BijouBlog

By Josh Eliot

**WARNING: Contents May Upset Your Stomach **

It was my love of movies and movie-making that brought me out to San Francisco at age 17 to try to make a go of it. For some reason, my brain retains movie trivia like nobody's business. Things I shouldn’t remember, but just do. Having said that, there are a few things I would like to forget about my time working for Catalina Video from 1987-2009. Not anything related to my co-workers, our ethics, or decisions we made, but things that grossed me out. I often felt like an impostor when I was working in the industry, because my focus was easily shifted if something I was watching made me a little squeamish. For example: when one of our directors was shooting a hot sweaty scene, I would focus on the sweat. Sweat in general grosses me out. I don’t want to see it, I don’t want it dripped on me during a moment of passion, all I want to do is wipe it away. I don’t know if I’m alone in this thought process, but it is one of the many turn-offs I witnessed on the set over the years. The sex we were shooting could be super-hot, but as soon as I saw something that triggered my squeamish side, it was my focal point, it would throw me off my game.

When I started with Catalina Video in 1987, they hadn’t yet embraced the condom. However, director John Travis and producer Scott Masters where trying their best to be responsible by using a spermicidal ointment when we shot fucking. Conceptrol with Nonoxynol-9 came in a tube, much like a tampon, and was a vaginal contraceptive to prevent pregnancy. In our studio, the shower had a douche attachment for the models to use prior to shooting the anal portion of the scenes. Once clean as a whistle, the model would come onto the set and the director or make-up man would insert the tube of Non Oxy 9 into their butt and push the gel up into them. This was short lived, and condoms came a few movies later. While using the Non-Oxy 9, it wouldn’t just magically stay inside - at any given moment it would fly out, most often when I was shooting the underneath shot. It would fly out and land on my camera lens, my arm, my ankle (if I was sitting instead of kneeling) or the top of my head. I made damned sure to keep my head down and mouth shut. An underneath cum shot with a load splattering, not a problem, but this stuff? UGHHHH.

In one of Scott Master’s movies, The Young Cadets, Mike Ryan‘s co-star could not keep a boner to save his life. Scott Masters made some calls and got Chris Burns to come in to do the fucking. Chris Burns (Below the Belt, Dangerous, Men of the Midway) had worked for Catalina Video in These Bases Are Loaded, Skin Deep and NightCrawler, but didn’t have the current “pretty faced jock” look that Catalina was now casting. He did, however, agree to come in as a “stunt dick.” It was very lucky for me that Dan Allman was doing the camera work for the insertion shots, because it went on forever and poor Mike Ryan was screaming his lungs out because Chris’s fat dick was ripping him a new one. Mike was a gay for pay model and really didn’t have a lot of anal experience, and probably could have used a lesson on how to properly douche. Chris was merciless, but the worst thing was that the damned Non Oxy 9 kept flying out and landing on the fill light. 400 watts of burning Non Oxy 9/butt juice that was literally smoking and filling up the studio, and it did not smell like Fabreze! Poor Dan got a cloud of smoke right in his face.

If you are still with me, it’s time to move onto another repulsive (in my book) liquid: spit. For some unknown reason, Chi Chi LaRue came up with this idea that spitting was hot. Now, I was fine over the years with a little appropriate spitting, like in someone’s ass crack, perfectly fine. But for a good year, all of Chi Chi’s movies - straight, gay and bi - had this non-stop spitting all over the place. Chi was also directing projects for Catalina during that period and I happened to be filling in on camera when the spitting started. Luckily, I was able to use my producer card and stopped that shit tout suite. Sorry “girl,” we don’t do that in Catalina productions, think of something else. Chi Chi obliged without an argument because he knew how much that churned my stomach. He did, however, like to keep the sweat on the boys instead of calling for make-up to wipe them down (like I always did), but I just grinned and bore it.

We always save the best for last, don’t we? I was shooting the movie Furry Men Do and there was a Latino actor named Gabriel Rocas that we used from time to time who had the biggest balls I’d ever seen. Like many models, he had his own specific routine to get himself hard prior to running onto the set and shooting a few moments of video with his erect penis. I learned about it on his first pair of movies for us, BEAR Skin & Latin Men Do, in 1999.

He would disappear into the adjoining room and soak his giant nuts in a bowl (that he brought with him) of warm water while he stroked his dick to get hard. Ok, no big deal, sounds pleasant enough. It worked, the scenes were completed and we all went home happy. Then on the set of Furry Men Do in 2000, Gabriel returned, bowl in hand, to shoot another scene. This time, one of my crew members was assisting him in the adjoining room. Always up for a good chuckle, Brad Austin and I snuck a peek into the room to see the crew member carefully blowing Gabriel, being extra cautious not to spill the water out of the bowl that his nuts were soaking in. I wish I had a photo. We finished the scene quickly, the models went to shower and we started to pack up. The crew member came walking into the room with the bowl of water and we turned our heads to look at him, when we heard him say, “Ahhh… Ball broth!” Without missing a beat, he put the bowl of water, pubic hairs and all, up to his mouth and drank the entire thing. Brad and I nearly lost our lunch. That was the very last time I ever booked Gabriel; nothing against him, but I just couldn’t ever witness another serving of Ball Broth!

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. 

Scotty Bowers, a legend in Hollywood’s sexual underground in the 1950s and 1960s, died at home in Los Angeles on October 13 at the age of 96.

When I found out about his book, Full Service, I must admit I was excited to read it, mostly because I always enjoyed titillating, “Hollywood Babylon” scandals. And here was someone who actually made satisfying the sexuality of Hollywood royalty of that period (and others) his business, literally.

He started his “infamous” gas station procurement network in the late 1940s, mostly hiring out young studs for closeted gay actors and others in the Hollywood business (and there were many).

According to his book, his career as a sex worker began in 1946 while he was working as an attendant at The Richfield Oil gas station located at 5777 Hollywood Boulevard, at the corner of Van Ness Avenue. In 1950, Bowers stopped working at the service station, and he then began working as a party bartender (one his party “tricks” involved using his schlong to stir drinks), while continuing his sexual services to both men and women. And he himself, because he was gifted with such a stunning endowment, according to Bowers, was quite popular.
 

I must admit I was surprised that the famous Hollywood actor Walter Pidgeon, whom I call Mr. Miniver (he was Mrs. Miniver’s [played by Greer Garson] husband in one of the most wholesome, inspiring, patriotic 1940s movies, Mrs. Miniver), was one of his first clients. It’s still sometimes difficult to separate the screen persona from the real person (and in Pidgeon’s case, he was married to a woman, of course), but that was Hollywood: ultimately, illusion.

What I found to be, according to Scotty (and I don’t dispute at all his reliability in this case, as many others do), the close to ultimate Hollywood illusion: the Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn romance. I remember when growing up, it was pretty much a given that these two were the romantic Hollywood power couple of the period (at least before Burton and Taylor came along). Yet, according to Bowers, both were gay (or in Tracy’s case, probably bisexual), and Scotty apparently was one of his sexual partners. Hepburn, who some have argued was really more fluid in her relationship to gender and sexuality, used Bowers as a means to “hook up” with several women.
 

But what I think when reading the book and also viewing the documentary (I made a special trip to see it), Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood, is that one can get distracted by all the Old Hollywood “scandal” and peccadilloes.

Scotty himself suffered many tragedies in his life that are perhaps closely related to, or perhaps not, his life a sex worker. He lived with a common-law wife whom he met right after his service in WWII, but they grew apart, and the daughter by this marriage, Donna, died young from complications after an abortion.

He did finally manage to find happiness with his last wife, but looking at the documentary, it’s clear Scotty suffered, especially later in life, from a hoarding disorder. I remember, and this behavior is that of a typical hoarder, a scene where he is going through memorabilia in a rented storage space stuffed to the maximum. Yes, there’s history made visible in the things he cherishes, but it seems buried, hidden, physically and mentally in clutter, multiplicity out of control.

Hidden and buried, yet now, no longer a secret. Scotty helped others keep secrets, but he never made his sex life a secret. He gloried in it. And I also think it wasn’t just a case of someone who knew he could use his sexuality as a commodity. Of course, he did, if one interprets his legacy very literally. Old Hollywood needed and wanted him to keep its illusion of heteronormative glamour intact.

But in doing so, he ended up exposing that illusion, not out of spite, but because in a world that was built on dreams and illusions, he actually fulfilled in the most primal, honest way the personal dreams of the stars who embodied on screen the dreams of people who probably got their gas pumped (and much more) at the Richfield Oil Gas Station.

On October 31, 1983, Falcon Studios model Dick Fisk was killed in a car accident with his lover, Joe Howard and the driver of another vehicle in Marietta, Georgia, a suburb of Atlanta. He was only 28 years old.

Dick's real name was Frank Ricky Fitts, and at the time of his death, he was employed in Atlanta gay clubs.

Dick was very much one of the famous faces of gay erotica during this period when the unabashed gay macho culture of the 1970s was still in full swing. Yet ominously, the mysterious “gay cancer,” (still not called AIDS) was beginning to claim victims in the urban gay ghettos of the period.

From the research I did, his porn career was not prolific, but he appeared in two of the main gay rags of the period, Mandate and Torso. His most famous image has become almost iconic: he appears as one of a trinity of porn gods of the time: Al Parker and Casey Donovan in Falcon's classic movie, The Other Side of Aspen.
 

In the Bijou Classics repertoire, he makes an appearance in the star-studded Cruisin' the Castro, but admittedly, he does not appear in one of the more distinctive points of the movie (Richard Locke reigns supreme here).

He really ascended to the pantheon of gay gods in the famous eight-page spread in the February 1978 issue of Mandate magazine, called “A Man to Size Up.”
 

Yes, he's got that overall macho look, and it's not just the mustache. It's the combination of a supremely confident (one might say arrogant) facial expression on a face that is both mature and youthful, the perfectly muscled chest, arms, and abs (muscled, but not overly bulked up), and the towering thick cock that rises like an obelisk between amazing legs that I could easily dub the Pillars of Hercules. And just enough hair, sexy growths in the most lickable places (I am thinking of the armpits).
 

I think he will always be an iconic image of a masculine ideal that so many gay men aspired to during that turbulent period in LGBTQ history. He died before the horrible plague, and perhaps the attraction, at least for me, is that he remains untouched by it. Of the trinity of porn gods I mentioned above, he did not suffer in body and spirit.

He is pure image, an Adonis killed tragically and suddenly as in the mortal beauty loved by the goddess Venus in Greek mythology (he was gored by a boar). But he does not (and nor does his lover) come back to life.

Connoisseurs of retro gay porn are perhaps familiar with Dave Connors because of his starring role in One in a Billion, enjoying his big balls and big dick. (In fact, I can't think of another stud's privates who one could so aptly call “meat.”) In the movie, big businessman Dave can magically hear what others are thinking, which add some flavor to a day of kinky adventures. All seem to want to taste what is really magic, his meat.
 

Art can reflect reality, and in an interview for Stallion magazine, Dave jokingly admits there are disadvantages to being “super hung:”

Connors: People have used any ploy and every ploy to get me into bed.
Stallion: How did they find out about what you were packing?
Connors (laughing): People talk! It's not something I can keep secret.
 

According to the interview, Dave was born in Florida, and he was inhibited as a child. He came out at the ripe old age of twenty-one:

“I finally came out at twenty-one in the Marine Corps. I had a lot of friends – and I could never understand why now, I know, at least I know what I missed – although I did have some very nice encounters in the service.”

But the path to pornhood was not smooth for Dave, as he claims he lost that Marine-induced “self-discipline” to drugs, and then gained it back in prison. Yes, prison.

By the age of 39, Dave had already made several porn movies, but he claims his experience in One in a Billion was enlightening, as it was his first experience with sync sound. And Dave did not have to lie on the casting couch to obtain his meaty part in that movie; he asked Al Parker, Parker had an idea, and voila!

Now, for a country boy from the sticks of Florida who looks like naturally strong, like he could wrestle a couple of alligators, he certainly fills out a business suit well. His career climaxed in the yuppie eighties, and in some ways he embodies that look: clean-cut, chiseled jaw, a “dirty blond” with just a hint of bad frat boy now grown up to dominate board rooms.
 

Some of the more famous films he made include The Biggest One I Ever Saw by Giant Films and Dirt Bikes for Falcon.

Tragically, at the time he was shooting what was to be his last film, Wakefield Poole's One, Two, Three, Dave succumbed to AIDS.

I, Madam Bubby, the author of practically all these blogs,  like to think not only our movies not just as “classics,” but some of our reviews.

One twitter follower recently complimented us on our movie descriptions, and in this more visually-oriented age, our reviews show the power of the word to give some in-depth insight into really groundbreaking porn movies.

Many of our films date from the heady, trippy days of 1970s gay liberation, and the gay pornography of that period probed for the first time gay men's sexual identity and expression. 

Sometimes it's even more exciting (and educational) to read the reviews of these movies in particular (of course we want you to buy and watch them too!).

Remember the late great Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert? I might consider these reviews close to their level; just click on the hyper links and enjoy. 
 

Check out the reviews of Born to Raise Hell, the uber-gay-leather-BDSM movie, from 1974 with the legendary Val Martin. Note we've got two approaches to this movie (which still both disturbs and excites viewers with its brutal edginess), almost like Siskel and Ebert sparring. 

 

The review of Jack alludes to the famous Continental Baths, where Bette Midler got her start, because guess what? That's where the movie takes place! 

 

The review of Adam and Yves is stunning in its detail and intensity (like the movie), and the author also ties  it deftly into the French New Wave movement. And there's a surprise guest appearance by a legendary actress of the silver screen. 

 

Attack of the Amazing Colossal Latino is in some ways so bad it is good, and reading the review itself a real camp fest like the movie itself, which clumsily attempts to do some genre crossing. Science fiction meets gay porn! 

 

All these movies stream at www.bijougayporn.com!

Watch now!