The era of gay porn you're describing probably was the golden age, but frankly, that's not saying much. First, people still paid for porn then, and pornographers could make a decent living. It wasn't the early days of Falcon when Chuck Holmes sold VHS tapes out of the trunk of his car, to the tune of $60 to as much as $100 a pop (in late 70s-era cash) when men would line up because there was nothing available in adult shops (making Chuck a wealthy man), but the resulting explosion in content producers made gay porn widely available in neighborhood video stores by the late 80s and early 90s.
AIDs, however, struck and the gay porn industry went off the rails. There was a need for sex education for gay men because we were ignored in any and all such materials and especially classrooms where anatomy was taught, and early activists worked with community resources and got bars to put bowls of condoms near entrances and posters on bathroom walls among general outreach programs. There was so much confusion and misinformation in the early days, and when it became clear how HIV is transmitted and the behaviors associated with seroconversion, I can see why porn was targeted, but the method and message alienated consumers. Nobody thought about the conflicting message porn was sending. To put it bluntly, you can't have your cake and eat it too.
And then Chi Chi LaRue got wrapped up (no pun intended) in activism and became the chief spokesman in the gay porn world for HIV/AIDs prevention. Larry was perhaps the most prolific director of gay porn throughout the 80s and 90s, and became an important figure in the industry. He used his influence to coerce the entire industry into using condoms, but ignored basic questions like how to use a condom, why proper application was important, and consistent use being paramount. The birth of the so-called "magic condom" in porn left viewers with a dearth of information and alienated because the tacit message was that gay men should use condoms but they are so unpleasant and uncomfortable that we can't show these guys putting one on, let alone doing it in a way that doesn't break the mood. And let's face it, the last thing a guy who's about to jerk off wants to think about is death.
Nevertheless, Chi Chi forced everyone until the last holdout, Holmes at Falcon, finally gave in an started using condoms in all productions. I don't know the specific date or production, but it was in the early 90s (as Chuck was dying from AIDs himself). It is ironic that the industry weathered all of the bullshit thrown at it by the Meese Commission, Rudy Giuliani whitewashing the adult sections of Manhattan, "Concerned Mothers of America", and every other organization that tried to shut down porn production, but folded like a house of cards when Larry threw his fat ass around.
Adding even more irony, what Larry did was create the bareback fetish and made condomless fucking the hottest niche going. While he wasn't the first pornographer in the genre, Bill Gardner from Hot Desert Knights is credited with the first bareback titles, which percolated underground for quite a while (translation: sold thousands of copies outside the normal channels of distribution, which initially prohibited bareback titles) before distributors and retailers finally couldn't ignore the trend any longer and started selling bareback titles alongside what had become the boring, repetitive, cloned titles from Catalina, Channel 1, Falcon, Hot House and Titan. When the first titles from HDK started moving through the channel such that no one could ignore them any longer, Chi Chi was approached and released one of the most pitiful remarks imaginable: bareback movies made him cry.
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