This is my last Porndoggy column. It has been a fun year, but it’s time to pass it off to somebody new. As a farewell gift, I offer 10 porn-related things you need to know about.
1. Guilt-free bareback porn from the ’80s. Jean-Daniel Cadinot (who died in 2008) was a visionary gay porn director. He favoured plot and dialogue and gorgeous countryside shoots with stunning college-aged boys. Often campy and extremely perverted — see the classic Carnival of Venice — his work was referenced (consciously or not) in Shortbus and Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut.
2. Just because Mandy Goodhandy is my business partner and friend doesn’t mean I can’t look objectively at her history and recognize her contribution to porn and adult entertainment. She started as a male stripper, became a drag queen, transitioned to transsexual woman, became a spanking-video star, then shot and produced more than 150 mostly gay amateur videos.
3. Jeff Stryker deserves recognition for being one of the first mega-superstar gay porn icons; he remained alive and relevant for decades. The dildo that was moulded from his cock is still a top-selling sex toy.
4. Bruce LaBruce’s No Skin off My Ass provided me with some of my first gay erotic images at age 17, when I ordered it by mail order. He continues to direct films that blur the line between porn and traditional cinema.
5. William Higgins is the founder of Catalina Video and directed many of its classics — The Young and the Hung is a must for any gay porn scholar. Higgins left Catalina in the mid-’90s and resurfaced in Prague with williamhiggins.com. Looking like Santa, he can be seen in the background of many of his videos surrounded by a bevy of gorgeous Eastern European boys, living an extremely enviable life.
6. Even if you find drag queen Chi Chi LaRue annoying when you see her in documentaries or behind the scenes, screaming at the top of her lungs, she has directed hundreds of top-notch gay porn movies and has been adamant throughout about not shooting bareback films.
7. Seancody.com has retained the image of “creator of highest-quality amateur gay porn with unbelievably good-looking straight guys” since 2001.
8. Collectively, all the tube sites have changed the porn world forever. In the beginning, porn could be produced only by the rich. Then cheap video cameras and the internet allowed amateurs to flourish. Now, the tube sites have made it so that only the rich can afford to continue producing. For better or worse, nobody under 30 will ever spend a penny on porn again.
9. Alexander Pictures is my personal favourite porn company — hot Brazilian guys in hardcore action.
10. All-powerful aebn.net is a mega pay-per-view site where you can browse and watch hundreds of thousands of titles from thousands of producers for nine cents a minute. It’s also the future owner of the porn universe, I predict. It’s already swallowed Falcon and Raging Stallion, and I think it’s going to own everything one day. In any case, if you are going to pay for porn, the 1,000-minute package, at $91.80, is an amazing deal that keeps me happy for months.
Todd Klinck is a proprietor of Goodhandy’s. Porndoggy appears in every issue of Xtra.
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