BijouBlog

1978 was a seminal year in LGBTQ history, mostly because it was the year Harvey Milk was elected in San Francisco to the Board of Supervisors, one of the first openly gay political candidates in United States history. He was elected on January 8, but he was assassinated 10 months later by Dan White, on November 27.
 

An article in Gay Life, a Chicago gay periodical of that period, reacts:

"Gay people all over the United States reacted with shock, dismay and outrage to the murders Monday of San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk. Before their deaths both men have proven themselves to be strong advocates of equal rights for gay men and lesbians. Milk, the first open homosexual elected to citywide office in San Francisco, was widely regarded as one of the most visible and influential leaders in the American gay community. Moscone during his term as mayor had been an active supporter of gay rights ..."

Some other news in this volatile year, showing both progress and regression, with a focus on Chicago:

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office rejected an application by Gaysweek magazine to register its name, claiming that it is “immoral.”

The Chicago Gay Pride Parade, according to a statistics compiled by its now iconic mover and shaker, Rich Pfeiffer, boasted an attendance of 10,000. The increase in numbers built on the previous year's increase, mostly because of the anti-Anita Bryant protests that took place at Medinah Temple.
 

Gay porn movies (and probably playing at the Bijou Theater) released that year included El Paso Wrecking Corp. (the famous Joe Gage movie) with Fred Halsted and Richard Locke and Hot Truckin' featuring Nick Rodgers and the muscle god Gordon Grant. Also released were A Night at the Adonis with Jack Wrangler and Malo show us the inside of the gay sex palaces of that time period, and Dune Buddies (also starring Malo). Jack Deveau of Hand in Hand Films was producing some of his best work this year!
 

We are always researching LGBTQ history and culture. Check out the blogs on our website, and we always welcome your comments and feedback!

Once in a Blue Moon, directed by Toby Ross, is truly a gem in our collection of vintage gay porn. Each vignette is essentially a “short story” that probes different dynamics in gay relationships, feeding off archetypal images that can be found in so much “mainstream” art, movies, and literature: a scene in hell, a soldier tortured by an enemy interrogator, and a prison inmate finally meeting his pen-pal. 
 

The second vignette in this movie is called “Better Sooner Than Later,” and stars Marcus Braun as a soon-to-be-departing executive headed for a new assignment in Paris, and Johnny Rahm as the coworker he is leaving behind. Their intimate, realistic and passionate dialogue reveals that not only are both gay, but that they have longed for one another for some time. They lovingly share cocksucking and fucking, switching off throughout the segment. The scene concludes with the title comment, “Jerry and Bob eventually both settled in Boston and lived happily ever after.” 
 

What makes this vignette particularly poignant is the life story of Johnny Rahm. (In my opinion, he has some of the most intense eyes not just in porn movies, but in all movies. Maybe it is the way his cheekbones set them off. According to an interview in Manshots in 1991, he is 30 to 40 percent Cherokee Native-American. Whatever the case, he is gorgeous!) 
 

Johnny Rahm's real name was Barry “J.T.” Rogers, and like so many guys born in the 1960s who became porn stars, he ended up fleeing a straight white Christian upbringing, but in this case, a particularly strict one. 

According to his obituary in SouthernVoice.com, he actually attended Bob Jones University, the place to go for particularly fundamentalist Baptists like Rogers aka Rahm's parents, who, Rahm reveals in the interview, hated him for being gay. 

The California gay scene called him the in the late 1980s, and he worked for ten years in the gay porn industry, kind of falling into spontaneously after an interview with J.J. Casting. 

He chose the name Rahm, but really wanted it to be Ra-m, but that didn't fly, and in the interview he relishes the irony of the name, as most viewers assume he would be a top, that is someone who does the ramming! 

In fact, Johnny was a hot bottom who admittedly liked dominant tops (especially those with mustaches) in his films and in real life, perhaps someone like his co-star in Once in a Blue Moon, Marcus Braun (Johnny and Marcus pictured below). 
 

 

The interview with Manshots reveals a high-spirited, honest, and intelligent artist who is really trying to work on his craft. 

Some particularly cogent quotes from the piece: 

Manshots: When did you come out? 

Rahm: I think I realized something was different about me when I was thirteen or fourteen. I didn't have the really serious sexual fantasies about guys until I was about seventeen. I remember wanting so bad to be on the baseball team in high school, because there were three or four guys on the team I really wanted to see in the shower. My first experience though was when I was twenty. It was with an amateur bodybuilder who lives in Atlanta, Georgia. It was phenomenal. 

Manshots: In your relatively short career in video so far, you've already made a reputation for yourself as an actor. My favorite was in Bedtime Stories for Catalina, where you played a black cat. You stayed in character as the cat through much of the actual sex. How much acting training have you had? 
 

Rahm: I'd say I started “studying” – and that's in quotes – when I was six years old. I used to have an old cassette recorder, and I'd record TV shows off the air and lock myself in my bedroom and turn the player on and act out the shows – playing all the parts....I was a big Monty Python fan... I was only kid in my junior high school who was weaned on public television. 

Manshots: Having something of a background in Monty Python style humor, do you ever get this moment on a set in the process of making pornography, where you get an overwhelming sense of absurdity? 

Rahm: Extremely, yeah, I get the idea that sometimes people who rent these videos think the work is so glamorous. But it's hard work – getting a hard on in a scene where it feels like it's twenty degrees below zero in the room. 

Manshots: What was working with Toby Ross on Once in a Blue Moon like? 

Rahm: It was a very good experience. His group was very laid back... He (Ross) asked us a lot of questions like “What would you like to do?” and “How can we make you more comfortable?” – and I liked that, and I've seen the movie and I liked it, but as usual, I'm never happy with the scenes I'm in. 

Manshots: Oh? 

Rahm: I'm never happy with my hair. Boy, is that the queeny phrase of all time or what? 

Some of his notable videos, in addition to Once in a Blue Moon, include The Devil and Danny Walker, Straight to the Zone, Badlands, and Hey Tony,What's the Story?. 

What happened to him is really sad, especially as the interview reveals his ambitions to work behind the scenes and put his background in film and acting to use as a directory. 

Johnny committed suicide in Atlanta in November 7, 2004, at the age of 39, by hanging himself with a wire on the fence line of the Atlanta Botanical Garden. At that time, according to his roommate, Adam Kahn, he was struggling financially. He was HIV positive, but in good physical health. 

Johnny, who lived happily ever after with his ideal man on screen, never found that happiness in his real life. 

But in all his life work, he really wanted to make his audience happy (and turned on, of course). In a talk with his cousin, he reflected, “It's good to know that I made a difference to some gay guys out there … even it was inadvertent. I feel honored to have that kind of devotion.” 
 

 

I used to see when I was traveling by car (including places with my parents when I was a child) places with signs like XXX, adult, bookstores, Girls! Girls! Girls!. I was blissfully ignorant, being more concerned at that point in my life with Star Trek and J.R.R. Tolkien, but I do remember now that we lived down the road from a notorious strip of what used to be called go-go joints. I later found out they were owned by the Mafia, and what looked like apartments above them were actually places where the johns could take the girls.

This underworld really invoked no curiosity, until right after high school my friend Nancy expressed an interest in going to an adult movie theater. Nancy's mother, far more hip and liberal than my parents, warned us that people might masturbate in there. The place itself, in the suburbs, didn't look much different than a mainstream movie theater. It was clean, physically, and the clientele wasn't the scuzzy people Nancy's mother thought would be whipping out their dicks. In fact, the people in there I noticed were more my parent's age. And the movie of course was heterosexual, but I saw oral sex for the first time (I was shocked at the size of the erect cocks, not in my experience at all), and an orgy scene. I was disappointed the guys were not doing it with each other. I also asked the ticket taker if they showed any S & M movies. He was cute, bearded in a kind of shaggy seventies style, and he said “No.” So, that was it, I guess. For now …
 

When I moved to the city, like many suburban gay guys did, to explore sex, I discovered gradually a deeper, more physically threatening underworld. The XXX adult bookstores prevalent at that time on Rush Street band State Street north of the Chicago River beckoned, and I even went to one during my lunch hour. I bought three of those pulp jack off books we sell on our website, all with S & M themes. About that time, I also remember going with Nancy again (by the way, she is now a doctor, interpret that development as you wish) to one of those stores. I was shocked by the titles of two books, Carol's Strange Choice (the family dog) and Widow Loves Farm Animals. Yikes! Moving on …

At this point I was feeling both titillated and shocked, but never really comfortable, like I was where I belonged. I graduated to a couple of places called bookstores which had peep show booths and glory hole booths, but I didn't actually do anything in them. The back room of a bar called Touché (the old one at Lincoln and Diversey) was the first place I actually fooled around with a guy in public, and it seemed like the places where I was exploring my sexuality were becoming more and more “divey” in the physical sense: dirty wooden floors, spilled beer … that unique scent of a bare cock and balls, skin and sweat and funk. Subsequently, I got to know floors quite well … the AA Meat Market, and several leather bars in New York City.
 

But the gay adult movie theater was still an unexplored place. I finally made it there, most unfortunately, long after its halcyon days, the Bijou Theater on Wells Street in Chicago. I went on a tour with the group Masters and Slaves together (it seemed clean and quiet, and I didn't make it to the upstairs maze. Yet. That happened a few years later when I went to a leather event at the theater, and I was one of those people (albeit dressed in leather) Nancy's mother warned us about. I do wish, however, that the event continued in my apartment.
 

Now that sexual exploration begins and ends with the Internet and social media apps, those secret XXX places can exist in one's phone and in one's home, but I think, overall, one loses some of that complex reaction to a physical place where the most physically powerful and also vulnerable of acts takes place.

By Madam Bubby
 

Malo is pretty much an icon in the Bijou Video filmography, despite his brief adult film career. A strong actor with a handsome face, commanding screen presence, and a chiseled physique, he highly memorably appeared in Jack Deveau's Hand in Hand Films classics A Night at the Adonis (DVD | VOD), Dune Buddies (DVD | VOD), and The Boys From Riverside Drive (DVD | VOD); in the first two, in leading roles, and paired in a sex scene with superstar Jack Wrangler in the third.

Malo on the set of Dune Buddies
  Malo with co-stars Larry Paige and Garry Hunt in Dune Buddies
  Malo and Jack Wrangler being filmed by Jack Deveau for The Boys From Riverside Drive

Malo and Jack Wrangler, whose sex scene kicks off The Boys From Riverside Drive

Along with the compelling line delivery and character work he gets to do in both Adonis and Dune Buddies, his sex scenes sizzle with electric sexual tension. In A Night at the Adonis, his sequences in barber chair with Jayson MacBride and in the orgy, paired with Geraldo, are highlights. And in all three films, he wields a stunningly beautiful uncut cock.

Malo, Jayson MacBride, and Geraldo in A Night at the Adonis

Not only is his cock stunningly beautiful. His overall physical beauty made quite an impression on many viewers when he appeared in the movie Cruising under his real (and mainstream performing) name, Arnaldo Santana. Yes, Cruising, the controversial Al Pacino movie.

There, he plays Loren Lukas, the first victim of the psycho killer. Young macho beauty (especially his perfect bubble butt which could have been lifted from a Greek statue of Apollo) violently mutilated. The whip the psycho runs across him seems almost ancillary in this scene which seems to find its orgasm in the knife penetrating the flesh, not a hole in the body. Check out the scene on YouTube; go to about 11:30 to see Malo in his beautiful agony (if you're not squeamish).

Malo/Arnaldo Santana in Cruising

And, believe it or not, Arnaldo was a friend of Pacino's, and Al got him a part in the movie Scarface - as his bodyguard, Ernie. According to imdb, “his acting career took a nose-dive when the handsome, muscular Santana gained over 100 pounds and became a heavy-set character actor," though Scarface was his most prominent film. You can see him as Ernie in this YouTube clip.

Malo/Arnaldo Santana and Al Pacino in Scarface

In the year following Scarface, 1984, Santana appeared as recurring character Hector Del Gato in all six episodes of comedian Paul Rodriguez's Norman Lear-produced sitcom (with a one-season run), a.k.a. Pablo, about a Mexican-American family in California. Malo/Santana can be seen throughout the opening credits sequence for the show here on YouTube.

Malo/Arnaldo Santana and Paul Rodriguez in a.k.a. Pablo

Other than a handful of additional details on imdb - references to his roles in films and television (also including Rage of Angels), this interesting list of his theater work (which explains his acting talent), mention of his birth (9/1/50, El Paso) and death (10/9/87, NYC) dates and locations, and a few other facts - I have found no biographical information about Arnaldo Santana.

But as Malo, he is an iconic figure from that first period of gay liberation in the 1970s, when sex was popping out of every nook and cranny. What was hiding in the shadows became passionately, violently free.

Malo in A Night at the Adonis

I used to wear loud pajamas with seventies colors that my brother said could “wake the dead,” even through my early twenties. I was used to I guess sleeping chastely, but I did not go completely in that direction, wearing a nightcap. 

I switched to sleeping in sweatpants as I matured in the adult world. I was already wearing them around the house all the time when I came out, but I never made the transition to wearing them out and about except when jogging. I don't know … I just feel like they are too casual for even mundane activities like shopping, and since they are my main sleepwear, I feel like I am going outside in my pajamas (I did that once when I lived in the dorms, but that's another story). 

Now it seems, the boundaries between sleepwear and casual everyday wear are more blurred. I've taught students who wear those flannel lounge pants (which for me are essentially glorified pajama bottoms) to class, and not just those who live in the dormitories. 
 

Thus, given the trend I mentioned above, seeing a guy in sweatpants on the subway or the bus is pretty routine these days, which leads me to my main point: one just doesn't notice the sweatpants. One notices the bulge. And if the guy is really hung, he “freeballs.” The loose-fitting wear allows some motion beneath one can see. 
 

Craigslist missed connections is replete with what I call the bulge gaze, usually quick and furtive, or furtively repetitive, in the gym, on the subway, in the Home Depot. I noticed the bulge in your sweatpants. Dude, you were freeballing when you got up from your seat in the subway. 

And combine the freeballing with the manspread, you've practically got enough vision of the cock to start creaming in your pants or sweatpants. 

I will share my one somewhat, and I say somewhat, erotic experience with sweatpants. I hosted a Halloween party many years ago. I dressed up as Joan Crawford as played  by Faye Dunaway in the Mommie Dearest jogging scene. (I must mention that men only wore sweatpants in the gym, and people, especially women, did not jog in public, in the 1930s.) I was wearing tight gray sweatpants. I slathered some mint julep masque on my face to combine that scene with the infamous wire hangers/forced bathroom cleaning scene. The costume was not a hit. The sweatpants were. 
 

A guest at the party, I think an acquaintance of a friend, was so enamoured of me in those sweatpants, that he pulled me into the bedroom and began feeling me over. He was not attractive to me, and I repelled his advances. I immediately complained to his friend, who basically told him he had to leave. Yes, my guest was drunk. Goodness, this sounds like sexual harassment, but I didn't think of it that way at that time. 

The next week I received in the mail (these were the days before the Internet) I guess what could be called a love letter or love poem. I apparently was so hot in those sweatpants. The sweatpants showed off my perfect ass. I received another letter and once more I complained to the mutual friend. 

Now I am thinking I should be so lucky to get fondled and stalked, at my age, but I must remember the guest was not cute. If it had been one of the other guests, the tall guy with the mustache wearing a tuxedo and harness boots, that would have been another story. 

I must admit since I lost 30 pounds I could probably buy a smaller size in sweatpants and maybe dare to wear them out to the Walgreens. 

Miracles do happen. Even when you are wearing sweatpants.