UC Irvine

In the 1960s and 1970s California was simultaneously at the forefront of the American adult film industry and a central stage for queer organizing and struggle. However, the links between queer history and adult film history extend beyond geographic proximity. In this period, the adult film industry embraced lucrative, but sexually illicit content that positioned it and its films as “deviant” from the postwar norms of heterosexual consumer culture. Queer “deviance” formed the connective tissue between this industry and its perceived obscenity both because sex in public was an illicit matter and because queer audiences, spaces, and content contributed significantly to the economic viability of the adult film industry in these decades. Despite adult-oriented motion pictures’ origins in the profit motives of exploitation cinema, queer-oriented industry practices, whether intentionally or not, facilitated forms of public queer visibility. Moving beyond representational approaches to adult film, this study’s examination of production, distribution, and exhibition foregrounds modes of censorship that range from business restrictions on market availability to law enforcement’s stringent policing of exhibition spaces under legal regimes such as obscenity. A heteronormative lens of legal rhetoric and enforcement sutured a perceived triad of obscenity, queerness, and contaminated public space onto the adult film industry and its patrons. Ultimately, the regulation and policing of California’s adult media industries in the 1960s and 1970s negatively impacted the niche media, spaces, and consumption sites that had energized the formation of marginal, queer audiences in this crucial period of film history.