Porn, as we scholars of the form know, takes place in an alternate universe too lopsided, too abundantly endowed, too strangely convenient to ever be described as parallel.

Pizza boys arrive with hardons. Doctors are as fit as musclemen and when they ask you to drop your pants, they drop theirs.

Here the locker rooms are oddly silent and empty … empty, empty empty — except for HIM! HIM has, of all things, the locker right above yours and a painfully erect whopper that keeps bumping into your face.

Welcome to Pornville. That Land That Never Was and yet can never die thanks to those old eight-millimeter reels that laid down the rules and regulations for all time. Rules like …

Well, finding a stranger asleep in your barn (your barn?) He is naked, of course, totally — except for one odd little hayseedy type thing: he’s wearing a studded cockring. That and giganzo chrome rings through his nipples, cockhead and perineum.

This, you think, must cause a sensation when Hayseed goes through the machines at the airport. But, of course, there aren’t any airports in Pornville. Only barns, locker rooms and embarrassingly queer-looking bedrooms decorated to within an inch of their silly High-Auntie lives. (And boy, do we have the evidence. See our brother site Lurid Digs.)

In those Arcadian days before the internet and the digicam decentralized the biz, the capital of Pornville was Hollywood.

Not the usual Hollywood of Lights, Camera, Action but a secondary, off-kilter demi-world. The Hollywood of boys getting off the Greyhound bus with a few bucks in their jeans and the sort of confidence that came from always being told that they were the hottest thing since toast.

Boys who found their way to Selma Boulevard and Santa Monica Boulevard, and took their shirts off and stuck their thumbs out, and anything else they could stick out to show off their massive talent (like Brad here, at right, circa 1979), convinced that this, surely, was the best way to attract a movie producer.

Which, as it turned out, it was.

The casting couch, rather than a route to a career, became in its many porn-movie iterations, the entire on-screen career itself.

Fresh off the bus from Nowheresville then and finding themselves not in a red-carpeted Glamorland but in the harder than hard Hollywood of earthquake-cracked streets, a lucky few were scooped up by the pioneers of movie-porn, the out-of-work cameramen and lighting guys who knew their way around the heavy equipment (this was, as we’ve said, way before the digicam) and were living on the cheap in Van Nuys or in some gritty bungalow in Silverlake with a sideline in boy-on-boy mail-order.

And so talent met direction in those long-ago disco years, the 1970′s.

Together they created reels and reels of not-quite make-believe where all the tops looked like Tom Selleck in plaid shirt, mustache and bushy-bushy hair; and all the bottoms resembled twink legend Kip Noll, who with his mess of curly blond locks looked like an angel that had fallen off the top of some Christmas tree in Surf City.

Which brings us to the little gem from Dan O Rama below, the whole reason why we’ve taken this lingering walk down memory lane.

Set to the music of the Village People — could it be any more perfect? — themselves a homage to every porn icon of the decade, we bring you a tribute to the once and still mythic capital of the porn world,
Holly Woooood!

(MEMBERS / non-MEMBERS take a free tour)

UPDATE: Video Everyone’s a Star in Hollywood by Dan O Rama
hat tip to Nightcharm reader Phil for turning us on to the video
Also of interest: My Life Among the Masters by John Calendo

© 2009, John Calendo. All rights reserved. Nightcharm.com