The DL porn survey

This thread needs a pole!!!

I’m over 40. Until the internet, I never really sought out porn. I happened upon my older brother’s Hustler magazine a few times and tried to view movies through scrambled cable channels on occasion. All straight, of course. I wouldn’t have even known where to get gay porn.

I would stroll the adult section of Tower Video and look at the back of the tape boxes.

Aside from a few various male relatives and/or neighborhood dads having str8 VHS and/or Hustler mags, my intro to porn in the late 80s was all print magazines.

I was a poor college student so I would go to the adult bookstore and buy one of those 3 packs for $6 or $7 - they'd usually have one decent magazine - a somewhat recentish Honcho or Inches - then one that maybe was meh, and a little digest thing. That's how I got turned on to Handjobs magazine (mostly printed stories, some illustrations).

It was the mid 90s before I started owning VHS copies of porn. The year I got a VCR and a few porn videos my "straight" friend who was engaged to be married somehow found his way to my place once every few months to "watch" a video out of curiosity, which would end up with me blowing him.

DVDs I never really had a huge number of those and almost all of them were Titan Men movies. I really had a thing for the Joe Gage ones.

Now of course everything is online somewhere.

Didn't ever get into the subscription sites much. Was always worried about credit card issues.

Some of those magazines and VHS box covers had beautiful photography. I remember great pics of Derek Cameron back then. Since the demise of the business of gay porn marketing, we really just get random iPhone pics of the latest "sensation". Those photos that were released ion that era help build a brand for the studio and the talent.

Under 40

Always online.

First memories are from the early 00s, there were sites where you could grab SeanCody and CorbinFisher passwords and they usually worked for a couple of months . Downloads would take hours and the video would be smaller than iPhone-size

[quote]Those photos that were released ion that era help build a brand for the studio and the talent.

That was the whole point of all of the still photography made when video was shot. The gay porn rags were a brilliant idea from George Mavety that got the porn studios to provide him with free content (in exchange for the publicity) and made him very, very wealthy. One of big-named professional photographers' dirty little secrets is that many of them got their starts and made bank snapping pics of naked people under various pseudonyms.

[quote]almost all of them were Titan Men movies...

Slightly off topic, but whenever anyone mentions Titan I feel compelled to bring up their hypocrisy of the first order. Despite their condom-nazi position, none of the guys who ran Titan were adherents and got really, really upset whenever anyone pointed it out. I had it out with Keith Webb when I discovered his Manhunt (ha! remember that site well before Grindr et. al.?) profile name was "hungraw1". He got so pissed off when I questioned if the "1" in the name was indicative of his endowment that we nearly got into a fistfight at the Powerhouse on Folsom weekend.

Despite the image of Titan, they were all a bunch of nelly queens (with apologies to nelly queens everywhere).

I'm 56, and was a young man in the mid 1980s. My first gay porn were copies of Playgirl hastily purchased at convenience stores on the other side of town, or during road trips. Later I would receive hand-me-down magazines from a friend, things like Inches and Honcho and its ilk. Those mags had ads for the 976 $1.95 per minute phone lines popular at the time. I tried them one lonely night and loved the audio porn they featured. I dreaded the next phone bill, but was relieved to find out they couldn't charge out-of-state callers and I only paid for the long distance, which was only pennies per one or two minute call during the overnight. So I would splurge on that now and then.

It was the early 1990s when I bought my first mail-order VHS porn. I first got a couple of cheapo compilation tapes, which got me on mailing lists for other mail-order joints. The phone book sized Bijou Video catalog lived on my closet shelf for years. I would also rent some from the neighborhood video store occasionally. After a decade of orders, I accumulated a huge box full of tapes that was a pain in the ass to get rid of during the digital age.

Once I got home internet, that became my main porn source. First with dirty pictures and stories from webrings and blurry Real Video clips, then PPV when speeds increased. I belonged to a Netflix-like rent by mail porn service for a while in the mid-2000s, but just like with actual Netflix the DVDs mostly sat around waiting to be mailed back.

Today my consumption is 100% online, though I do tend to download video to watch later more than streaming. My collector's nature leads me to keeping them rather than deleting, so I have way too many gigs stored on my hard drive. I do a spring cleaning now and then to keep it only mildly creepy.

A friend of mine had a "vintage" 8mm film of Joe Dallesandro getting fucked. That started my 12 yr old porn fantasies.

R1 yeah, you're gonna suck that big old poll, aintcha?

I graduated in the late 80s and was in college in the early 90s and that was my intro to porn. It was all magazines at that point, and every once in a while a rare VHS tape would come into my possession. I didn't have much money so buying them new was impossible but I did get a few really hot ones from friends or from the porn store having a sale.

I really don't like online porn much. It seems to lack a little something that older movies had....something that sort of gave it context. I also am not really into the sort of guys seen in most porn today. I'm sure that the men I saw in those earlier articles/pictorials and movies imprinted on my preferences. (Though I was always a bit of a 'daddy' chaser, anyway.)

[quote] He got so pissed off when I questioned if the "1" in the name was indicative of his endowment that we nearly got into a fistfight at the Powerhouse on Folsom weekend.

MARY!

[quote] Despite the image of Titan, they were all a bunch of nelly queens (with apologies to nelly queens everywhere).

I didn't like most of their output, except for the Joe Gage films.

r10 I'm 71 and I still have 8mm films and a projector. I haven't watched them in decades, though.

R2 was too dumb to locate a porn shop

I'm 45.

Being from a small, conservative Southern city, gay porn was not something I could find locally, and there was no way to purchase Playgirl without that knowledge making it back to my mother, so it was really the nascent, dial-up internet that provided me my early explorations of my sexuality (ah, pretending to be an adult in the AOL m4m chat rooms). I don't think I ever had DVD or VHS porn that I owned, although I do remember renting some soft core stuff from Netflix back in its early days (pre-9/11) and probably got a video or two from the independent video stores in the town where I went to college.

I'm sure I had a few magazines as well. But mostly I remember using the Abercrombie quarterly catalogs as the main source that wasn't USENET groups.

Kinda sad

For being a straight men's magazine, Hustler ALWAYS had some really hot dudes in their one male/female pictorial. Unlike most of the gay mags or Playgirl, they weren't necessarily going for the "pretty" guy, just one with a big dick.

Gay guys may want to see a big dick for the sake of a big dick, but straight guys apparently like seeing it because it makes them think *they're* the ones with a big dick. I know a lot of str8 porn (video) started to be like this a few years back, where they wouldn't even show the guy's face....it was as if you were watching something shot from a guy's cell phone (and maybe it was).

I wrote a bunch of stories in the early 1990s that were published by one of the digest magazines. I can’t, for the life of me, remember the name of the magazine, but it was based out of Teaneck, New Jersey. $100 bucks a pop was great money for me then. A lot better than the $10 a pop I later earned for reviewing gay porn.

Oh, the money I wasted on porn when I was younger! I never got any sex (I was shy and not very pretty) and every month I went to Phoenix to stay with my brother and his wife, and I would go to Castle Boutique and spend at least $100 on magazines, toys and VHS videos. Then years later I sold it all on Ebay for a pretty penny. Some of it went for 10x what I originally paid for it, it was amazing. Couldn't get those prices now.

Late 60's/early 70's: all magazines. The only moving picture porn I saw then was straight, usually at some guy's stag party. Not filmed or a magazines but at one the MC came out (mob guy in green slacks and white shirt open to the navel and lots of gold chains - OG pimp style) and told the audience "If youse guys behave yah selfs, the girls will give you a great show" and they did, I guess. It started with two black women naked eating each other out on stage. Billy, the groom-to-be was killed in Vietnam six months later. Back then it was print media exclusively except maybe some rich guys had 8 mm films.

VCR's didn't come out until 1978 and they weren't widespread until the early-mid '80's. There were arcades/peep shows showing films, but even then, most of what was onscreen was straight porn. I just concentrated on the guys.

I still have an old suitcase full of gay porn magazines that's moved with me about five times. No one wants them now. I don't know how to get rid of them discretely.

Blueboy was my rag of choice. The models were mostly what I liked at the time: smooth/toned, not many beefy guys I recall.

Blueboy was the first porn magazine I ever bought when I was a freshman in college. It took all my courage to buy it at the local newstand and the young guy behind the counter gave me a dirty look.

I'm over 60, started with the Sears catalog.

I started with Greek vase paintings.

Hi Michael, R19, I miss the Village Voice and your reviews!

i LOVED porn mags as a young adult and teen

I would drive across town as a teen/college kid and buy gay porn magazine (sometimes the bundle packs). I couldn't even wait to get home to look at them. I would have to park and look at them. Then I would lock myself in my room and jerk off so many times it was ridiculous. After a few days I would drive to a random trash dumpster and toss them all in. I was so afraid of getting caught. I remember my heart would beat a million miles an hour when I was taking the magazines up to the counter of the news stand to buy them. I was just so incredibly horny back then with no real outlet.

I used to fish them of the trash from behind the porn shop on the main drag near the freeway—supe 8 film too.

I was 10 years old.

60 yrs old. I remember a friend offering me tapes of which he’d grown tired. I said no. Seemed so clear to me that it would have a negative impact on my sex life.

I used to take my old porn magazines and slip them between books in the gay section at the university library.

I am over forty, 47, I was eight years old and silently watched where my mom hid her one single Playgirl, I needed dick BAD so I was down in the basement looking through it every chance I had. It got me through till I was eleven and had to resort to straight porn mag's that I would steal from her friend's husband's porn stash. Getting busted putting a Hustler in the trunk of her car. Who Put THAT in here?? Exasperated I said I didn't know. Needless to say, I didn't get to keep it. In my later teen years, My mom bartended at her brother's Bar, and above the business was an apt, my cousin's Fiance a huge Muscle hunk lived up there and had tons of Hustlers. I would look through them while I watched him work out. I told her I was going up to see the kittens he had.