Article Title

123

Fashion Theory, Volume 18, Issue 2, pp. 123–148

DOI: 10.2752/175174114X13890223974461
Reprints available directly from the Publishers.
Photocopying permitted by licence only.
© 2014 Bloomsbury Publishing PLC.

Costume or
Dress? The Use
of Clothing in the
Gay Pornography
of Jim French’s
Shaun Cole Colt Studio
Shaun Cole is a writer, lecturer, Abstract
and currently Course Leader
for MA History and Culture of
Fashion at London College It would seem that one of the intentions of the viewer of gay pornography
of Fashion. His publications would be to see the sexual engagement of the participants (and perhaps
include “Don We Now Our
Gay Apparel”: Gay Men’s
the “money shot”) with a focus upon the gymnastics and writhing of
Dress in the Twentieth Century bodies that constitute the practice and representation of sexual activity
(2000), and The Story of Men’s within the film. However, before nudity or nakedness is presented the
Underwear (2010).
s.r.cole@fashion.arts.ac.uk
“characters” are dressed. Using the films and photography of Colt
Studio and its founder Jim French from the period 1967–81 as a focus
this article explores the ways in which the “characters” are constructed
through their clothing and costuming. It will address the ways in which
124 Shaun Cole

these “icons” of masculinity that had developed in the pre-liberation

physique magazines and stag films reflected the prototypes, archetypes,
and stereotypes of post-liberation gay identity and dressed appearance
in the fifteen years following the Stonewall riots and gay liberation.
Colt Studio was famed for its particular presentation of hypermasculine
images and a “stable” of masculine actors that included Clone superstar
Al Parker. This article will offer an analysis of the use of particular items
of clothing and the iconic styles of leatherman, motorcycle cop, and gay
clone in Colt’s output of this period.

KEYWORDS: gay pornography, masculinity, cowboy, leather, arche­

type, Colt Studio

Introduction

We had been told there was full wardrobe at the COLT studio,
so we had to bring only ourselves … He photographed us both
dressed as leather men and cowboys. His studio had a wardrobe
like nothing I had ever seen before. It was packed to the rafters
with all kinds of masculine costumes and outfits. Jockstraps
hung everywhere and old pairs of sexy boots lined the walls. I
recognized so many of the shirts and jackets from the [Colt and
Mandate] magazines when I was growing up. Now I was getting
the opportunity to wear the same clothes that had graced the
bodies of all the musclemen before me. (Blake 2008: 143–4)

This reflection by the porn star Blue Blake highlights the importance of
costume in the creation of the films and photographs of Jim French’s
Colt Studio. The mere fact that French had assembled a wardrobe of
clothes and costumes that were used and reused in his still and moving
imagery indicates the way in which he considered this element of
his work. That Blue mentions both leather men and cowboys is also
significant, as these were recurring types not only in French’s work but
in gay iconography and in the dressed appearance of gay men in the
years following gay liberation of the late 1960s.
In this article I aim to explore the ways in which the “characters”
that feature in Colt Studio films and photographs between 1967 and
1981 are constructed through their clothing and costuming. Taking a
number of archetypical styles of gay dress from the 1970s I will examine
the way in which the presentations of a new found gay masculine
appearance was both influenced by, and reflected in, pornography of
the period. I would like to propose that gay men in their consumption
of pornography could both revel in the fantasy of the characters created
by the pseudonymously named porn stars and reflect on the reality of
the constructions and its relation to their own sexual and social lives.
 Costume or Dress? The Use of Clothing in the Gay Pornography of Jim French’s Colt Studio 125

Jim French and the Formation of Colt Studio

After being discharged from the United States Army in 1957, following
active service during the Korea conflict, Jim French (b. 1932), who had
trained at the Philadelphia Museum School of Art, moved to New York
where he worked as freelance fashion illustrator for clients including
department store Nieman Marcus. At the same time he was creating
his own private homoerotic physique drawings under the name of
Arion. For French the discipline of fashion illustration was key to his
developing style: “I don’t think there is any way my pictures could look
the way they do without coming from a background in illustration. I
have something to say, a way of saying it, a way of conceptualizing it,
making a statement clearly” (cited in Mainardi 2011: 61). During this
time Saul Stollman, with whom he had served in the army, approached
French about producing a series of male physique drawings. They
went into business together producing 8 × 10 inch reproductions of
French’s drawings that were sold by mail order through advertisements
in physique magazines under the name Lüger. French chose the name of
a German pistol for the company because, he recalled, “it symbolized
power and force” and was “the foreign equivalent of America’s Colt
Firearms” (cited in Mainardi 2011: 42).
The content of the Lüger images was in the tradition of other
male physique illustrators such as George Quaintance, Etienne (Dom
Orejudos), and Tom of Finland (Touko Laaksonen), representing
icons of masculinity such as bikers, cowboys, sailors, and construction
workers, which French saw as “standard pillars of masculinity”
(cited in Mainardi 2011: 70). John Mercer similarly notes they acted
as “exemplars of strident masculinity” and exhibiting “prototypical
characteristics” (2003: 287) that have subsequently come to populate
gay pornographic texts. French’s drawings were based upon physique-
style photographs he and a photographer named Lou Thomas took of
models and were adapted to enhance details of the costumes or the
fabric-clad genitals that were, according to obscenity regulations always
required to be covered. In 1967, following a falling out, French sold
Lüger to Stollman and set up a new company with Thomas, which
following the gun theme they named Colt. French took up the new
pseudonym of Rip Colt, inspired by an amateur photographer in San
Francisco called Rip Searby who had taken images of one of Colt’s first
models Alan Albert.

Leathermen and Bikers

Thomas was a well-known face on the New York gay leather scene
and this interest had influenced some of the content of Colt’s images.
In 1964, Thomas had put a photograph of himself wearing leather
126 Shaun Cole

jacket and jeans on the cover of the first edition of Boys in Leather
accompanied by model Gary Stone wearing a leather cap, biker boots,
and leather jockstrap (Fritscher 2008: 230). Five years later French took
a series of black-and-white photographs of San Francisco actor Paul
Gerrior, promoted by Colt Studio as “Ledermeister,” wearing a similar
hat and boots, holding a leather jacket with his genitals barely covered
by a mesh posing pouch. In 1968 French took a photograph, entitled
“Hogchopper” of a man sitting astride a motorcycle wearing a similar
cap, boots, and sleeveless leather jacket that is reminiscent of later works
by Robert Mapplethorpe. Reflecting on this image French recalled that
it was assumed that he was an active participant in the leather scene
but as he noted, “Because you draw or photograph somebody who
has a leather jacket, leather boots, a motorcycle, that doesn’t mean
that that’s something you personally are into … you don’t have to be
part of that world to illustrate it … to me it’s just illustration” (cited
in Mainardi 2011: 69). Jack Fritscher, novelist, editor-in-chief of gay
leather magazine Drummer (1975–99) and Robert Mapplethorpe’s one-
time lover, has noted how following their parting in 1971 French moved
to Los Angeles while Thomas remained in New York where he set up
his own studio, Target, that focused on leather, sometimes contributing
images to Drummer magazine, and founded the notorious gay leather
bar The Anvil. Although, as Fritscher has noted, following Thomas
leaving and French moving to California, Colt Studio moved away from
leather and presented a “Leather-Lite” look (2008: 197), French did
photograph men in leather clothing and in 1980 made a short film,
entitled Killer and Butch that centers around motorcycles with Butch
Barnes wearing a leather Muir cap, that featured in Tom of Finland’s
biker images and was popular headwear in gay leather clubs such as
the Anvil. In his essay on gay prototypes in pornography, John Mercer
notes that the leatherman “is of crucial significance to gay porn and is
one of the genre’s most recurrent prototypes” (2003: 287) and, as I have
discussed elsewhere, played a very real place in the masculinization of
gay male style (Cole 2000).

Not So Lonesome Cowboys

A similarly iconic and prototypical image in gay iconography and dress

is the cowboy. However, even more than the biker, whose appear­
ance informed and underpinned that of the archetypal leather man,
the cowboy projected an image of all American rugged outdoorsy
masculinity, a “derivative of the natural myth” that “implies virility,
simplicity and—most important—freedom from any type of structure”
(Fischer 1977: 19). The cowboy featured in many forms of popular
culture and thus as Hal Fischer has observed it “would be unlikely for
an American boy growing up in the 40’s or 50’s not to have a cowboy
 Costume or Dress? The Use of Clothing in the Gay Pornography of Jim French’s Colt Studio 127

hero” (1977: 19). However, the inherently masculine heterosexual

appeal could also be viewed differently through the intimate and
sometimes subliminally erotic readings that can be placed upon same-
sex homosocial environments and appearances in popular literature,
as discussed by Chris Packard in his book Queer Cowboys (2005).1
These queered cowboys appeared frequently in the photographs
and illustrations of underground erotic magazines such as Physique
Pictorial. French’s Lüger drawings pick up this queering of cowboys,
often removing their trousers and shirts but leaving them with the key
signifiers of hat and boots, and frequently presenting them in pairs
where the sexual tension was palpable. Like most of the “commercial”
but privately sold drawings in the 1960s, modesty was required by law,
often to French’s frustration: “I was trying for a feeling of authenticity
with all the appropriate props. Somehow, posing straps weren’t quite
right but they were all we were allowed in those days” (cited in Mainardi
2011: 147). However, French found subtle ways around this, such as
drawing the lariat held by one particular cowboy, shown in profile, in
the shape of a large phallus and scrotum.2
Cowboys continued to play a part in the development of Colt’s lexicon
and French recalls that at the first photo session he held with one of
Colt’s first models, Alan Albert, he dressed Albert in “white jeans with
a white cowboy hat and then in black jeans with a black cowboy hat.”
Albert’s Colt name “Blackjack” came from the name given to the series
of images (French in Mainardi 2011: 147–8). In 1969 Colt produced
a series of six drawings of cowboys under the title “Longhorns.” One,
“Longhorns – Dance” featured two cowboys standing face to face.
The dark-haired cowboy to the left is wearing a black cowboy hat,
sunglasses, a neckerchief, a denim jacket, gun holster, and decorative
cowboy boots. His blond companion, wearing white cowboy hat, polka
dot neckerchief, leather waistcoat, leather wrist strap, and boots, with
a heart tattoo on his left bicep, is tying the first cowboy’s neckerchief.
Posed in front of a “sign” that reads “DANCE SATURDAY NIGHT,”
they are so close together that the tips of their large penises almost
touch. While the attention to the detail of the clothing is typical of Colt
drawings and reinforces the training French received in illustration,
there is a greater fashion relationship with this image (see Figure 1).
The image was reproduced in issue seven of Manpower, a Colt Studio
magazine, in 1974 which was bought by British designer and music
manager Malcolm McLaren when he was living in New York. McLaren
appropriated the image and added a text “conversation” between the
two cowboys – “ello Joe been anywhere lately” “Nah its all played
aht Bill Gettin too straight” – that expressed the “the frustration and
boredom [McLaren] felt at the time (Gorman 2011).3
In the same year as the Longhorns drawings, French produced a
series of short eight-millimeter loop films, called Saddle Tramps, that
were filmed at a former Western movie set called Hope Ranch, near
128 Shaun Cole

Figure 1
Copy of Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren’s “Sex” shop T-shirt, featuring Jim French’s “Longhorns – Dance” drawing.
 Costume or Dress? The Use of Clothing in the Gay Pornography of Jim French’s Colt Studio 129

Santa Barbara, California. One, set in a Western rocky terrain, features

six “cowboys” all of whom are wearing three key garments that signify
“cowboy”: hat, boots, and neckerchief. All, except one who is wearing
jeans, are wearing chaps that leave their genitals exposed, reflecting the
dress style of the Longhorns series and other, earlier Lüger drawings.
The rest of their outfits vary to include waistcoats, shirts, wrist straps,
and gun belts. Another loop is set in the ranch house itself where the
men appraise each other’s muscular semi-clothed bodies and French
particularly remembers a scene “looking down at the stable and all their
butts are displayed in the window openings” (French in Mainardi 2011:
181). The models included a hustler called Billy Ferguson (whom French
believed was not gay), Ken Sprague (who later went on to run Gold’s
Gym) known as Dakota, and Ledermeister, who makes a connection
in dress style between the cowboy and the leatherman. Incidentally no
sexual activity took place in the Saddle Tramps loops.4
Continuing the Cowboy theme and fantasy, the 1978 Colt film The
Bonus opens with a close up shot of a Colt belt buckle, framed by the
waistband of a pair of white jeans and a light-colored Western-style
checked shirt (see Figure 2). The camera pans up the body to actor,

Figure 2
Detail of Colt belt buckle from opening shot of The Bonus (1978).
130 Shaun Cole

Shadow’s, face beneath a white cowboy hat and then back down to the
belt buckle, where two sets of men’s hands undo the belt and unzip the
fly of the white jeans, revealing no underwear but large genitals encircled
by a metal cockring. The second set of hands belong to actor Mike
Davis, who has a moustache and is wearing a black cowboy hat and red
and blue plaid shirt, undone almost to the navel to reveal a muscular
hairy chest. As the camera pans back, it focuses upon his genital bulge
and the fact that the flies of his blue jeans are already open. Two minutes
into the film, the camera pans away from the sexual activity to reveal
the location as a cattle ranch and Shadow and Davis break apart as a
third “cowboy,” played by Gunther Keller, arrives riding a horse. Like
the other two he is dressed in classic cowboy, and by this time gay clone,
style: black cowboy hat, red and black plaid shirt jacket over white
Western-style shirt, tan-colored jeans, and brown cowboy boots (see
Figure 3).5 After dismounting from his horse, Keller hands Davis an

Figure 3
Gunther Keller, Mike Davis, and Shadow in cowboy clothes in The Bonus (1978).
 Costume or Dress? The Use of Clothing in the Gay Pornography of Jim French’s Colt Studio 131

envelope of money and the two kiss, an action that could imply that
this is a paid for sexual encounter. Shadow watches as Davis and Keller
undress and move to a stall to have sex, after Davis puts the money in
his jeans which he hangs over the stable partition. Two sex scenes ensue:
one between Keller and Davies and the second a solo masturbatory
scene where Shadow’s jeans are around his ankles revealing a leather
cockring, which is mirrored by the studded leather wristband worn by
Keller. Throughout, all three men keep on their boots, reinforcing their
supposed identities as cowboys, while Shadow never removes his hat,
similarly reflecting the mystery suggested in his name. Davis and Keller
encourage Shadow to join them in a threesome and following Shadow
and Davis’s ejaculations, the former dresses slowly, pulling his jeans
up to frame his genitals in the open button flies of his jeans, before he
pushes them down the right leg of his jeans, turns to take the money
from Davis’s jeans pocket, and rides away on Keller’s horse.
I focus upon the details of the clothing and the non-sexual activity
here in order to make a number of points: first about the relation
between the clothing of porn actors and gay clones of the period;
second to address the focus on the primacy of “well-hung” men in
pornography; and third to engage in the debate about the relevance of
plot and narrative in gay pornographic film. As I have noted above the
cowboy played a key role in the creation of gay physique photography
iconography. In the early 1970s following gay liberation American gay
men were seeking to challenge the stereotypes of limp-wristed effete
“queens” and to become, or at the very least to look like, “real men.” So
they looked to iconic images of rugged American masculinity, including
the cowboy with his associations of toughness, virility, strength, and
potency for inspiration. The signifiers of blue-collar working-class
tough masculinity—jeans, plaid shirts, work boots, and facial hair—all
became key staples in the clone wardrobe. Gay author Felice Picano’s
1979 thriller The Lure describes a scene in “The Grip” gay bar that
illustrates this move from preconceived ideas and stereotypes to new
masculine archetypes:

He’d always associated homosexuality with feminine gestures and

speech. But in here it was just the opposite: an extreme manliness,
unruffled, almost frontiersman calm, as though all those Gary
Cooper movies had come to life. Sure! That was it! The rough
clothing, the swaggering walk, the drawling speech. They were
acting out cowboy fantasies.” (Picano 1979: 52)

In his tongue-in-cheek guide to clone style, The Butch Manual: The

Current Drag and How to Do It, Clark Henley describes how to wear
these masculine items of clothing in a particularly “butch” manner.
Shoes “must be durable” (1982: 67) and shirts, which include cowboy-
inspired blue denim work and flannel varieties, as well as T-shirts,
132 Shaun Cole

tank‑tops, and gray athletic shirts, are selected “with one aim in mind, to
show off his torso” (1982: 58). His trousers (crucially and importantly
Levi’s 501s) or “panting baskets” must “show off his bulging calves,
his tantalizing thighs, his perfect buns, and of course, his notorious
basket” (1982: 55). In order to show off this “panting basket” to its
best effect, underwear “is completely unnecessary” and the one item
that is favorably described is “the all-time-crowd pleaser” jockstrap
(1982: 66), to which I will return later.

Big Dicks and Tight Pants

Henley’s emphasis on the crotch-hugging nature of jeans is reemphasized

in his discussion of the “persistent fantasy that [Butch’s] sex partners
will throw their legs in the air and beg ‘Oh Hot man, fill me with that
big hot dick’” (1982: 48), reflecting the language frequently used in gay
pornographic film. The centrality of a large penis in pornography is, Peter
Lehman proposes, a “genre convention” that marks a differentiation
between porn and the primacy of the “desirable big dick” and art with its
“tasteful aesthetic penis” (2006: 11, 14).6 John Mercer meanwhile notes
that specifically in gay pornography a big dick is a “pre-eminent unitary
currency” (2006: 155). To bring this to back to Colt Studio specifically,
when discussing his first meeting with Al Parker7 in 1976, French noted
that “he had two of three things I required: he had a wonderful face and
he was generously endowed” (cited in Mainardi 2011: 186). One of
Parker’s own first encounters with Colt Studio centered on the penis size
of the model. A set of Colt photographs he ordered from a magazine
advert he found on the way home from school contained one of a model
who “went by the name of Toby. I remember seeing a picture of his
dick next to a Coke can – the can looked small by comparison” (cited
in Edmonson 2000: 6). Copies of two of the photographs from this set
are reproduced in The Jim French Diaries (2011) and reveal that Toby is
wearing a white full-body overall/jumpsuit with all the buttons undone
and his genitals sticking out.
This form of display is common in French’s photographs where models
wear a variety of styles clothing, including a three-piece beige suit worn
by Mark Rutter in a 1980 photograph that in the juxtaposition between
penis and suit fabric is reminiscent of Robert Mapplethorpe’s Man in
the Polyester Suit (1981) photograph. In the 1979 Colt film The Senses
Taker Ralph Whitaker dressed as a respectable businessman arrives at
Bruce Craig’s house in a russet brown suit and after being shown inside
fondles his crotch, opens his flies, and lifts his genitals out to rest framed
by the trouser fabric. A 1975 photograph of Al Parker, dressed in a blue
denim jacket and blue jeans opened at the flies and waist and pushed
down, almost recreates this reveal. For Parker’s first film for Colt,
Chute (1977), French paired Parker with Toby. This featured a scene
 Costume or Dress? The Use of Clothing in the Gay Pornography of Jim French’s Colt Studio 133

Figure 4
Al Parker wearing flared jeans
and Toby wearing military
in which, after finding Toby hanging from a parachute in a tree dressed
overalls in The Chute (1977).
in olive drab military overalls similar in style to those in the “Coke”
photographs, Parker “climbed into the tree and somehow Toby’s over­
alls were unzipped” (Edmonson 2000: 167), revealing his genitals in
what Parker’s biographer Roger Edmonson calls the “culmination of
[Parker’s] most treasured boyhood fantasy” (2000: 88) (see Figure 4).

Is Plot and Narrative Important?

This brings me to the place of narrative and plot and its relation to
costume in gay pornographic film. In Chute, Parker discovering Toby
dressed as parachutist hanging from a tree serves purely as a means of
introducing the two to allow for sexual scenes staged in the back of
Parker’s truck. Similarly, The Bonus set up a narrative which “begins”
when Gunther Keller arrives to pay his ranch hands for work, which
leads to a series of sexual scenes, and ends with one of the ranch hands
taking all the money, following the “money shots.” French himself has
134 Shaun Cole

noted that Colt’s “early films were almost always shot on location and I
would decide what we were going to do on the way there” and that the
“plot” of Chute was inspired by finding a parachute in an Army Navy
store en route to the remote filming location. Both Harris (1999) and
Dyer (1989, 2004) have noted how the plot in gay pornographic film
has been criticized for either a lack of plot or that it is almost incidental,
serving only to drive the film towards ejaculation. While Gertrude
Koch has maintained that “the trappings of anonymous passion” and
the “hearty gymnastic primacy of genital sex” obscures both “desire”
and the establishing of characterization and storyline that is created by
costumes and locations (2004: 159), Dyer has pointed out that if all the
film consists of is a “fuck between two men” then a series of narrative
elements are still present that lead up to and follow the “money shot”:
“the arrival on the scene of the fuck, establishing contact … undressing,
exploring various parts of the body, coming, parting” (2002: 140–1).
In her seminal work on pornography, Hard Core, Linda Williams
discusses how close-up shots of particular body parts are privileged in
pornography in what she calls the “principle of maximum visibility”
(1989: 48). Taking this idea further, John Mercer believes that “the
fragmentation of the male body in gay pornography” not only “con­
structs the homoerotic narrative” but “is in fact central to it”: that this
fragmentation creates a way of looking at the male body, placing an
emphasis on “exteriority and physicality” (2006: 157). I would like
to argue that in the case of Colt films the fragmented dressed body
and the fragmented focusing on specific items of clothing is central
to the construction and delivery of the narrative, and I will return to
specific garments later in this article. Daniel Harris turns Mercer’s
argument around arguing that gay pornography has “contributed to
the creation of the gay body” (1999: 127) and is echoed by Dyer’s belief
that this knowledge of the gay body and its place and involvement in
pornographic film is “a culturally validated knowledge of the body”
(2002: 138).8 Dyer continues that the “experiential education of the
body” that is experienced through the consumption of gay pornography
has “contributed to and legitimized the masculine model of gay
sexuality” (2002: 144) that I have argued was a key component of 1970s
gay clone identity, and was influenced by prototypes of masculinity that
appeared in earlier physique imagery such as that by Tom of Finland
and French’s Lüger drawings.
Mercer has proposed that particularly through repetition the
homoerotic prototype has operated as an “idealized object” for gay
men, providing a “regularizing and normative role” in which “hyper-
masculinity and machismo become the signifiers of gay sexuality as well
as the object of gay desire” (2003: 289). Thus for the gay viewer of gay
pornography “it is true that the viewer, sexually aroused, lusts after
the object, it is equally true that he may also want to be that object”
(Bronski 1984: 165; italics in original). Describing his own practice as a
 Costume or Dress? The Use of Clothing in the Gay Pornography of Jim French’s Colt Studio 135

gay pornographic filmmaker during the 1970s, Bob Alvarez of Hand in

Hand Pictures remembered “we tried to show as much as possible what
the true scene was. Anything we had was pretty much about consensual
sex between two gay people living in a real gay world” (cited in Lovett
2008). Gay writer and activist Roger MacFarlane recalls that in the
1970s in major American cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles
“anything that was in pornography you could have in abundance on the
street any day … Life was a pornographic film” (cited in Lovett 2008).
Both Scott Macdonald (1990) and Michael Kimmel (1990) have
noted how porn­ography is used by men in a “educational sense” to
observe sexual practices, negotiate personal desire and fantasy, and
learn “about the relationship between their sexuality and masculinity”
(Kimmel 1990: 12); so while some gay men in the 1970s were watching
films such as those made by Colt and Hand in Hand to “learn” about
sexuality, for many others it was a about a validation of their identity,
lifestyle, and sexual choices, bridging a gap between what had been a
fantasy and could be a reality.

Fantasy or Reality

Reflecting on French’s use of “standard iconic fantasies” in his films,

drawings, and photographs, both he and Robert Mainardi mirrored Hal
Fisher’s sentiments noting that “Western/cowboy, policeman/leather,
bodybuilders all a part of the gay … id” (French in Mainardi 2011: 165)
and “the cowboy is one of the most traditional of American icons, it’s
just that you [French] keyed into eroticizing these images for gay men”
(Mainardi 2011: 165). Gay cultural critic Michael Bronski has noted
how fantasy has always been important within gay cultural life, because
homosexuality itself was, up to and including the period covered in this
essay, a “forbidden fantasy” (1984: 173). Teresa de Lauretis meanwhile
offers a broader view, writing that fantasy “is a fundamental human
activity based on the capacity for imagining and imaging” (1999: 306).
Fantasy clearly plays a big role in the construction and reception of
gay pornography: in their analysis of gay (or as they term it, noting
that not all actors identified as gay, all-male) pornographic film, Rich
Cante and Angelo Restivo have described how “structures of fantasy”
have “enframe[d] the visual field” and a convergence of “‘reality’ and
diegesis” occur through the “intervention of fantasy” (2004: 154). In
relation to this notion of fantasy and constructions of sexually active
and engaged “gay” men, Richard Dyer has noted that gay pornography
“collapses the distinction between representation and that which it is
a representation of” i.e. the sexual act (2002: 146). But I would argue
that the distinctions between reality and fantasy could also be collapsed
within gay pornography, particularly that produced by Colt Studio,
following Greg Blachford’s proposition that for gay men in the 1970s
136 Shaun Cole

and 1980s, it was “possible to separate this fantasy image from the
reality of that fantasy” (1981: 192). Blachford is echoed by gay activist
Arnie Kantrowitz’s reminiscences of the 1970s: “you needed to get
a glimpse, a shadow anything to build your fantasy on of what this
person looked like and then from there what this person was. Of course
we didn’t really think they were lumberjacks or cops in the back room
at the International Male or the Anvil” (cited in Lovett 2008).
The production of fantasy identities in gay porn can be linked
closely to the descriptive texts in the physique magazines of the 1950s
where models with monosyllabic forenames were identified as manual
laborers and ex-military (Mercer 2006: 151). French continued this
practice giving his models pseudonyms that reinforced a certain rugged
masculinity and producing descriptors such as “Caution prevents us
from disclosing which area of the criminal justice administration Bruce
[Craig] works in but enough to say he is more at home in uniform than
out” (cited on smutjunkies.com). This merging of reality and fantasy
in Colt Studio stars and films is clear in the case of Clint Lockner, who
before becoming a porn actor was in the Los Angeles police force and
in at least three Colt films from the early 1980s—Lockner’s Key (1980),
Moving Violation (1980), and Playing with Danger (1981)—played a
motorcycle cop (see Figure 5).9 Similarly, Paul Gerrior, aka Ledermeister,
had worked as a lineman for an electrical company and appeared as
an electrician in the 1972 Colt film The Meterman alongside Dakota
(Fritscher 2008: 511). As both French (2011) and Cante and Restivo
(2006) have identified, not all actors in “gay” pornographic film and
other imagery identify as gay. Ken Sprague/Dakota for example was
married to a woman, while both Mike Davis, whose real name was
Winn Strickland, and who was a successful set designer, and Al Parker
were both out and made a point that they were gay men appearing in
gay pornography. French was aware of his creation of a fantasy in his
porn stars noting audiences should be allowed “their fantasies. That’s
what it’s all about. Let people speculate whether these men are straight
or gay, whatever they prefer. Let them believe they are genuine cowboys.
Or real mechanics or insatiable leather masters …” (cited in Mainardi
2011: 286).

Real Clothing and Fantasy Costumes

In relating fantasy and reality Cante and Restivo also note how gay men
have transformed themselves in large urban setting through the purchase
of “necessary equipment” that includes particular items of clothing and
pornography (2004: 144–5). The clothing purchased to construct a gay
identity was often featured in Jim French’s Colt films, further reinforcing
the convergence of reality and fantasy. Al Parker’s second film for Colt—
Timber Wolves (1977), consisting of two eight-millimeter loops—placed
 Costume or Dress? The Use of Clothing in the Gay Pornography of Jim French’s Colt Studio 137

Figure 5
Clint Lockner as motorcycle cop in Lockner’s Key (1980).

him in a cowboy-related scenario with Mike Davis, who had starred in

The Bonus. The opening scene of Timber Wolves Part One is of trees,
sky, and mountains evoking an idealized Western location. The camera
pans in to show Parker standing outside a log cabin “ranch” house (near
Breckenridge, Colorado, that had been named “The Bunkhouse” by its
owners) wearing denim dungarees and brown cowboy boots. Davis
arrives on the scene on horseback dressed in tan cowboy hat, tan jacket,
blue checked shirt, white jeans, and brown cowboy boots. Davis retains
his jeans and boots throughout the sex scenes, while Parker loses his
dungarees. Timber Wolves Part Two relocates Parker and Davis to the
mountain side, where they are shown reclining on the rocks beside a
waterfall, dressed in their original outfits. As a prelude to sex they undress
but retain their footwear reflecting a fetishization of footwear and a
reinforcement of the cowboy fantasy. The blurring between fantasy and
reality around Timber Wolves is also apparent in the stills that French
produced both to promote the film and to sell as sets of photographs and
138 Shaun Cole

in his photographs of Parker and French “off duty” during the filming.
In one Davis and Parker are dressed identically, clones of one another, in
matching crotch-hugging denim jeans and plaid flannel shirts, the only
difference that Parker is bearded and Davis clean shaven.10 In another,
Davis is wearing the same checked shirt and boots from the film along
with a pair of cut-down denim shorts. Parker is wearing a denim jacket
open to reveal his bare chest, white denim cut-down shorts, work boots,
and chunky hiking socks. They sit leaning against one another on the
rocky mountaintop, Davis’s hand on Parker’s knee and Parker’s testicles
purposely or accidentally hanging out of the leg of his shorts.
Cut-down denim shorts were a key staple of the clones’ summer
ward­robe, as evidenced in the documentary photographs of gay photo­
graphers such as Leonard Fink. As such they also appear as “costume”
in Colt’s films from the mid-1970s onwards. For example, in the
opening scenes Flat Bed (1976) Paul Storr is dressed in very short cut-
off blue denim shorts with brown work boots, white sports socks, a
red and black plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled up to show his biceps,
and a red baseball cap. As the camera moves in on him pumping the
tires of his car, the focus is on his buttocks encased in tight denim, his
muscular thighs, and, mirroring Parker in the image described above,
his scrotum hanging out of the leg of his shorts. His sexual partner in
this film, Gordon Grant, arrives on the screen bare-chested, wearing
blue denim jeans, a black belt, and brown works boots; again reflecting
standard clone clothing (see Figure 6). In Moving Violation (1980) these
genital‑revealing cut-off jeans again make an appearance, this time
worn by Mike Davis, with a red singlet. He is discovered lying on a
bed reading gay pornographic magazines by Clint Lockner, dressed as a
motorcycle cop—helmet, fur-collared black leather jacket, black riding
trousers with white stripe, gloves, and long calf-length motorcycle
boots, with a moustache—who has chased Mark Rutter into Davis’s
house. Rutter is dressed in a standard clone uniform of boots, jeans,
leather chaps, white singlet (with a Colt logo), aviator sunglasses, and
a trimmed full beard. Before approaching Davis, Luckner engages in a
strip scene, removing each item of his uniform slowly, almost fetishizing
each garment, finishing by undoing and pushing down his trousers to
reveal two metal cock rings encasing his genitals. The motorcycle cop
uniform enhances the element of fantasy by conjuring up “images of
authority and power” (Snaith 2003: 85). Davis and Locker similarly
slowly strip Rutter, again with a pause as his jeans are lowered around
his genitals.
Lockner’s strip scene also occurs in Lockner’s Key (1980), where
his uniform is identical except for the trousers which are beige with a
yellow strip rather than black and a black leather Muir cap. In this film
the sex scene between Locker and Bruno, who is initially presented to
the viewer lying on a bed, similarly to Davis in Moving Violation but
wearing a singlet and jockstrap, is a fantasy that Bruno imagines after
 Costume or Dress? The Use of Clothing in the Gay Pornography of Jim French’s Colt Studio 139

Figure 6
Paul Storr in cut-down jeans and plaid shirt and Gordon Grant wearing Wrangler jeans in Flat Bed (1976).

Locker (significantly wearing a motorcycle helmet, signifying real cop as

opposed to gay fantasy version) has found Bruno’s keys left in his front
door. Here, there is a fetishization of each of the items of clothing but
also a presentation of “masculinity as a sexual fetish” (Gough 1989:
121). When Lockner lowers his trousers he reveals a white jockstrap
identical to that worn by Bruno at the beginning of the film. The
jockstrap is a garment of homoerotic masculine athleticism where the
pouch “enshrines the symbol of the myth of masculinity” or phallus
(Pronger 2000: 160), while at the same time paradoxically revealing
and drawing attention to the buttocks and anus through the positioning
of the straps. For its simultaneous hiding and revealing nature and its
athletic associations the jockstrap became a fetishized item amongst gay
men and as such appears in a number of Colt film’s at the point before
a genital reveal. This overt fetishization is highlighted in the 1982 Surge
Studios film Turned On, which Al Parker both directed and starred
in. The final scene features Parker in a steamy bathhouse location
140 Shaun Cole

searching for the object of his desires, Sky Dawson, surrounded by ten
white-jockstrap-wearing men standing on plinths with their crotches at
Parker’s eye level. Parker is wearing a red jockstrap and when Dawson
appears he is wearing a yellow jockstrap. The colors could be read as a
reference to the hanky code, developed by gay men to indicate interest
in particular sexual activities.11

Classic Clone Style

The jockstrap as the essential clone undergarment is highlighted in a

further Colt Studio film—The Come On (1980). Here Mickey Squires
arrives in his car at a garage and as he gets out of his car his white
jockstrap is revealed through the rip in the back of his Levi’s 501s jeans.
It is significant here that the jeans are 501s as they were the clone jeans
and this lingering shot on Squires’s buttocks serves to both emphasize
his position as a clone and through the rip, to frame his buttocks and
anus, in the same way as the jockstrap. Squires’s sexual partner in
this film, Jack Hacker, is also significantly dressed in 501s along with
cowboy boots and a red baseball cap. In the left back pocket of his jeans
he has an oily rag, mirroring the hanky code and thus setting up the
expectation that he will initially take the active role in the forthcoming
sexual activity. Hacker also appears dressed in a similar clone outfit of
501s, boots, and khaki military-style shirt alongside Clint Lockner in
the 1981 Colt film Playing with Danger.
The classic Clone style worn by Hacker is replicated in the 1981
film Prowlers. The film opens on two pairs of work boots, one brown,
one black, surmounted by the hems of denim jeans. Following a cut to
an opening door, Mark Rutter is presented to the camera and viewer
wearing the classic basic clone style of boots, jeans, white T-shirt, and
denim shirt, topped off with a moustache and blue denim cap. His
companion Ed Wiley, is almost identically dressed—a clone of Rutter—
but with a blue plaid rather than denim shirt and a rip in the front thigh
of his jeans. A rear view of Wiley reveals that his jeans are Levis 501s, as
the camera focuses in on the red tab label. This is repeated later during
the sexual activity as Rutter lowers his jeans and they too are proven to
be 501s (see Figure 7). The rip in Wiley’s jeans acts in the same way as
the cut-off nature of jeans described earlier in allowing easy access to
genitals that are free from underwear. Like the striptease performed by
Lockner, Rutter and Wiley slowly remove selected items of their clothes,
but in this instance neither is entirely naked, retaining signifiers of their
clone identities throughout the sexual scenes.
In Colt films of this period there are never more than three men
engaged in sexual activity, partly due to the nature of the length of the
eight-millimeter film that was used. However two other feature-length
films, produced by different studios, did introduce more varieties of
 Costume or Dress? The Use of Clothing in the Gay Pornography of Jim French’s Colt Studio 141

Figure 7
Close-up detail of Mark Rutter’s
Levi’s 501s, with focus on
red tab label, in The Prowlers
(1981). coupling and one particular scene in each emphasizes and displayed the
standard images of clone style. Jack Deveau’s 1977 Night at the Adonis
features a scene in which one of the established staff members who
works at the porn cinema of the title shows a new employee around the
cinema. Standing on the top balcony they look down into the gloom,
illuminated by the flickering of the film, and the former explains the
styles of dress worn by each of the men below, as the camera focuses
upon each of them. As he describes the dress styles the men fondle
themselves, open their trousers to reveal their genitals and engage in
sexual activity with one another (Cante and Restivo 2004: 156). This
description mirrors a scene in Andrew Holleran’s novel Dancer from
the Dance (1980[1978]) where the established Sutherland describes
to the newcomer Malone “the various meanings of the outfits going
by” (1980: 172). Al Parker’s Turned On (1982) features a dream
sequence in which Parker has sex with a series of archetypal masculine
clone stereotypes—a cowboy, a leatherman, a sailor, a lumberjack, a
construction worker, and a businessman (see Figure 8)—which Parker’s
142 Shaun Cole

Figure 8
Archetypal masculine
stereotypes in Turned On
(1982).
 Costume or Dress? The Use of Clothing in the Gay Pornography of Jim French’s Colt Studio 143

biographer, Roger Edmonson, describes as “every sexual stereotype in

the canon, Village People-style” (2000: 132).12 Jim French too mentions
the Village People, reflecting how they had popularized and even watered
down the original prototypical images of gay masculinity that Mercer
identifies in Tom of Finland’s 1970 Untitled drawing (2006): “it’s true
that the Village People nailed those stereotypes once and for all, [but]
that’s not to say you can’t go back to those motifs if you have a new take
on them, if you approach it differently, if you enrich it somehow with
your own imagination” (cited in Mainardi 2011: 127). Something that
French continued to do until he sold Colt Studio to John Rutherford,
who had previously run the San Francisco-based pornography outfit
Falcon Studios, in 2003.

Conclusion

The films and photographs of Jim French’s Colt Studio contain a wealth
of representations of masculine men. In the early days of his production
of images, Jim French mirrored the prototypes that had been created by
illustrators such as Tom of Finland and photographers like Bob Mizer of
the Athletic Models Guild and Physique Pictorial. The films that French
produced at Colt Studio continued the use of such images and as gay
liberation began to make its impact upon gay men’s dressed appearance
and hypermasculine styles took a primary position, so this was reflected
in the clothing worn by the characters and stars of French’s still and
moving images.

Notes

1. Male hustlers dressed as cowboys appear in both John Rechy’s 1964

novel City of Night and James Leo Herlihy’s Midnight Cowboy
(1965). Andy Warhol’s 1968 film Lonesome Cowboys is a satirical
queered rereading of Hollywood Westerns and Shakespeare’s Romeo
and Juliet.
2. In an excerpt from his diary from December 28, 1967, French notes
“Walked to ‘Town Squire’ and bought posing straps … Trying to
darken them with tea” (Mainardi 2011: 148). Town Squire was a
gay-run boutique clothing store on Polk Street in San Francisco that
specialized in close-fitting fashionable clothes and underwear. The
link between a pornographer that had trained as a fashion illustrator
and a fashionable men’s boutique is interesting and would benefit
from further investigation. Town Squire was comparable to Vince
Man’s Shop in London. See Cole (2000, 2012).
3. This T-shirt sparked a prosecution for obscene exhibition in August
1975. See Gorman (2001) for more detail.
144 Shaun Cole

  4. Mustang Studio, a subsidiary of Falcon Studio that was set up

around the same time as Colt, made two films named Saddle
Tramps in the late 1990s demonstrating the ongoing popularity of
the cowboy as a gay pornographic archetype.
  5. For a further detailed discussion of the development of gay clone
style see Cole (2000).
  6. There is a considerable and well-documented debate about the
differ­ences and crossovers between pornography, erotica, and art
and this article is not the place to rehearse these arguments in any
detail, but it is perhaps worth noting a few definitions: Laura Kipnis
has identified that defining porn “is one big headache” as ‘[o] ne
person’s pornography is another person’s erotica” (1999: 64).
Lynda Nead meanwhile states “[f]or art to be art it has to engage
the mind rather than the body, [pornography] incite[s], or more
accurately excite[s], the body to action” (2004: 216). Marty Klein
says that “[p]eople use erotica to become aroused’ (2004: 248; my
italics) while Richard Dyer believes “a pornographic film is any film
that has as its aim sexual arousal in the spectator” (2002: 138),
once more blurring the boundaries.
  7. French chose the name Al Parker for Drew Okun as it “was the
name of one of my favorite classic American Illustrators. I liked the
directness of the name” (cited in Mainardi 2100: 186).
  8. This reflects Peter Lehman’s statement that “pornography is at best
a historically and culturally defined category and as such it changes
over time periods and within and between cultures” (2006: 10)
and Cante and Restivo’s belief that “pornography provides crucial
ideological sites at which social subjects are situated in relation to
the world” (2004: 110).
  9. In Colt Men 7, Rip Colt describes Locker as “college and police
academy graduate: marksman, weapons expert, operations super­
visor: efficient, low-key personality, extremely masculine, a tower
of sexuality” (http://www.smutjunkies.com/directory.html).
10. For more on the role of hair and the practices engaged in to control
head, facial, and body hair in relation to gay identity see Cole
(2008).
11. A full listing of colors and their corresponding activities can be
found in Cole (2000: 114).
12. Village People was a disco group created in 1977 that dressed
its six members in key styles drawn from the Clone canon: cow­
boy, leather­man, cop, construction worker, soldier, and American
Indian.
 Costume or Dress? The Use of Clothing in the Gay Pornography of Jim French’s Colt Studio 145

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