Blasts From The Past: Into The Gay Porn Time Tunnel

“Dated” — it’s such an unfair word.

Sometimes, being era-specific can be a virtue.

Gay porn doesn’t really date all that well — it’s amazing to see how polished and professional the medium has become since the days of the handheld video revolution — and I’m frankly glad for that. So much of “new” porn is striking me as rather bland; creative sets have fallen by the wayside in favor of these generic “porn house” locales, music is no longer sublimely terrible than it is just ambient synth, and context isn’t as integral to setting a scene’s mood anymore.

The joys of dated gay porn are about more than just the stars, though it is nice to know that there was a time when models looked like fresh, approachable extras on The Dukes of Hazzard or Melrose Place rather than overly-’roided-out, too-aggressive sex mutants who require a team of day laborers to lift their elephant-sized legs while they’re getting nailed on their backs (true story). No, it’s the sore-dick little details that might as well have pop-up captions over them — look at the pic to the right and tell me what jumps out to you — that pull you down the rabbit hole.

It’s a trip watching guys call each other on colorful, corded phones. My eyes can’t help darting away from the action whenever I see a stuffed Garfield on a shelf or a Buffy The Vampire Slayer movie poster over a bed. There’s something magical about seeing establishing filler of a guy walking through old Times Square in high tops or topsiders, and if I hear slang like “stoked” or “Not even!,” it’s all the better. I don’t have anything against super-current guys like Reese Rideout or Marcus Mojo, but if I could live the movie of my mind, Paul Barresi would be playing my grab-ass boss at Ames, I’d be rollerblading with my fuck buddy Rob Cryston, and compact ’90s Zak Spears would be my erotomaniac stalker — not enabled by Grindr, but using the old-fashioned lurking-in-the-bushes technique.

I’m an “out-of-time” person in that sense, meaning I never feel quite of the era I’m living in. My apartment is such an odd mix of curios from different decades that I’ve taken to calling it The Land of The Lost, and I’ve started seeking out vintage clothing that bucks the current too-trendy look on men. I even dream that I travel through time, sometimes through a photograph or a mirror. Is it retroactive falsification? Maybe a longing for a better time before the Bush era Decade of Doom and all its ensuing fallout? All I can say is this: if it was revealed I was marooned here from another time — somehow thrust forward or backward — it would explain a lot.

Gay porn and its stars are so ephemeral — revered by small, culty circles or forgotten all together — that an eeriness sets in when you see them burning bright in their prime, especially if they died prematurely. It’s hard not to get wistful when I see Jon Vincent with his baby fat and ’80s wedge haircut fucking Kevin Williams on a train in The Look, or Steve Regis alive and well outside a Brooklyn pizzeria circa 1993 in Hey Tony! What’s The Story?. It’s all very Donnie Darko, but I find myself hoping that time isn’t linear — that maybe I really could go to the Big Apple premiere of King Kong or tell the disruptive crowds protesting Cruising, “Relax, guys — people are gonna be begging for this bitch on DVD someday.”

Butterfly Effect be damned.