When he isn’t writing for QX, David McGillivray produces films. His latest, a documentary about veteran porn director Peter de Rome, returns to BFI Southbank this week…
Allow me to choose some popular elements of gay porn in the 21st century. If, for example, you go to a site called Gay Male Tube, you’ll find 4,727 clips under the heading “huge cock” and 1,753 under “shower”. But choose “interracial” and you’ll have 16,622 choices. It’s one in the eye for racists everywhere, but most of us like to see men of different colours and types getting it on. We also love to see porn models taking big risks by having sex in public places. So much so, in fact, that if you type “gay public sex” into Google, 46 million results appear. And let’s look at Kristen Bjorn, widely regarded as the world’s best director of gay porn. What’s he most famous for? The no-hands cum shot. He was the first to put this on screen, right? Well, wrong.
I’m hoping you’ll be surprised to learn that all these elements and more were introduced to gay porn forty years ago by one man. You may not know his name because he retired in 1979. But I’m one of the growing band of admirers of Peter de Rome, whose films, some shot as early as 1964, are now available in the UK for the first time. And not on some niche market label. They’re being promoted by the government’s official film body the British Film Institute. Don’t you just love the idea of the government sponsoring smut? Actually the BFI probably wouldn’t release any old smut. But Peter de Rome is special.
You’ve got to be as old as me to remember the early 1970s, when all porn was illegal in the UK and you could go to jail if you were caught selling it. Things were a bit more relaxed in New York, where the British-born Peter lived and worked. There you could see his films – several of his short movies were joined together as The Erotic Films of Peter de Rome – in cinemas. But in the UK we could see only tantalising stills from the films in a raunchy-arty movie magazine called Films & Filming. By the time porn was legalised in the UK in 2000 Peter de Rome had been forgotten. Kristen Bjorn, Jean-Daniel Cadinot and Chi Chi La Rue were the directors that connoisseurs admired.
Peter was rediscovered in 2005 by historian and author Rupert Smith. An article he wrote caught the attention of Brian Robinson, programmer of the London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, which brought Peter to London in 2007 for the first ever screening in the UK of Peter’s films. Among those at the sold out screening was yours truly. One thing led to another (if you want the whole story I wrote it in QXMEN in March) and I ended up going to New York with director Ethan Reid and making Fragments, a documentary about Peter’s life and some of the many films he never managed to finish. The BFI added this documentary, along with many other fascinating bits and pieces, to The Erotic Films of Peter de Rome, which has just been released on DVD for the first time. The bits and pieces include Peter’s 1966 film, Scopo, never previously seen anywhere in the world, which I’ve called one of the finest gay erotic films ever made, worthy of comparison with Genet’s Un chant d’amour.
“Peter’s been called a legendary pioneer of gay porn”
Peter’s been called a legendary pioneer of gay porn and that’s not just because he was one of the first to earn legitimate money from the business but because he was a genuine innovator. He used black and white models decades before the practice became fashionable. Prometheus is as hot today as it was when it was filmed in 1972. The same year he made his most famous film, Underground, in which two guys have real sex on a real subway train. Two years earlier, in The Second Coming, he filmed what’s arguably the first no-hands cum shot. In Mumbo Jumbo (1971) he may have recorded the earliest first person cum shot. And so the list of his achievements goes on.
I was as happy as Larry when the screening of Fragments at this year’s LL&GFF sold out even before tickets went on general sale. Two extra screenings at BFI Southbank were organised and Peter will be making a personal appearance on 17th May. But the film is too short, says the BFI, who’ve commissioned a feature-length version. We’re shooting it now for next year’s festival. I can exclusively reveal that in June, when Peter reaches the grand age of 88, we’ll be taking him to Barcelona to meet Kristen Bjorn. The old and the new masters of gay porn together at last. I can’t wait.
• Fragments: The Incomplete Films of Peter de Rome is at BFI Southbank on 17th May at 6.20pm and 19th May at 8.50pm. Box office: 020 7928 3232 or www.bfi.org.uk. The Erotic Films of Peter de Rome is released on DVD by BFI Video
