Hardcore gay sex isn’t the sort of thing major film organisations traditionally spend much time promoting, but a couple of years ago the British Film Institute devoted a season to the work of Peter de Rome, a man often dubbed the ‘grandfather of gay porn’.
They also released The Erotic Films Of Peter De Rome on DVD, collecting together many of his works and giving properly scholarly attention to them. De Rome couldn’t have ever expected that the BFI would give him that sort of respect, especially when he was making his hardcore-yet-arty short films in the 60s and 70s, many of which were just personal projects he only initially thought would be shared with friends and acquaintances.
However since then they’ve come to be seen as part of the beginning of modern gay porn and important windows into a part of the pre-AIDS gay experience that few others documented.
The exposure from the BFI has now led to the feature-length documentary Peter De Rome: Grandfather of Gay Porn, where the filmmaker (who sadly died recently) and others look back at his life and work, and how his hardcore sex films became respected as works of art.
The movie is currently screening at film festivals, but you can take a look at a NSFW clip from the documentary below. This particular clips focuses on the short film, Underground, where de Rome filmed two men having sex on a subway carriage.
And if you are interested in the point where porn and art intersect, I’d highly recommend getting hold of a copy of The Erotic Films Of Peter De Rome.
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