After the THT video Gearing Up… had been out and about for a while we had the idea of adding a bit more to the basic ‘protective gear’ message
The idea was to create a trilogy of messages emphasising other things to do sexually, besides penetrative sex. In retrospect this seems like a slightly condescending idea but it’s important to recognise then that there were no real ‘manuals for safer sex’. Whilst ‘The Joy of Gay Sex‘ had come out in 1977 in the States with a print run of 75,000 copies this really wasn’t bought by a large number of gay men in the UK or even known about by many others. It’s not something that you would have found in bookstores except specialist ones like Gays The Word (and even they were prosecuted by HMRC for selling it at one stage..) It was reissued and republished in an updated more contemporary form as The New Joy of Gay Sex, edited by the gay American writer & poet Felice Picano (whose poetry had particularly resonated with me years before in 1979) & published by Perennial in August 1993 but that still quite some years away.
Organisations like the THT were discussing options in their leaflets and literature, organisations like London Gay Switchboard would go into some detail if you had a phone call but there was always some reticence about how far it was permissible or appropriate to discuss ‘sexual pleasure’ on a call as opposed to the technical specifics of keeping ‘safe’ by using a condom. I think there was a concern that such conversations could stray into the pornographic in nature. Volunteers were supposed to terminate a call if it was felt the caller was asking questions of a very sexually specific nature that involved them self satisfying themselves on the phone. These were put down as ‘wank calls’ on the shifts log sheet kept by each volunteer.
As I touched upon earlier, explicit pornographic videos being made in America but also in Denmark, Holland & France) were still technically illegal to watch or purchase in the UK, although some British companies had started to produce some relatively tame material.
In 1989 for the first time, the British born director Kristen Bjorn produced a ‘game changer’ in the gay porn industry, ‘Tropical Heatwave’ which portrayed a more nuanced and sensual style of pornography for gay men than had generally been produced by American studios at the time, which was soon very popular. However, again, it was not technically available in the UK but it was nevertheless widely seen. Certainly most men I knew would have seen it (often through pirated copies) in the few years after its release. Similarly pornographic magazines would mention the need for safer sex then but there was relatively little in the way of recognising that various erotic practices could also provide sexual pleasure. The ‘Millivres empire‘ owned by Alex McKenna in the late 80’s was still struggling to ensure that it kept the content of its stable (Vulcan, Zipper, Mister etc) within guidelines that were laid down by UK authorities and that it didn’t fall foul of the obscene publications act. At one stage the 45 degree rule or ‘angle of the dangle’ was held to be the extent to which an erection could be shown in a magazine.
The law of desire: the angle of the dangle
´the angle of the dangle is inversely proportional to the heat of the meat,
provided that the maxis of the axis, and the gravity of the cavity, remain constant´.
Anything more was likely to be seen as unacceptable by the authorities but in truth there were no hard and fast rules. Publishers would sometimes push the boundaries, to see what was acceptable.
All this invariably led to a somewhat mechanical or even clinical portrayal of sex, if it was portrayed at all. We wanted to be more adventurous and suggest that all sorts of sexual activities could be erotically charged.. and to be fair the original manual of gay sex in America had suggested these possibilities as far back as 1977. It came from discussions I’d had with gay men that acknowledged that there were many erogenous zones for men. One key one that came up was the nipples. At that time I’d never seen anything in any literature that acknowledged the huge role these played in relation to sexual pleasure for many men as well as women. We wanted to highlight a range of senses that could offer sensual erotic pleasure. Touch & taste were most frequently mentioned as being important stimulants.
My business partner Paul Turner had flown the nest to San Francisco by then to pursue options there. Luckily an old friend, Neil Mc Callum, was able to step in, to help develop the ideas and assist in the co-production and was to be invaluable in getting things done in the next few years. We decided to produce a number of self funded videos that could be used alongside the original protective gear advert that promoted these qualities. These were shot on broadcast quality steadycams rather than being on 16mm, as Gearing Up had been. We decided to use strong lighting to emphasise the chiaroscuro of light & shade. The Kiss was one which featured the highly erotic quality of kissing in a sexually charged situation. In our 3 minute video, which we again set to music, a painter is moved to sketch a worker carefully replacing stained glass in a window. Although the setting wasn’t explicitly inside a church we wanted to strongly suggest that the setting for a sexual encounter could be a strong erotic addition to its enjoyment. Our protagonist, rather beautifully played by the actor Matthew Hiscott, starts to draw the semi clothed muscular figure but then is startled as he gets down from the steps, gently places the glass aside, beckons him to be quiet and kisses him. The rest of the 3 minute piece is then taken up by this passion, this one single long kiss (apart from a short break as they draw back to catch their breath). A stirring original soundtrack with its elements of religious music by Craig Snelling (Some Contact) enhanced the imagery. The ‘glass’ itself features two male silhouettes interspersed with a string of X’s. We end with a view of the completed drawing: the workman completing the glasswork repair.
A second video also shot at the original Four Corners film workshop in Bethnal Green Rd, East London, took Taste as its theme. The inspiration for the tableau was a shot by Bruce Weber called ‘On leave in Waikiki’ (Hawaii) shot in 1982. It shows five bare chested sailors on a bed together, engaged in various activities, one reads a book, another lies on the bed half asleep, another knees up to his chest appears deep in some personal thought, two are engaged, watching something off screen, possibly a TV.
The image was included in Weber’s first monograph, (Twelvetrees Press, 1983), hailed as his ‘breakthrough collection’ and still considered among his most iconic. The book includes a set called “On Leave in Waikiki,” described in its original publicity as ‘a breathtaking suite of images showing both the macho camaraderie and quiet reflection of Navy men on leave in Hawaii’. The shot on the bed has arguably become the portfolio’s most iconic image. Many of the pictures he took for the monograph were rejected by the magazine he had been asked to shoot them for, L’Uomo Vogue, as being ‘too risky’ for publication and appeared instead in 1982 in the more avant garde magazine ‘Details’ and then in his first monograph portfolio.
Initially however, we had some discussion about whether it was useful to use iconographic american material in this way, especially given the previous concerns I’ve outlined about the way the porn actor Jeff Striker (and others) had become so emblematic in gay sexual culture at the time. It was eventually agreed that we would proceed by trying to subvert the restrictive notions of masculinity, of being either ‘passive’ or ‘active’ that were created in particular by such stateside produced pornography. We had to recognise that fantasy was indeed a strong part of the eroticism of safer sex, indeed sex per se, and that we had already used it in fact in ‘Gearing Up’ and that it was no bad thing.
Whilst Weber was not the first to understand the lure, the desire that the potentially unobtainable, perfectly shot figure or figures have for some, (perhaps especially some gay men), he was, arguably, the person to most perfectly articulate that desire visually in the last few decades of the previous century. His other photo monographs such as “Lifeguards; “Jeff,” a photo-essay of Jeff Aquilon, championship swimmer, of a young Matt Dillon and his equally iconic ‘Marky’ Mark Wahlberg portfolio are equally visually arresting and attractive in a slightly colder, more detached way. Later, the Pet Shop Boys were also to make use of his iconic visual americanised style in their video for ‘Being Boring‘. However, we felt the particular image ‘On Leave’ actually captured something rather warmer in his ouvre.
Whilst there is no sexual contact between them, for many gay men we knew the image was (and still is) charged with erotic meaning. Two of the men are smoking in the published shot but due to the health related element of the film we decided to self-censor this and replace these items in our group with beer, water and oranges and -perhaps oddly in retrospect- liquorice allsorts (though these were simply part of the playful subversion that we wanted to use). The video was cut to another original Craig Snelling track composed for the video & called ‘Taste‘ in a hi-energy style, popular in clubs at that time; it is a fast cut video (in colour) looking at various things happening between the men who are posed more or less similarly to the original Weber image. The word taste is repeated again & again in the lyrics, its double meaning thus hopefully emphasised, as opposed to over emphasised (it’s a matter of..). A can of beer is thrown, opened and spills out over another soaking him so he removes his top. He pours more beer over his friend, causing him to remove his top too. Shorts are removed, a bottle of water is poured into another’s mouth, allsorts are thrown onto a bare chest, from which they are then eaten, an orange is squeezed onto another jock strap, then the juice sucked from it. This type of imagery is not unusual now but it was quite different from most explicit porn in this period (as mentioned nearly all produced in the States) with its key emphasis on the pleasure gained from penetration (both anal or oral). The video ends with a deck of cards thrown in the air, coming down with the jacks uppermost, the men silent, in tableau, again (with notion of the play on the word ‘jack’, as in to jack off or masturbate, of a playing card bearing a representation of a soldier, page, or knave, normally ranking next below a ‘queen’.
In the United States a ‘Jack’ is an absolutely amazing person with a great sense of humour who will make you laugh until you are crying, (though this meaning is less well known in the UK). It also referenced what was a big gay club hit at the time ‘Jack your Body’ by Steve ‘Silk’ Hurley, the first house song to reach number one in the UK . The title references ‘jacking’, an ecstatic dance style that emerged within the Chicago House scene in the early to mid 1980s. In 2020, The Guardian ranked the song at number 50 in their list of “The 100 greatest UK No 1s” and added
“It’s hard to imagine now how strange and alien ‘Jack Your Body’ sounded in 1987. Other early house hits had at least come with a song or a hook attached, but this had neither: it may be the most minimal No 1 of all time… as a signal of a vast shift in the way pop music sounded, it’s unbeatable.”
So, simply, the concept was referencing a new way of thinking, of being, of creating a good time.
The final video shot ‘Touch’ was the least successful both literally and creatively of the three. In its post production I struggled to cut it together successfully. Unfortunately the montage we used (much of it shot in First Out’s now infamous coffee bar off the Tottenham Court Rd in central London), featuring waiters losing their balance, dancing mask wearing policemen, clergymen all spinning around to another song by Some Contact was not in the end very suggestive of the merits of ‘touch’. Eventually we gave up on it and edited it to use the footage of our lead character showing imagery of him as a baby, meeting friends in ´First Out´cafe and going to the Pride March and Festival in 1988, using a rapidly cut montage of footage we had shot when making the documentary of Pride in 1988 for the Pride committee that year. Hence it became a short video about having ‘Pride’, enjoying yourself and finding your identity by developing friends within a community of people, hence echoing, re-emphasising, the themes Jimmy Somerville sings about in the title track to Gearing Up. In some respects this became the most uplifting of them all.
The group of videos was then packaged together as the ‘Sex, Love and Life trilogy’ and ended with the helpline numbers trail for THT and Gay Switchboard and a relatively new service, the ‘National AIDS helpline’.
Interestingly at the same time in New York GMHC had asked a number of directors to produce their own safer sex ‘shorts collection’ too. Its concepts and messages were broadly similar to those we were working with, but they were able to be slightly more explicit than we were at the same (though this decision did in some respects came back to ‘bite’ them) and then again in 1989 where they were able to show naked bodies, with safer sex merssages using soundtracks like ´Jack Your Body´.
In fact, the Trust were to revisit some of these issues again in 1992, when they produced a further safer sex video, this time a fifty minute documentary aimed at gay men, some three years after the ‘Gearing Up’ video, entitled ‘The Gay Mans Guide to safer Sex‘ with, to give it credibility as a ‘health documentary’, the medical adviser, Dr Mike Youle, who as one of the founders of the Kobler Clinic of the Chelsea & Westminster Hospital in London, (the earliest specialist centre combining HIV care and research in the UK) had been the centre’s Clinical Trials Co-ordinator for six years then, looking at the potential for new drugs that might be effectively used against the ravages that HIV has on the immune system. It must have been very hard for such doctors at the time, (in much the same way that the coronavirus has been more recently) to be on wards where so little seemed to be really effective in halting HIV. Certainly his message is fairly sombre in this piece but given the circumstances this is hardly surprising. The documentary was licensed for home use only and produced in association with ‘Basilisk’ and ‘Pride Productions’, Mike Esser’s film company. Due to its intended home use and not public viewing it was at least possible to be more explicit in its nature you could actually show rolling a condom onto an erect cock for example).
The Gay Mens Guide to Safer Sex (THT, 1992):
https://archive.org/details/Gay_Mans_Guide_2019_Remaster
I always felt that they struggled with a little with it because it just wasn’t possible to be as explicit as much of the imported American gay porn flicks of the time were and therefore they fell a little flat. This was an issue sex educators in the UK ran up against again and again in this era. The American porn being produced was technically illegal but it was still available over here (VHS tape having made poor quality bootlegged copies widespread). The THT video is notable now particularly for its ‘Coil’ sound track, and, re-watching it after some decades, this documentary is still a nice attempt at producing something more ‘erotic’ for gay men in the safer sex genre but, in retrospect, it’s easier to understand now why this wasn’t universally liked, as I think its creators produced more the piece they wanted to see, rather than thinking about what the audience might actually want or need.
By our standards now, it’s very ‘slow’, many people found the music ‘very odd’ and at the time the video struggled to make an impact with younger men -but was better received by older men. I still feel the shorter ‘sex, love & life’ clips work better in getting a message across but again they were produced for a quite different (semi public club) use. The Trust teamed up with Pride Productions again though and had another go in 1993, producing a video more specifically targeted at younger gay men, which works far better I think. In the next decade, albeit very slowly, the British Board of Film Censor (BBFC) restrictions were to be lifted, to allow directors and producers like Esser and others to go on to create more explicit pornography to be either produced or marketed here in the UK but that was all still quite a way off in the late eighties: for now ‘the angle of the dangle’ ruled. And of course I am getting ahead of myself, yet again.
On to Sex, love and life The Rituals) 2.28 Section 28 and a question going forwards..
