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CHAPTER NINE

T h e P e r f e c t O rg y
Chemistry between performers makes a scene
work. You can’t fake true chemistry between
performers.

— CHI CHI LARUE

To me sex is one of the highest artistic acts.

— ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE

On June 13, 1989, Christina Orr-Cahill, director of the Corco-

Copyright © 2009. Running Press. All rights reserved.

ran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., canceled “The Perfect

Moment,” a large-scale retrospective show of Robert Map-
plethorpe’s photographic career due to open at the Corcoran
on July 1. It covered the full spectrum of his work including
celebrity portraits, spectacular photos of flowers, self-por-
traits, and homoerotic and sadomasochistic photographs.
While the show had appeared without controversy in
Philadelphia and Chicago, Orr-Cahill decided to cancel in
order to avoid playing into a growing controversy over fund-
ing from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). Her
decision to cancel triggered a dramatic explosion between con-

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BIGGER THAN LIFE

servatives and the art community. Two days after 108 members
of Congress filed a complaint against NEA for using federal
funds to support indecent and immoral art, artists and mem-
bers of the arts community also protested Orr-Cahill’s decision.
The Corcoran lost members, several curators and other staff
members resigned, and artists who had scheduled shows at the
Corcoran canceled them.
Republican Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina led the
opposition to the show. He regarded some of Mapplethorpe’s
photographs as pornographic and produced a packet of four
Mapplethorpe photographs, one of which was the famous
“Man in Polyester Suit” which showed the torso of a black
man clad in a polyester suit, his large uncircumcised penis
dangling from his fly.
Helms sponsored an amendment to an appropriations bill
to bar the National Endowment from funding “obscene art-
work” and to exclude the organizations that had organized the
Mapplethorpe and other shows from federal funding for five
years. The Helms Amendment forbade the NEA to fund:
“…[O]bscene or indecent materials, including but
not limited to depictions of sadomasochism,
homoeroticism, the exploitation of children or
individuals engaged in sex acts; or material which
denigrates the objects or beliefs of the adherents
Copyright © 2009. Running Press. All rights reserved.

of a particular religion, debases, or reviles a per-

son, group, or class of citizens on the basis of race,
creed, sex, handicap, age or national origin.”
Mapplethorpe himself never saw the show. Three months
earlier, on March 9, he had died of AIDS. [Steiner, 19–22]

THE PERFECT MOMENT

The controversy around “The Perfect Moment” illuminated the

significance of the erotic in art and how it intersected with

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The Perfect Orgy

obscenity and pornography. The show was originally conceived

and mounted by the Institute for Contemporary Art in
Philadelphia. Mapplethorpe’s work had been controversial
since the late seventies, when he had become known for his
erotic photographs and his collages of pornographic images.
Among the most controversial of those early photographs was
Self-Portrait of 1978, in which Mapplethorpe posed bent over
with his back to the camera and his head turned around to face
it, wearing leather chaps, vest, and boots, and with the handle
of a bullwhip penetrating his anus.
Galleries that mounted the exhibit were legally obligated
by the artist’s estate to mount all 175 photographs in the show,
including the controversial X, Y, and Z Portfolios: the nude and
sadomasochistic images in X, the flowers in Y, and the
provocative studies of human figures in Z. The 1978 Self-Por-
trait was also included. Curators in Philadelphia and Chicago
cautiously segregated the most controversial images in special
galleries with warnings posted for spectators.
When the Corcoran canceled “The Perfect Moment,” a small
local arts organization called the Washington Project for the
Arts mounted the exhibit. Whereas the Project for the Arts
averaged forty visitors a day, more than four thousand people
attended on the first weekend. The show traveled to the Uni-
versity Art Museum in Berkeley, then on to the Contemporary
Art Center in Cincinnati. There, on the exhibit’s opening day,
Copyright © 2009. Running Press. All rights reserved.

police closed the show temporarily in order to videotape it as

evidence for an obscenity indictment brought by the county
prosecutor. Both the center and its director, Dennis Barrie,
were indicted on charges of pandering obscenity and child
pornography (the show included several photographs of
unclothed children).
The indictment cited the 1973 Supreme Court ruling in Miller
v. California, the same Supreme Court opinion that had been so
influential on the porn film industry’s adoption of plots and nar-
rative to qualify for “serious literary, artistic … value.” Miller
v. California ruled any work obscene that “taken as a whole,

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BIGGER THAN LIFE

appeals to the prurient interest in sex; portrays in a patently

offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by the appli-
cable state law; and taken as a whole, does not have serious lit-
erary, artistic, political, or scientific value.” [Slade, 216–217]
The controversy over “The Perfect Moment” was where the
world of high art merged with the world of commercial
pornography. Mapplethorpe drew his inspiration from early
beefcake porn and went on to explore the world of sado-
masochism and present it to the world. Commercial gay
pornography portrayed explicit sexual activity between men
and gave it affirmation. From Robert Mapplethorpe to Tom of
Finland to Joe Gage and Chi Chi LaRue, the portrayal of sex
and the representation of erotic images seem to inhabit the
same world.

T H E FA N TA S Y B U S I N E S S

In 1988, “The Perfect Moment” was in Chicago while the AVN

award show was in full swing at the Tropicana Hotel in Las
Vegas. It was only the fourth year that the AVN had recognized
gay videos. Falcon Studio’s Touch Me won the AVN award for
the Best Gay Video of 1988. It was the first time Falcon had
won an award for one of its films.
That Touch Me won the award was ironic. Falcon movies
Copyright © 2009. Running Press. All rights reserved.

were known for their unsentimental, unplotted sex scenes, but

Touch Me was atypical in two important ways—first, it was a
love story, and second, it had kissing in it. It was also the first
film conceived and directed by Steven Scarborough. Early
winners in the gay categories at the AVN award show had been
veterans from the first days of gay hardcore movies: Tom DeS-
imone (as Lancer Brooks) for Bi-Coastal (Catalina, 1985), Matt
Sterling for Inch by Inch (Huge Video, 1985), and John Sum-
mers for Rock Hard (L.A. Video, 1987).
When Scarborough first approached him with the idea of
producing a love story, Chuck Holmes had declared, “I don’t

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The Perfect Orgy

want any fucking kissing in my films.”

Scarborough protested, “I want to have this great love
scene,” he told Holmes. “Let’s do something that people can
relate to, a lover gets caught cheating, the one lover tries to
walk away, yet he can’t. He comes back.” He persuaded
Holmes to let him make such a film under Falcon’s aegis.
[Scarborough, Manshots, 8/96, 68]

•••

Scarborough’s arrival at Falcon was a significant event both

for the studio’s creative approach as well as its business strat-
egy. His reorganization of Falcon’s production process helped
to establish the economic foundation for Falcon’s preeminence
over the next two decades.
Scarborough thought that Holmes was “the smartest, most
successful man in gay porn during his lifetime. Yet he was not
the innovator. He had to be dragged kicking and screaming
into every change we ever made.” [Moore, 98] Known for his
strong likes and dislikes (about talent and sex), he was more
of a businessman than a director. After John Travis left Fal-
con and went to work for Catalina in 1984, Falcon struggled
to stay afloat. It had long survived by producing loops and
packaging them together in “Falcon Video Packs.” Steven
Scarborough arrived in San Francisco in 1974 when he was
Copyright © 2009. Running Press. All rights reserved.

twenty-one. Though married, he was actively bisexual and had

even had an affair with one of his wife’s former boyfriends.
After a couple of years, he opened a health food store on
Castro Street across from Harvey Milk’s camera shop. He met
a local sales clerk, Dick Fisk, who worked at a clothing store
named Rugby, which was owned by John Summers and Matt
Sterling. Fisk was one of the stars of Falcon’s hugely success-
ful The Other Side of Aspen (1977). It wasn’t long before Scar-
borough met Chuck Holmes, and the two men became friends.
“Chuck was enamored of me,” Scarborough admits.
Holmes, who was seven years Scarborough’s senior, had just

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BIGGER THAN LIFE

broken up with a boyfriend of ten years. Soon Scarborough

and Holmes were caught up in a “crazy, torrid six-month”
affair. Throughout their relationship and even after Scarbor-
ough broke up with Holmes, he would ask, “Why did you do
that?” or go so far as to say “I’d have done that.” Finally
Holmes had heard enough, and Scarborough remembers him
saying: “Listen big mouth, why don’t you come down …”
Scarborough agreed, “but on the first day I was supposed
to shoot, I didn’t show up.” Scarborough recalled. “I couldn’t…
So [Holmes] sent somebody to come get me, and they brought
me to the set, and I was very, very shy. I knew what I wanted
to see, and I had considerable experience in sex. But I never
had technical movie training. I was very timid. I would whis-
per ‘… is it possible to do this?’” [Scarborough, Manshots, 8/96,
66; Jansen, 16]
“I was a sexual person, but I was a very private person,”
Scarborough explained.
“I think I had a reputation because Chuck and I
had been involved, and for some reason, I had
several porn stars who had become long-term
sex partners. I wasn’t a bathhouse kind of per-
son. If I went to the bathhouse, I went to look or
maybe gather. But I was very private about what
I did. And I think that coming forward like that
Copyright © 2009. Running Press. All rights reserved.

I felt exposed…. So when I first came on the

set—I would say to whoever was sitting next to
me: [whispering] ‘Tell them to do this. Tell them
to do that.’ I was afraid to speak up, I felt so
exposed.” [Scarborough, Manshots, 8/96, 66-67]
From the start, it was clear to Scarborough that Falcon’s
operations were not very efficiently organized. Its production
team had worked together for a long time, but they had spent
the last six months of 1987 making only one movie, Perfect
Summer (Falcon Video Pac 57); Scarborough came in and fin-
ished it in no time.

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“When I came to Falcon they didn’t have one des-

ignated director. It was done by committee. I
don’t have any film background. I had no video
background, I had no production background.
What I had was a sense of business and sense of
compulsion and a sense of organization.… And
I’ve been very successful at getting people to
work together. And that’s basically what I found
a director did: bring all these talented people to
get them to work together.” [Scarborough, 66–67]
At the time, Falcon had a camera crew that had worked for
the company for years. It was based in Los Angeles, and most
Falcon films were shot in northern California or on location.
While the film’s director may have often worked from a script,
the production crew worked with “a general idea of what they
were going to do. And they just kind of all wandered onto the
set and they spent a lot of time arguing. I watched them argue
a lot in the beginning …” [Scarborough, Manshots, 8/96, 67]
Once a movie was shot, the camera crew returned to Los Ange-
les to edit it.
Scarborough thought that Falcon needed to make more
movies in order to generate a more continuous revenue
stream—and in line with that he thought that the editing
should also become a continuous process. He concluded that
Copyright © 2009. Running Press. All rights reserved.

the Los Angeles-based team should focus exclusively on edit-

ing, while a San Francisco-based camera crew shot the film.
Holmes resisted; he wanted “people who’ve shot sex.” Instead,
Scarborough argued for “really good technicians … kids, fresh
out of school who have something to prove—who are really
good, know their equipment, know lighting, have a lot of
energy, really want to work hard.” Scarborough prevailed.
They hired two young men, fresh out of the film program at
San Francisco State—John Rutherford and Todd Montgomery,
who at the time were boyfriends. The L.A. camera crew came
up to San Francisco to train them. When Montgomery wanted

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BIGGER THAN LIFE

to relight everything as if they were shooting a commercial, a

member of the old crew just countered with “Goddamn it, just
pull in the lights and keep shooting, ’Cause when you’ve got a
hard-on, you gotta shoot.” {Scarborough, Manshots, 8/96, 67]
But their youth and technical savvy gave Scarborough the free-
dom to focus on directing the sex and managing the models.
With a full-time production unit in place, Scarborough had
greater control over quality and consistency. In order to keep
the production unit busy and further increase revenues, he
upped in-house production for two other Falcon lines: Jocks
and Mustang. He used the subsidiary lines to audition and
build new talent “like the farm teams” do for major league
baseball. Chi Chi LaRue and Bruce Cam were hired to direct
for those lines.
Chuck Holmes was known for the strict guidelines he
imposed on Falcon performers: white, “All-American” young
men, no body hair, especially no chest hair, no body builders,
and no tattoos. The approach was often called “the Falcon car
wash,” ensuring everything was “clean” and hairless.
When Scarborough first started at Falcon, casting usually
began with a script that often took months to develop. He mod-
ified the process and began to work with a simple “treatment”
that was nothing more than an outline. More important than
having a finished script was knowing which performers were
available. [Scarborough, Manshots, 8/96, 67–68]
Copyright © 2009. Running Press. All rights reserved.

Scarborough may have been timid at the beginning, but he

soon developed a reputation for being demanding on the set,
especially when dealing with performers.
“I don’t talk very much…. Once it gets going. I
like to—I challenge the models a lot. I have a
whole grab-bag of directorial tricks. I think you
have to be a psychologist and you have to know
who to push, who to coddle, who to encourage,
who to stop, who to time and talk to, and who
needs personal attention. I say, ‘You call that

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The Perfect Orgy

fucking? I don’t call that fucking!’… Sometimes,

it’ll challenge them.” [Scarborough, Manshots,
8/96, 11]
Scarborough’s approach was very effective with performers
who considered themselves straight.
“With these straight boys, I don’t care what they
do. I don’t care if they call themselves Martians
or what their sex lives are about. In my book, if
you wanna come down and work in gay movies,
then by God, you’re gay for the day. ’Cause it’s
insulting and demeaning and degrading for these
straight guys to come on these sets and act like
they’re better than these gay models. We’re gay
men making gay movies for a gay audience.”
[Scarborough, Manshots, 8/96, 70]
Another important development during the Scarborough
years was the policy of signing performers to “exclusive” con-
tracts—contracts that did not allow a performer to appear in
the videos of another company for a limited period, usually for
a year. The “exclusive” performer was a form of investment
that was meant to guarantee movie sales. In exchange, an
exclusive contract promised the performer a guaranteed num-
ber of film appearances (five over the course of a year) and a
higher fee per scene than performers without an exclusive con-
Copyright © 2009. Running Press. All rights reserved.

tract. The studio strictly regulated the careers of its exclusives

by controlling their access to the gay press, their sexual reper-
toires, and the characters they played. The policy helped to
limit a performer’s “overexposure” and to carefully stage the
expansion of his sexual repertoire.
It was not, at first, a systematic policy. The earliest mention
of anyone “exclusive” was in the Falcon marketing brochure
for Out of Bounds (FVP 53, 1987), which stated that the film
was “Starring Falcon’s exclusive discovery, Chris Williams.”
The next exclusive wasn’t announced until 1990 when Jack
Dillon was listed as “our newest Falcon Exclusive superstar,

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BIGGER THAN LIFE

‘Big’ Jack Dillon.” Thereafter, the “exclusive” became an

essential component of the studio’s promotional and market-
ing efforts.
Scarborough’s major achievement as a director at Falcon
was the Abduction series—The Abduction (1991), The Conflict
(1993), and Redemption (1993)—in which he pushed beyond
the long-standing Falcon formulas to explore a “world of uni-
forms, humiliation, and discipline.” Originally inspired by a
location Scarborough came across while shooting a Jocks
video in Los Angeles, The Abduction was shot in a vast under-
ground cavern on an old evacuated military base in the moun-
tains outside Los Angeles. From the minute he saw it, he had
envisioned fascist “goons marching” across the large empty
space—men abducted from their homes and brought to a tor-
ture dungeon to be searched for a mysterious roll of film. They
search every orifice with cocks, dildos, and fists. Candle wax,
anal beads, gags, enemas, and auto-fellatio supplement the
whips and riding crops. The Conflict, its sequel, was even more
brutal and scary, continuing the extreme leather play and
extensive butt-play with toys, dildos, and fists—with spitting,
pissing, and boot licking. Redemption, the last installment of
the trilogy, continued the same round of intense kinky sex.
In the Abduction trilogy Scarborough articulated his most
fundamental vision of extreme sex. John Rutherford, his assis-
tant at Falcon, has said that “Steven has always been
Copyright © 2009. Running Press. All rights reserved.

extremely charismatic. Something that stands out for me when

looking at Steven’s movies is the character and sexual chem-
istry between top and bottom. Steven’s always had a creative
mind in coming up with scenarios of fantasy and playing roles
of dominance and submission. He does this like no other, and
continues to set the bar.” [Jansen, 18]
While working on The Conflict and Redemption, Scarborough
and Holmes were caught up in a fierce conflict over various
aspects of the production. But it was both a clash of wills and a
matter of creative differences. Their conflict provoked Scarbor-
ough’s departure. “The straw that broke the camel’s back was

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The Perfect Orgy

about a camel in Conflict/Redemption, having a camel walk

across a scene. And that’s basically what the whole issue was
around. But it was a control issue.” [Scarborough, Manshots,
8/96, 14]
Years later, Scarborough reflected on their conflict.
“Now I look back and see it was just stupid. But
there was a struggle going on, where I was
becoming my own person. I’d found my voice
and identity, and yet I had been tied to Chuck.
He was my protector, my boss, my lover … It was
a very complicated relationship.” [Moore, 98]
Scarborough left Falcon after six and a half years—during
which time he had virtually remade the studio. He took the
savings he had planned to buy a house with and formed his
own company, Hot House—where the vision he had articulated
in the Abduction series would serve as the foundation of his
future work.

BORN TO PORN

A poster of Jeff Stryker wearing white gym pants, his large,

partially erect penis straining against the pant leg, was what
lured Larry Paciotti to Los Angeles from St. Paul, Minnesota.
Copyright © 2009. Running Press. All rights reserved.

He’d seen the poster for Powertool and knew his future lay on
the West Coast.
Within days of arrival, Paciotti landed a job at the leg-
endary Catalina Video as a sales agent. Catalina had just
released Powertool, Stryker’s breakout movie. He got the job
because he knew a great deal about gay porn. “It … was a
case,” he explained, “of my life’s devotion to pornography
actually paying off.” [LaRue/Erich, 50]
Paciotti was born in 1959 in Hibbing, Minnesota (also the
hometown of Bob Dylan). The persona of Chi Chi LaRue first
emerged as a personality and a performer in a group of drag

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BIGGER THAN LIFE

queens known as the Weather Girls. Paciotti is a big man—

well over six feet and somewhat heavy, even by his own admis-
sion. In drag, his dimensions are amplified, adding to his
mesmerizing presence.
Initially, he had to overcome the resistance of adult video
producers allowing him to direct gay films under the name Chi
Chi LaRue. For several years after he started, he worked under
a variety of other pseudonyms, such as Taylor Hudson and
Lawrence David, but eventually, even Falcon, a bastion of gay
male machismo, permitted him to use his drag name.
Paciotti’s ambition was to direct gay porn films, and he
energetically pursued that goal. At Catalina, he moved from
sales agent to a job in Catalina’s promotion department where
he supervised the design of box covers and ads.
Eventually, William Higgins, the owner of Catalina at the
time, relented. He told LaRue, “Come up with a concept and
lighting scheme for a segment in our Hard Men series, and you
can go to San Francisco and direct the segment.”
“That was the first thing I ever directed,” Paciotti recalled,
“and it was the best in the series.”
Higgins sold the company before Paciotti ever got the
chance to make another film. Scott Masters, who was
Catalina’s director of production, refused to let LaRue direct.
“He thought I was too big and too loud and too fun and too
into everything. He said I’d never direct unless I lost one hun-
Copyright © 2009. Running Press. All rights reserved.

dred pounds—and he was a heavy guy!” [Isherwood, 23]

One friend summed up his opinion on the industry: “Why
should a big fat femme drag queen be telling gorgeous guys
how to have sex?” [Isherwood, 25]
In 1989, LaRue left Catalina to take charge of marketing at
InHand Video, where he was also given a chance to direct. The
budgets were much smaller at InHand, and many videos were
shot in a day or even in hours—but LaRue was given free rein.
He made gay, straight, bisexual, transsexual, and lesbian porn,
and he began to develop his style—a wild mix of imaginative
sex, humor, and energy. While his “drag name” appeared in the

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The Perfect Orgy

credits, he did not direct his gay or straight movies in drag.

As LaRue explained, “I had no training; I didn’t know what
to do. They just kind of threw me into the job.” [GayVN.com,
9/07, retrieved 10/21/07]
He made a handful of gay videos at InHand before moving
on to Vivid Man, the gay line for Vivid Video, one of straight
porn’s largest and most profitable firms.
By the end of 1989, after only two full years of directing,
LaRue had directed almost twenty gay videos. And he began to
work for Catalina again. His first film after he came back was
Billboard, which starred his “discovery” Joey Stefano, who
would go on to become one of the major stars of the early
nineties.
In 1990, LaRue won the AVN award for Best Director for
his Catalina video, The Rise, which starred another “discov-
ery,” Ryan Yeager. By the end of 1991, he had made a handful
of videos for Catalina and had been signed by Steven Scar-
borough to direct for Falcon’s Mustang line. That same year,
Jumper, one of the videos he made for yet another company,
HIS Video, won the AVN award for Best Gay Video.
By the end of 1992, not even five full years after LaRue
entered the industry, he had directed at least sixty videos. He
made more than twenty videos in 1992 alone—mostly for
Catalina and Falcon’s Mustang line. And he again won the AVN
award for Best Director of a gay video—for Songs in the Key of
Copyright © 2009. Running Press. All rights reserved.

Sex (HIS Video), probably his most ambitious film to date.

LaRue’s most ambitious as well as his most award-winning
work in these early years was made for HIS Video, a subsidiary
of VCA, one of the major straight porn companies. Both
Jumper and Songs in the Key of Sex had well-developed
scripts by Stan Ward (stage name Stan Mitchell) that required
some degree of acting in addition to skills as an adult per-
former. Jumper, modeled somewhat on the 1978 Hollywood
movie Heaven Can Wait, tells the story of a restless young man
in Heaven, a former soldier who died in the Revolutionary War
of 1783. He persuades the authorities in Heaven to let him

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BIGGER THAN LIFE

come back to live out some of his unfulfilled dreams. Songs in

the Key of Sex is about a young gay man, played by Randy
Mixer, who is trying to make his way as a singer. He breaks up
with his long-term boyfriend and gets involved with an alco-
holic man, played by Jason Ross. Songs has original music and
songs (lip-synced by Randy Mixer) in addition to nonsexual
dramatic roles.
LaRue was astonishingly prolific. Over the next eight years
(1993 to 2000), LaRue would make on average one video every
other week—most directors might make one a month. He con-
tinued to work in a number of different genres. Lost in Vegas
(1993) was an ambitious narrative movie based on the main-
stream movie hit, Leaving Las Vegas—and dealt, like Songs in
the Key of Sex, with the impact alcoholism on gay men. Idol
Thoughts (Catalina, 1993) and Idol Country (HIS Video, 1994)
were vehicles for superstar Ryan Idol. LaRue counted Idol
Country as one of his best movies—in a comment made in 1999,
LaRue put it his “top four.” LaRue won the 1995 Gay Erotic
Video Award for Best Director for his work on Idol Country.
[Adam, 1999, 37]
Increasingly, he became known for his “wall-to-wall” sex
films—often involving large groups of men, broken into
smaller overlapping combinations of three or four men and cli-
maxing in a large orgy scene. Wall-to-wall sex is one of the
standard categories of modern pornographic videos. Never-
Copyright © 2009. Running Press. All rights reserved.

theless, wall-to wall sex movies require considerable planning

and advanced preparation.
One of LaRue’s biggest commercial successes was the Link
series of all-sex movies (1997 to 2007). They were shot in a San
Francisco leather bar, and the performers are dressed in leather,
harnesses, chaps, and black denim. The sexual action takes
place in dark, dimly-lit rooms, in slings, through glory holes, and
in an enclosed area of chain-link fencing; there are fisting, a beer
enema, and mild water sports. Many of the group sex scenes are
performed by muscular, hairy men. The set, costumes, casting,
and lighting create an atmosphere of underground and hidden

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The Perfect Orgy

places and rough, uninhibited sex. Despite their darkness and

sexual intensity, LaRue himself characterized the Link movies
as “leatherette movies because they’re not heavy leather, even
though they are total sex pig movies.”
LaRue initially thought of Bolt (2004), one of his most suc-
cessful recent movies, as another Link, but he took it in a com-
pletely different direction by making it bright and “clean”
(“not the sex, the sex is dirty”) rather than dark and dingy by
using silvers, chromes, and Lucite [LaRue, unpublished inter-
view]. In conjunction with Bolt, LaRue’s company introduced
a large industrial-style metallic bolt as a dildo, which is used
throughout the movie. Bolt, like Link, is also a “total sex pig
movie” though with a different sort of casting—younger men,
more blondes, and the wearing of torn white jockey shorts and
tank tops rather than leather. Consequently, it conveys a very
different erotic atmosphere and mood from the Link movies.
LaRue is especially well-known for his orgy scenes. Group
sex, particularly if it is a large group, is very difficult to choreo-
graph. All-sex movies and orgies often have no discernable nar-
rative structure, other than that they will start with oral sex and
kissing, move on to rimming and fucking, and culminate in the
money shots. However, the sexual activities are usually cumula-
tive—the sucking, kissing, and rimming are added step by step.
Only orgasms bring the sexual narrative to a conclusion.
Among the notable “wall-to-wall” sex movies are Boot
Copyright © 2009. Running Press. All rights reserved.

Black 1 (1994) and Boot Black 2: Spit Shine (1995) for HIS
Video, Dirty White Guys (1996), In the Mix (1997) with an
interracial cast, and the leather-themed Link series (Link,
1998, Link 2 Link, 1998, and The Final Link, 1999) for All
Worlds, and a series of feature-length orgy videos for Jocks
(The New Pledgemaster, Jocks, 1995; Stock: Released, Jocks,
1998; Stock: Sentenced, Jocks, 1998).
Casting was the key to the success of LaRue’s erotic film-
making—together with his skill for directing sex, his unparal-
leled talent for casting, and his ability to work fast and on
small budgets. He could rapidly put a concept together and

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BIGGER THAN LIFE

just as quickly make a video on a relatively low budget. By one

estimate, he made more than a dozen movies for at least three
different companies—InHand, Vivid, and Catalina—in his first
year in the business.
From the very beginning of his career, LaRue found young
men willing to appear in his videos—and from his first videos
he was able to draw out strong sexual performances from
them. He and William Higgins would often egg each other on
when Higgins stopped by the Four Star every Friday night to
catch LaRue’s drag show.
“[H]e and I would dish about the cute boys in the bar,”
LaRue recalled. “He’d say, ‘Go up and ask that one if he wants
to do movies.’ And I’d do it.”
“I used the same formula for every person I’ve ever
approached,” Larue told Jerry Douglas.
“I don’t lie. I don’t put across any fakeness. I’d
walk up and I’d say, ‘Hi, have you ever thought
about doing porno movies?’ Most of them answer,
‘No, I’ve never thought about it.’ or ‘No, I could
never do it.’ But every once in a while, a cute one
will say: ‘Yes, I’ve thought about it.’ And then I
pursue it from there, the next step is I tell him
how good-looking I think he is, would he like to
come in for an interview?” [LaRue, Manshots,
Copyright © 2009. Running Press. All rights reserved.

10/91, 15]
Among the earliest of LaRue’s major discoveries were hand-
some brunette top Ryan Yeager and pouty straight boy Andrew
Michaels. LaRue had cast Michaels in A Friendly Obsession,
one of the first videos he shot for Vivid Man. “I brought some-
thing out in him,” LaRue recalled.
“I got this little straight boy, who wouldn’t do
anything, [but] he progressively did more and
more things for me as time went on. He was and
always will be one of my favorite models.… He
was such a good worker. He could get it up for

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The Perfect Orgy

any woman, any man. He never had any trouble

keeping a rubber on. He always did what I told
him to do, and there was never a problem.”
[LaRue, Manshots, 10/91, 17]
Yeager had sent photographs of himself, wanting only to
model for magazine layouts until LaRue explained there was
little money in it. But over the course of four or five months
they spoke regularly on the phone. Eventually, Yeager agreed
to appear in The Buddy System (Vivid), a military-themed
video LaRue had written specifically for him. In no time,
LaRue knew he had a “natural.”
“He arrived at the airport at two in the after-
noon, I drove him to the location, and at four
o’clock, shoved him in front of the camera for his
first scene.… He was flawless. He gave me two
cum shots in his very first scene, got fucked, and
bit a chunk out of the ladder. He was a director’s
dream come true. He is a natural actor, he is a
naturally nice guy, and he’s naturally sexual. His
dick stays up forever.”
This was 1989, before Viagra.
One reason for LaRue’s success is his ability to anticipate
sexual chemistry between performers. Nevertheless, it’s always
a process.
Copyright © 2009. Running Press. All rights reserved.

“I talk to them and find out what they like before

I put them together.… I make the set so com-
fortable for them they become compatible even
if they’re not. I let people do what feels good to
them. If I want to see something specific, I’ll tell
them. If somebody wants to do something, I’ll let
him try it.… if there’s a secret to my getting good
sex, it’s that it’s a comfortable situation from the
initial interview till we walk out the door and
say it’s a wrap.” [LaRue, Manshots, 10/91, 16–17]

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BIGGER THAN LIFE

The biggest discovery of LaRue’s early career was Joey Ste-

fano, whom he described as having “that special something.”
“It’s all about star quality, that great indefinable
aura of glamour and fabulousness. If you have
that trait, you can’t hide it. Heads will turn when
you walk into a room, and prospective sexual
partners will throw themselves at your feet.… If
you don’t have it, you can’t fake it. You’ll just
never have it.… [W]ith … Joey Stefano, I knew
it from the second I laid eyes on him.”
[LaRue/Erich, 111]
For LaRue, it was also love at first sight. And he didn’t hes-
itate. He immediately cast Stefano in Sharon and Karen,
which starred veteran porn actress Sharon Kane and drag per-
former Karen Dior, in a scene with Kane and Andrew Michaels,
LaRue’s “gay-for-pay” discovery.
In their scene, Kane was asked to fuck Stefano using a
strap-on. “He brought his own,” she recalled, though she was
“amazed at how big it was. I thought he was an amazing per-
former—he was quite relaxed about it. That’s when I fell in
love with him.”
Though both LaRue and Kane were in love with Stefano,
they remained close friends and frequently worked together.
Charles Isherwood, Stefano’s biographer, was impressed that
Copyright © 2009. Running Press. All rights reserved.

“the complexities of their romantic or emotional or sexual

attachments didn’t destroy their friendship.… Perhaps because
they had sex—or orchestrated it—for a living, they didn’t over-
value its importance as a validation of an emotional or spiri-
tual bond.” [Isherwood, 35]

•••

Born Nicholas Iacona, Stefano grew up outside of Philadelphia

in Chester, Pennsylvania. He dropped out of high school in
1983 not long after his father died—and quickly moved away

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The Perfect Orgy

from his family. He told LaRue and others that he supported

himself by hustling.
From an early age, he was a serious user of drugs, includ-
ing cocaine, heroin, and angel dust (PCP). He also had an avid
interest in porn and an encyclopedic knowledge of performers
in both gay and straight video. He was so knowledgeable, in
fact, that he could identify a performer solely on the basis of
an anatomical close-up.
Stefano’s fascination with porn led him to attempt to pose
for magazines, but not knowing anyone in the business, he
went to the Jock Theatre in Manhattan where porn stars some-
times stripped, hoping to make a connection to the industry.
“So I went to pay to watch one of these porn
stars [Tony Davis]. I never heard of him before,
because my porn star favorites are older guys
from way back. I wound up talking to him, and
he took my pictures and said he’d see what he
could do because he knew some people. I called
him a week later and bugged the shit out of him.
He told me to come on out.” [Isherwood, 15]
That’s when Stefano flew out to Los Angeles and Davis took
him to meet LaRue. From that point on, it was a “long, emo-
tional roller coaster ride.… [A]nd it didn’t end until Joey’s
death five years later.” [LaRue/Erich, 113]
Copyright © 2009. Running Press. All rights reserved.

As LaRue remembers, “Joey did bang-up jobs for me in

films like Songs in the Key of Sex (HIS Video, 1992) and …
InHand flick called Fond Focus (InHand, 1990). As time went
on, though, the temptations of the fast-paced porn world
began to take their toll on him. His drinking and drug use
increased, and he got in this downward spiral that no one could
seem to break him out of.” [LaRue/Erich, 114]
The depth of LaRue’s feelings for Stefano caused him a
great deal of pain.
“Joey could do no wrong in my eyes…. I was
blinded by my affection for him, and anything he

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BIGGER THAN LIFE

did to me, no matter how cruel or thoughtless, I

could always find it in me to forgive. We never did
have sex.… It was a long period of hell for me;
many times I would drop him off at his place or
at a friend’s, then drive home crying to myself out
of frustration and my love for him.” [LaRue, 200]
The end finally came in 1994, while LaRue was out of town
shooting a film for Falcon. LaRue and the cast were waiting
for Joey, who was supposed to be in a scene. Stefano had prom-
ised LaRue that he’d remain sober. But when Stefano didn’t
show, LaRue recalls:
“(I) started to get a really bad feeling. I called
home to check my messages, and there was one
… telling me that Joey had overdosed and was
in desperate condition at Cedars Sinai Medical
Center.… John Rutherford and I jumped in his
truck and rushed immediately to the hospital....
He was gone of an overdose—heroin and special
K, an animal tranquilizer—at the tender age of
26. Whether it was a suicide or a tragic accident
is something that’s never been fully determined.”
[LaRue/Erich, 115]
Throughout his career, LaRue produced a constant stream
of young men who wanted to work in porn. For several years
Copyright © 2009. Running Press. All rights reserved.

in the mid-nineties, his house was called “the Porn Motel”

because there would always be three or four performers stay-
ing there. The list of his discoveries—probably more than a
hundred—comes right up to the present.
In gay porn there is no greater master of the “all sex” video
than Chi Chi LaRue. Widely considered the best and most orig-
inal director of sex scenes in gay porn today, he is also far and
away the most prolific director (probably approaching five
hundred or more videos) in the history of gay porn. Since the
late 1990s, he was also one of the leading directors of straight
porn—being the preferred director of such leading female per-

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The Perfect Orgy

formers as Jenna James and Tara Patrick—though he left the

straight industry when using condoms ceased to be required.
“I don’t write stage directions on my scripts,” LaRue told
me, “only the dialogue. All the sex, all the movement comes
out of my head. Sitting right there.… I’m a sex director.”
LaRue’s improvisational style extends even to the preparation
for future movies—visits to the hardware store can yield mate-
rial for his next film: “I love water sports, so I do as much dirty
water sports as I can get away with.… I’ll go to a hardware
store and look at anything weird that’s used for gardening or
hosing off the driveway and I’ll think, ‘Oh that’ll look great up
a butt!’ and I’ll buy and use it in a movie.” [LaRue, unpub-
lished interview]
Another notable aspect about LaRue is his directing style.
He shouts out instructions (“Go down on him!”), encourage-
ment (“Yeah, that’s fucking hot! … Harder, harder…”), and
exclamations (“That’s hot!”) as he coaches the performers step
by step through the sexual scene. He literally supplies the
“sexual script” to the performers, the videographer, and the
film crew while at the same time establishing his own sexual
script as a framework. Although some performers are uncom-
fortable with LaRue’s method, most find it valuable. Usually
the biggest problems created by this approach occur in post-
production when the sound editor must go through and metic-
ulously strip LaRue’s voice from the recorded sound track.
Copyright © 2009. Running Press. All rights reserved.

Through his drive, fertile erotic imagination, and prolific

production, Chi Chi LaRue has emerged in the last decade as
the dominant personality—director, impresario, and pro-
ducer—of the gay adult entertainment industry. He has made
hundreds of gay porn movies and many straight videos; has
organized and continues to organize live strip shows and char-
ity events around the country; has recruited and directed hun-
dreds of performers; has published photo books of his stars;
has founded one of the first popular internet live sex websites;
and has started his own production company—within the last
three years Channel One, his production company, has pur-

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BIGGER THAN LIFE

chased All Worlds and Catalina Video to emerge as the largest

company in the business.
So many of those who work in the adult film industry have
ambitions to cross over and work in the mainstream film
industry or some other area of entertainment. But LaRue says
he has no interest in doing that: “For me the sex is it. I will
make porn movies for as long as I can.”

C O M PA N Y M A N

In August of 1993, Chuck Holmes walked into John Ruther-

ford’s office and offered him the job of director of production
for all four Falcon lines—Falcon, Jocks, Mustang, and Falcon
International. Steven Scarborough had left in the middle of
making the last two installments of his Abduction trilogy, and
Rutherford and his team were in the midst of finishing it.
“I shook in my shoes,” Rutherford recalled. “I
was thinking, ‘Me?’ I mean, with Abduction 2
and 3 (Conflict/Redemption) I’d really been
directing a lot. I mean directing, directing,
directing, and thinking it was easy for me to be
in that position because I could make all these
great, great decisions, let my creativity flow and
Copyright © 2009. Running Press. All rights reserved.

never have the responsibility of being told by the

owner of Falcon, ‘That’s not a good idea.’ And at
that point, that came into my mind: ‘Now I have
to do the best job I can do. And I have to answer
for it.’” [Rutherford, Manshots, 10/95, 13]

John Rutherford grew up in Redwood City, south of San Fran-

cisco. He attended college in the area, but was not sure of what
he wanted to do. He thought about business, but wasn’t good
at math. He decided to go to school in Paris. He knew he was
gay, but denied it to himself and continued to date girls. While
in Paris, he met a young woman who worked as a movie extra.

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The Perfect Orgy

Intrigued, he went with her to work. As he watched the direc-

tor and the production crew at work, he thought: “God, this is
fabulous. I want to do this.”
He took some classes in Paris and worked frequently as an
extra. When he returned to the United States, he attended the
film production program at San Francisco State University,
where he met a fellow film student, Todd Montgomery. They
immediately fell in love.
After Rutherford graduated, a friend of his who put on strip
shows using Falcon performers told Rutherford that Falcon
was looking for production crew members. He asked if Ruther-
ford was interested. Rutherford replied, “Are you kidding? I
graduated with a degree. I’m doing corporate videos at
Hewlett-Packard and … production management on low-
budget? There’s no way I’m going to do that.” [Rutherford
Manshots, 10/95, 66–67; Barker, 24]
Rutherford reconsidered the suggestion when a couple of
months later he wasn’t making enough to pay his bills. Find-
ing that the job was still available, he went into the Falcon
offices to talk with Chuck Holmes.
“[W]hen I met Chuck Holmes and went to visit the offices,
it was like going into the corporation I worked with in Silicon
Valley—very well run, efficient. And I was very impressed.”
[Rutherford, Manshots, 10/95, 67]
Rutherford was hired as Steven Scarborough’s assistant
Copyright © 2009. Running Press. All rights reserved.

director. Slowly, he developed his own approach to erotic film-

making. Initially, he felt creatively stifled.
“I was doing what others wanted me to do. And
I didn’t feel that any of my other input was being
utilized in the first year…. I take my jobs very
seriously. I become a company man. I’m quiet for
a long time, because I study things. I study the
way people are. I study what they expect of me,
how I can become most efficient.… [A]fter I got
a grip on it … then I started pushing my way in.”

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BIGGER THAN LIFE

In his first year at Falcon, he was still in the process of com-

ing to terms with his homosexuality. “It was like a puzzle. It just
fit.… I was very closeted. My mother’s a lesbian, and I think for
a long time, it was hard for me to accept her sexuality because
I was trying to deny my own.” [Rutherford, Manshots, 10/95, 68]
Since Holmes had started the company, there had never
been any production credits on Falcon films—neither the cin-
ematographer, the director, nor the producer received any
credits. For many years, the name “Bill Clayton” was used to
identify anyone who spoke for Falcon—whether it was Chuck
Holmes himself or one of his directors/cinematographers such
as Matt Sterling or John Travis. This tradition of anonymity
continued with Steven Scarborough. Rutherford, the company
man, more than anyone, came to exemplify this tradition.
“There’s a philosophy that Chuck [Holmes] started 30 years
ago,” Rutherford told Blueboy magazine.
“It’s not important who’s making the movies. The
most important thing is what you’re seeing in our
product and that you get off on that. And until
recently there were no titles on Falcon movies, no
credit for crews.… The reason why Falcon videos
are Falcon videos is because there’s a team here
and there’s a philosophy of how we do things.
Seeing credits, ‘John Rutherford,’ is fun for me
Copyright © 2009. Running Press. All rights reserved.

and it strokes my ego because I’m human, but I’m

not the most important person here.” [Barker, 24]
Under Rutherford, the development of a Falcon film con-
tinued to be, as it had been almost from the beginning, a group
effort. It began with a meeting of the development director,
production manager, and Rutherford as director of production.
The planning started with the review of a list of performers
who had been interviewed by the development director or who
had contacted Falcon. The planning committee selected the
models and then built a movie around them and specific loca-
tions. Then elements, ideas, and story lines were developed.

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When a strong idea emerged Rutherford asked whoever had

come up with it to write a script. When the script came back,
Rutherford took it to Chuck Holmes, who would either give it
the go-ahead or suggest changes.

•••

Within a year of taking over from Scarborough, Rutherford

began to put together his first major project as head of pro-
duction. “Everyone was talking Abduction 4,” Rutherford
explained.
“Now that wasn’t me. Abduction 2/3 was a part
of me, but I wanted more story line. I wanted
more than just sex. I wanted character develop-
ment. Chuck [Holmes] believed in that. Chuck
wanted that too. We all wanted it.… We wanted
something that would bring back the Touch Me
days, when we got the best picture for Touch Me.
We wanted something with story line, character
development, good sex in it.… I wanted to do
something like [Thelma and Louise].” [Ruther-
ford, Manshots, 12/95, 14]
In 1994, Falcon released Flashpoint, its annual big-budget
feature and the first major feature produced under John
Copyright © 2009. Running Press. All rights reserved.

Rutherford as head of production. Flashpoint is a road movie

about the sexual adventures of Hal Rockland and Scott Bald-
win. Like Touch Me, Flashpoint won the AVN Award for Best
Gay Video as well as the Gay Erotic Video (GEV) award for
Best Video, while Rutherford won both the AVN and GEV
awards for director.
Like Chi Chi LaRue, Rutherford stresses the importance of
the filmmaker’s attitude toward performers—he believes that
filmmakers should do everything to keep alive that sense of
possibility and desire. “It’s really very important to keep the
sexual energy and tension going, which ultimately passes on

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BIGGER THAN LIFE

to the viewer.… The viewer is alone in his living room enjoy-

ing the fantasy and maybe daydreaming about our guys.”
In 2000 Rutherford made one of his most ambitious films—
the annual Falcon big two-part “travelogue” called Out of
Athens—starring Falcon exclusives Johnny Brosnan, Travis
Wade, and Cameron Fox. Based on Rutherford’s own experi-
ence as a young man, “Out of Athens was my story, I decided
to take three months off and go to Europe after high school.
And I traveled around Greece.... I did a loose story [based] on
my travels and the conflict of being who you are.” [Barker, 25]

D E C L I N E A N D FA L L

In September 2000, Chuck Holmes died from complications of

HIV/AIDS at age fifty-five. Within a short period of time, Fal-
con Studios found itself in a dramatically altered situation.
After twenty-eight years, it not only had lost its fiercely opin-
ionated and iron-willed leader, but in his will, Holmes estab-
lished the Charles M. Holmes Foundation to promote gay civil
rights and gave the foundation complete ownership and con-
trol over Falcon Studios and all its subsidiary businesses,
including the website, streaming videos, and sex accessories.
Rutherford, who had served as the executive vice president
and director of production, was named president of Falcon Stu-
Copyright © 2009. Running Press. All rights reserved.

dios—Conwest Resources was Falcon’s corporate name. Terry

Mahaffey, who had come to Falcon in 1996 from the old-line gay
porn producer Le Salon and had served as controller and vice
president of finance, became the chief financial officer.
Holmes’s will also established a board of directors that con-
sisted of the company’s high-level management to guide the
studio in the immediate aftermath of his death—specifically
mandating that it continue to produce adult films “in the Fal-
con style,” which was spelled out in detail in the will.
Holmes’s death brought a new player onto the scene: Terry
Bean, an Oregon-based real estate developer and gay political

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The Perfect Orgy

activist, was named executor of Holmes’s will. Holmes and

Bean had become close friends when they served on the board
of the Washington, D.C.-based Human Rights Campaign, the
nation’s largest and most influential gay rights lobbying group.
As the executor of Holmes’s estate and later as the president
of the Holmes Foundation (which was established in 2002),
Bean played an active role in the direction and management
of Falcon Studios—though he knew nothing about the adult
entertainment business.
Over the years, Chuck Holmes often told John Rutherford,
“When I die, I don’t want those lights to flicker.” At the time
of Holmes’s death, Rutherford was in the middle of shooting
Bounce, a vehicle for “Lifetime Falcon Exclusive” Matthew
Rush—a young bodybuilder of mixed racial heritage who was
the biggest gay porn star of the late 1990s. [Barker, 24] Though
Rutherford grieved Holmes deeply, he decided not to stop the
production. Instead, he asked his close friend and longtime
Falcon colleague Chi Chi LaRue to direct two of the scenes. It
was the first time LaRue directed any scenes for a Falcon
movie since he had been hired by Steven Scarborough in 1991
to direct the videos for the Mustang- and Jocks-branded lines.
Once Bounce was completed, Rutherford went on to shoot
The Other Side of Aspen 5, the latest installment of Falcon
breakthrough films from the late seventies. As soon as the first
sex scene was shot, Rutherford instinctively went to call Chuck
Copyright © 2009. Running Press. All rights reserved.

Holmes and tell him about it when he realized “‘There’s

nobody there to call; I’m the last stop.’ … that was difficult. It
made me nervous.” [Barker, 25]
Rutherford lamented:
“After [Holmes’s] passing Falcon was run by a
board of directors that he elected in his will to
run the studio. After the first year, I quickly
noticed that everything had changed … the sprit
that once was, was no longer—it became a busi-
ness. The board focused more on trying to meet

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BIGGER THAN LIFE

projections and goals, rather than on what

Chuck and I believed was the recipe for Falcon’s
success—making damn good movies with the
world’s best looking men.” [Rutherford, inter-
view, 12/06]
Rutherford understood that success involved more than
mere formula. “Both desire and passion must be present in
front of the camera and behind the camera as well. If you don’t
like, enjoy and believe in what you do, you won’t be success-
ful in this business.” [Clarke, 59]
When Rutherford and LaRue tied for Best Director at the 2000
GayVN award show—Rutherford for Out of Athens and LaRue
for Echoes—they discussed making a movie together. Working
together on Bounce reinforced that idea. In 2002, Rutherford and
LaRue moved ahead on the idea of codirecting. The video they
made was Deep South: The Big and the Easy (FVP 144), one of
Falcon’s big annual feature productions, another “travelogue” to
be shot in New Orleans. It follows a private investigator played
by Falcon Exclusive Josh Weston, who must go to New Orleans
on the trail of the missing Jeremy Jordan.
The movie was huge commercial success. Reviewer Brent Blue
concluded, “It’s been a long time since there was a porn extrav-
aganza with the magnitude and force of Deep South. Directors
Chi Chi LaRue and John Rutherford absolutely outdo themselves
Copyright © 2009. Running Press. All rights reserved.

in creating a vivid piece full of complex characters, a sturdy well-

developed plot, thanks to [writer] Jordan Young and some of the
most gnawing sexual force you’re likely to find any time soon….
Put simply, this is gay porn at its best.” [Blue]
(http://mannet.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb-cgi?ubb=get
_topic&f=2&t=000569, retrieved on 9/7/2008)

•••

While Chuck Holmes was alive, he had been an active partic-

ipant in Democratic Party politics as well as a major financial

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The Perfect Orgy

contributor, his goal being to promote gay rights in the United

States. After his death, Terry Bean sought to continue that
work by providing funds from the estate to host meetings with
President Bill Clinton and other Democratic leaders in Wash-
ington to discuss gay issues. Between 2000 and 2002, the
Holmes estate made major donations to a number of Demo-
cratic causes in Oregon, including the gubernatorial race of
Ted Kulongoski. When it became known that contributions
had come from the estate of a producer of gay porn videos,
Kulongoski’s campaign returned a $15,000 donation.
Bean sought to downplay the significance of Falcon’s adult
video business—at one point telling The Oregonian, the state’s
leading newspaper, that “Conwest does produce some male
erotic videos. It also does a lot of other post-production things
and documentaries in other arenas.” As Bean explained, “the
adult video portion—primarily Falcon Studios—is less than
half of Conwest’s business, although he could not provide
specifics or estimates of the company’s overall revenues.”
[Hogan, 6/26/02]
Under Bean’s direction, the estate and the foundation con-
tinued to support many of Holmes’s causes and made contri-
butions to many organizations serving the gay community,
notably the Human Rights Campaign Fund and the San Fran-
cisco Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Community
Center—which renamed its building in honor of Holmes when
Copyright © 2009. Running Press. All rights reserved.

the estate pledged $1 million.

However, by 2002, the foundation’s board increasingly found
the Falcon legacy a liability in its attempts to advance its polit-
ical and philanthropic mandate. On the other side, many of
those managing Falcon Studios felt that Terry Bean knew noth-
ing about the adult industry and had no interest in it—though
it was the primary source of the estate’s endowment.
Discussions soon began to take place about the possibility
of selling Falcon Studios/Conwest Resources. Rutherford, the
man most committed to upholding the Chuck Holmes legacy,
proposed that Conwest purchase Colt Studios, which had been

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BIGGER THAN LIFE

put up for sale by its founder Jim French. Colt was a classic
“beefcake” studio and was considered more “artistic” and less
“pornographic” than Falcon. Rutherford thought that such a
move presented a “great opportunity” for Falcon. The Foun-
dation rejected the idea. Rutherford also seems to have made
an offer to buy Falcon from the foundation, but was again
rebuffed. [Rutherford, 2008]
On April 4, 2003, Rutherford resigned from Falcon Studios.
In June of that year, he and his partner Tom Settle announced
their purchase of Colt Studios. Terry Mahaffey, who had been
at Falcon since 1996 as the controller and vice president for
finance, was named president, chief financial officer, and chief
creative officer. Todd Montgomery, a business consultant who
had worked at Levi Strauss for many years, was named vice
president and chief operating officer.
With Rutherford gone, Chi Chi LaRue emerged as the lead
director for Falcon and continued to direct movies for all Fal-
con brands. In March 2004, LaRue suffered a mild heart attack
just as he was about leave for London to direct Taking Flight,
Falcon’s annual two-part “travelogue.” Since it was too late to
cancel the production, Falcon hired Chris Steele, the script’s
author and a former performer, who had directed only one
video previously. Nevertheless, Taking Flight became one of
Falcon’s all-time best-selling videos.
Soon Steele was named Falcon’s new director of production.
Copyright © 2009. Running Press. All rights reserved.

It had been almost a year since John Rutherford had vacated

that position. Almost immediately, Steele and the Falcon man-
agement began planning for the next year’s big-budget two-
part production. They selected a script (Cross Country) by Jack
Shamama and Michael Stabile, the authors of Wet Palms, a
highly publicized gay porn soap opera serial that ran on the
Naked Sword porn website.
When LaRue recovered from his heart attack, he decided,
after ten years of working for Falcon, to limit his directing to
videos for his own company, Rascal Video. His last video for
Falcon was Heaven to Hell—the story of an angel sexually

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The Perfect Orgy

tempted by the Devil and cast into hell. It was shot in Decem-
ber 2004 and released in 2005. It was the only movie in the his-
tory of Falcon Studios in which the cast consisted entirely of
Falcon exclusives.

•••

In August 2004, Conwest Resources, Falcon’s corporate parent,

announced that it had agreed to sell itself to the newly formed
3 Media Corporation for an undisclosed amount. 3 Media was
owned by two of Falcon’s managers, Terry Mahaffey and Todd
Montgomery (not the well known videographer of the same
name), in partnership with former Conwest board member
Steve Johnson. Mahaffey remained as Falcon’s CEO and chief
of production, and Montgomery became president and CEO of
3 Media.
Once LaRue left at the end of 2004, except for Terry Mahaf-
fey, the creative direction of Falcon was almost entirely in new
hands—with Chris Steele as director of production. He was
joined by Rod Barry as the new director of talent development.
Production on Jocks and Mustang was suspended pending
“rebranding” and repackaging of the subsidiary lines. In early
2006, John Bruno, the owner of Massive Video, was brought on
to relaunch the Mustang line around the beefy muscular mod-
els he used in his own Massive movies. Later that year, Chad
Copyright © 2009. Running Press. All rights reserved.

Donovan, a director and former Falcon performer, took Barry’s

place as the head of talent development. In November 2006
Steele resigned from Falcon. Donovan briefly took over as the
director of production. Then he, too, left.
In May 2008, Todd Montgomery, the managing partner since
Rutherford had left, was forced out. Steve Johnson, the last of
the original three partners who had purchased the studio from
the Chuck Holmes Foundation, took over the reins. Today, the
Falcon brand is in crisis. Rutherford’s departure initiated years
of turmoil and change, marked by a seemingly accelerating
turnover in personnel that dramatically affected Falcon’s role as

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BIGGER THAN LIFE

the industry leader and as a commercially successful business.

At the time of Holmes’s death, Falcon Studios, along with
All Worlds Video, was one of the largest companies in the gay
porn industry. Although they operated with diametrically
opposite business models, they were the dominant companies
of the 1990s. While Falcon continues to put out releases on its
Falcon, Jocks, Mustang and Falcon International lines, the tra-
ditional Falcon packaging has been dropped. It is constantly
tinkering with different packaging styles and has even gone so
far as to retitle earlier films. The company appears to be lurch-
ing from director to director, releasing videos in a number of
different styles. There is no longer an identifiable Falcon style.

REFERENCES

Adam Gay Video (AGV) Erotica The Top 40 Films of Chi Chi
LaRue (Los Angeles: Knight Publishing, 1999).
Adam Gay Video (AGV) Erotica The Falcon Movies of John
Rutherford (Los Angeles: Knight Publishing, 2000).
Keith Barker, “The Emperor of Erotica,” Blueboy, October
2001.
Georges Bataille, The Tears of Eros (San Francisco: City Lights
Books, 1989).
Copyright © 2009. Running Press. All rights reserved.

Brent Blue, “Deep South,” Review, Mannet.com

Ethan Clarke, “John Rutherford: Falcon’s Top Man,” All Man,
January 2003.
Dave Hogan, “Democratic Contributor Linked to Gay Porn,”
The Oregonian, June 26, 2002.
Charles Isherwood, Wonder Bread and Ecstasy: The Life and
Death of Joey Stefano (Los Angeles: Alyson, 1996).
Brady Jansen, “Phoenix Rising,” GayVN, Supplement to AVN,
November 2007.

286
Escoffier, Jeffrey. Bigger Than Life : The History of Gay Porn Cinema from Beefcake to Hardcore, Running Press, 2009.
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BTL Interior.qxp:Bigger Than Life 3/27/09 12:09 PM Page 287

The Perfect Orgy

“Chi Chi LaRue, Behind the Camera:” Interview by Jerry Dou-

glas, Manshots, October 1991.
“Everything’s Coming Up Chi Chi LaRue,” GayVN.com,
September 21, 2007.
Chi Chi LaRue commentary, More of a Man (Douglas dir:
Channel 1 dvd, Platinum Collection Edition).
Chi Chi LaRue with John Erich, Making It Big: Sex Stars, Porn
Films and Me (Los Angeles: Alyson, 1997).
Parker Moore, “Man of the House,” Men Magazine (Hot House,
special collector’s edition), May 2007.
“John Rutherford, Behind the Camera:” Interview by Jerry
Douglas, Manshots, Part 1, October 1995; Part 2, December
1995.
John Rutherford, interview, GayNYCity.com, February 2006.
John Rutherford, johnrutherfordblog.blogspot.com/2008
Retrieved 9/18/2008.
“Steven Scarborough, Behind the Camera:” Interview by Jerry
Douglas, Manshots, August 1996.
Joseph Slade, Pornography in America (Santa Barbara: ABC-
CLIO, 2000).
Wendy Steiner, The Scandal of Pleasure: Art in an Age of Fun-
Copyright © 2009. Running Press. All rights reserved.

damentalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).

287
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Copyright © 2009. Running Press. All rights reserved.

Escoffier, Jeffrey. Bigger Than Life : The History of Gay Porn Cinema from Beefcake to Hardcore, Running Press, 2009.
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