Good Vibrations Magazine

The San Francisco International Gay & Lesbian Film Festival — the oldest, biggest, and probably most fabulous queer film festival in the world — has never been shy about showing sexually explicit flicks. And that’s as it should be. Queer people spend more time examining our own sexuality than most other folks; dicks and cunts are an integral part of our figuring out just who we are. So it was gratifying that once again, amidst this year’s murky lesbian mysteries, chirpy gayboy comedies, and the stand-up-and-cheer story of a Thai transvestite volleyball team, the Festival programmed a clutch of crotch-centric shows of the sort that, years ago, lost the Fest its NEA grant.

While past Festivals have often unspooled male-male fuck films, this year’s hottest porn flick was the all-woman Sugar High Glitter City, the latest clit-pic from dyke-a-licious couple Shar Rednour and Jackie Strano. Made by dykes for dykes, SHGC eschewed the soft-focus, airbrushed aesthetic of Playboy’s “lesbian” pictorials in favor of something a lot more down, dirty, and edgy. Women of varying races and body types (though skewing toward the 20s) cavorted in nasty, gritty closeup, provoking moans of appreciation from the women in the sold-out house. To be sure, the form of the film was hardly ground-breaking; the dystopian plot about a society in which sugar is outlawed was just the thinnish pretext for a series of girl-on-girl encounters featuring fisting, dildos, and dominant dyke daddies. Switch the sexes of some of the actors and it would have been just another het porn flick. But SHGC sure did deliver the girl goods, in soaking-wet, orgasm-filled profusion.

Less “pornographic,” but no less graphic, Peter Barbosa’s documentary, Out in the Open, explored gay men’s penchant for public sex, alternating talking-head interviews with hardcore scenes of sex in the bushes, bookstores, and backroom bars. Aiming at both head and hard-on, the film scrupulously presented various viewpoints on monogamy, sluttishness, and the self, all the while treating the packed house to hot shots of glory hole sex.

Then there was The Phantom, the dark tale of a Portugese garbage man (really!). A long way from the saccharine pleasantries of Will and Grace, it featured the star’s big schlong getting blown in loving close-up.

And a documentary called The Pain Game, detailing the considerable talents of Mistress Cleo Dubois, headed up a stimulating late-night program of S/M films, delighting them that’s into whips and chains.

But perhaps the hottest tickets, sexwise, were back-to-back retrospective looks at dirty movies, one for the fags, one for the dykes.

Thomas Waugh, a Canadian professor and the author of Hard to Imagine, guided a theaterful of horny guys on what he called “a rollercoaster ride through eight decades of gay and bi male porn.” And quite a ride it was. While many a queer pornhound has seen what Waugh pointed to as the first above-ground gay male skinflick, The Boys in the Sand, the evening’s real treasures came from way back before the era of Stonewall and the de facto decriminalization of porn. Tracking down rare archival footage, Waugh found totally queer images in early “straight” stag films.

One major astonisher was a French film from the 1920s based on the opera Madame Butterfly. This time around, Butterfly’s faithful maidservant consoled her with cunnilingus, while Lieutenant Pinkerton’s male servant sucked his master’s less-than-faithful dick. Too bad the film was silent; a bit of Puccini would have been perfect. Other putatively straight stag films, such as Piccolo Pete and the strip poker opus A Stiff Game, included a bit of male-male cocksucking as a means, Waugh theorized, of “inoculating” straight male viewers against homo-desires while titillating those whose tastes ran to dick.

Such is the murkiness of smut history that Three Comrades, the earliest all-male stag film Waugh has found, may date from any time between 1928 and the 1950s. Whatever its vintage, the flick’s blurry images of fucking, sucking, and rimming were instantly familiar to the audience of gay guys.

Waugh zoomed through the decades, from the rise of 8 mm, to the rise of commercial aboveground 1970s porn, to the triumph of video, which, Waugh pointed out, turned queer porn “into a domestic masturbation aid rather than a collective community-builder.” Bemoaning the rise of superficial mainstream product featuring “synthetic, self-hating, headless penises,” Waugh noted a recent rise in niche genres and specialty companies, even as rapid globalization has universalized “the Big Mac, the cum shot, and the shaved scrotum.” It was a fascinating trip through gay smut, though the audience groaned whenever the clip stopped short of the cum shot, and several patrons of the arts later complained about the shortage of something more… orgasmic.

The women then had their turn with “Lesbian Porn 101,” a program presented by sex educator Laura Weide. The place was again packed, but then, as one audience member pointed out, “Whenever the Festival shows lesbian porn, it’s standing-room only.”

“How many of you like to watch porn?” Weide asked the audience. Many hands shot up, lots of cheers. “And how many of you have seen a lot of movies you’ve liked?” This time, tellingly, a mere three or four women raised their hands.

Weide did her best to remedy that. While Waugh’s presentation had been chronological and academic, Wiede’s was topic-based, offering a sampler of everything from dildo-packing dyke daddies to a scene of a Survivor-like tribe of tribal dykes practicing “ecstatic breathing.” Like Waugh, Weide extolled authenticity, contrasting amateur and woman-produced porn with the “uninspired Baywatch ripoffs” of the commercial mainstream. “Performing cunnilingus the way it’s shown in most mainstream films will get you kicked out of bed real quick,” she said. And Weide did clarify one previously contentious issue: the distinction between “erotica” and “pornography.” It’s all, she said, in the decor. “If the characters in the movie have good jobs and a kidney-shaped pool,” she said, “it’s erotica. A plaid sofa and ugly shag carpeting equals porn.”

If “Lesbian Porn 101″ was little more than the sum of its (dripping, wide-open private) parts, it was still an exhilarating view of images of queer female sexuality, from the cowgirl loopiness of Hay Fever (according to Weide,”the silliest lesbian porn film ever made”) to a jaw-dropping scene of a butch fucking her bottom with a dildo impaled on her stiletto heel. Every orgasm prompted a delighted cheer from the crowd; a straight-at-you shot of a gushing ejaculation brought down the house. If anything, the women’s program was even sexier than the guys’, and the women went home happy and, one presumes, horny.

For all their strengths and weaknesses, the fuck-based programs in this year San Francisco Festival exemplified its organizers commitment to keep the “sex” in “homosexual.” In the rush to queer assimilation, while we fight to get married in church, enlisted in the army, and let into the Boy Scouts, it’s nice that what goes on below the belt is still foregrounded in the Festival.