Porn Watcher

I recently wrote about the first time I went to see a straight porno movie. I was thinking about it again the other day, and was remembering the first time I went to a gay porno movie.

I was dating a guy named Carl at the time. He was in the navy stationed in the town in which I lived. Carl, it turns out, kept a lot of secrets from me and from a lot of people. After we'd been dating for six months, I learned he was 18 years old, not 21 (as he'd told me) even though that's what his ID said (He had to have the fake ID, I guess, since you have to be 21 to get into a bar in Washington State. And we were often in bars together.) The other big surprise was when I discovered he was married. To a woman! That was a massive surprise, especially when the wife showed up knowing nothing about Carl or me or our cock sucking. Ah, well.

But one weekday afternoon, before the wife made her way to town, Carl and I took a trip into Seattle. I had never been to a gay porno flick, although Carl had been to many, mostly when he had been stationed in San Francisco. There was only one gay adult theatre in Seattle in the early eighties, and I'm sorry to say I've forgotten what it was called. It was on First Avenue near the waterfront. If you're Seattle literate, it was somewhere near where the art museum is located now, although the theatre was on the west side of First. Now when I pass the strip joint in that neighborhood, I often wonder if that's where the gay porn was shown.

When Carl and I arrived the theatre was between shows and in complete and total darkness. This place had not been one of the great, luxurious movie houses of the thirties. It was an old warehouse or something of that ilk, installed with stadium seating and a screen. When the projector finally purred to life the first thing Carl and I saw was a public service trailer warning the audience about unscrupulous guys trying to rob you. The short was set in the back room of a gay adult theatre where one guy walks up to another, kisses him, drops to his knees and starts sucking the standing man's cock. As he does, the sucker pulls the suckee's wallet out of his lowered jeans and pockets it. Running at about four minutes, this was the first gay porn flick I ever saw in a theatre. I had seen gay videos, of course, but this was film -- Cinema!

I've never seen another "public service" porn short since. Sure there were messeges at the end of eighties videos teaching about AIDS and condoms. But I've never heard of anything that ran in theatres, and since that time I've looked around a lot for them. I wonder if any copies of this little robbery short still exsist?

Soon it was time for the feature presentation. The film playing that day was titled Performance. I've searched for years but found little information about this movie. I have no idea who the stars were, nor do I even know when it was produced. I had this Seattle adventure somewhere around 1980 or '81, and the theatre was a "first run" house, so I'm guessing it was made around then.

The plot deals with a handsome young theatre director calling actors to appear in a play he's producing. Each of the men called just happens to be in the middle of having sex when the phone rings. One guy is even in the pool with a lover being filmed for a porn film when called to the phone.

Tragically, that afternoon I had an appointment I couldn't get out of, so Carl and I could only stay for about an hour of the film. Consequently, I have no idea how it ends. Carl was later convinced that the play the Director character was casting was Boys in the Band. I felt certain a porno movie wouldn't use the name of an actual hit Broadway play. It doesn't really matter, it was porn, I was interested in the sex, not the denouement.

If only I knew then what I know now. Although the theatre was very dark, I didn't pull my dick out to jack-off, or reach over to pull Carl's dick out to jack him off. At the time I thought it was inappropriate to do something like that with my boyfriend sitting right beside me. Carl would have loved it, and in retrospect I'm kind of surprised he didn't reach over and pull out my cock. That's the kind of thing he liked to do.

The men's room must have been somewhere behind the screen, because there was a steady stream of guys walking in and out of that area. I didn't have to take a leak during this performance of Performance, so I didn't head to the head. Now I would kill to know what was going on back there. I'm sure it was very nasty and extremely illegal. And I would have loved to have seen it. Or joined in.

That was the only time I ever went to a gay porn theatre showing 35mm film. By the time I made it to The Campus Theatre in San Francisco they were showing video porn between male strippers. And that's a very different experience.

I'd love to find a DVD of Performance and see it again. I'd like to have another look at the (as I remember it) hot sex, and to find out how the fucker ends. I also wish there were someway to discover what Carl is up to these days. I wonder if he is still with his wife. He loved it up the butt, so I wonder if she ever used a strap-on on him. I wonder if she eventually found out about his secret sex life. I wonder what would have happened if I hadn't had an appointment that afternoon, had pulled Carl's cock out of his pants, had gone back to the men's room behind the screen.

I wonder a lot of things.