New Doc Explores Chuck Holmes :: Porn's Unsung Hero

"Porn stars are really heroes. They were doing what they did at a time when no one was out."

Jake Shears from "Seed Money: The Chuck Holmes Story"

Chuck Holmes was a groundbreaking figure in gay history. He was also a producer of pornography. Contradictory? Why should it be?

In many respects his daring to change the way porn was shot and distributed, as well as the content, changed the industry itself. More importantly, Falcon Studios had an incredibly positive influence on many gay men and their identities, at a time when there were few role models.

Holmes made brilliant and poor decisions in his professional and personal life, which was more reason for the politically correct to inch away from embracing him despite all the good he accomplished. Nonetheless politicos loved to accept his money.

An enigmatic innovator

Filmmaker Michael Stabile examines this powerful, enigmatic innovator in the documentary, "Seed Money: The Chuck Holmes Story," which features interviews with former porn stars Jeff Stryker, Tom Chase and Jim Bentley as well as, oddly, John Waters and Jake Shears. The first-time director is interested in all the contradictions but never judges his subject.

I had a chance to speak with Stabile shortly before his film bowed at NYC's Newfest last month. (That screening immediately sold out and a second screening had to be added).

"I feel like porn gets short shrift and it's an important part of our culture, Stabile asserts, "Hopefully this is just the start."

It took the director over six years to make "Seed Money," which was born from his doc short, "Smut Capital of America," about the birth of pornography in San Francisco. Making movies wasn't his initial intent. "I got into filmmaking almost accidentally... I started off as a journalist. I edited an alt weekly in San Francisco in the '90s... I started talking to people in the sex industry; adult film, obscenity laws, sex work."

Telling stories

Stabile was "tipped off" to a story about Falcon titan Chuck Holmes by his friend, Jack Shamama (a producer on "Seed Money").

"Falcon had been sold, at this point, 2 or 3 times, 6 years after Chuck's death. And the new owners were emptying out the archives. And some of the people who had been at Falcon for a while started telling Jack stories... so he said there might be something we could do with this."

Prompted by the fact that many of the people with tales to tell were already dead (for example Matt Sterling, who founded one of Falcon's major competitors Huge Studios), Stabile and his crew embarked on a mission to speak with those who were still around.

"There's no real official accounting of this... It became apparent that if you were going to tell a story about Chuck and Falcon and porn, it seemed a shame not to do it visually... We figured out what resources we had and started shooting. And realized this was a feature and we were going to try and tell the story as best we could."

Thus began a filmmaking odyssey (the first official meeting was in January of 2009) that had Stabile sifting through hours of porn. "The footage really helped to define the project," Stabile imparts. "It became clear, early on, that we were going to have little to no footage of Chuck...These (Falcon) films would really stand in for him. We were looking for things that mirrored Chuck's experiences. We were also looking for things that mirrored the gay culture of the time -(that) served as an amplification of that culture. Falcon was really strong in mail order. (These films) went out across the country to small towns in ways that films playing in theatres never did. The theatrical circuit was largely, maybe, 8 theaters across the country. But mail order went all over the world, to small towns where people were ordering 8mm reels.

Importance of porn

"I talked to somebody at Falcon, early on, who said, 'Growing up in Iowa, those films were my only connection to gay culture... my only positive representation of gay life. Mainstream media told me that I was sick and dirty and that I was going to live a lonely, sad life. And here were these images of guys leading shame-free, aspirational, even wealthy, gay lives.'

I think of Chuck's films as the original "It Gets Better" videos. They went out wide. They showed people who were closeted and lonely and just coming out that there was a world that awaited them. They didn't have to be sad. They didn't have to be lonely."

Stabile stresses that the importance of porn to young gays shouldn't be overlooked, since there were few positive role models just a few decades ago. "In the pre-'Will & Grace' era there just wasn't that much... Now we forget because porn is everywhere, everyone has access to it and there is a robust independent gay film culture. But in the 1970s and 1980s, outside of a few cities in the United States, there wasn't much that was reaching you. There wasn't much that was reaching me, at least."

He explains his own "coming of age" experience: "I was limited to the underwear section of the JC Penny's catalogue and the occasional Jockey ad. I would steal a picture of a man's butt from my dad's Hustler. Occasionally my aunt had a Playgirl that I used to obsess over. There was a nude scene in 'I, Claudius.' But it was the sort of thing you had to piece together. And you always felt like an outsider looking in. You always felt like a creep because these were not meant for masturbation-these were things you were taking with your creepy gay eyes and perverting.

An unsung hero?

"What gay porn did was show you how it's done-the mechanics-because there was so much mystery, pre-Internet. But it also showed you that people were doing it and enjoying it and were happy. That this might be something that you could do as well. You don't have to be limited to the guy in the Macy's bathroom. It was tremendously liberating...the trembling and the excitement of getting your hands on a VHS, obsessing about the scenes. We have so much of it now, we take it for granted but it was just so potent and so powerful and an encapsulation of gay life and gay sexuality."

Stabile was born in Sussex County, New Jersey and raised in an Irish-Italian (lapsed-Catholic) household where journeying into New York City was deeply discouraged. "I didn't start spending a lot of time in New York until I went to college at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. I would start going into the city, this was the early 90s, and I got a real sense of what gay culture was. And what a broader culture in general was."

And that exploration of the LGBT evolution, with all its warts, is what drew Stabile to Holmes. "We're in a phase right now, in gay culture, where we really want heroes. We really want people who we can look up to and are righteous and do all the right things and fight for our rights and are politically pure. But we might be ready for more complex gay characters... What I loved about Chuck as both a character and a man is he was incredibly flawed but he was very open about it... It's a more mature period in gay culture if we can look at some of the people who helped lead the culture as human, as people who have prejudices and have insecurities and are just like us."

The shame factor

Of course, convincing certain people to take part in the project proved quite challenging. "Chuck loomed larger than life for a lot of them," he shares. "And I got the feeling both on the porn side and the political side, that people were worried about saying the wrong things, not wanting to do a disservice to Chuck's memory."

What perplexes Stabile most is that despite Holmes' philanthropic generosity, the politicos who benefitted financially still refuse to speak about him. A key moment in the doc shows just how devastated Holmes was when, after donating tons to the Clinton campaign, he didn't even rate a meeting with the man.

And then there's HRC.

"The most difficult part of making the documentary, other than not having Chuck around or much footage of him, was the political side. We could not get anyone from the Human Rights Campaign to talk to us. Six years into the project, I still have never gotten a return call, let alone an email... We weren't able to get people from the organizations that Chuck supported... People were really hesitant to speak on camera. And on the porn side that was because there was a long history that goes back to the FBI days. On the political side, he is still seen as radioactive... To me it's like another form of the closet. If we can't be honest about our history and honest about sexuality, it's going to manifest itself in other ways. We can't be embarrassed about this. It's an important part of our history."

A paradox

The Chuck Holmes paradox is most apparent in how vehemently he fought to keep condoms out of gay porn, even when so many of his actors were dying of AIDS. Then how, after being diagnosed himself, he became political out of necessity and donated to candidates who were fighting for a cure.

Holmes was obsessed with depictions of gays as masculine, wholesome and classy. And, post 1980-Calvin Klein ad, they also had to be smooth. Falcon films observed how clean-cut boys, often blond, would become "piggy" when they got behind closed doors.

Onset, though, Holmes did his best to "make sure everything was on the up and up--that models were treated respectfully and there wasn't a casting couch."

Stabile debates another Holmes contradiction: The models we spoke with did respect and admire Chuck. He had a rule no one was to sleep with the models. Of course, Chuck dated numerous models. One of the great loves of Chuck's life was Falcon model, Cort Jensen, who described his world with Chuck as living in "a gilded cage." He had everything provided for him, and at the same time, Chuck was incredibly controlling. There wasn't a lot of freedom."

Up next for the director is a film about Warhol star, Holly Woodlawn, "one of our first gender icons." And then, perhaps, a Chuck Holmes feature? "I've talked with several people about shopping it around as a narrative," Stabile shares, ""Chuck's story is Shakespearian. There are betrayals and disappointments. So many things didn't make into the film. He's Gatsby. There's very little known about where he came from. He had these dubious connections. There is so much you could explore in a narrative film about Chuck."

For more on Seed Money: The Chuck Holmes Story,