The event, scheduled for 7 p.m. PDT, is sponsored by gay video-on-demand provider Naked Sword, adult retailer Good Vibrations, the Center for Sex and Culture, and GLBT activist organization The Triangle Project.
Center for Sex and Culture founder Dr. Carol Queen will host the event, and also helped to compile the collection of GLBT film clips that will be shown.
After receiving positive reaction to a collection of film clips she put together for a previous event called Beyond Boogie Nights, Queen realized there was only one GLBT clip included for the show.
She then tapped San Francisco-based archivist and film critic John Carr to create the History of Gay Porn presentation, which will document the emergence of gay adult films as a medium, the historical significance of those films for GLBT culture and how societal attitudes have changed.
“When you watch some of these clips, the ones that where banned as obscenity and punishable by law, you realize how laughable and oppressive the laws of bygone eras were,” Queen said. “Carr and I started looking a these clips from the ‘50s, and they where so paunchy and pose-y. We thought, ‘How could this be considered obscene?’”
The show will feature film clips from the ‘50s through the ‘70s.
“By taking the audience from the oppression-laden past of porn to its inception as a community asset and enterprise,” Queen added, “it really shows the measures pornographers had to go through to express their art.”
