FROM THE TDB ARCHIVES: AN AUDIENCE WITH PORN LEGEND TOBY ROSS

 

This interview with famed porn director Toby Ross originally ran in Three Dollar Bill on September 25, 2008. It has been updated. Ross has also just published his hugely entertaining Toby Ross and the 70's: An Erotic Memoir as an E-Book on Amazon.

I love porn and longtime readers know I believe porn is healthy. Over the years I’ve interviewed many of its players, old and new, from directors Chi Chi LaRue to Flash Conway, but few as insightful as director Wakefield Poole, whose 1971 film Boys in the Sand is generally considered to be the first widely available gay porno.

Porn legend Toby Ross, circa 1976
Photo courtesy Toby Ross

“What changed, what I did, was the marketing,” Poole told me some years ago. “We marketed Boys like a legit film. We put an ad in The New York Times. My God, it was unheard of. I think the Times didn’t know what they were putting in the paper because later on they refused us.”

Turned out Boys is also the only X-rated porn film reviewed by The New York Times, not to mention the first porn film to include on-screen credits for its cast and crew (though many were assumed names). Boys was also the first porn film to parody the title of a mainstream movie, 1970′s The Boys in the Band.

Then came Toby Ross, whose 1975 classic Cruisin ’57 is one of the great porn films of all time.  

“I was fascinated by nostalgia for the 1950s,” Chicago-based Ross told me. “I wanted to make a gay version of American Graffiti.”

Cruisin ’57 was originally filmed on 16mm film (“We converted that to 8 mm – you went smaller because it was sharper”) in San Francisco where Ross, born in Germany in 1955, came of age.

“It was a different world,” Ross recalls. “I was created in San Francisco. My whole personality, the gay Toby, everything.”

The following year, 1976, Ross filmed White Trash, about two teens fucking while watching Led Zeppelin’s The Song Remains the Same in a dark movie theatre. The plot isn’t much different than Ross’s own youth.

“I loved escaping to see movies beginning at the age of 9 and 10,” says Ross. “[Later when I was older] there were incidents in the theatre where men came on to me, and there were people feeling me all over and I went home and thought about it. I equated movies with sex.”

White Trash is also notable for its soundtrack featuring Led Zep. I tell Toby I’ll never listen to Stairway to Heaven the same way again.

“No one [from Led Zep] sued us,” Ross says. “At that time gay porn was considered so off the beaten track that there was no money to be made from us.”

Today, the porn industry releases dozens of new titles each week, but that doesn’t mean the quality has improved. Just look at all the free porn on the Internet.

“Some of it is very good, but 90 per cent of it is crap,” says Ross. “Today, with video cameras, every actor with a nine-inch cock wants to be a star and every director thinks they’re Cecil B. DeMille.”

Ross isn’t exactly Cecil B. DeMille either. He’s more like the John Waters of porn, a status he maintained by casting freaks and weirdoes in many of his films, one of the reasons why so many of his stars didn’t die with the onslaught of AIDS.

“Wakefield Poole used the clone type whereas I cast the runaways, the fringe homosocial scene, and they mostly survived,” Ross points out. “A lot of my friends are still around today.”

For his body of work, Ross was inducted into the GayVN Awards Hall of Fame (the Oscars of the porn world ) in 2003, and was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Grabbys (the Golden Globes of porn) in 2008.

Also in 2008. Montreal rapper Socalled  and his musician friends – the self-dubbed “Homo Supergroup” featuring Owen Pallett of Final Fantasy (and sometime Arcade Fire member), Mike Dubué of the Hilotrons, Stef Schneider of Bell Orchestre and Al Watsky – performed a live soundtrack during a midnight screening of Cruisin ’57 at Montreal’s last-remaining porn theatre, Cinema L’Amour on The Main, during that city’s famed Pop Montreal festival (watch a live clip on VIMEO by clicking here).

As for Ross, who came out at the age of 13 in 1968 to the absolute horror of his parents (“I was not loved”), he has found happiness at long last.

“I [was] grateful for the Montreal tribute,” Ross told me. “I do feel a sense of pride being one of the founders of gay porn.”

Click here for the official Toby Ross website, here for Toby’s Tumblr site, here for his Pinterest page and here to purchase Toby’s memoir from Amazon.

Watch an entertaining clip of rapper Socalled's Homo Supergroup playing the live score at the Cruisin 57 screening at Pop Montreal, by clicking here. Renowned film historian and author Thomas Waugh introduces the film.

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