Douglas Messerli | Two Porno Firsts [Introduction]

 

two porno firsts

by Douglas Messerli

 

In the very last year of the second decade of the 20th century, according to movie lore, small audiences caught glimpses of what might be described as dubious first-time events, the very first gay porno film and the first sex porno animated movie. In both instances I doubt the claim of these particular works representing the earliest examples of their genres, particularly since already in 1920 Le Ménage moderne du Madame Butterfly displayed in a single movie, heterosexual, lesbian, and gay sex acts as well as male masturbation.

 

   But if you’re fascinated by the idea of being “first,” these two probably fit the bill as well as any others we might later discover. The works under discussion include the pseudonymous The Surprise of the Knight from 1929 or 1930 which is generally hailed as the first all-gay film; and Eveready Harton in Buried Treasure, what is probably the first pornographic cartoon to depict male on male sex.

  Clearly, they were not the last, although immediately due to the increasing pressure of studio heads fearing precisely what did happen, and the actual arrival by 1934 of a strict censorship code, such activities were not publicly available again to run through a public projector for several decades. Of course, such films continued to be made, but were sold not only “under the counter” and hidden away from the prurient prying eyes of anyone who might be even the least sympathetic to censorship or government sexual oppression. You might even go so far as to say that with the issuing of these two works, LGBTQ sex was banned from public consumption for the next thirty years, not to become available again until the 1960s, and even then, mostly in underground and foreign cinema. For many Americans, the horror of depictions of same sex relationships of any kind is still with us. As I will argue later in these volumes, even among the most liberal of LGBTQ supporters among heterosexuals, there is still very little interest in actually having to witness movies about queer relationships and sex, even though every queer movie goer has seen hundreds of heterosexual movies and probably enjoyed many of them for their depictions of love and love-making.

       Enough said. These movies tell their own stories.