Former QX writer David McGillivray is the producer of a film about porn pioneer Peter de Rome, which opens the Fringe! Queer Film & Arts Fest at Hackney Picturehouse next week. David hopes you might like to come along and see some vintage smut – or is it art?
I’ve been fascinated by porn ever since I saw my first stag film projected on to a wall at my friend Jim’s house in 1966. You’ve got to remember that in those days porn was illegal. Knowing that at any moment the police could burst in and arrest us was really exciting.
I’ve been a writer for donkey’s years. The first article I wrote was about that first porn film I watched. After it was published, more than one person told me I could be arrested just for admitting I’d watched an illegal film. I wasn’t arrested. So I’ve written about porn ever since. I used to review porn for QXMEN. I enjoy bringing good porn to people’s attention.
The best in my view is Kristen Bjorn’s. In his early work, his models ejaculated without using their hands, which was a novelty. Later there was all that stuff, called gonzo, in which guys pretended they’d just met people in the street and that they’d agreed there and then to be filmed having sex. Today what’s really popular is POV porn, where guys have sex wearing cameras strapped to their heads.
I had no idea that none of these ideas were original. What I discovered quite recently was that every one of them had been invented forty or even fifty years ago by one man. Peter de Rome. I interviewed him for QXMEN in 2007. By this time he was being hailed as a pioneer, the godfather of gay porn. The British Film Institute had preserved his films in the National Film Archive. I decided I had to make a film about him.
“Peter was a film fan and his porn reflects film history. It’s full of imagination and creativity.”
Peter didn’t like the word “godfather”, which he thought made him sound like a Mafioso. So we called our film Peter de Rome: Grandfather of Gay Porn. He certainly is that. He began making what we now know as gay porn in the mid-1960s, years before anyone else. He influenced Wakefield Poole, who directed Boys in the Sand, the 1971 film that kick-started the gay porn movie industry. But Peter received very little recognition until right at the end of his remarkable life.
Peter began as an actor in the UK, then moved into film publicity, which took him to New York in the 1950s. He was involved in the civil rights movement and bought an 8mm movie camera to record it. But he also filmed men taking off their clothes. His films became more and more explicit. Peter would genuinely pick men off the street and film them. But the results were far better than the movie I saw on Jim’s wall.
Peter was a film fan and his porn reflects film history. It’s full of imagination and creativity. He discovered how to film himself wanking, and how to achieve a no-hands cum shot. He filmed two guys having real sex on a subway train, and he must have been the first porn director to use stop motion animation. The list is endless.
In our film we tell Peter’s life story. We take him back to Margate, where he grew up, and to New York’s Fire Island, where he made two movies, and to Barcelona to meet Kristen Bjorn. Peter saw the finished film. But he was too ill to come to its premiere in Sheffield in June and he died a couple of weeks later.
We’re so happy that we’ve been able to introduce Peter’s work to people who haven’t heard of him. And I hope we can re-ignite the argument that pornography isn’t art. Watch Peter’s films and let me know your opinion.
• Peter de Rome: Grandfather of Gay Porn opens the Fringe! Queer Film & Arts Fest at 8.30pm on 6th November at Hackney Picturehouse, fringefilmfest.com.
• The Erotic Films of Peter de Rome is released on DVD by the BFI: www.bfi.org.uk/blu-rays-dvds/erotic-films-peter-de-rome
