Thanks for asking about an 8mm porn interview.  I’d love to do it, but I panic with a weird phobia when there’s a camera and I have to talk or answer questions.  Don’t know why that is, but it’s always been that way.  Yes, I wanna be a Gage Man, and I really am one already, but I physically can’t do a live interview.  

Here are my memories of the 8mm days…

I remember them well.  Before video tapes we had to set up the room for film viewing.  Get out the screen, open the tripod legs and then open the screen from bottom to top like an up-side-down window shade and hook at the top.  Then the torture of threading the film through all those loops and sprockets and clamps from one reel to the other.  Then you would sit there through the clatter of the noisy projector clackity-clack-clackity-clack as you tried to concentrate on the naked guys on the reflective beaded screen. 

In the beginning it was just guys in posing straps.  Later they could be naked, but not touching and no erections.  Finally there were erections but absolutely no ejaculations.  Wow, we thought that was the ultimate.  Seeing guys having sex in a silent black-and-white movie. 

Once in awhile the film would get stuck in the projector and you would see the frame burn up before your eyes as you quickly turned off the hot projector lamp.  Everyone had to have a splicing machine in order to cut out the burned frames and spice the film back together, creating some jerky scenes, usually right at the point of ejaculation, when it was finally allowed.  But, somehow all the work and bother and fuss was worth it, just to see some very primitive sex scenes on screen. 

At my house (that my partner and I bought in 1970 – forty years ago next February) there used to be a small glass window in the wall at the end of the living room.  There was a hinged framed picture that covered the window.  On the other side was the master bedroom clothes closet with a shelf for a projector.  So we had many visitors over to see the amazing 8mm films being projected onto the screen in the living room – through the glass window – so you didn’t hear the very noisy projector.  There was even a light switch in a box plugged into the wall that would turn the room lights out magically just before the film started.  We thought we were the most progressive guys in town and our friends would come over to be amazed at our porn (without having to hear the clatter of the projector). 

Then one day we heard of Super 8.  Amazing.  The same 8 millimeter film size but now the picture was clearer.  Instead of the film frame completely to the right of the sprocket holes, they now used the entire width of the film for the picture with the sprocket holes between the frames.  Everyone rushed out and bought the latest projector that could project the new Super 8 format.  It had a switch so it could also show both the old regular 8mm films and the latest Super 8 film.  Watching the sex was now the ultimate and we thought there could be nothing in the future that would ever be better than this.  This was the best it could ever get. 

There were no stores where films could be bought or rented.  There was no internet to order them from.  It was only through mailings that we would receive from mail-order companies.  The films would arrive in “plain brown wrappers” with discrete return addresses.  What a large collection we amassed.  Many of our friends couldn’t afford the cost of it all – the projector, the screen, the films.  So we were known as the guys up the road that you could call almost any evening of the week if you wanted to come over and see some gay porn. 

The years went by and we heard of something called video.  How could that be?  The same magnetic tape used for voice recording would be used for moving pictures AND sound recording??  Sure enough, it was true.  So we rushed out and bought the very first video tape player.  The tapes still came on reels that had to be threaded through the maze of the video player that must have weighed fifty pounds.  Of course you had to have the latest TV with inputs to plug the player into.  Wow.  Now we were inviting friends over to see porn in living color with sound right there on the television set.  No more setting up a screen.  Most of the first videos were copies of the original 8mm movies, but with dubbed sound.  We could hear the sounds of cumming but easily knew it was someone else gasping and groaning at the appropriate times on the video.  Didn’t matter.  It was the ultimate. 

Wasn’t too much longer when Sony developed the first video recorder/player that used tape inside a cassette.  Fantastic, no more threading the tape from reel to reel.  Just slide in the Beta cassette and press Play.  Now this definitely was the ultimate.  Stores started showing up where you could actually rent a gay porn Beta tape.  If you could afford it, you would buy a second Beta recorder, rent a tape, copy it from one machine to the other and have your own copy.  (That was back before it became illegal and they started imbedding copy-guard technology so you couldn’t copy the cassettes.)

Later a far inferior video format showed up called VHS.  They made the cassette larger than Beta so you needed another tape player to play the porn that began showing up in VHS format.  Even though it was an inferior format, they managed to produce tapes that played at a slower speed so they could play for two or even three hours.  Beta was stuck at one hour per tape.  By the time they came up with Beta II and Beta III, the VHS machines had taken over and Beta finally faded into the sunset.  Everyone with large collections of Beta porn were out of luck.  The video stores stopped renting Beta tapes. Sony stopped making Beta recorders.  VHS was the ultimate.  Lots of gay porn available.  Stores were full of  VHS-only tapes now that Beta had disappeared.  Nothing could ever get better than this.

DVD?  Here comes a small compact disc that plays videos.  Now all gay movies are available in this format.  No more rewinding tapes.  Just insert the disc, play and eject when done.  This must be the ultimate. 

Well, then came HDTVs and high definition videos on Blu-Ray discs.  Now we can see our gay porn in Wide-Screen High Definition clarity where we can actually count the hairs on the guy’s ass and see his cum splatter clearer than real-life during men’s finest moment. 

Now there’s also Hard Disc Drives or tiny postage stamp size storage units that can hold Terabytes worth of gay videos.  You can even watch your porn on iPods and iPhones.  This must be the ultimate.  But don’t worry, they’ll be something even better in the future.  Wow, in the hundreds of millions of years we’ve been on Earth we’ve cum a long way in just forty short years.  Silent, blurry, shaky, black-and-white eight millimeter projected films, anyone?

M.