LOS ANGELES—Legendary gay porn director and writer Jerry Douglas, a 1997 GayVN Hall of Fame inductee, is the author of two new books that take readers behind the scenes of the gay porn industry over the last four decades through interviews with dozens of porn performers and directors — interviews that originally appeared in the magazines Manshots and Stallion.
In one of the two new volumes, Directing Sex: Interviews with the Directors of Gay Pornography, Douglas provides a short history of the gay porn industry starting from its origins in the 1970s until the present day — and then launches into no fewer than 53 Q&A format interviews with a lengthy roster of industry directors, including Joe Gage, Wakefield Poole, Jean-Daniel Cadinot, John Travis, Matt Sterling and Toby Ross among many others.
According to the book’s own promotional material, Douglas — now 85 years old — asks such probing questions as, “What appeals to porn viewers more – a porn movie with a story or just raw wall-to-wall sex?” and “Do you get the hottest sex scene by casting two porn stars hot for each other?” as well as the always intriguing, “What if one of them is straight?”
In one interview, Poole reminisces about attending one of Bette Midler’s legendary New York bathhouse performances in the early 1970s, telling Douglas, “I wasn't watching. I was fucking.”
In another, director Scott Masters traces is own career to its roots creating single-scene film-loops, through the peak of the 1980s VHS explosion when he created such works as Powertool 2 and Behind the Barn Door.
The other Douglas volume now available from the publisher Moustache, Close-Up: Interviews with the Performers of Gay Pornography, quizzes more than 60 performers on such topics as, “Do you remember the first time you saw pornography?” “When did you first have sex with a man?” and “Was the idea of anal sex fascinating to you?” among numerous others.
His interview subjects in the “performers” volume include Peter Berlin, Leo Ford, Richard Locke, Tim Lowe, Sam Dixon, and Ken Ryker, among others.
Performer Steve Marks, a former TV weatherman who became a porn performer, sums up his experience to Douglas by saying, "When you do a movie, it's sex, but it's not sex. A movie that take nine hours with twelve people watching you, with lights up your ass. The trick is making it look great, and that's what our job is."
Photo By Damnskippy23 / Wikimedia Commons
