Most of us know the Bay Area as a hotbed of Internet start-ups. (Social-media giants like Twitter and Google got their start in Silicon Valley, after all.)
But San Francisco is also home to a surprising number of entrepreneurs in an altogether different field: gay porn.
Queers have been flocking to SF since before WWII, but when the Summer of Love hit in 1967, the door was flung wide open for sexual libertarians to storm the City by the Bay. Among them were burgeoning porn studios like Colt, which opened that same year, and Falcon, which hung its shingle in 1971. The men who started these companies—and the studios that came after—saw the city as a place they could ply their trade without interference from puritanical busybodies.
Today, we’re taking a look at six porn companies that call the City by The Bay home—examining how they got their start, what (and who) made them big and how they’re facing the challenges of the digital age.
How about we take this to the next level?
Our newsletter is like a refreshing cocktail (or mocktail) of LGBTQ+ entertainment and pop culture, served up with a side of eye-candy.
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Mike in Asheville
Wow, what you guys, and the linked Gay Cities post, know about gay porn in the 70’s, is just about zilch. SF had Colt and Falcon, and many many many a visit from the San Ferdando Valley based William Higgins, Catalina Video, Joe Gage and more. Sleazy hot!
Ogre Magi
So is San Francisco still the gay porn capital
Mike in Asheville
Forgot to add that I can still remember the “click click click” sound of the Super 8 projectors that the baths used for playing movies. Geez I am getting old.
Mike in Asheville
@Ogre Magi: Well, I don’t think that SF was ever a gay porn capital. Except for Colt and Falcon, there were far many more studios in the San Fernando Valley/Off Off Hollywood, through 2000.
As the digital age has come, there really isn’t a porn capital anymore as anyone can make and upload a homemade video.
Dan Avery
Just to clarify—the article isn’t suggesting SF is THE capital of gay porn, just that a surprising number of studios are there. The San Ferdando Valley still has its share, and online companies pop up all over the country. Then there’s the whole Prague/Eastern European scene.
B
The funny part of the history – in 2007, the mayor declared a Colt Studio Day in honor of how long Colt Studios had been in town, causing the usual uproar from the right-wing media.
Reality: these are perfunctory declarations handled by someone umpteen levels below the mayor on the city’s org chart. Nobody had thought of an item on the checklist about “no proclamations for porn companies,” since there were so many more important issues to worry about.
You probably had a 75 year old straight guy thinking Colt Studios showed pictures of horses.
jeff4justice
We web site users should ignore articles that require clicking on multiple pages. It’s lame.
Kurt
Pretty much all gay/bisexual and even straight porn gets made in Los Angeles or somewhere in Southern CA, not in SF.
I did go to the link and the fact that they mention Treasure Island Media and pretty much condone the bareback sex is wrong.
Daniel Villarreal
@jeff4justice: Yes, any article that requires more than one page of reading is crap. I feel the same way about newspaper articles that jump to another page just to sell me more ads and any book or novel more than one page long.
jason
Most of the men who did Colt movies are now married with children. They were never exclusively gay to begin with. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that most of then were predominantly attracted to women.
As for porn in general, it is not about sexual liberation. It’s about paid professional prostitutes having sex in front of the camera. They aren’t doing it for you, they’re doing it for themselves. They often have drug habits to feed. They couldn’t give a rat’s about you.
Mike
@jason: well said, I’d go even further and say that porn has done nothing positive for the gay community, or any-other community for that fact. It’s a waste of money, people, and in some cases talent ( very few cases ) but take Colton Ford, the man has a voice, he can really sing. So I like every one else has been fooled into thinking that there was something special about these guys, and really there’s not.
Kurt
I agree Jason and Mike.
Now Colton Ford wants to claim he’s somehow LMAO a singer and an actor in D-list movies like the not funny sequel “Gays gone wild”. His music sucks and I’ve met highschool and college kids who were better at singing and had more talent than he ever will at music.
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