Saturday, April 5th — The day is almost over at New York’s Anthology Film Archives, and projectionist Jose Ramos is thinking about his upcoming retirement. June will be his last month at the East Village arthouse theater where he’s worked for nearly 24 years. After that he’ll pack up and move to Puerto Rico, where he has a nice house, all paid for. It’s time to get out of the booth. He’s gone through so many books of Sudoku he’s lost count. He hates the cold. Mostly though, he’s just tired. He didn’t used to need as much sleep as he does now. Four, five hours a day and he would be raring to go when he woke. It was Jose’s strong constitution which enabled him to carry on two very distinct jobs for many years: West Harlem kindergarten teacher by day, Times Square porno projectionist by night.
It all started with a fire. Jose was teaching his class in West Harlem one day in 1977 when a huge black man with a mean face showed up to his school, asking everyone “Where’s Jose Ramos?” “I saw him and thought, this cat’s gonna kill me!” Jose recalls. “It turned out he was cooking bacon at his house, and there was a little grease fire and smoke came up, and his kid, who was one of my students, dropped on the floor, crawled and rolled, and he was impressed with that. He said, “Who taught you that?” It was me. It turned out he had just gotten out of prison a couple of years before, he did like 18 years for murder or some shit like that.”
Jose’s new ex-con friend was working as a projectionist. It was the kind of job they liked to give to ex-cons, maybe because they figured they wouldn’t be in a position to get into much trouble, or perhaps because parolees were used to being in small dark rooms for long periods of time. A teacher’s salary wasn’t enough to put food on the table for Jose’s wife and daughters. So his friend taught him how to thread film through a projector and man the controls in the booth. Jose took the licensing exam and joined the projectionists’ union.
He’d always loved movies. While growing up on New York’s Lower East Side, Manhattan’s Puerto Rican neighborhood, Jose would frequent theaters like the Loews Delancey, the Apollo on Clinton Street, or the Essex Theater on Grand. His favorite movie was West Side Story, the first film he saw which had Puerto Ricans in it. Little did he realize how few real Boricuas were actually in it. “Only two — everybody else was Greek, Mexican, or Irish or some shit,” he says, laughing. “But that was the first movie that impressed me. I knew all the words, sang all the songs.”
But musicals were not the type of films he ended up spending most of his time projecting. At first he started up in the South Bronx, where few projectionists were willing to go because the neighborhood was so rough. He’d play films like Rambo or Conan the Barbarian. The grindhouse, action, and exploitation cinemas were in full bloom during that time. Then he moved to Queens and took a fill-in job at a porno theater called the Austin. That’s when Jose learned the number-one rule of porno. “At one point my film popped,” he remembers, “So I stopped the projector and turned on the house lights so I could tape up the film and the manager came up yelling ‘What the hell are you doing? You never turn the lights on here! Just tape it up and keep the lights off!’ So I started learning the ropes in the porno theater.”
Not too long after, Jose found himself in Times Square at the height of the early-80s, triple-X theater boom, working at straight jerkoff palaces like the Roxy and the Venus, and gay theaters like the Eros and the Adonis. He’d finish teaching his class at three, go home to nap for a few hours, then get up and head out to Forty Deuce where he might be out until all hours. Some theaters opened at 10AM and closed at 2AM. The Eros and the Venus didn’t close until 6AM. They’d close for a few hours to mop up the jizz, sweep away the poppers bottles, and be open again four hours later for the horny daytime regulars, who would fade away as the night approached and the rough element — junkies, thieves, hookers and hustlers — came in.
Jose spent a lot of time at the Eros, which was openly gay, and the Venus which was straight but catered a lot to closet-case types. The theaters were connected, and owned by two Greek sisters, grandmas who lived above the theaters in a lavish apartment. Jose recalls the difference in the layouts between the two spaces: “The Eros had a stairway and the booth was upstairs, then there was the auditorium, and then it had a basement, like, tunnels and that’s where the bathroom was and everything. So that’s where a lot of activity was happening. The Venus, the booth was separate also but it was just a theater, there was no basement. Stuff would just happen in the theater.”
Most of the stuff Jose saw in the straight and gay theaters didn’t bother him, whether on screen or in person. He had been to a midnight screening of the German art-porn classic Taxi Zum Klo, at the St. Mark’s Theaters on 8th Street, long before he started at the Eros in 1982. The film depicted everything that could be done between male partners in detail, from blowjobs to watersports to anal sex. Being around porn and sex 24/7 anesthetizes you to sex, whether straight or gay, Jose says.
The only thing that ever really shocked him was an impromptu visit to Show World, one of the few porn places that still remains on the 8th Avenue Strip. “I had to go to the bathroom,” he remembers, ‘I knew the ticket girl, so I said honey I’m going to run to the bathroom. So she took out her key and said here’s the one for the staff bathroom. I said ‘Nah don’t worry about it.’ I went down to the regular bathroom, and it was like a sub-society down there, man, there was drag, there was this, there was that. I was in pure and utter shock. Ran upstairs, got the key to the staff bathroom quick. She was like, ‘I told you so.’ She was real cool, she was gay also.”
Though working in two such disparate places might have seemed like tempting fate to some, for Jose, working in porn theaters was just another job. His children knew what he did, only in the broadest terms, though his wife knew he worked in gay theaters. He remembers a few times when friends would walk by the theater and see him smoking under photos of buff nude men, and quickly walk past, trying not to make eye contact. “Like you know, they didn’t want to acknowledge me. I’d be like, bro I’m just working here, what is your problem? And even if I was, what was your problem?” he says.
Jose only had two moments where he felt his job choice might put his well-being at risk. The first came when a fellow Eros staffer handed him a bat and asked him to help chase off a particularly large guy who’d been ripping people off. “I go down with the bat and he says ‘Man, if you were a man you’d drop that bat,’” Jose recalls, “I said ‘Man I drop this bat I’ll be a dead motherfucker. And he laughed and left.” The second, more dangerous moment came while working at The Roxy.
“The Roxy was a whorehouse, basically,” Jose explains, charmingly pronouncing whore, “hoo-er.” “They showed 16mm films, and I ran the lights for the strip show and the live sex. The girls would walk around and pick up their clients and go to the rooms in the back. And one day I was working the booth and I looked out the window and the place was being raided, police everywhere. I was like, oh shit, if I get caught here and they find out I’m a teacher, the association would be very negative and so I blended in with the audience and walked out. I remember the workers looking at me like, ‘Man, you fucking punk,’ But I got something to lose, this is all you guys do.”
Whatever ill will Jose had with the other staffers after this, it didn’t last long. There was a camaraderie amongst the workers at the various theaters, and especially between Jose and many of the gay employees. He remembers the more feminine voices the guys at the Eros would use to answer the phone when he called. “If I needed something from one of the other theaters, I’d call up and they would answer ‘Helloooo Eros?’ I’d say, ‘Hi, it’s Jose.’ They’d put on a butch voice, ‘OH HI JOSE, HOW ARE YOU?’ I said you don’t have to change your voice for me. Then they started doing it as a joke, ‘Jose, how are those Yankees!’ Like they ever saw a game. Everybody was happy with who they were.”
The gay guys became Jose’s drinking buddies after his shift was over. But then suddenly things started to change. “All of a sudden you start seeing ’em get skinnier, and the lesions and shit were coming out. And then they weren’t around no more. That happened quite a bit,” he remembers. He admits he avoided sharing bottles or joints in the period before people knew what how HIV/AIDS was spread. When its status as a sexually transmitted disease was confirmed, he never felt like he, or his business was part of the problem, unlike future Mayor Rudy Guiliani, who eventually put nearly all of the theaters out to pasture in the early nineties. The Greek sisters made a fortune selling the theater spaces they owned during this turnover, Jose recently learned.
After the theaters started switching over to VHS, the porn projectionist’s job became obsolete. VHS players were installed in ticket booths and the ticket girl would switch out the tapes after someone from the audience would yell out “Film’s over!” Jose’s days were numbered, and so in 1990, he migrated back to his old neighborhood to work at Anthology, where he’s still showing edgy, explicit erotic fare from time to time, only now, it’s mostly experimental films like Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures and Andy Warhol’s Blow Job, which ironically busted open the censorship laws, helping usher in theaters like the ones in Times Square and beyond. Recently, a young curator named Casey Scott has started showing classic 70’s porn at the theater, and so Jose’s back, finally projecting porno at long last as he gets closer and closer to the final reel. The good ones, the really good ones, films like Armand Weston’s masterful Take Off, make Jose very happy. And while he won’t be projecting any more gay porn before he goes — June’s special gay pride edition of the vintage porn series features straight porn directed by gay men like Chuck Vincent and John and Lem Amero — he will get to project one last special screening on June 6th as part of the theater’s tribute celebration for Jose: West Side Story.
Adam Baran is a filmmaker, blogger, former online editor of Butt Magazine and co-curator of Queer/Art/Film. His short film JACKPOT, about a porn-hunting gay teen, won Best Short Film at the Miami Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, and was recently featured on The Huffington Post, Queerty, and Towleroad, among others. He is a features programmer at Outfest Los Angeles LGBT Film Festival and NewFest in New York. In his spare time, he complains about things to his friends. “Fisting for Compliments”, his weekly musings about the intersection of sex, art, porn, and history, will appear every Monday on TheSword. You can contact him at Adam@TheSword.com and follow him on Twitter at @ABaran999. Here’s the Fisting For Compliments archive.
Were those two Greek sisters the same who owned the fabled Gaiety?
Great story. I miss having sex in Times Square.
This was a beautifully written, fascinating story about a man who actually curates a specific time in history. Thank you Jose and thank you Adam Baran. Evocative, heart-warming and utterly lovely. Thank you again.
I was told that in those old downtown movies ( in my country… but maybe in U.S. too ) corridors and toilets smelled like bleach because of the semen. I also think some of them were 24 hours and the newspaper adds explained there were strip tease or even sex shows ( both gay and straight ) on stage during projection! A real pigsty! LOL.
I was also told that in Havana at Fulgencio Baptista era ( the 50’s – Not my time and I’m not Cuban ) there were those movies too and when the film was to hard core and people have to queue in the sidewalks to by tickets it was very common to see people with a paper bag covering their heads to avoid to be recognized. LOL.
When I was able to go to such places it was indeed the VHS time and all kind of porn was offered in ‘rent stores’ to watch at home so I went to watch straight porn kinda movies at my neigborhood movie theater that was much safer than the ‘pigsty’ ones. It was a place where people went only to see the fuckery and jackoff later at home. There wasn’t whores, transvestites or wheirdos there were only horny family guys. I was accustomed to my tv screem and it was strange to see tits and cunts and some dicks on the huge movie screem with a bunch of people in the sits next to me.
Ok. ok…I beg your pardon…Full of mistakes here… : Newspaper’s adds; Baptista’s era; VHS’s time; neigborhood’s movies; There weren’t…; Also I was told… and There weren’t whores…or wheirdos but only horny family guys.