With Jack Deveau and Tom DeSimone, Peter de Rome dominated the gay porn industry of the 1970s. Emphasizing his talents for sexual farce (as in the short film “Deliveries in the Rear” in Private Collection), artful photography, particular (some might claim peculiar) lust, kink, and bizarre, surrealistic images, de Rome demonstrated that sex could be art, and vice versa.
Winner of several awards for his unique audience appeal and for his artistic technique, de Rome helped to expand the gay porn world of the 1970s into something of long-lasting aesthetic appeal, and he helped to create the porn flick as an living event of theater.
Peter de Rome passed away just as a flurry of interest and analysis in his career appeared in England. For more information, see these articles.
Why the interest in England? Peter was an expatriate Englishman! He chose New York as his home base, supposedly after an incident with the police involving “loitering” (homosexuality was illegal then in England, around 1956). He emigrated to New York, got a job at Tiffany's, and bought his first 8mm camera in 1964.
The two articles I link to above give much information on his life and some analysis of Peter's films.
What I find most interesting is Peter himself speaking in a couple of articles that appeared in the magazines HIM in 1976 (right before The Destroying Angel came out) and Philadelphia Gay News in 1985 I pulled from our archival material.
Peter on his first experiments with the camera, from HIM:
“I'd shoot a bit of skin – say myself stark naked in front of a mirror—and send it off to Kodak, waiting tremulously until it got back! … Touch wood it always came back. Over a period of ten years I only lost two or three sequences because they could only spot-check films.”
Peter responding to a question about the pornographic nature of his films, again from HIM:
“I don't mind what they're called. Basically they're gay sex movies – but then you see you get into all that boring categorisation of whether it's soft core or hard core. Now of course all the films we make in the US have to be hard core because people won't accept anything else. Now of course it's getting into pretty advanced froms of sex – S & M, fistfucking and so on. I'm not really intrigued with all that—my feeling is for eroticism. And that for me is 'leading up to sex.' Once you're at the sex stage it can quickly get terribly boring. For me, a lot of the arousal is in the mind and the imagination.”
Peter on the shift in the nature of porn and the porn industry that occurred in the 1980s:
“With the advent of AIDS and the VCR, it seems that porn is moving out of the public arena and into the privacy of the home The dangers of the disease may have scared many away from the movie houses where the film on the screen became merely a backdrop against the action taking place in front of it (so that filmgoing became more of a participator than a spectator sport), but the video cassette has opened up a whole new range of possibilities where eroticism may finally face its unique challenge.”
Did the videocassette medium live up to Peter's challenge, which, he claimed, would, because of repeated viewing, “operate on more than one level of suggestion?”
Ah, there's the rub. Peter himself realized that the new porn wasn't subtly erotic (and ended up, with the advent of youtube, becoming public again on a gigantic scale) at all; he retired from the industry in the middle of the eighties, “finding its purely functional orientation—less about the teasing thrill of anticipation than the brutal payoff of money shots—'infinitely tedious and depressing,'” according to Maitland McDonagh in the recent feature on Peter in Film Comment, “Flesh and Fantasy.”
I just wonder today, when anyone can make a movie on youtube and call it porn and immediately globalize the effort, if the courage and daring and fun Peter showed in his films is really a lost legacy. I am thinking specifically of the fun Greta Garbo cameo in Adam and Yves (her last filmed appearance, though she did not know it)!
I am also thinking of the scenes in The Destroying Angel, where Peter transforms that whole genre of sexploitation films that spiced up their appeal with religious settings and imagery: Caswell as the huanted young man torn between taking the cloth and ends up descending (or perhaps, given the emotional ending), ascending via a hallucinogenic mushroom into a dream world of sex and drugs but ultimately intimacy with the stranger on the beach.
And Peter himself loosely based the script on a relatively obscure story by Edgar Allen Poe, William Wilson, which plays on the theme of a double identity, particularly telling for gay men just emerging from the shadows of the closet into a sexually liberated world which paradoxically had discovered its own shadows of narcissism and consumerism.
Heady stuff!
But as Peter himself repeatedly implied, the brain is the most erotic organ, and like his Romantic predecessor Poe's stories, Peter's films, with their dream-like, surrealistic imagery and wordless action, convey Poe's view that words “have no power to impress the mind without the exquisite horror of their reality.”
We at Bijou will continue to promote Peter's legacy by maintaining his interesting and provocative films, which we will hope will inspire the artistic imagination in all of you, not to mention the hidden eros in your psyche.
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