LOS ANGELES—William Higgins, the GayVN Hall of Fame director regarded as one of the fathers of gay porn, passed away Saturday in Prague, Czech Republic.
Higgins died of an apparent heart attack at the age of 77. The sad news was first reported by LGBT historian Will Kohler on his site Back2Stonewall.com.
Higgins had resided in Prague since 1992.
Widely considered a major influence on modern industry filmmakers, Higgins enjoyed remarkable longevity in adult entertainment. In 2018 he celebrated 40 years in the industry; his indelible legacy includes a body of work consisting of more than 3000 movies since the mid-1970s.
Higgins's resume of iconic films included such classics as The Boys of Venice, The Class of '84, These Bases Are Loaded, The Best Little Warehouse in L.A., Sailor in the Wild, Cousins, The Pizza Boy, Big Guns and more.
He also directed the likes of Jack Wrangler, Kip Noll, Rick Donovan, John Davenport, Mike Henson, Jon King, Jeff Quinn and Jan Dvorak, among hundreds of other performers.
Higgins said he found gay porn at a twin theater called the Kit Kat in Dallas but he wasn't pleased with the quality. At the time he also had been a consumer of Falcon and had received a letter that their 8mm films would no longer be shipped to his state. That was when he decided to make his own porn, Higgins said in a 2018 interview with GayVN.
Higgins embraced the cinéma vérité style of filming, operating the camera himself most of the time.
Even after leaving the States for Europe—he most recently lived in Prague—Higgins continued producing for his original studio label Catalina, which was eventually acquired by Channel 1 Releasing.
C1R in 2016 released Higgins' Uncut and Raw, marking his first new Catalina title in 20 years. C1R also started to release Higgins' Catalina classics in a multipart anthology later in 2016. C1R as recently as last year continued to release new content under the Catalina Video/William Higgins Bareback label.
In last year's two-part interview with GayVN editor Brady Jansen, Higgins shared he never anticipated the gay porn market would rise to its current level of popularity.
“I certainly had no idea that it would grow to the dimensions that it has," Higgins told Jansen last fall. "I went to one GayVN Awards in Los Angeles—one of the few they actually had for just the gay side—and there were 4,000 people there. I was already over here, but I went back to be inducted into the GayVN Hall of Fame, and there must have been hundreds and hundreds of directors and producers and everybody working in the industry. When I started, there were, I don’t know, four or five people in L.A., five people in San Francisco, maybe four people in New York—and all working part time except for the people in San Francisco. Who ever knew that it would grow any bigger? But trust me, those days in the 1980s were the big profit days. We didn’t realize it, but it turned out that way.”
Higgins' sudden passing came as a shock to close friends, studio staff and colleagues as he was generally thought to be in excellent health. He posted a vlog on his website on Dec. 20, appearing upbeat and looking ahead to 2020. Click here and scroll to the bottom of the page to watch Higgins' last vlog.
