During the 1980s US feminist sex wars, pornography edited its own history, leaving a distorted record both less problematic and less queer than scholars have yet recognized. Academic inquiry into pornography coincided with home-video boom years, and research often took place in adult backrooms, necessarily because pornography was so poorly archived. Yet even as access has shifted from VHS to digital, the field has yet to reckon with how its interpretive frameworks were shaped by a material history in which the films that scholars watched were often altered from the versions patrons had seen in theaters. Gone from both straight and gay films were many transgressive sex acts that had frequently been staples of the genre, affecting the perceived oeuvre of nearly every hardcore filmmaker of the era. This article recovers the lost history of sexual media editing, arguing for a more carefully historicized interrogation of the commercial sources of our porn archives.
Pat Rocco shot and exhibited the first openly erotic gay films in the United States, beginning in the summer of 1968, near downtown Los Angeles. Yet he has been remembered primarily as a transitional figure, relegated to a marginal position in the narrative of gay history. This article argues for a recovery of his work, reading his films as bold acts of place-claiming on cultural, social, and also spatial geographies, resisting a hegemonic, heteronormative legal and political regime. Rocco resisted this regime of the illicit by celebrating not just gay eros, but also the visibility of gay bodies in specific social locations, forcing public recognition of the gay presence in greater Los Angeles, his home base. Rocco's films operated on dual planes, functioning at both the textual level of representing gay visibility in public space, and at the material level of public exhibition.
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