July 9, 2007

"Slave Market" Vintage Gay Porn Re-Issue

NEW AMG Classic DVD Release!
Story Film Classics: Slave Market
Featuring Keith Stephen, the original muscle hunk

When I saw that poster for AMG's Story Film Classics: Slave Market with that dreamy bodybuilder, I almost turned into a Tex Avery cartoon complete with bug-eyes popping out of my head, steam shooting out of my ears, wolf whistle and shrieks of "Hubba Hubba!" And that would be totally befitting the genre of this vintage gay porn movie.

The Athletic Model Guild (AMG) announced the release of Story Film Classics: Slave Market, earlier today. Slave Market is a compilation of Bob Mizer’s campy, plot-driven films that cover a nearly 50-year career. This collection includes 20 vintage, color and black/white films starring over 50 models, including some faces familiar to physique photography aficionados.

For the first time ever, AMG is releasing the only film of Forrester Millard in existence. Forrester was among the very first models photographed by Mizer when the studio opened its doors in 1945. Today, original AMG photographs of the muscular young Millard sell on the market in excess of $1000. This solo film captures the reasons why. In addition, Slave Market contains an early 1951 posing film of Keith Stephen, a favorite among collectors for his 6th place ranking in the 1951 Mr. America bodybuilding contest.

Slave Market also contains a rare bit of behind-the-scenes footage from a very early AMG film, Pose, Please, starring John Tristram (also photographed by Colt’s Jim French). In the DVD extras, viewers are invited to take a candid look at the creating of Pose, Please, where Tristram and his costar make suggestive and playful use of a banana. Bob Mizer kept this short bit of footage hidden for decades, perhaps due to its overtly sexual nature. The resulting film was compiled from original film negatives recovered from the AMG cutting room floor; it is some of the most sexually playful footage ever seen from the repressed 1950s.

“When I came across a little film box in the AMG estate, which contained old unused footage of John and Larry horsing around on the set of Pose, Please, I thought ‘Wow, this stuff almost never saw the light of day,” AMG’s President, Dennis Bell said. “There’s not a lot, but it brings another dimension to these models’ personalities.”

Bell added that it is a big priority for AMG to remaster and distribute the films that Mizer worked so hard to produce. It is important that people continue to have access to Mizer’s work, because he had such historical significance, he said.

How true that is. Early in Mizer’s career, he was convicted and spent time in prison for sending “obscene” material through the mail. By the late 1960s, the laws were relaxed, allowing Mizer to make the more sexually explicit works characteristic of his later years. This period is represented in Slave Market as well, with the full-color nude film, Wizard of Azz, which dates back to the early 1970s when gay porn was in its infancy.

“Bob Mizer made a lot of films in his time,” Bell said. “It is time that everyone has the opportunity to see the foundation that the modern all-male adult industry was built on.”

Posted by lavenderlounge at 7:12 PM

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