BijouBlog

By Josh Eliot

My spouse Tony Fontana and I are super-organized. We keep the place spotless. All things of importance have their own binders. The filing cabinet folders get edited yearly, and our desk calendar is always up to date. One thing we did during the initial Covid-19 lockdown was go through our photos and separate them into categories inside manila envelopes. A bit much? All that aside, the other day I was going through the envelopes to pull pictures for a recent blog about my past partner, Mark Rutter. Tony worked with Mark Rutter at the Gold Coast Bar and they shared a history as well, so I was looking to see if there were any shots in his envelopes with Mark. I didn’t find Mark, but I came across this one shot that kind of blew my mind. I pulled it out and went up to Tony and said: “Is that AL PARKER in your photo?”

It was, in fact, Al Parker in the photo. Al and his group of friends were photographed at a Renaissance Fair in the 1980s. My partner Tony is standing in the photo facing the group of friends, which included the woman wearing the blue outfit. Probably a Fred Segal outfit, as she loved to shop there. Her name was Nancy Cole Sawaya, and she was the “glue” that united this large group of friends.

Nancy lived in a mansion off of LA’s infamous Mulholland Drive. A typical weekend for the group would be to start Saturday night off at Greg's Blue Dot, a Hollywood gay hot spot, whose clientele was the crème de la crème of the best looking studs. Around 1 a.m., the group would walk a few doors down to the members only disco Probe and stayed there until well past dawn. The Probe would feature “A-list” divas like Viola Wells , Angela Clemmons (“Give Me Just a Little More Time”), Fun Fun, Linda Clifford, Madleen Kane and many more. When Nancy and the boys showed up there, the staff would see to their quick entrance. After dancing the night away they would all end up at Nancy’s place poolside, where the party would go on throughout the day; even the DJs from Probe and Blue Dot would follow and spin records.

In October of 1982, Nancy and her friends Matt Redman, Ervin Munro and Max Drew attended an emergency meeting featuring a presentation from the San Francisco Kaposi’s Sarcoma Foundation about Gay Related Immunodeficiency Disease. Stunned by what they learned, these four friends set up a telephone hotline to answer questions from the community, because fear about the new disease was rampant. Over the holidays, Nancy and her small group of friends threw a Christmas party at her place called “A Christmas Present,” where guests were asked to donate money in the spirit of the season. Shortly after, Nancy took Tony to a small office in Hollywood on Cole Avenue she was thinking of renting to get his opinion. With the funds earned from the Christmas party, around $8000, she leased the office with her team of friends and offered counseling services to about twenty people known to have Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, making it a first in Los Angeles County to do so. This small office, through it’s hard work and dedication to the gay community, became APLA, AIDS Project Los Angeles. APLA’s early fundraisers were held in gay bars and discos and they went on to raise millions of dollars over the next few years with the help of such celebrities as Joan Rivers and Elizabeth Taylor. Nancy served on the Board of Directors for nearly two years while continuously offering one-on-one counseling to the members.

Co-founders Nancy Sawaya and Max Drew tested positive for the disease and by August of 1986. Nancy had been hospitalized six times. Nancy and her husband Lou adopted a baby girl named Morgan who was two years old when her mother passed away in October 1986 at age 40. This was the same year Al Parker lost his partner of eleven years, Richard Cole aka Steve Taylor, with whom he started Surge Studios. Surge Studios was one of the first studios to mandate safe sex practices. Al Parker passed away on August 17th 1992, also at the age of 40, and his ashes were scattered near the nude section of San Gregorio State Beach. Seeing both Al and Nancy in this random photo and hearing these stories about them was really quite extraordinary. They both became icons of gay history, giving so much of themselves to the gay community. Such a tragedy to lose them both so early in life.

As I started to put away the photos, I saw a manila envelope labeled “Tony and Friends,” so I thought I would look in that one to see if there were any more shots of Al or Nancy. I carefully scanned each and every photo, checking to see if I could recognize any faces when suddenly... I saw another one! Tony was facing the camera making a silly face, but it was the person who was to the right of the shot that again blew my mind. I took the photograph, marched down the hallway to the office, went up to Tony again and said : “Is that ESTELLE GETTY from GOLDEN GIRLS in your photo?”

Thank you to Josh Eliot for use of his photos.

Bio of Josh Eliot:

At the age of 25 in 1987, Josh Eliot was hired by Catalina Video by John Travis (Brentwood Video) and Scott Masters (Nova Video). Travis trained Eliot on his style of videography and mentored him on the art of directing. Josh directed his first movie, Runaways, in 1987. By 2009 when Josh parted ways with Catalina Video, he'd produced and directed hundreds of features and won numerous awards for Best Screenplay, Videography, Editing, and Directing. He was entered into the GayVN Hall of fame in 2002. 

 

Richard Locke - the sexy, confident, bearded daddy, with a hip tattoo of a butterfly and a physique naturally toned from working outdoors (or, as he claimed, from jerking off in front a a mirror for thirty minutes a day) - was one of the first to establish mature men as potent sex symbols in gay porn. He became an icon from his outstanding starring role as Hank, a relatable everyman hero, in the late '70s Working Man Trilogy from the Gage Brothers (Kansas City Trucking Co., El Paso Wrecking Corp., and L.A. Tool & Die). This trilogy brought a new sexual focus to average working class men who have sex with men, and their sexual lives in smaller cities and rural areas across the United Sates, which had a massive impact on gay porn.
 

Born June 11, 1941 in East Oakland, California, Locke served in the Army in his early adult life, where he worked as a tank mechanic. He returned to California and eventually began starring in porn in his mid-30s, quickly ascending to star status. Locke worked on films with some of the finest auteur directors of classic gay porn (Joe Gage, Arthur Bressan Jr., Steve Scott, Wakefield Poole) and biggest stars (Jack Wrangler, Will Seagers, Fred Halsted, Clay Russell, Roy Garrett, Casey Donovan). He even had a sex scene with his real-life lover, Alex, on the roof of their Desert Hot Springs home in Wakefield Poole's Take One (1977). Locke used his real name in porn, telling Jerry Douglas in an interview for the December 1992 issue of Manshots, “I'm very proud of my work and everything I do. An artist signs his name to the canvas, and I sign my name.”

Locke's films (narrative features, experimental/art porn, straight-forward sex films/loops) and characters span a wide variety. His character Hank focuses on raunchy casual encounters throughout the majority of the Working Man Trilogy, but shows his soft side by following his dream man (played by Will Seagers) across the country in L.A. Tool & Die, and Arthur Bressan Jr.'s Forbidden Letters also focuses on a romantic storyline. (Locke also appeared in a smaller role in Bressan Jr.'s Passing Strangers.)

In contrast to his romantic roles and the easy likability of the trilogy's Hank, in Joe Gage's 1982 release, Heatstroke, Locke plays a mean sonofabitch, the gruff ranch foreman (though with a knowing sense of humor). In addition to his countless filmic sexual encounters, Locke gets into two memorable brawls on screen, both in Heatstroke and L.A. Tool & Die, tossing a homophobe out of a gay bar in the latter.
 

 

In this fascinating 1978 interview with Richard Locke, conducted by his brother Robert, Richard stated his goal in making pornography: “When I was coming out, I didn't feel good about myself. Now I do feel good and I want to share that. If I can project that solid, good feeling within myself into the audience, to people who don't feel good about themselves, if they can say, 'That's what I like; that's what I want to be like, open and free,' then I will have accomplished one of the goals in my life – to bring freedom to other people, the freedom of being themselves.”

Later in his career, Locke toured the country performing live strip/jack off shows for enthusiastic crowds (including at the Bijou Theater), published two books (Locke Out and In the Heat of Passion), authored a play (Loving), mountain climbed, and lived in a sparsely-populated part of the desert outside Palm Springs, where he did body work as a licensed masseur in the city and, out in the desert, worked with his interests in rural and self-sustaining/do-it-yourself living by building a geodesic domed home with a working solar and wind power system.
 

After his 1983 HIV positive diagnosis, Locke turned his focus to activism. In the '80s and '90s, he used his platform as a popular porn star to tirelessly spread information about safer sex practices and health services during the AIDS crisis, in radio and magazine interviews, at seminars, and even at his strip show appearances (which featured creative and practical safer sex activity demonstrations).

During this period of time, he additionally worked with support groups, raised money, protested, publicly advocated for condom usage for individuals as well as porn studios (saying he was blackballed in the business as a result), visited patients in hospital wards, and much more that is likely not chronicled. This beautiful article - “Two Kinds of Hero: Richard (Butterfly) Locke” - provides some insight into that chapter of his life.

Locke was inducted into the Hall of Fame at the 1994 Gay Erotic Video Awards. He died of AIDS-related complications in 1996.

Richard Locke was known for being a charming combination of strong, caring, bright, unpretentious, and entirely genuine; a down-to-earth guy and a confident, unapologetic gay man – qualities reflected in many of his movie roles. Bijou owner Steven Toushin described him as a very kind man and director Joe Gage (in this interview discussing his films, including commentary on Locke) called him “the last of the true live-and-let-live hippies.”
 

Through Bijou Video, you can find Richard Locke in our fresh new release, Heatstroke (DVD | Streaming) as well as in a number of other classics we carry, including the collection The Best of Richard Locke (DVD | Streaming).

Online Sources and Further Information:
My Brother the Porn Star: An Interview with Richard Locke
Keep on Truckin': An Interview with Joe Gage
Two Kinds of Hero: Richard (Butterfly) Locke
Ask Any Buddy podcast: Kansas City Trucking Co.
Wikipedia – Richard Holt Locke
Gay Erotic Video Index – Richard Locke