Yet these films and these images still captivate and the period they document and helped form remains fascinating – perhaps all the more so now that it seems vanished forever. This new style of gay masculinity is all over Ask Any Buddy, just as it is in the porn films of the period– the “ Castro clone” or the leatherman, images of gay men that were new at the time and for many liberating, if reductive, offering fetishized images of gay men as overwhelmingly white and almost unnervingly fit and masculine (save the occasional drag queen). In this period, particularly in the first several years, gay porn films were among the very few places depictions of queer sexuality and an emergent, liberated gay male identity could be seen on screen. A video companion to the Instagram account Purchell began in 2018, the Ask Any Buddy movie compiles footage from 126 gay porn features made between 19 into a “day in the life” document/fantasy of urban gay life in the year leading up to the Stonewall uprising and in the years that followed, as a (largely white) gay subculture became codified – in part through the porn films Purchell uses as her material. Today and tomorrow Elizabeth Purchell’s new feature-length video Ask Any Buddy streams as part of the 2020 Outfest Los Angeles LGBTQ Film Festival, which this year (aside from a handful of drive-in screenings) takes place mostly online.
