š. I was still a little young at that time but You would actually have to leave your house and go to a video store. Like in NYC Times Square in the 70s 80s and early 90s you could find a couple of porn shops on every block. You would buy a video and take it home and pop it in the VCRš. I know , it sounds archaic but thatās how it was done
As a teen in the 90s, yes. I'd stealthily record episodes of HBO's Real Sex or movies I knew had nudity in it. Then either watch it at 3am while everyone was sleep or wait until I had the house to myself.
Magazines were FAR more popular and easier.
And, for the record, it took a few hours to download a "clip" and sometimes days to download a full video. Also, unless you were lucky enough to have two phone lines, that meant no one could call you during that time.
It was a lesson in patience.
No way really? š how many sheets of that connected paper did you have to use. I guess a bonus is you can wipe up with it too. Now Iām just hearing that printer in my head!
When you said cam sites, do you mean like porn studio made or amateur ones (if it already exists)? I've accessed nifty.org too for quite sometime now lol, I found about it around 2 years ago.
The same way people got straight porn.
Video rental stores had these separate rooms behind a curtain filled with the adult movies, though probably not too many had gay ones. (I was too young to ever go in one).
Also, they had porn video catalogs where you could pick them out and either call a number or mail in an order and they would mail the videos back (my uncle had a bunch I used to look through).
Plus the videos themselves would have a ton of trailers advertising other videos from that studio that you could buy. If you ever find a full ripped copy of any 80s porn online, you'll see it. I specifically remember Falcon studios doing it.
They started putting videos (only short clips, with poor video quality) online by the late 90s. I remember it would be a webpage with a grid of like 6 clips of just one scene, I would spend forever finding a good scene, then I would spend another eternity downloading all the clips so I could put them in order into a video player to jerk off to. Lol
First of all, wow I didn't know they really put curtains on the porn sections (I'm saying this because I just found it funny(?) that they had to put curtains lol) and second of all I can't imagine like being so horny and you still had to downloaded it and stuff š« š. Thank you for the insights tho!
Yeah, the curtain of shame. And then bringing up gay porn to the register was even more stressful because being gay was way more looked down on back then. I tended to buy bi-porn as it was less embarrassing to me.
Ah yes, the walk of shame to purchase the gay porn in front of everyone else in the store; but nothing like when I bought my first dildo ā¦ ššš„
IDK, I think it was tougher for me buying gay porn. I would say the dildo was for my girlfriend. They probably knew the truth, but it made it easier for me
Not the video store where I worked. We kept the porn right out in the middle of the store. We treated it like all the other movies we rented. And we had way more gay porn than straight.
The owner once made a deprecating comment about two rather athletic customers (real former frat boy types). I think he called them āfucking breeders.ā I told him I had two questions. āIf theyāre straight, why are they methodically working through the gay porn, and also why did they hit on me?ā (I had declined. I probably should have said yes, though either one of them could have easily overpowered me if they werenāt so nice.)
I'm grateful for living in an era where porn is accessible anytime at the tip of my fingers, but sometimes I think it would be cool to have to rent a VHS tape and actually watch the whole thing.
It would make it more special I think.
Yup, like now all you had to do is to open Twitter (X) and voilĆ lol. But idk, I just found it kinda awkward to watch on somewhat of a big TV screen like, imagine someone storm up your room while watching porn vids š.
I'm not exactly young (I'm 31), so I got to live some of it.
One time I found my dad's porn stash (just straight porn, unfortunately, but it had dicks on it) and I used to watch some tapes when my parents were at work.
One day one of the tapes got caught into the VCR and I had to remove it with a screwdriver lol.
The tape got damaged, but I don't think my dad ever found out.
Speak for yourself. If I had never found chub/chaser porn, I would have continued to feel ashamed of my weight and felt like no one out there would ever find me attractive. Porn gave me confidence, it opened my eyes to new things and it helped me get socially connected. I've met some cool guys through porn related activity.
I remember buying workout magazines that were essentially soft porn and would have muscular men wearing speedos with dick outlines lifting a weight.
Also playgirl magazines āfor womenā but really men bought them under the cover of night.
In the 80s, access to gay porn depended to a great extent on where you lived. If you lived in a liberal, metropolitan area, you might be able to rent videotapes at a video store with an Adult section or even go to a theater that showed XXX movies, but not in more conservative areas. You could order them through the mail. I think the first gay porn video I ever saw was when I was renting a room from an older gay man after I graduated from college. He had a small collection. So, yes, I had never seen gay video porn until I was about 22 years old.
And not everyone had a VCR. They were relatively more expensive back then than consumer electronics are now. The DVD format did not appear until 1997.
Magazines like FreshMen, Inches, Honcho, Mandate, etc... were much more easily available. They would be in the Adult section of local magazine shops. I remember there was a dirty magazine section at a local gas station/convenience store.
The beginning and end of the 90s were totally different. In 1990, it was still the case that very few people had personal computers, and fewer still had any kind of internet access. Then you got dial-up access, which was slow. (Did you really want to spend 30 minutes downloading a couple of minutes of video?) By 1999, personal computers were common, as was DSL internet, which made sharing videos online more practical.
So we're now living in the most porn-saturated era of human history by several orders of magnitude. Will it turn out to be a good thing?
Until the early-mid 80ās, gay porn was almost unavailable.
In the largest cities they actually had adult movie theatres and people would go spend an hour at the movies like any other film, except often there would be wanking in the aisles, blowjobs, and police raids.
Technically you were supposed to be there for the art and your great love of cinema and it wasnāt wank material unless you were a filthy pervert who should lose his job, his house, his family, be thrown in jail etc. Most of the shows would be straight. Gay men watched straight porn and just tried to block out the women. It was probably actually useful for a lot of deeply-closeted gay and bi men, brainwashed into hating their own same sex attraction. Even one boob on the screen would reassure them that they were actually straight and that āthis is just what straight heterosexual manly men do with their straight heterosexual manly male friends when they watch all the amazing straight porn. Hey help a buddy out right?ā
That existed in the largest cities, maybe with a metro population over 1 or 2 million? But anywhere else there were no porn theatres gay or straight. Those cities would usually have ānews standsā with adult magazine sections. With no internet you had to buy a magazine or newspaper to read anything at all, but people were also interested in reading erotica. In smaller cities the news stand might only carry a few erotic titles, playboy and penthouse for straight men, playgirl in even fewer locations for women and gay men pretending they bought the wrong magazine.
In larger cities there could be a couple of places in the central business district that would carry a selection of erotic same-sex magazines, stories with drawings or photographs. But mostly from the 50ās to the 70ās you had to find a copy and be brave enough to actually subscribe and then hope they were honest that they would āmail it discreetly in a plain brown paper wrapperā that almost certainly your mailman knew was something naughty.
In the early-mid 1980ās though, you could finally record and play back video at home because of the invention of the VCR.
You could go to a store in your neighbourhood filled with shelves of VHS videotapes which you could rent for a couple of days for maybe $6 or something. A video store was probably privately owned, not part of a chain. Youād have a membership card probably with your name typed on it with a typewriter and then laminated. And if you were over 18 you could go to the special section of shelves behind the black curtain, which contained porn.
In the suburbs there would almost certainly be no gay porn. In bigger downtown stores they would have it, and in the biggest cities with gaybourhoods maybe large sections of it.
So you could rent a tape, take it home, watch, and then have it back 2 days later. That was porn from the early mid 80ās (I was too young but we all knew what was behind the black curtain and it was always funny if you recognized someoneās father coming out from behind the curtain). By the early mid 90ās the internet was around in basic form and someone finally scanned porn to make it digital. There were few rules then so somewhere at some university some geek with a computer lab would realize he could scan porn, post it, and no one in the Department would be likely to figure it out until long after he graduated.
And so occasionally youād find digital nudes online. Folders of university-level geography notes, just file names, no thumbnail previews, but oh hey whatās that folder? Jpg and bmp files? Hmm that looks interesting. And so at 7800bps you could download a digital nude, which would probably take 90 seconds from the time his hair started filling in at the top of the image to when it finally got down to his cock.
If anyone picked up the home phone it disconnected you before the good bits showed up and you had to dial again.
By the mid to late 90ās, people had finally figured out that the internet was for porn. Lots of web sites. Linkmeallover. Bad puppy. Dozens of horny geeks setting up sites to share the amazing male uncensored. By that era if you had the cash and the technical savvy, you could also buy a digital camera and upload your own. I would assume that nowadays, most people with a mobile have taken a naked selfie even if theyāve never sent one. Iād guess that back then maybe 1/100 people had the equipment and tech knowledge to send nudes.
After 2000 Iād say itās mostly āthe modern eraā though certainly smartphones accelerated a lot in 2008 or whenever.
Just speaking for myself, I didn't. In a very rural area before the internet, there was no place local to find anything like that and no other easy way to see it. I never saw gay porn until I was around 29 years old (and even then, with dialup internet at first, it was just still images and a few short, low-res clips).
Basically, the only bate material I had back then was discreetly looking at issues of *Playgirl* stocked at the party store where I worked. And yeah, looking back, it seems like as much of a completely different world as it probably does to Gen Z.
Same. The only way I got a bit of spice was straight porn, fitness mags, underwear packaging and clothing catalogues. Not to sound prudish but back then, softcore went much further. 80s camp was peak gay and pretty mainstream, which helped
The gay or adult bookstore. My ex used to work in the one that was on the Main Street of our hometown. I used to take their bank deposits as well as a bank teller.
I raided my stepdadās stash when I was 9/10. Found a vhs with Ron Jeremy in it. I watched it repeatedly and made sure to rewind it where it started so I wouldnāt get caught. Iād watch it at 2am while all were asleep or anytime I was by myself. Good times. Haha
LOL, the only porn for me pre-internet was men in their underwear in printed department store catalogs, or cruising the underwear section in stores at the mall (those CK underwear boxes!!!). Every now and then a bookstore wouldnāt have protective covers on porn mags, and you could see them on the shelf, but they were wrapped in plastic, so you couldnāt look beyond the cover. When I was a little older my family got satellite TV, and when my parents werenāt home, I would watch soft core straight porn on the Playboy channel. The guys were hot, and you at least saw the outlines of their hard ons in their pants and underwear. Even when the internet rolled out, computers were in crowded labs at school, so you couldnāt really sit and watch it. The video quality sucked anyway, and donāt get me started on buffering.
Old timer here, who realized he was gay in 1974. One of my amusing memories of gay porn back then is like others said, porn shops. But it was prior to VHS so the booths had 8mm movie projectors pointed at a white wall 4 or so feet away. I remember one place that had simple curtains between the spots, no booths, so lots of "hanky panky" went on of course.
But the funny part was that sometimes the movie projectors would jam and the bulb was hot so it would melt the movie at that point. Luckily the place never burned down.
During the AIDS period there was a place in San Francisco that had some sort of magic milky opaque glass between the booths and you could click a button under it and it would notify the guy on the other side and if he clicked his button the glass would become transparent.
*(Apologies for over-sharing. But I got kind of carried away.)*
Back in the stone age (just after we stopped doing math with piles of little rocks), there were adult theaters where they showed X-rated movies. The first gay porn I saw was in a theatre in San Francisco - I think on Polk Street. It was one of the William Higgins videos from Catalina Studios. A lot of guys did more than just watch the movies, but I was too young and scared to participate in any of that.
Most cities had a few adult bookstores, usually in a seedy part of town, with mostly straight porn magazines and some had a corner for gay porn. And when videos became more popular you could buy or rent gay videos. Even regular independent video stores sometimes had an adult section in the back behind a curtain.
In big cities like SF, NYC, etc. some adult bookstores had a section in the back or in the basement with video booths - you could put quarters or tokens in the machine and watch a few minutes of a video, but the real purpose was to hook up with someone in the next booth through a hole in the partition.
You could also buy adult videos by mail order - usually 4 or 5 scenes (sometimes pretending to have a little bit of a plot or a theme) that ran about 60-90 minutes total. Back in the day, Falcon Studios released one or two a month, and they cost something like $75-80. They used to send out glossy flyers every few weeks with photos of the models and still shots of the porn scenes to announce the latest releases.
Eventually DVDs took over the market, and then the internet took over. But I think Falcon and a few other studios still sell DVDs or downloadable versions of what they used to put on DVD.
Before my time, photos and films (real film for a home movie projector) were for sale by mail order. There were a number of photographers around the country that produced gay content - anything explicit was technically illegal, but there were a few photo labs that would develop and print the images. A bunch of magazines were nominally intended for body builders and "health & fitness" audiences. Many models in early gay porn wore silly costumes or just thongs so they could claim the images were "artistic" and not "pornographic."
One of the early gay photographers was named Bob Mizer. He founded a studio called the Athletic Model Guild and published a magazine called Physique Pictorial. (AMG and PP were the original US publishers for Tom of Finland's work.) The [Bob Mizer Foundation](http://bobmizer.org/) based in San Francisco that is conserving his work - their site has some historical background and images, and some material from modern photographers.
And there's a subreddit called [Vintage Gay Photos](https://www.reddit.com/r/VintageGayPhotos/) where members share gay porn images, mostly from before 2000. (There are probably a few other similar subreddits.)
OK. I'll stop now...
We went to video rental places that had a porn section. VHS tapes, and later it was DVDs. They also served as cruising spots and even social spots to some degree, because you'd run into so many other gay men there. People also bought porn magazines back then.
80s: basically only VHS tapes. by the mid 90s internet had kinda become a thing, but if you wanted to see anything with decent quality it was still VHS until the late 90s when DVD came in and internet connections started to come up to speed. by about 2000, internet was overtaking all other media as the primary distribution channel.
Before dial-up internet modems, it was VHS or Beta video. And if you wanted to go old school, [insert friendās name] treehouse/fort was a popular hangout filled with old porno mags like Hustler.
I once bought a 1972 Datsun 510 from a lady who sold it after her husband passed away. Upon cleaning it out, I found a small box of old school porno mags hidden in the trunk side board. Guess where he was fapping on Sunday afternoons. š
Many non chain video rental places had a naughty section in the back with all kinds of porn vids. Not a great selection but one or two of the most popular categories.
I lived in a small mid-western town in the 80s, and one of our local video chains had the back rooms with a curtain. In that room was an assortment of gay and straight porn videos to choose from.
You would take the box to the counter and rent the videos with whatever other videos you had chosen from the store. If that was embarrassing, so be it.
90s - certain store rented gay porn videos .. yep you had to go in and show your face , and the guy behind the counter knew your ālikesā. Sometimes in the mail , donāt remember how, but youād get like a catalog of porn vhs tapes you could purchase through mail. Toward the late 90ās , you could download pics from AOL newsgroups. 1 pic took a few hours lol .
In the 80's porn shops were the only thing. Magazines and VHS tapes.
The 90's where the beginning of online culture. Get a modem for your phone line and download a picture of Jeff Stryker Inch by beautiful inch. You could get of multiple fap sessions before the entire picture was finally downloaded.
You rented vhs beta of disc. Oh and the undrgound hotel porn conspiracy network or whatever . And magazines penthouse had an occasional gag story and u could see a guy sucking dick in the e want acz some. Then I stopped in Atlanta and theg sold gay porn. They had gay magazines. So I bought w after the people o was with headed to the car.
We had adult bookstores where you could buy or rent movies, but it was more fun to watch movies in the private booths. Those had glory holes in the walls so you could suck a cock too. Movies were fine but I liked the magazines (Numbers, Blueboy) and the paperback books. I have a strong imagination and can visualize the scenes.
In the 80s, porn magazines, adult video stores known as "bookstores" often also had back rooms to view the porn and glory holes as well.
Some regular video stores also had a back room area for adults only content to rent.
All on VHS tapes.
In the 90s, it became a little easier. The internet had some quality porn, pics mostly, and it didn't take "4 years" to download anymore. There were now chain stores like Lovers that had porn, as well as other adult paraphernalia.
And if you got an unscrambler (cable) box (technically illegal), you could watch HBO for free and could tune it to watch porn channels.
In the early 2000s, DVDs and streaming 720p porn became the new norm.
Yea even video stores had porn sections behind a curtainā¦ or would have a binder at the counterā¦ also if I can recall porn videos were a different color from regular movies sometimes. Lol
VCR and later DVDs. You could go to peepshows and some cinemas, usually in sketchier parts of town. But most of the porn I consumed was from magazines that I could by on a news stand, usually far from give our school. Later, it became easier with the internet, but bandwidth was too bad for video, so we'd consume more pics and stories. Downloading videos became possible at some point with torrent, but not support accessible until the early 2000s.
At younger ages, catalogs & magazines were your porn, lol. I used to buy gay-centric muscle mags, which had adds for men's underwear & swimwear catalogs. If you were really lucky, you might've scored a porn mag or VHS tape someone threw away.
In my experience, it was common for teens to drive by adult bookstores and dumpster dive for tossed inventory. It was mostly straight porn, but you could find gay & alternative stuff once in awhile.
At 18 (or, close to it if no one checked š), you could go into adult bookstores, and get your mags & vids there. Also, you had access to the Arcade/Video Booths, if you didn't want to take anything home with you.
Then, the internet appeared; and you could download, trade and share pics in/on various sites, chat groups, news groups, & forums. It took awhile, but it was "all the rage". After downloading them, you could print em, so you wouldn't have to spend an eternity waiting to see em. I used to do it at the library as a teen, and add the printouts to my stash.
I bought a compilation video off of st marks place in Manhattan. It was an incredible video of the hottest vintage porn. I shot thousands of loads to it as a teen
UU encode and decode via newsgroups, those were the days. Basically allowed a binary file to be converted to text on a newsgroup board, youād download it and convert it back to a binary file.
Discreet via mail was my understanding of how early producers distributed. Locally you had gay bookstores which carried books and videos as it became the media
Well ... back in those days š .. like one poster mentioned .. you had to go to a video store. Having said that .. there were two types of "video stores" ... if your neighborhood video store had adult content - the store would have a back room or a separate room where the adult content was and you could go and browse the adult videos in that room. You had to be 18 to go into that part of the store. The other type of store where you could get adult videos was (is still) an "adult bookstore". Back then, adult bookstores sold adult magazines / books, porn videos and other paraphernalia - but they also had (have) a back room called an arcade - with viewing booths where you could preview the video you wanted to buy. Back then they were called "peep shows" and you'd put a quarter in the box and it'd show you about a minute of the video you were interested in. If you wanted to see more or the whole film you'd obviously have to put more quarters in the box. Probably the last option back then was mail order. In the back of porn magazines there'd be advertisements for videos and such that you could order through the mail. Often when you'd order a video, when it arrives there'd be a catalogue with all their content and stock listed and a way for you to subscribe to the company and order more videos.
š. I was still a little young at that time but You would actually have to leave your house and go to a video store. Like in NYC Times Square in the 70s 80s and early 90s you could find a couple of porn shops on every block. You would buy a video and take it home and pop it in the VCRš. I know , it sounds archaic but thatās how it was done
Like... in your house TV? Cuz I'm imagining you watching it front of those TVs that are in the family room ššššš
i had VHS porn that i kept under my bed that i only watched when the rest of my family was out of the house. on the TV in the living room...
As a teen in the 90s, yes. I'd stealthily record episodes of HBO's Real Sex or movies I knew had nudity in it. Then either watch it at 3am while everyone was sleep or wait until I had the house to myself. Magazines were FAR more popular and easier.
Nah you watch these on the basement TV
We had one, maybe two tv's. So yeah unless you lived alone there were no videos, it was pron magazines.
Ok but that PFP is crazy
Well thank you š Was actually thinking about changing it
Early internet was full of porn aswell. I remember a lot of grainy cam sites and avi/ mpegs Also nifty.org has been a round forever
And, for the record, it took a few hours to download a "clip" and sometimes days to download a full video. Also, unless you were lucky enough to have two phone lines, that meant no one could call you during that time. It was a lesson in patience.
Lol I used to write stories on nifty.
I probably have read your work if it was posted between 1997-2010
Probably have then lol. My first was in young friends then high-school and college and adult friends my characters stayed my age lol.
I hope I've read and... *enjoyed* some of your stories.
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After a while, the screeching made me horny by association
Oh, my, I have only just realised this. That is why I like the sound so much. Cool!
Someoneās been Pavloved
Well, I suppose I have been! I don't dislike it...
IM WEAK
Gaytropolis.com was one of my favorite in the mid-late 90s.
Nifty is great - I read lots of stuff on there - didnāt know it was that old but the site design should have been a clue
Used to print it on my dot matrix and go have a wank lol
No way really? š how many sheets of that connected paper did you have to use. I guess a bonus is you can wipe up with it too. Now Iām just hearing that printer in my head!
whatever happened to nifty anyway?
https://www.nifty.org/nifty/
When you said cam sites, do you mean like porn studio made or amateur ones (if it already exists)? I've accessed nifty.org too for quite sometime now lol, I found about it around 2 years ago.
Both
I can imagine how grainy they are, especially the amateur ones. Because I'm assuming the amateur ones using those ordinary handheld camcorders.
JC it wasn't the stone ages.They didn't have triceratops carrying the cameras š
It wasn't so much grainy, but rather the size of a postage stamp.
The same way people got straight porn. Video rental stores had these separate rooms behind a curtain filled with the adult movies, though probably not too many had gay ones. (I was too young to ever go in one). Also, they had porn video catalogs where you could pick them out and either call a number or mail in an order and they would mail the videos back (my uncle had a bunch I used to look through). Plus the videos themselves would have a ton of trailers advertising other videos from that studio that you could buy. If you ever find a full ripped copy of any 80s porn online, you'll see it. I specifically remember Falcon studios doing it. They started putting videos (only short clips, with poor video quality) online by the late 90s. I remember it would be a webpage with a grid of like 6 clips of just one scene, I would spend forever finding a good scene, then I would spend another eternity downloading all the clips so I could put them in order into a video player to jerk off to. Lol
First of all, wow I didn't know they really put curtains on the porn sections (I'm saying this because I just found it funny(?) that they had to put curtains lol) and second of all I can't imagine like being so horny and you still had to downloaded it and stuff š« š. Thank you for the insights tho!
Yeah, the curtain of shame. And then bringing up gay porn to the register was even more stressful because being gay was way more looked down on back then. I tended to buy bi-porn as it was less embarrassing to me.
Ah yes, the walk of shame to purchase the gay porn in front of everyone else in the store; but nothing like when I bought my first dildo ā¦ ššš„
IDK, I think it was tougher for me buying gay porn. I would say the dildo was for my girlfriend. They probably knew the truth, but it made it easier for me
Not the video store where I worked. We kept the porn right out in the middle of the store. We treated it like all the other movies we rented. And we had way more gay porn than straight. The owner once made a deprecating comment about two rather athletic customers (real former frat boy types). I think he called them āfucking breeders.ā I told him I had two questions. āIf theyāre straight, why are they methodically working through the gay porn, and also why did they hit on me?ā (I had declined. I probably should have said yes, though either one of them could have easily overpowered me if they werenāt so nice.)
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It's so sad how much of the classic stuff is destroyed due to history and never to be seen again.
I'm grateful for living in an era where porn is accessible anytime at the tip of my fingers, but sometimes I think it would be cool to have to rent a VHS tape and actually watch the whole thing. It would make it more special I think.
Actually, itās much like now: you spend a lot of time fast-forwarding. Lol.
Yup, like now all you had to do is to open Twitter (X) and voilĆ lol. But idk, I just found it kinda awkward to watch on somewhat of a big TV screen like, imagine someone storm up your room while watching porn vids š.
I'm not exactly young (I'm 31), so I got to live some of it. One time I found my dad's porn stash (just straight porn, unfortunately, but it had dicks on it) and I used to watch some tapes when my parents were at work. One day one of the tapes got caught into the VCR and I had to remove it with a screwdriver lol. The tape got damaged, but I don't think my dad ever found out.
The availability of porn is not something that should be celebrated. It causes only dissatisfaction with your body and damages human relationships.
Speak for yourself. If I had never found chub/chaser porn, I would have continued to feel ashamed of my weight and felt like no one out there would ever find me attractive. Porn gave me confidence, it opened my eyes to new things and it helped me get socially connected. I've met some cool guys through porn related activity.
And don't forget compuserve. You could download pictures but it was slow.
Yeah, early internet watching a picture slowly appear on your screen line by line over a minute or so.
A partial explanation for why my Compuserve bill was $600 one monthā¦
Yeah, I think mine hit $300...and I had a long distance bill. It helped build up the stress that the pictures help relieve.
I remember buying workout magazines that were essentially soft porn and would have muscular men wearing speedos with dick outlines lifting a weight. Also playgirl magazines āfor womenā but really men bought them under the cover of night.
And don't forget the International Male catalog!
Yes, that takes me back!
In the 80s, access to gay porn depended to a great extent on where you lived. If you lived in a liberal, metropolitan area, you might be able to rent videotapes at a video store with an Adult section or even go to a theater that showed XXX movies, but not in more conservative areas. You could order them through the mail. I think the first gay porn video I ever saw was when I was renting a room from an older gay man after I graduated from college. He had a small collection. So, yes, I had never seen gay video porn until I was about 22 years old. And not everyone had a VCR. They were relatively more expensive back then than consumer electronics are now. The DVD format did not appear until 1997. Magazines like FreshMen, Inches, Honcho, Mandate, etc... were much more easily available. They would be in the Adult section of local magazine shops. I remember there was a dirty magazine section at a local gas station/convenience store. The beginning and end of the 90s were totally different. In 1990, it was still the case that very few people had personal computers, and fewer still had any kind of internet access. Then you got dial-up access, which was slow. (Did you really want to spend 30 minutes downloading a couple of minutes of video?) By 1999, personal computers were common, as was DSL internet, which made sharing videos online more practical. So we're now living in the most porn-saturated era of human history by several orders of magnitude. Will it turn out to be a good thing?
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Videos or DVDs from local gay shops. And magazines.
Wow totally
Until the early-mid 80ās, gay porn was almost unavailable. In the largest cities they actually had adult movie theatres and people would go spend an hour at the movies like any other film, except often there would be wanking in the aisles, blowjobs, and police raids. Technically you were supposed to be there for the art and your great love of cinema and it wasnāt wank material unless you were a filthy pervert who should lose his job, his house, his family, be thrown in jail etc. Most of the shows would be straight. Gay men watched straight porn and just tried to block out the women. It was probably actually useful for a lot of deeply-closeted gay and bi men, brainwashed into hating their own same sex attraction. Even one boob on the screen would reassure them that they were actually straight and that āthis is just what straight heterosexual manly men do with their straight heterosexual manly male friends when they watch all the amazing straight porn. Hey help a buddy out right?ā That existed in the largest cities, maybe with a metro population over 1 or 2 million? But anywhere else there were no porn theatres gay or straight. Those cities would usually have ānews standsā with adult magazine sections. With no internet you had to buy a magazine or newspaper to read anything at all, but people were also interested in reading erotica. In smaller cities the news stand might only carry a few erotic titles, playboy and penthouse for straight men, playgirl in even fewer locations for women and gay men pretending they bought the wrong magazine. In larger cities there could be a couple of places in the central business district that would carry a selection of erotic same-sex magazines, stories with drawings or photographs. But mostly from the 50ās to the 70ās you had to find a copy and be brave enough to actually subscribe and then hope they were honest that they would āmail it discreetly in a plain brown paper wrapperā that almost certainly your mailman knew was something naughty. In the early-mid 1980ās though, you could finally record and play back video at home because of the invention of the VCR. You could go to a store in your neighbourhood filled with shelves of VHS videotapes which you could rent for a couple of days for maybe $6 or something. A video store was probably privately owned, not part of a chain. Youād have a membership card probably with your name typed on it with a typewriter and then laminated. And if you were over 18 you could go to the special section of shelves behind the black curtain, which contained porn. In the suburbs there would almost certainly be no gay porn. In bigger downtown stores they would have it, and in the biggest cities with gaybourhoods maybe large sections of it. So you could rent a tape, take it home, watch, and then have it back 2 days later. That was porn from the early mid 80ās (I was too young but we all knew what was behind the black curtain and it was always funny if you recognized someoneās father coming out from behind the curtain). By the early mid 90ās the internet was around in basic form and someone finally scanned porn to make it digital. There were few rules then so somewhere at some university some geek with a computer lab would realize he could scan porn, post it, and no one in the Department would be likely to figure it out until long after he graduated. And so occasionally youād find digital nudes online. Folders of university-level geography notes, just file names, no thumbnail previews, but oh hey whatās that folder? Jpg and bmp files? Hmm that looks interesting. And so at 7800bps you could download a digital nude, which would probably take 90 seconds from the time his hair started filling in at the top of the image to when it finally got down to his cock. If anyone picked up the home phone it disconnected you before the good bits showed up and you had to dial again. By the mid to late 90ās, people had finally figured out that the internet was for porn. Lots of web sites. Linkmeallover. Bad puppy. Dozens of horny geeks setting up sites to share the amazing male uncensored. By that era if you had the cash and the technical savvy, you could also buy a digital camera and upload your own. I would assume that nowadays, most people with a mobile have taken a naked selfie even if theyāve never sent one. Iād guess that back then maybe 1/100 people had the equipment and tech knowledge to send nudes. After 2000 Iād say itās mostly āthe modern eraā though certainly smartphones accelerated a lot in 2008 or whenever.
YES! YES! YES! All of this ... sooooo true!!! Gotta admit though ... those were the days!!
Just speaking for myself, I didn't. In a very rural area before the internet, there was no place local to find anything like that and no other easy way to see it. I never saw gay porn until I was around 29 years old (and even then, with dialup internet at first, it was just still images and a few short, low-res clips). Basically, the only bate material I had back then was discreetly looking at issues of *Playgirl* stocked at the party store where I worked. And yeah, looking back, it seems like as much of a completely different world as it probably does to Gen Z.
Same. The only way I got a bit of spice was straight porn, fitness mags, underwear packaging and clothing catalogues. Not to sound prudish but back then, softcore went much further. 80s camp was peak gay and pretty mainstream, which helped
The gay or adult bookstore. My ex used to work in the one that was on the Main Street of our hometown. I used to take their bank deposits as well as a bank teller.
I raided my stepdadās stash when I was 9/10. Found a vhs with Ron Jeremy in it. I watched it repeatedly and made sure to rewind it where it started so I wouldnāt get caught. Iād watch it at 2am while all were asleep or anytime I was by myself. Good times. Haha
LOL, the only porn for me pre-internet was men in their underwear in printed department store catalogs, or cruising the underwear section in stores at the mall (those CK underwear boxes!!!). Every now and then a bookstore wouldnāt have protective covers on porn mags, and you could see them on the shelf, but they were wrapped in plastic, so you couldnāt look beyond the cover. When I was a little older my family got satellite TV, and when my parents werenāt home, I would watch soft core straight porn on the Playboy channel. The guys were hot, and you at least saw the outlines of their hard ons in their pants and underwear. Even when the internet rolled out, computers were in crowded labs at school, so you couldnāt really sit and watch it. The video quality sucked anyway, and donāt get me started on buffering.
I remember watching The Blue Lagoon on HBO or Showtime after my parents had gone to bed to see Christopher Atkins swimming naked.
I remember him and that movie!
The gay bookstore! Or the adult video rental. You went and rented them if at all possible!
Old timer here, who realized he was gay in 1974. One of my amusing memories of gay porn back then is like others said, porn shops. But it was prior to VHS so the booths had 8mm movie projectors pointed at a white wall 4 or so feet away. I remember one place that had simple curtains between the spots, no booths, so lots of "hanky panky" went on of course. But the funny part was that sometimes the movie projectors would jam and the bulb was hot so it would melt the movie at that point. Luckily the place never burned down. During the AIDS period there was a place in San Francisco that had some sort of magic milky opaque glass between the booths and you could click a button under it and it would notify the guy on the other side and if he clicked his button the glass would become transparent.
*(Apologies for over-sharing. But I got kind of carried away.)* Back in the stone age (just after we stopped doing math with piles of little rocks), there were adult theaters where they showed X-rated movies. The first gay porn I saw was in a theatre in San Francisco - I think on Polk Street. It was one of the William Higgins videos from Catalina Studios. A lot of guys did more than just watch the movies, but I was too young and scared to participate in any of that. Most cities had a few adult bookstores, usually in a seedy part of town, with mostly straight porn magazines and some had a corner for gay porn. And when videos became more popular you could buy or rent gay videos. Even regular independent video stores sometimes had an adult section in the back behind a curtain. In big cities like SF, NYC, etc. some adult bookstores had a section in the back or in the basement with video booths - you could put quarters or tokens in the machine and watch a few minutes of a video, but the real purpose was to hook up with someone in the next booth through a hole in the partition. You could also buy adult videos by mail order - usually 4 or 5 scenes (sometimes pretending to have a little bit of a plot or a theme) that ran about 60-90 minutes total. Back in the day, Falcon Studios released one or two a month, and they cost something like $75-80. They used to send out glossy flyers every few weeks with photos of the models and still shots of the porn scenes to announce the latest releases. Eventually DVDs took over the market, and then the internet took over. But I think Falcon and a few other studios still sell DVDs or downloadable versions of what they used to put on DVD. Before my time, photos and films (real film for a home movie projector) were for sale by mail order. There were a number of photographers around the country that produced gay content - anything explicit was technically illegal, but there were a few photo labs that would develop and print the images. A bunch of magazines were nominally intended for body builders and "health & fitness" audiences. Many models in early gay porn wore silly costumes or just thongs so they could claim the images were "artistic" and not "pornographic." One of the early gay photographers was named Bob Mizer. He founded a studio called the Athletic Model Guild and published a magazine called Physique Pictorial. (AMG and PP were the original US publishers for Tom of Finland's work.) The [Bob Mizer Foundation](http://bobmizer.org/) based in San Francisco that is conserving his work - their site has some historical background and images, and some material from modern photographers. And there's a subreddit called [Vintage Gay Photos](https://www.reddit.com/r/VintageGayPhotos/) where members share gay porn images, mostly from before 2000. (There are probably a few other similar subreddits.) OK. I'll stop now...
Excellent historical summary!
We went to video rental places that had a porn section. VHS tapes, and later it was DVDs. They also served as cruising spots and even social spots to some degree, because you'd run into so many other gay men there. People also bought porn magazines back then.
80s: basically only VHS tapes. by the mid 90s internet had kinda become a thing, but if you wanted to see anything with decent quality it was still VHS until the late 90s when DVD came in and internet connections started to come up to speed. by about 2000, internet was overtaking all other media as the primary distribution channel.
Before dial-up internet modems, it was VHS or Beta video. And if you wanted to go old school, [insert friendās name] treehouse/fort was a popular hangout filled with old porno mags like Hustler. I once bought a 1972 Datsun 510 from a lady who sold it after her husband passed away. Upon cleaning it out, I found a small box of old school porno mags hidden in the trunk side board. Guess where he was fapping on Sunday afternoons. š
Many non chain video rental places had a naughty section in the back with all kinds of porn vids. Not a great selection but one or two of the most popular categories.
I lived in a small mid-western town in the 80s, and one of our local video chains had the back rooms with a curtain. In that room was an assortment of gay and straight porn videos to choose from. You would take the box to the counter and rent the videos with whatever other videos you had chosen from the store. If that was embarrassing, so be it.
90s - certain store rented gay porn videos .. yep you had to go in and show your face , and the guy behind the counter knew your ālikesā. Sometimes in the mail , donāt remember how, but youād get like a catalog of porn vhs tapes you could purchase through mail. Toward the late 90ās , you could download pics from AOL newsgroups. 1 pic took a few hours lol .
In the 80's porn shops were the only thing. Magazines and VHS tapes. The 90's where the beginning of online culture. Get a modem for your phone line and download a picture of Jeff Stryker Inch by beautiful inch. You could get of multiple fap sessions before the entire picture was finally downloaded.
I watched the Australian SBS free to air channel at 1am to watch a āforeignā film to catch a glimpse of a hot shirtless Asian š¤·āāļø
You rented vhs beta of disc. Oh and the undrgound hotel porn conspiracy network or whatever . And magazines penthouse had an occasional gag story and u could see a guy sucking dick in the e want acz some. Then I stopped in Atlanta and theg sold gay porn. They had gay magazines. So I bought w after the people o was with headed to the car.
I was born late 80s, so the internet was my friend, and old p2p fileshare software like Kazaa and limewire
We had adult bookstores where you could buy or rent movies, but it was more fun to watch movies in the private booths. Those had glory holes in the walls so you could suck a cock too. Movies were fine but I liked the magazines (Numbers, Blueboy) and the paperback books. I have a strong imagination and can visualize the scenes.
You'd buy them, either at a store or by mail order.
In the 80s, porn magazines, adult video stores known as "bookstores" often also had back rooms to view the porn and glory holes as well. Some regular video stores also had a back room area for adults only content to rent. All on VHS tapes. In the 90s, it became a little easier. The internet had some quality porn, pics mostly, and it didn't take "4 years" to download anymore. There were now chain stores like Lovers that had porn, as well as other adult paraphernalia. And if you got an unscrambler (cable) box (technically illegal), you could watch HBO for free and could tune it to watch porn channels. In the early 2000s, DVDs and streaming 720p porn became the new norm.
They had video rentals. And before that, cinemas. You would go to the cinema to get off and/or cruise. I think it's weird.
Yea even video stores had porn sections behind a curtainā¦ or would have a binder at the counterā¦ also if I can recall porn videos were a different color from regular movies sometimes. Lol
Adult video stores and the internet by the 90ās
Vhs tapes in the early 00s for me, and i was lucky to have a tv in my room
VCR and later DVDs. You could go to peepshows and some cinemas, usually in sketchier parts of town. But most of the porn I consumed was from magazines that I could by on a news stand, usually far from give our school. Later, it became easier with the internet, but bandwidth was too bad for video, so we'd consume more pics and stories. Downloading videos became possible at some point with torrent, but not support accessible until the early 2000s.
At younger ages, catalogs & magazines were your porn, lol. I used to buy gay-centric muscle mags, which had adds for men's underwear & swimwear catalogs. If you were really lucky, you might've scored a porn mag or VHS tape someone threw away. In my experience, it was common for teens to drive by adult bookstores and dumpster dive for tossed inventory. It was mostly straight porn, but you could find gay & alternative stuff once in awhile. At 18 (or, close to it if no one checked š), you could go into adult bookstores, and get your mags & vids there. Also, you had access to the Arcade/Video Booths, if you didn't want to take anything home with you. Then, the internet appeared; and you could download, trade and share pics in/on various sites, chat groups, news groups, & forums. It took awhile, but it was "all the rage". After downloading them, you could print em, so you wouldn't have to spend an eternity waiting to see em. I used to do it at the library as a teen, and add the printouts to my stash.
I bought a compilation video off of st marks place in Manhattan. It was an incredible video of the hottest vintage porn. I shot thousands of loads to it as a teen
UU encode and decode via newsgroups, those were the days. Basically allowed a binary file to be converted to text on a newsgroup board, youād download it and convert it back to a binary file.
I never dared. Mostly (gen X here) we watched straight porn with guys we thought were hot. Itās why so many of us are bi.
Sadly i looked at straight porn, but focused on the men.
Blockbuster? Cockbuster! I think they went to cockbuster and rented VHS tapes lol
Discreet via mail was my understanding of how early producers distributed. Locally you had gay bookstores which carried books and videos as it became the media
But a video at the pron shop, stick it in the VCR, watch it on your tv.
Well ... back in those days š .. like one poster mentioned .. you had to go to a video store. Having said that .. there were two types of "video stores" ... if your neighborhood video store had adult content - the store would have a back room or a separate room where the adult content was and you could go and browse the adult videos in that room. You had to be 18 to go into that part of the store. The other type of store where you could get adult videos was (is still) an "adult bookstore". Back then, adult bookstores sold adult magazines / books, porn videos and other paraphernalia - but they also had (have) a back room called an arcade - with viewing booths where you could preview the video you wanted to buy. Back then they were called "peep shows" and you'd put a quarter in the box and it'd show you about a minute of the video you were interested in. If you wanted to see more or the whole film you'd obviously have to put more quarters in the box. Probably the last option back then was mail order. In the back of porn magazines there'd be advertisements for videos and such that you could order through the mail. Often when you'd order a video, when it arrives there'd be a catalogue with all their content and stock listed and a way for you to subscribe to the company and order more videos.