Now, the above event may be unique to the dynamic of gay porn and its purpose of sexual exploration and gratification, but what happened after that movie/performance links to that Old Hollywood world:
Vintage poster for Kansas City Trucking Co.
He turns back, the lights fade, he exits and the film Richard Locke returns to the movie screen.” Finally he reaches orgasm, shooting onto the mesmerized audience. Richard turns to face the audience, clad only in a leather harness, stroking his erect penis. A new kind of show is in progress at the Bijou Theater - but Richard Locke is still the center of attention. A cool blue light silhouettes a muscled body and music builds. The light on the movie screen fades, and suddenly a figure appears from behind the screen. The center of the action is the older, experienced trucker, played by Richard Locke, muscular, masculine, bearded and obviously enjoying himself on screen. In this case, however, the truckers are not sleeping they are fucking and sucking with a vengeance. “The screen on the Bijou screen – a dimly lit room at truck stop, fitted with grimy cots, where truckers catch forty winks before they hit the road again. Here's a description of the event, which, as with many other events that showcased porn movies and their stars, blurs the lines between on and off screen performances in an enticing, exciting way: Vintage poster for the Al Parker film, Inches (Steve Scott, 1979)Īnd the uber- Daddy of them all, Richard Locke, also appeared at the Bijou Theater in 1984. Live apperance by Peter Berlin at the Bijou Theaterįor example, when Al Parker, the greatest of them all, appeared at the the theater in the early 1980s, he did a live sex show (a live orgasm to complement so many of those on-screen orgasms), but according to Steven Toushin, owner of the theater, he spent most of the time there signing autographs and talking to fans. The Bijou Theater thus showcased some groundbreaking gay porn films, but in tandem it also showcased the stars of those films. Porn studios like Hand in Hand Films and Falcon and, later during that Golden Age, Al Parker's Surge Studios were definitely producing more substantive work, but the assembly-line, amateurish product with mostly anonymous participants (like that being churned out in Europe these days) were confined to peep show booths. A premiere there was akin to a red carpet event, like it was in Old Hollywood.īijou premiere of Michael, Angelo and David & live appearance by Marc Stevens Gay XXX's home in Chicago was the Bijou Theater, and in its heyday, it showed some of the famous, finely crafted classics of gay porn (shot on film, of course). In fact, I remember in the camp classic Valley of the Dolls, Neely O'Hara sees her friend Jennifer's (now a star of soft-core French porn) name lighting up that ubiquitous XXX signage as she wanders drunkenly through what is probably the Nob Hill area of San Francisco. Even though such venues were usually ghettoized "red light” districts (think 42nd Street in New York City) and often shared buildings and neighborhoods with the seedier peep shows and massage parlors (live sex, less cinematic content) and the like, they still boasted the marquees and the names in lights. The adult movie houses, and in the gay world, often called porn palaces, followed suit when censorship restrictions were lifted in the wake of the 1960s sexual revolution. In fact, on one of the videos, I saw theaters whose marquees displayed Leave Her to Heaven with Gene Tierney, and on another one, Joan Crawford in A Woman's Face. Yes, the marquee, the name in lights, oh so Old Hollywood.
I was looking at some footage on YouTube of Chicago in the 1940s (my nostalgia kick keeps kicking and kicking and kicking, ouch!), and I noticed, as most of the footage was of tourist sites like “State Street, that great street” and its plethora of movie theaters.Īnd these were not movie theaters hidden inside in decaying malls or bland multistory cineplexes with parking garages, but both glitzy and palatial structures (quite a combo!) that beckoned to passersby (yes, people walked more, it seems, to entertainment) through signs.Ĭhicago's Oriental Theater in the 1940s showing the Jane Russell film, The Outlaw