My First Gay Porn Theatre

I recently posted about the first time I went to a theatre to see a straight porn flick. I was thinking about it again the other day and was remembering the first time I visited a gay porn theatre.

I was dating a guy named Carl at the time. He was in the navy, stationed in the town I lived. Carl, it turns out, kept a lot of secrets from the navy and from me and from a lot of people. After we'd been dating for six months, I accidentally learned he was 18 years old, not 21 (as he'd told me) even though that's what his ID said (He had to have the fake ID, I guess, since you have to be 21 to get into a bar in Washington State. And we were often in bars together.) The other big secret was he was married. To a woman! That was a massive surprise, especially when the wife showed up knowing nothing about Carl and me or our cocksucking. Ah, well.

But one weekday afternoon, before the wife had made her way to town, Carl and I took a trip into Seattle. I had never been to a gay porn flick, but Carl had been to many, mostly when he had been stationed in San Francisco. He insisted he wanted to be the one to introduce me to joys of public gay porn. There was only one gay adult theatre in Seattle in the early eighties, and I'm sorry to say I've forgotten what it was called. It was on First Avenue near the waterfront. If you're Seattle literate, it was somewhere near where the art museum is located now, although the theatre was on the west side of First. Now, when I walk through that gentrified neighborhood, I often wonder where the gay porn was shown.

When Carl and I arrived, the theatre was between shows and in complete and total darkness. This place had not been one of the great, luxurious movie houses of the thirties. It was an old warehouse or something of that ilk, installed with stadium seating and a screen. When the projector finally purred to life the first thing Carl and I saw was a public service trailer warning the audience about unscrupulous guys trying to rob you. The short was set in the back room of an adult theatre where a guy walks up to another, kisses him, drops to his knees and starts sucking the standing man's cock. As he does, the sucker pulls the suckee's wallet out of his lowered jeans and pockets it. Running at about four minutes, this was the first gay porn flick I ever saw in a theatre. I had seen gay videos, of course, but this was film -- Cinema!

I've never seen another "public service" porn short since. Sure, there were messages at the end of eighties videos teaching about AIDS and condoms. But I've never heard of anything that ran in theatres, and since then I've looked around a lot for them, unsuccessfully I'm afraid. I wonder if any copies of this little robbery short still exist?

Soon it was time for the feature presentation. The film playing that day was titled Performance. I've searched for years but found very little information about this movie. I had this Seattle adventure somewhere around 1980 or '81, and the theatre was a "first run" house, so I'm guessing it was made around then. I can't even tell you who the performers were. I believe it was a Nova production, but I have never been able to find a copy, either on DVD, VHS or on the internet. If anyone knows of it floating around as a post here on XHamster, please direct me to it.

The plot deals with a handsome young theatre director calling actors to hire them to appear in a play he's producing. Each of the men called just happens to be in the middle of having sex when the phone rings. One guy is even in the pool with a lover being filmed for a porn film when called to the phone. The first few scenes could have been compiled from loops for all I know, but I assume there is a huge orgy with everyone involved at the end. I assume.

Tragically, that afternoon I had an appointment I couldn't get out of, so Carl and I could only stay for about an hour of the film. Consequently, I have no idea how it ends. Carl was later convinced that the play the Director character was casting was Boys in the Band. I felt certain a porno movie wouldn't use the name of an actual hit Broadway play. It doesn't really matter, it was porn, I was interested in the sex, not the denouement.

If only I knew then what I know now. Although the theatre was very dark, I didn't pull my dick out to jack-off, or reach over to pull Carl's dick out to jack him off. At the time, in my early 20's, I thought it was inappropriate to do something like that with my boyfriend sitting right beside me. Carl would have loved it, needless to say, and in retrospect I'm kind of surprised he didn't reach over and pull out my cock. That's the kind of thing he liked to do.

The men's room must have been somewhere behind the screen, because there was a steady stream of guys walking in and out of that area. I didn't have to take a leak during this performance of Performance, so I didn't head to the head. Now I would kill to know what was going on back there. I'm sure it was very nasty and extremely lively. And I would have loved to have seen it. Or joined in.

That was the only time I ever went to a gay porn theatre showing 35mm film. By the time I made it to The Campus Theatre in San Francisco they were showing blurry porn videos between appearances by live male strippers. And that's a very different experience.

I'd love to see Performance again. I'd like to have another look at the (as I remember it) hot sex, and to find out how the fucker ends. I also wish there were someway to discover what Carl is up to these days. I wonder if he is still with his wife. He loved taking it up the butt, so I wonder if she ever used a strap-on on him. I wonder if she eventually found out about his secret sex life. I wonder what would have happened if I hadn't had an appointment that afternoon, had pulled Carl's cock out of his pants, had gone back to the men's room behind the screen.

I wonder a lot of things.