New Seed Money Trailer And A Request For $1, Please

I try not to force anything down your throats here (well, unless it’s you-know-who or you-know-what), but I’m gonna go ahead and blatantly do it right now, only because it’s for a good cause.

Here’s the new trailer for Mike Stabile’s upcoming documentary on Falcon Studios founder Chuck Holmes:

With just under three weeks left to donate to the film’s Kickstarter page, you’re cordially invited to click here and donate one lousy dollar. Just $1! What if I charged you to read The Sword, $1 per day? Ha…no one would pay. So instead, everyone just give $1 to this project. If all of you reading this today did that, work on completion of the full length feature would be more than funded, and an important story could be shared with a wide audience–an audience who, whether they know it or not, have more than likely been affected by Holmes in one way or another.

Stabile recently told Manhunt Daily:

For me, Chuck’s story is really a way of looking at how gay politics changed over the course of those 30 years. From the sexual revolution to the inside the beltway galas of today. Falcon was the biggest gay porn company in the world, and aggressively, purposefully set out to change the look from hippie to preppy. For much of that time, the only place that you could see realistic depictions of gay men was porn. Everything in the mainstream media was tragic or comic, if not outright homophobic. And so that Falcon look — blond hair, popped collars, boy next door — was actively imitated and replicated. So the story of Chuck is the story of how we came to see ourselves, for better or worse. Gone were the hippies and the liberationists, in came a gay identity that wouldn’t be out of place at a genteel dinner party. In a lot of ways, in order for gay men to come out of the closet, gay sex had to be pushed back in. I think you can still see this discomfort in gay politics with things like ENDA and the battles over trans inclusion. There’s a discomfort with difference, politically.

Chuck’s story — and his own efforts to fit in socially — mirror this. It’s a profoundly American story: the Kennedys and the Carnegies transformed ‘dirty’ money (bootlegging and strike-breaking) into social standing was through philanthropy, and so did Chuck. But I think it came at a cost. Despite all of his efforts to fit in with that high-society, there was always some insecurity about whether his checks would be returned (as they sometimes were) or whether he’d be welcome at events (as he sometimes wasn’t).

But even aside from the politics, Chuck lived large, a gay porn Hugh Hefner. Parties at Studio 54, Rolls Royces to take him to the clubs, orgies. He even moved into the Getty Mansion in San Francisco’s Nob Hill. Falcon was the progenitor of the modern gay porn industry — Hot House, Titan, Chi Chi, (modern) COLT, Kristen Bjorn etc — all started as off-shoots of Falcon. He’s been a lot of fun to research, even aside from all the politics.

Donate! Remember, it’s just $1. (Or more, if you’ve got it.)

[Kickstarter]