This music video by an obscure band called Aikiu has gone viral. It’s not because the music is anything special, it’s because it incorporates clips from vintage gay porn movies. Remarkably, it’s NOT because the clips are graphically obscene or anything. In fact, you hardly see anything more than bare shoulders and arms. The video is innovative in how they cleverly superimposed naked guys chests over band members playing instruments with virtually the same positions and movements. Cute.
The song and the artists are forgettable, as were the movies that these vintage gay porn movie clips were taken from. That’s why the band felt free to utilize them. Even though the movie creators or performers don’t get credit, and least it’s a (kitschy) way of showing value in recycling the material.
SOMEBODY made those gay porn movies, probably in the 1980’s. They shot it, edited, put it on the market in stores that eventually made it to people’s VCR’s. There were real people in those movies that had (and probably still have) lives and rent to pay. Porn has always been thought of as disposable, with nameless, soulless bodies writhing and fucking on VHS tapes and magazines that viewers felt guilty owning.
Hollywood has been making movies for over a hundred years. Most of that time, those movies were thought of as disposable, too. A vast majority of the silent pictures made 90 years ago no longer exist, nor do the actors, producers and directors. A lot of the animation cells from Disney cartoons that fetch thousands at auction were recovered from garbage cans.
I am hoping there is still interest in preserving vintage gay porn for future generations. That’s why I run this site. I don’t want Jack Wrangler movies to suffer the same fate as Fatty Arbuckle movies that are lost forever.
