Without eschewing the hardcore content of these films, Purchell reveals what is joyous in these films and the burgeoning community they document, from drag acts to nude discos to a KISS impersonator stripper, all set to genuinely great music.
It manages to be both very hot and often very funny. Beyond its historical interest, Ask Any Buddy is also simply a lot of fun. Long lost bathhouses, porn theaters, gay bars, and cruising sites, such as the Christopher Street piers, are all documented in these films. In one instance an actual arrest takes place in a go-go bar where one of these porn films is being shot and the filmmakers defiantly leave it in, providing on screen commentary. Harvey Milk makes a brief appearance in footage shot on the street at a pride parade, as do a different set of revolutionaries, the Cockettes.
For many gay porn filmmakers of the era, just making these films was an important political act, and it may surprise some viewers today to see how much footage of gay liberation marches, pride parades, and demonstrations made its way into porn films.
An extended sequence in a men’s room is downright instructional, showing viewers how to cruise a tearoom and how to avoid cops.
There is a fascination in seeing the formation of a subculture on screen – a nascent subculture seeing itself and learning about itself on screen. The footage Ask Any Buddy brings together is often exceedingly rare, culled from increasingly hard-to-find home video releases of films which were commonly considered niche and ephemeral – a precarity and distance from our own time reflected in the patina of horizontal lines of video interference running across the vertical emulsion scratches of the original film prints seen throughout the video. Yet these films and these images still captivate and the period they document and helped form remains fascinating – perhaps all the more so now that it seems vanished forever. This new style of gay masculinity is all over Ask Any Buddy, just as it is in the porn films of the period– the “ Castro clone” or the leatherman, images of gay men that were new at the time and for many liberating, if reductive, offering fetishized images of gay men as overwhelmingly white and almost unnervingly fit and masculine (save the occasional drag queen). In this period, particularly in the first several years, gay porn films were among the very few places depictions of queer sexuality and an emergent, liberated gay male identity could be seen on screen.
A video companion to the Instagram account Purchell began in 2018, the Ask Any Buddy movie compiles footage from 126 gay porn features made between 19 into a “day in the life” document/fantasy of urban gay life in the year leading up to the Stonewall uprising and in the years that followed, as a (largely white) gay subculture became codified – in part through the porn films Purchell uses as her material. Today and tomorrow Elizabeth Purchell’s new feature-length video Ask Any Buddy streams as part of the 2020 Outfest Los Angeles LGBTQ Film Festival, which this year (aside from a handful of drive-in screenings) takes place mostly online.