The story behind the forgotten first gay porn film

It starts like so many porn movies: a beautiful, lithe white woman appears onscreen in an elegant dress, and is clearly horny. She fixes her hair, rubs her breasts and lifts up her long skirt, revealing a full bush. She shares a tipple with a hot, suited-up white guy who begins to hungrily caress her. But as his hand slowly pulls up her gown, she playfully stops him. Instead, she unzips his pants and goes down on him, the fellatio a precursor to a frenzied bout of anal sex that results, seemingly, in two ecstatic orgasms.

But this isn’t just any porn movie. The Surprise of a Knight—believed to have been made in 1929—belongs to the rarefied genre of stag films: clandestine erotica made between the late 19th century and the end of the 1960s, when landmark laws ushered in the golden age of porn. Stylistically, it’s not hard to spot a stag. They’re usually short, silent movies shot in black and white, their actors cloaked in the anonymity of tongue-in-cheek pseudonyms like Ima Cunt or Miss Park Avenue. They’re a relic of a bygone era, when catching a glimpse of onscreen nudity was only possible at your local frat house or brothel, if you were lucky.

The Surprise of a Knight is remarkable for another reason too: in the film’s final moments, the gorgeous woman lifts her skirt, revealing her flaccid, cut penis. It’s initially tucked between her legs, but there’s a brief flash of text—“Surprise!”—which plays before she untucks, strips naked and bounces her junk around gleefully. Her dapper fuck buddy smiles at the camera. He does not look “tricked” or “trapped.” His expression is open to interpretation, but it isn’t one of evident disgust, more a hazy, post-coital glow and a slightly goofy grin. The Surprise of a Knight is often referred to as the earliest hardcore gay porn film, a claim muddied by our growing understanding of transness and the fact that genitals don’t define gender. But it’s undeniably one of the few explicitly queer moments in a highly censored era of porn, an era whose treasures are still being excavated.

Film historian Dr. Thomas Waugh, a renowned lecturer who’s written extensively about gay erotica over the past four decades, first experienced The Surprise of a Knight during an early 1980s summer of research at the Kinsey Institute in Indiana, which is home to a huge stag collection. He had wanted to write about queer sex in his doctoral thesis, but instead opted for the less controversial political cinema. By 1981, he had completed his PhD and earned the security of a tenured job. “I thought, ‘Right, let’s veer into sex,’” he tells Xtra.

Waugh regularly documented his adventures in stag history for one of Canada’s earliest gay magazines, The Body Politic (which was published by Xtra’s parent company, Pink Triangle Press). It became a lifelong fascination, spawning a decades-long career as one of the world’s most prolific gay porn scholars. He was so enamored by The Surprise of a Knight that he sought permission to record his private Kinsey Institute screening with his VHS camera. “I was so excited that I couldn’t maintain my non-existent technical skills, so my recording is slightly off-screen,” he laughs. He now has a higher-quality screening link, which he graciously shared with me in my preparation for this article; even now, this slice of cinematic transgression is hard to track down.

Waugh recalls, on his first watch, being “delighted by the unexpectedness of this glimpse into [the lead character’s] world,” and he’s drawn conclusions about this onscreen heroine after careful study. “She was a trans sex worker, obviously,” he says, “very beautiful and very much in possession of herself. The film is very frank about her fucking, as well as her costume performance and the revelation. I think there were a few rare glimpses of trans characters [in stag films], but this was unique.”

Dr. Mireille Miller-Young, an acclaimed author and porn studies academic, spent years tracking down erotica collectors while researching A Taste for Brown Sugar: Black Women in Pornography, her groundbreaking study of Black women in porn history. Stag films, in particular, were hard to come by. Some were delivered to police during raids, and many were donated to the Kinsey Institute, but others were destroyed, she tells Xtra. “You’d have materials found by relatives who would find them after someone’s death, think ‘Wow, Grandpa’s got a strange collection,’ and throw them out on the street,” she explains. “There’s a disposability to this history that makes it so liminal.”

In A Taste for Brown Sugar, Miller-Young wrote of becoming fascinated by one unnamed Black actress, who appeared in two films: The Golden Shower and The Hypnotist. In both, the actress has sex with women and men. To see women fuck in stag films wasn’t uncommon, Miller-Young notes, but the level of awkwardness in the scenes varies. “It’s hard to know if they’re awkward about the sex, whether they’re not being paid enough or whether they’re afraid of being arrested,” she says, “but some of the women seem totally comfortable. You watch them like, ‘You’ve done that before, girl, y’all know how to eat pussy!’”

These weren’t just American films; there were stag epicentres across Europe, especially in France and Germany, as well as in Latin America. The Surprise of a Knight is believed to have been made in the U.S., where screenings created unique environments for groups of horny, rowdy, likely almost exclusively straight, men. Waugh has written about this “homosociality” in his essay for the 2004 Porn Studies anthology, in which he recalls a raucous college viewing of a stag film in the college chapel. “It wasn’t like men were going to movie theatres to watch these,” clarifies Miller-Young. “There were traveling-salesman types who had the projector. You’d pay them to come to your frat house, your private party, your brothel. They bring the movie, you bring the music and booze, these films are playing in the background.” Stags were used as warm-up material in brothels too.

The Surprise of a Knight stands out from its contemporaries. It proves that gender, sexuality and desire have always been fluid, that transness in porn is nothing new. But it’s also, comparatively, forgotten. Emerald Vaught, a doctoral candidate at Indiana University who teaches a class on trans representation in media, is one scholar trying to change this.

Vaught’s research traces the lineage of what is commonly referred to online as “shemale” porn, which she tells Xtra she “couldn’t do without thinking about some early cross-dressing porn.” In her article “Saturated Feminities: Trans Women in Porn Beyond the Shemale,” published in a 2024 issue of Porn Studies, Vaught wrote that “the portrayal of gender-bending in The Surprise of a Knight operates primarily for the purpose of comedy,” situating it in the context of private viewings, the “ribbing and laughter between patrons accusing each other of getting got—or maybe, getting trapped.”

Vaught is interested in the complexity of transfeminine representation in porn, the tension between fantasy and fetishization, the changing ways we understand and identify with transness. “I think we’ve learned that transness isn’t just ‘You’re a boy, now you’re a girl,’ or vice versa, or neither,” she tells Xtra. “There’s this huge swath of identities and expressions that can fall into this category of ‘trans.’ In a way, it’s new knowledge, but it’s also not—[trans author and activist] Leslie Feinberg was saying this 30 years ago. But I think every generation has to relearn these lessons, and that’s why The Surprise of a Knight stood out to me, because this has been going on for a while.”

Fleshing out histories of queerness in porn isn’t about labels or identities—“I’m firmly on the side of anachronism, I’ll call Joan of Arc transgender any day,” jokes Vaught—but rather about the buried glimpses of sex lives that might mirror our own, the sexy, onscreen proof that desire throughout history hasn’t always been straight and vanilla. The Surprise of a Knight lives up to its name in more ways than one, a retro glimmer of subversion within the under-discussed oeuvre of the fabled stag.