So Saturday I wound up buying even more After Dark magazines, and now I'm stashing over 30 issues on my porn shelf. (Yeah, I know - what the hell am I doing letting non-porn take up valuable porno real estate?!!?) I decide I need to sort thru them, and prepare at least a few for auction. Good music playing, nice breeze coming through the windows, I begin to sort thru for pics/pages to scan. But very quickly I realize that the photography is much better than I had thought (see the far right pic from SUNDAY), and much much more important, there are ads and blurbs for some of the earlier gay porno flicks - some I hadn't even known existed! So now I'm marking pages to scan for my pornology pages, rather than for selling purposes. ARRRGH. Several great ads for HAND IN HAND FILMS, an ad for the 1974 David Davidson film, THE DEVIL AND MR. JONES (try googling for that one!), and then I see a full page color ad for A Very Natural Thing (not porn) - a movie I'd heard about, had on that list of things to someday rent and view, but never got around to it. Finally, after giving up on the After Dark magazines (I was scanning all these ads, a pic of Fred Halsted, the full page one of "Brahm", and other stuff, but not the covers and 'selling points' of the magazines), I got out of the house, and went to 2 local video stores in search of Natural Thing. When I finally found it, I continued looking thru the gay-themed videos, figuring it's Saturday night, might as well have a double feature. I picked up a copy of The Cockettes, another 'heard it was good, hadn't gotten around to it yet' movie.

Settling in finally later that night, I was quickly drawn in to the film. Not dated as I had expected (maybe some hair and clothes), it was an interesting exploration of one man's search for a committed relationship with another man. Unlike the review I linked above, I didn't get the feeling that the filmmaker's were commenting on "the empty side of gay life" as much as they were saying that for this young man, the gay sex scene - baths, multiple partners, no commitment, etc, - wasn't for him. And his growth in realizing this, accepting it, and becoming sure that what he wanted - a committed long-term relationship - was worthwhile, was done in a beautiful, non-preachy, sweet, wonderful manner. I loved this film!

Later, I popped in the VCR The Cockettes - and was happy to see I had picked another excellent film. I won't go into why, just that it was a wonderful documentary about a group of people, a time, that was just marvelous to witness. Gay San Francisco communes, free love, bad singing, fascinating people reminiscing about their youth..... just great. Oh wait - one of the little "pluses" of the first film was the main character's brief visit to a gay bathhouse. It's all of 3 minutes on the screen, but when he begins to leave the shower, seemingly repelled by someone trying to give him a hand soaping up, he walks past - OH MY GOD OH MY GOD - Brahm van Zetten, the guy who portrayed Samson in Wakefield Poole's 1973 Bible! He then walks into the steam room, two guys start to have sex with him, and Brahm joins them - you see nothing explicit, and Brahm is only easily viewable for a mere few precious seconds, but all wet, and goateed, and, GRRRR! (see middle pic of Sunday's post) So, going thru my memory banks, I'm like, I know this guy was a Colt model, right? Took me all of 15 minutes to figure out (through my bazillions of jpegs saved on the trusty ol' hard drive) that he's a Target Model, named BRAND, (see left pic from Sunday)and never seemed to have actually appeared in any gay porno. (Of course, I'll have to do more research to verify that.)

Oh yeah, the movies, the movies. I think if one had to try to figure out some theme, or similarity, between the two films, it is that each displayed characters who were quite happy with being their own unique self, and not in a self-satisfied "I'm better" or "this is how queers should be" but merely "this is what's right and good for me" absent any preachiness. Several thumbs up for both!