A Pornographer

Foreword

DISCOVERING ARCH BROWN

Jameson Currier

This memoir was discovered in 2012 in the months after Arch Brown’s death at the age of seventy-six, when James Waller, Arch’s friend and literary executor, was cleaning out Arch’s home in Palm Springs, California, and locating documents, photos, and other materials to be archived as a record of Arch’s rich and varied literary, theatrical, and film career. In 2004, Arch had self-published a few manuscripts—10 Men, 20 Years, a cycle of ten short plays based on the gay men in his life; Love Plays: Four Comedies for the Stage, a collection of plays that included The Bottom Drawer, Living Arrangements, Pantheon, and Brut Farce; and The Land of Rodina, a comic novel about a gay man thrust back to his midwestern roots when he attends a family funeral. Arch had distributed copies of these books to his friends and the board members of the Arch and Bruce Brown Foundation, which Arch had created in 1994 to award production grants to LGBT theaters and writing competition grants to LGBT authors. I had been a fortunate recipient of a grant in 1997 for my first novel, Where the Rainbow Ends, and the following year Arch had asked me to join the foundation’s board. When I attended the foundation’s board meeting in 2004, I did not know that Arch had been diagnosed with cancer; I remember asking him why he had self-published these three books, and his sharp, curt reply was, For posterity!

At the foundation board meeting in New York City in November 2012, James Waller mentioned finding an unpublished manuscript in Arch’s belongings in California, offering only the slightest details, including the title and the topic, which were one and the same: A Pornographer. This was a memoir Arch had written about his directorial work in adult films in the mid-1960s through the early 1970s. Several things went through my mind at once: Why hadn’t Arch published this manuscript when he was self-publishing his other work in 2004? Could this be something I might consider publishing for Chelsea Station Editions as a way of posthumously thanking Arch and the foundation for giving me a career boost in 1997 when I desperately needed one? And why had I neglected to learn more about Arch’s early career as a writer and director of gay sex films?

I asked to read the manuscript. James mentioned it was in a fragile state—the typewritten pages were disintegrating—but he would arrange to have a photocopy made for archival purposes and the manuscript retyped.

I didn’t receive the typescript until 2015, but I read it with interest and immediately realized it was something entirely unexpected as well as being more than a memoir. It not only captured a changing moment in the sexual culture of the country pre- and post-Stonewall, it also revealed the underlying psychology of how that change occurred on an individual, personal level, not only for its author, but for those depicted within its pages. This was a distinct and unique historical manuscript.

Up to that point, I had never seen any of Arch’s pornographic films, so I had no reference material in mind when I read the manuscript. In many ways that worked to my advantage and was another reason why when I had finished reading the manuscript I felt compelled to publish it. In A Pornographer, Arch recounts his interviews with many of the men and women who wanted to star in his sex films—some who did, others who did not. He is all at once receptionist, gopher, casting agent, writer, director, stagehand, cameraman, talent scout, friend, and on-the-spot psychiatrist. You don’t need to have viewed any of Arch’s sex films to appreciate this memoir. In fact, Arch goes out of his way not to mention the titles of any of his films and he only identifies his cast of characters by fictional first names. The result is that A Pornographer is a historical gem, an unexpectedly insightful psychological view of the performers who were drawn to having sex in front of a camera and how and why audiences responded to them.

Arch’s porn career stretched from 1967 to 1985, but my estimation is that he began writing this memoir around early 1974, following the release of The Night Before, his breakout feature-length film success. I date the writing of the manuscript from several events: In the memoir, Arch notes that he has made thirty films and references the success of The Night Before, not by name, of course, but by writing, "A few months later a film that I had made was the twelfth largest grossing film for that week in the country according to Variety." In an article published in 1973 shortly after the release of The Night Before, the writer noted that The Night Before was Arch’s twenty-fifth film. It’s impossible to estimate Arch’s total film output because he uses the term film to denote movies of any length, including those with a running time as short as eight minutes, generally referred to as loops, or today called a short. Many of Arch’s early loops were also later released bundled together as anthology features or in other cases Arch had written and filmed a subsequent narrative frame to combine them into a longer feature for theatrical release. Arch also writes in this manuscript of being in a twelve-year relationship with Brew, a nickname for his longtime partner Bruce Brown. Arch and Bruce met during Labor Day weekend in 1965 at a Coney Island bathhouse, so a twelfth year would occur around 1977, which I estimate is the year Arch began to submit this manuscript to publishers. After the success of The Night Before, Arch also worked with several actors who became legendary personalities recognized for their performances in gay male adult films, among them Jack Wrangler, Scorpio, Casey Donovan, and Justin Thyme, and later in his adult film career, he also worked as a cinematographer on several films produced and directed by Christopher Rage. In this manuscript, there are no anecdotes or recollections of those actors or films.

The publication of A Pornographer has also cast me as an accidental historian. When I made the decision to publish the memoir, it was always my intent to include some additional material, though I knew I wanted to avoid an academic or pompous assessment or reassessment of Arch’s film or theatrical career. Arch preferred to avoid this kind of examination. In these pages he writes, I have never intended my films to be judged as masterworks of cinematic art. I prefer they be judged as good or bad sex films; if something else in them appeals to the viewer, fine, but to discuss my works totally as some sort of grand statement seems a bit silly. But there is a statement there and I guess for those that want to see it and discuss, I am pleased they do.

I did, however, want to include an appendix including Arch’s filmography and, if possible, quotes from reviews his films received at the time of their release. My goal of compiling a complete filmography proved to be a more difficult task than I expected. As an example, A Pornographer provides details of many female performers who appeared in Arch’s early short films and Arch describes filming many heterosexual couples having sex, though unlike Arch’s gay shorts and longer feature films, these productions remain missing or unidentified and haven’t garnered the attention that archivists have directed at early gay pornographic films. In September 2016, I made a trip to Ithaca, New York, where Arch’s papers are now housed in the Human Sexuality Collection at the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections at the Cornell University Library. Looking through the archive, I found reference to only one film with female performers in the cast, a movie called The Country featuring gay and heterosexual couples, which appears to have been filmed outside New York City, post-1972, and perhaps after the writing of A Pornographer. As James Waller notes in his fascinating Afterword, while sorting through Arch’s possessions to archive, he found little documentation of Arch’s porn film career except for production stills and a scrapbook of clippings and reviews. This scrapbook provided a primary source of the critical response Arch’s films received, and also served as a key to understanding the chronology of his films.

As a pornographer, Arch always worked for hire, writing, directing, and filming for a flat fee. Unlike other early sex filmmakers, he did not own or produce or distribute his films, and this has both helped and hindered the archiving of his films, because he did not possess final reels of them. Arch’s early gay male sex loops were shown in a private movie club in New York City called Cinema 7, an organization that charged members a three dollar admission fee to watch gay porn films. In January 1970, Cinema 7 was raided by the police and several customers, a ticket taker, and the club owner were arrested. Several sources note that many of Arch’s films were confiscated, though one of the projectionists saved some of Arch’s loops; these saved shorts were later released together as the feature-length Five Hard Pieces.

Many of Arch’s gay sex films can still be found and viewed on the Internet, which is where and how I discovered and viewed them. I hope readers will use this book as their own stepping stone to such an adventure. As one critic of the day noted, there is something for every sexual kink in Arch’s oeuvre. What stands out importantly to me, however, and what Arch himself notes in a summation of his early films, is his focus on romance and relationships. I tend to be an incorrigible romantic in many ways and the endings of my films seldom are negative and are usually very positive and possibly happy, he writes in A Pornographer. Relationships started in films tend not to end with the film but have a chance of succeeding on a long-term basis.

Relationships, of course, are varied and complex and each partner will have their own distinct view. James Waller’s Afterword is as memorable as Arch’s memoir, because James examines, through a prism of time and distance, his personal relationship with Arch. It is a multifaceted view of a multifaceted man, with a bittersweet ending that Arch might have orchestrated himself.

I first knew Arch as a philanthropist and a benefactor, then later as a playwright and a generous friend, and now as a filmmaker and an author. And I am grateful to be able to share my admiration of his life and career with audiences both new and old.

Jameson Currier

September 2017

Arch Brown editing a film, circa 1969

A PORNOGRAPHER

a memoir by

Arch Brown

Chapter 1

The Lights

In the spring of 1967 I was steadily and more or less happily employed by a large corporation as a junior executive. It was a career totally unrelated to the communicative arts. I had no intention of quitting the job or leaving the field I was working in. I certainly had no idea that my life was about to completely turn around and I was going to become a maker of erotic films. In fact I had never even had a motion picture camera in my hands. But then through a series of events that were completely unpremeditated and for the most part unrelated I had a new career. The changes came fast and a year and a half later, in the fall of 1968, a series of pornographic films that I had made had been shown in New York and Variety reported, Brown is acquiring quite a reputation for the highly professional techniques and the romantic-fantasy approach to his films.

In the two years prior to these changes I had gone through another time of transition. The mid-Sixties were a good period for me. I had had a series of mediocre jobs with several different companies, but a sudden change had put me into my latest job, the first real position that I had ever held with any real responsibility. I had answered a rather ambiguous newspaper ad and gone to a couple of interviews. After the second appointment I was hired on the spot. My last several jobs had all related to advertising, promotion, and merchandising. The reason the ad had been ambiguous was that it included aspects of all of these areas and more. My background was just what they were looking for and the next day I handed in my notice.

I now had my own office, a small staff that proved to be a good group of people to work with, considerable freedom, and enough creative challenges to make the job truly exciting. At first I was overawed by all of this but I soon gained an assurance and sense of capability that I had never experienced before. And I had, for the first time in my life, a decent salary.

I had been in New York for almost eight years and during that time had lived either with a roommate or in a series of cheap studio apartments. The additional income allowed me to look for a larger place and almost immediately I found and signed a lease on a large, sunny place with a little view of Central Park. Not only did I have the bedroom I had missed for so long, but I also had a guest room, dining room, study, and a double living room. It wasn’t in the greatest condition, but I started to paint walls and scrape floors and within weeks it began to shape up.

In less than two months I had acquired a new job, a new home, and, most importantly, a new attitude about myself. I felt good, better in fact than I had ever felt. I liked my new life and it gave me a new pride in myself. Obviously it showed. The way I dealt with the world had suddenly changed. I sensed people reacting to me differently. I was somehow more open, most positive than I had ever been.

Three months after the move a new love affair began and grew into a solid and wonderful relationship that continues to this day. We dated for several months and then decided that as long as I had the big apartment we’d move in together. With the money we saved we bought a little cottage in the country on a small lake.

Life was good. Not only was I enjoying myself, I was doing exactly what was expected of me. I was Mr. American Consumer. I had a good and a satisfying job. I had a car and a country place. I had settled down. Wasn’t all of this what my parents had been hoping for?

I come from determinately middle-class, midwestern, middlebrow parents. I was raised in a neighborhood of small bungalows with alleys and garages. I played with the kids on my side of the street because I wasn’t allowed to cross the street and it didn’t occur to me to do otherwise. I was a good little boy.

I was pudgy and shy. I wasn’t very good at sports and my friends were the nice kids in the neighborhood and the tougher guys laughed and made fun of us. Good grades and getting ahead were very important to my family and so I was an excellent student. We went to church most Sundays and when I was old enough, I joined the Cub Scouts. My parents wanted the best for their only child and I was expected to do my best. I was born in the middle of the Depression and like so many of my contemporaries the concepts of earning money and keeping a steady job were regularly drilled into my mind.

I enjoyed school and it was easy for me. I took part in all the activities and my folks were in the P.T.A. High school was different. I had to really work to keep my grades up; few of my old friends had gone to the same school and those that had were lost amongst the thousands of students. Because I had skipped some grades in grammar school I was younger than most. I was still pudgy, baby-faced, and hairless. Many of my fellow male freshmen were six feet tall with deep voices and hair on their legs. I got laughed at again. And called names and occasionally beaten up.

Suddenly, I grew. The fat got distributed over the several inches I gained each year and although I was still no great athlete, guys didn’t tangle with someone over six foot three. This physical change gave me a new self-confidence and I got more involved in activities and found a group of good close friends. I joined the yearbook staff and the choir. My grades got better and work became easier. In the summers I got jobs in supermarkets or warehouses.

My family was not rich, but there was money for me to go to college, a luxury neither of my parents had experienced but wanted badly for me. My father had always presumed I would enter an engineering or business school and here came the first crack in the big dream: I wanted a liberal arts education with television and theater as fields of major interest.

I had always been a very visual person. As a small child with a bag of marbles on the rug, I would arrange them in geometric patterns rather than shoot them at each other. My toy soldiers seldom had battles, but would be lined up for review or a parade instead. In high school when the choir was trying to raise money for new robes, I wrote, organized, and directed a big musical revue that raised the cash. I directed several of the school assemblies before I graduated and acted in or directed class plays. Two of my teachers that had been involved in these areas with me had both come out of a large university that was known for its programs in these areas and both talked individually to me about going there. My family was not pleased but had seen it coming and after weeks of discussion about How will you ever make a living? they finally agreed.

A large competitive university is filled with students fresh out of expensive private schools and prep schools. A city public school had not prepared me at all for the intellectual demands and again I was a floundering freshman. I barely made it through my first year and never was able to get the grades I had been used to all my life.

A large university is also filled with a lot of dead wood on the faculty and I soon learned that I was not getting much of an education from professors who stood in front of a lecture hall and droned out pages of dull statements that they had delivered dozens of times before. The supposedly excellent television department had decent classes but almost no practical-experience labs as there was only one small ill-equipped studio. The theater department had one great acting teacher and not much else to offer. Luckily the program was very low on required courses and I ended up taking classes that were reputed to be more exciting. Good teachers draw interesting students and word of mouth travels fast.

I directed some workshop productions and joined other activities, mostly related to music, writing, and theater. I worked part-time and tried to find time for homework. College was a tense, highly disciplined part of my life and although fun, not the country club goof-off time of some of my better-prepared contemporaries. I graduated with no specific major but with seven minors including philosophy, semantics, and religious history. My father had been right. I was prepared for nothing.

After graduation I moved home and immediately attempted to save money in order to leave. After four years away from home it was impossible to deal with the What time will you be home? Who are you going to be with? questions that suddenly plagued me. Another break in the Great American Dream had occurred: sex.

I cannot ever remember my family speaking of sex or using the word itself. I had never got the father-son puberty talk and the topic was skirted at all costs. The only thing I can specifically remember was being told to lead a clean life to make mother and dad proud. It took me years to understand what that meant. I was in the eighth grade and had no comprehension about sex. I didn’t even know my pee pee did anything but pee pee.

First sexual experiences are common cocktail party or locker room topics and I am one of the few people I have met that ever had a first fumbling sexual experience before they knew what it was about. Luckily I was spared those months or years of hunting and praying and waiting. What happened or how it happened are unimportant except to point out that I was no sexual wunderkind. What is important is that I was twelve and it happened with a classmate, a boy. This is not unusual for two twelve-year-olds. He knew what we were doing. I didn’t. I learned a great deal from him. Later I had similar fumblings with girls and learned very early that I preferred men.

Unlike many of my contemporaries who were discovering their homosexuality in the Fifties, I suffered little guilt and pain. I knew what made me happy and went out after it. By the time I was fifteen I knew all the cruisy streets and locations like the bus depot in town. Compared to other stories I have heard I don’t feel I was an exceptionally promiscuous youth but I suppose I was making love once or twice a month which was far more experience than many of my straight friends had. I had a lover for several years during high school and a couple of intensely romantic affairs in college. Periodically I would attempt to get involved with a woman but it was never as satisfying or exciting for me.

I always found it amusing in the dorm that guys would sit and talk for hours about how they had almost made it with some girl after the drive-in movie and look at me as if I had never gotten close to a climax when I had just finished making it with their roommate, who was also in the room. The Fifties were a great time of talkers. I didn’t talk much. Being homosexual in those days was worse than being a communist and only a few funny nellie queens in the theater department could get away with it and they were only tolerated as a joke.

But then I was suddenly faced with having to live this lifestyle under the eyes of my family. I tried to talk about it with them a couple of times but the subject was taboo and if they suspected anything they certainly didn’t want to know that their worst suspicions were true. I tried to spend the night out, something I had been doing while away at school, and the resulting uproar was deafening. I tried lying and making up girlfriends and that proved disastrous. I got a job I hated that paid well, and I saved everything I could and six months after I had graduated, I flew to New York.

I sublet a little apartment and got a job part-time in a little clothing shop. Eventually I landed a job with an off-Broadway theater. I worked on the crew, checked coats, and sold orange drink. There were not the opportunities then like there are today with all of the off-off-Broadway houses and although I knew I wanted to direct I had no idea how to get that first break. Directors were in their forties and had lots of connections. I was frustrated but stuck with it for a couple of years waiting to find the big break. I did some designing and worked on a couple of small nightclub reviews. Nothing really clicked.

But my love life was great. Being twenty-one and in New York is an unbeatable combination. I had many little affairs, a couple of longer and more stable ones, and the usual array of one-night stands common to the young gay world. Through one of my lovers I got a job outside the theater. This was the start of several positions that led to the executive job. I worked on advertising layouts, display, and merchandising in both retail and wholesale firms. I still did an occasional freelance job in the theater but the great passion was stilled and I was enjoying what I was doing. Six years from that first job I had my new position, my new apartment, my little cottage, and my wonderful lover. Except for the fact that I was a creative director instead of an engineer and that my life’s partner was a man instead of a woman, I had become what had been drilled into me as a child and there was no reason to see it coming to an end. That is, until the spring of ’67.

One aspect of my job was to find contemporary topics or ideas on which my company might hang a promotion or advertising campaign. I ordered my staff to look through any old magazines or papers that might be around the office for contemporary typefaces or photographic lettering ideas that we might use. One of them was thumbing through a copy of Playboy when an executive came into our offices and, catching him, blew his stack. I don’t know how the magazine got there. I tried to explain to the man that the guy had been working under my orders and I was to blame for anything that might have happened. The boy in question was gay and I was sure he was not getting off on the girly pictures but I couldn’t tell that to top management. They decided to fire him.

Several other people at my level and fellow workers of the young man held an impromptu meeting and decided to stand up for him. This was during the beginnings of sexual liberation and having a sexy magazine was not grounds for dismissal of a very good worker who was, after all, doing his job at the time. We all agreed that if he was fired we all would leave. It never occurred to any of us that they would let the heads of two departments and several members of our staffs walk out. We were wrong. It took management twenty-four hours to decide we could all go. We did.

I was unemployed and as with so many people working in a specific field there were not that many positions open that I would qualify for. Even in a large city, the number of jobs above a certain level in an area like mine are few and the competition is enormous. I sent out the resumes and went to all the appropriate agency people and there was nothing. Not one job in the city that anyone knew of.

I was also furious. I had seen it happen before in other jobs. Someone gets to a position of power and arbitrarily uses that power without thought or consideration for anyone. When I worked for a retail store, no wall could be painted blue because the manager didn’t like blue. There is nothing to do in these cases but beat your