JACKPOT: A Film By Adam Baran from Adam Baran on Vimeo.
There are worse ways to spend eight minutes than watching âJackpot,â a cute little short film set in 1994 about a kid desperate for porn, but itâs 1994 so he canât get it online.
Yes, life sure was full of hardship back then.
Provided youâre over 30, thereâs plenty of nostalgia to go around here, as the film does a fairly impressive job of dressing sets and actors as though itâs actually the mid-90s. (One exception: a kid on the phone who seems to have never held an SNES controller before.)
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.
And of course, thereâs that wistful Iâm-all-alone feeling thatâs all too familiar. The hero of âJackpotâ isnât just cut off from naked men, heâs cut off from any gay culture whatsoever.
Before the internet was widespread, before any gays could marry, and before Ellen and George Michael were out, it was very very easy to feel like the whole world hated you. Whereas today, itâs possible to reassure yourself that only certain parts of the world hate you.
âJackpotâ is currently dancing around at various film festivals and fundraising for a full-length feature (you may recall its previous Kickstarter), so keep an eye on this one.
redcarpet
I remember using the Penny’s catalog. Lucky for me the internet came to our house right about the same time (i’m 29).
Still, who didn’t want to hand that kid an iPad and say “Knock yourself out”?
rand503
OMG! That was SO me back then! I used to clip out photos of all my favorites male models and keep them safe under my bed. And those photos of are Michael Ives, one of my all time favorite models! He first hit is big when Bruce Weber discovered him in the early 80s and he was the perfect preppie. I tried my best to learn about all these models.
I even subscribed to INternational Male just to get some hot guys in nearly naked photos to jerk off to. I was so deprived until the internet came along.
Scribe38
My granddad moved into an apartment and the renter before him would get the international male catalog. I must have stolen every one that ever came there and hid them in the drop ceiling in my parent’s basement.
Mr. E. Jones
@rand503:
I even subscribed to INternational Male just to get some hot guys in nearly naked photos to jerk off to.
@Scribe38:
My granddad moved into an apartment and the renter before him would get the international male catalog. I must have stolen every one that ever came there and hid them in the drop ceiling in my parentâs basement.
I’ve got great memories of the IM catalogues too. Discovered the company in an advert in the back of a 1989 GQ magazine, and sent off for a copy, and when it arrived, oh the joy it brought me!
Merv
There was life online before the internet. Doesn’t anyone remember dial-up BBSs? There was one in may area the allowed over 50 dial-up connections at once. It was so profitable, the owner threw a lavish annual party for free. There were also national services such as Compuserve, which cost an arm and leg to connect to. Of course, downloading pictures was insanely slow at 1200 baud.
Rooney
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rand503
@Mr. E. Jones: GQ was terrific for both the ads with gorgeous models and the editorial fashion spreads. Even the covers used to feature anonymous hot guys. Then they realized they could sell more mags with celebrities on the cover, and it’s been down hill ever since.
All those mags, including Esquire, Details, and so on, knew that a large percentage of their readership was gay. As you mention, you just had to look at the ads in the back. Their articles were always gay friendly, too, in the sense that they never ever wrote anything that could be remotely construed as anti-gay. In fact, if you looked them over carefully, it was almost a wink wink that they were written by and for gay men.
And that meant that they were the perfect magazine to read if you were in denial, or deeply closeted, as I was way back then. To this day, I’m sure that a large percentage of their readership was men who were somehow not totally hetero and deep down knew it but couldn’t necessarily face it.
Let’s face it: Madison Ave knows more about they psychology of sex than any psychologist!
ppp111
I remember buying not only the old GQ magazines with the hot cover models but those fitness mags with nearly naked guys who seem to love to flex. Men’s Workout was one of my favorites since many of the models also posed nude in porn rags and some also did adult films.
rbettenc
I’m glad I grew up then. While the Internet has its advantages, I wouldn’t wont to grow up with sex being so proliferate.
tdx3fan
Thankfully, I had older family members that had porn which got me through until I was 17. At 17, I started printing porn from the library at the college where I was doing early enrollment. Growing up watching straight porn I kept earning for a time that I could see gay porn. This was during the 1980s and 1990s when straight porn showed you the guys face for about 3 seconds every scene and other than that he was just a prop for the ladies.
tdx3fan
@rand503: Thankfully, we had a librarian in my high school that took an early stance for diversity in a school district that was backwoods and dominated by white “Christians.” That meant that she filled the library with magazines that showed actual diversity (YM, GQ, etc.) and started to bring in books that showed gayness in a positive light during the 1990s.
Jayson
It was about 1986 when I found a bunch of 50’s-60’s “posing strap” magazines my father had left before he left. Looking back, I think there’s a story there. Anyway, I took them from the basement and kept them in my room. Then, when I was 17-18 I bought my very first gay magazine ‘Honcho’ at Out of Town News in Harvard Square. I wore that magazine out! On my second trip, I met a guy there and I went back to his place for a romp. I was pretty young and inexperienced, so it wasn’t that much fun, but it certainly started my gears grinding. To this day I do miss the book/video stores. Something about not having it right at your fingertips made it more exciting. Plus, the face-to-face cruising was fun.
tjflorida
I wanked to my baseball cards in the 80’s đ