WEST

The first in a series of missions to rescue obscure 70s porn magazines from their decades of oblivion: 'West' (1973)
In 'West's' simple yet bizarre narrative, an African American hunk who may or may not be selling what looks like vaseline door to door suddenly starts getting it on in a standard porn manner with one of his potential customers, a somewhat hippieish meets teen idolish blond boy until what appears to be the blond's roommate or boyfriend or an intruder spies them and joins in whereupon the porn transforms into a sequence of awkward modern dance style poses that are apparently meant to represent the wild, go for broke three-way that would naturally ensue and ends not with the usual multiple orgasms but rather with an inconclusive if rather heroic pose. Whether the photographer was trying to challenge porn conventions in a period avant-garde manner or was very stoned or was seeking to comment on race relations or something else entirely for which the strangely unsexy title forms a clue, we'll never know, but the curious if somewhat annoying results are a very rare instance of deliberate experimentation within the medium of the gay porn magazine, and that plus the fact that I think the blond is hot made 'West' the first target of my new search and rescue missions.----
Posted by Dennis Cooper at 8:53 AM 6 comments