stabile reveals. “Even in liberal San Francisco, after Chuck passed away and left money for the Gay and Lesbian Center, many in the community were willing to take his money but wanted to distance themselves from Chuck.” The in-your-face gay male sexuality or male erotica did not fit neatly into the “virtually normal” narrative that mainstream gay rights organizations want to use to secure corporate sponsorships and White House access. But Holmes’ centrality to the gay community (and by extension, porn) is hard to deny when it was his money which allowed these groups to be founded.

FVP012_A.tifJust five years ago, Stabile was working for a high-tech adult website himself. As he dug into the origins of the gay male porn industry, one name kept coming up: Chuck Holmes. While investigating Holmes’ legacy for Seed Money, Stabile uncovered so much amazing footage of San Francisco in the 1970s that put the city’s role in the history of porn on display that he set Seed Money aside to make Smut Capital of America, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2011. Numerous other films happen to be popping up that celebrate iconoclasts from the early 60’s and 70s — I Always Said Yes: The Many Lives of Wakefield Poole (2013), about the director of Boys in the Sand (1971); and I Am Divine (2013), about the drag star beloved of John Waters come to mind — all aimed at recognizing the early contributions that gay pioneers made to American independent film.

Seed Money is in many ways an oral history of a time, bringing together different segments of the community, from Chi Chi LaRue and Jeff Stryker and Jake Shears to Holly Woodlawn, among others. Stabile has chased down every conceivable lead, from speaking with porn stars who still ply their trade on rentboy.com to Chuck’s closeted high school sweetheart. It’s not just authoritative about Chuck Holmes and Falcon, but captures a point in time in which sexual freedom for gay men was both an act of hedonism and politics. Sex — and certainly porn — does not fit into the carefully crafted box that gay men are placed in by corporate culture, but Seed Money shows how a driven man whose story contradicts that contrivance makes up the foundation that that box rests on today.

Making a documentary about a pornographer does come with its downsides. In an era where the official message from Gay, Inc. is that gay people are no more than a marketing segment, our sex lives doesn’t fit into the carefully crafted vision of groups like the HRC. But the merit of this film is to show the deep integration that gay porn has had since the beginning of the gay movement in all aspects of society, gay and straight. Chuck Holmes made his millions weaving images of straight male archetypes with gay erotic fantasies, and was generous enough to give back monetarily — including to organizations like the HRC, which now work to erase his legacy. Michael Stabile’s documentary captures a time and place in gay history a time in which gay men started to accept their desires and thus themselves.

Mark James lives in San Francisco and is a frequent contributor to Film International.

3 thoughts on “Seed Money: Capturing a Pivotal Era of Gay Porn”

  1. Great article! Gay males invented porno chic (thanks to Wakefield Poole’s Boys in the Sand and Bijou) and porn played a key role in gay liberation, even if the gay mainstream media would like to sweep all that under the rug. I would like to call your attention, however, to an error in the article. My feature-length documentary about pioneering filmmaker Wakefield Poole is entitled I Always Said Yes: The Many Lives of Wakefield Poole. It is based on the Poole’s autobiography, which is entitled Dirty Poole. Thank you. Jim Tushinski, producer and director of I Always Said Yes and That Man: Peter Berlin.

  2. Great article but it is a mistake to paint Holmes as some sort of everyman gay populist – he was just as elitist as the Gay Inc. you deride. Nothing wrong with that but I think it is a mistake to frame this as some sort of anti-assimilation dynamic.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *