This is a past event
Ask Any Buddy is a moustache and leather clad exploration of gay men’s social history, told through a collage of vintage gay adult movies. Available to rent on QFT Player from Monday 16 to Sunday 22nd November, as part of Outburst Queer Arts Festival.
Content warning: This film contains explicit imagery and is therefore 18+.
Long before films like Love, Simon and Call Me by Your Name became common fare at the multiplex, the only places gay men could see their lives depicted with any degree of reality on screen was at their local all-male adult cinema.
Set on the streets and piers, and in the bars, cinemas, bath-houses and toilets of New York and San Francisco and using fragments from over 125 theatrical adult feature films spanning 1968-1986, Evan Purchell’s experimental documentary offers an unabashed, explicit and hot kaleidoscopic snapshot of urban gay culture in the era—or at least how it looked in the movies.
From tearoom cruising to actual police raids, Purchell excavates rare footage shot at dozens of real bathhouses, bars, movie theaters, pride parades and legendary hotspots like New York’s piers to explore the genre’s unique blend of fantasy and reality and its role in documenting a subculture that was just starting to come into visibility in the years immediately following the Stonewall Riots.
"A clever, funny, and sexy phantasmagoric tribute to a bygone era" - The Quietus
Film courtesy of Evan Purchell and the American Genre Film Archive.