LOS ANGELES—Tom of Finland Foundation’s TOM House at 1421 Laveta Terrace, Los Angeles, CA 90026, will host a book signing and film screening event, where retired gay adult director Phil St. John will autograph copies of his novel Diary of a Puerto Rican Porno and screen a 70-minute feature edit of the best of his films. Also on display will be framed photographic prints from St. John’s movies.
Diary of a Puerto Rican Porno is an action-adventure, sexually outrageous filmmaking odyssey. St. John takes his boyfriend and a porn star bottom to the land of the “big tops” to make the fictional Foreskin Island and Return to Foreskin Island, two tropical gay-themed movies shot back-to-back in the jungles near San Juan. The moviemaking is fraught with knife fights, sexual intrigue, nervous breakdowns, tropical depressions, secret marijuana smuggling, and true cinematic, pornographic love.
Phil St. John, a nom de porn, acted in gay adult movies while attending film school in San Francisco. Later, in Manhattan’s East Village, he read scripts for United Artists by day while making porn loops for the Mob’s Times Square peep shows at night. A fellow of The American Film Institute, St. John’s first blockbuster Getting It, was distributed by Falcon Films. St. John was a semi-prolific filmmaker between 1984 and 2006, working for such well-known companies as Titan Media, Pacific Sun Entertainment, All Worlds, Jocks studio, HIS and several others. Some of his bigger hits have included Arousers (LeSalon), Don't Kiss Me I'm Straight (HIS), his All American series for Pacific Sun, and his most recent, Code Red and Fever for Titan Media. In 2009, the author was inducted into the Gay Porn Hall of Fame and now lives in West Hollywood, California.
St. John has also received much advance praise for Diary Of A Puerto Rican Porno:
“Phil St. John has stripped the porn-making experience bare, so to speak, and in Puerto Rico no less. But it’s what’s not on camera that truly titillates in this madcap adventure of a scrappy little crew filming on the fly as they dodge drug dealers, thugs, cops, STDs, mosquitoes—even heterosexual romance in addition to all the gay love tenting one pair of shorts after another. And let’s not forget the difficult and impudent models and the crew’s own unstable personalities, all of which require drugs, alcohol, bribes, and lots of ad hoc psychotherapy, not to mention quite a bit of creativity. And then to top it all off, there’s young godlike Duro, who’s poised to wreck St. John’s heart if he doesn’t wreck another part of his body first!”—Trebor Healey, Lambda Literary Award winner and author of Sweet Son of Pan and Faun
“In a voice that is alternately flippant, funny, compassionate, and wise, this is a one-of-a-kind adventure in guerrilla filmmaking where the thrills of lust and danger run neck and neck.—Aaron Tilford, editor-in-chief, Spunk
Diary of a Puerto Rican Porno is available in the Tom of Finland store tomoffinlandstore.com, on Amazon.com and at bookstores like Circus of Books.
