During the early to mid-1970s, when feature-length hardcore films became a popular cultural phenomenon in the United States, hardcore came to designate more than just a genre or an industry—it became a ubiquitous mode of performance, an ethos, and a style. This article explores how hardcore as a style was taken up by the popular gay-marketed entertainment magazine After Dark . Through a close descriptive analysis of three photo spreads from 1975–76, it illuminates how female, gay male, and otherwise non-straight-identifying performers participated in a hardcore stylistic that, paradoxically, worked to shape queer elaborations of heteroeroticism. Within these vital images of singers, dancers, models, and performance artists, created at the height of hardcore's newfound cultural influence, performances of female-male coupling and group-centered socio-sexual activity both worked with and moved to dissolve normative heterosexist configurations of sex and gender.

This essay examines the legacy of gay playwright and activist Robert Chesley through an in-depth look at his most controversial play, Jerker , or The Helping Hand (1986), uncovering a unique strand of safe-sex advocacy that emphasized sound—and the voice specifically—to manifest queer desire. Phone sex, or dial-a-porn, as it was first called, rose to popularity in the 1980s amid the AIDS crisis. Chesley's depiction of it onstage reimagined the pornographic address, unleashing it from the visual primacy of video porn of the time to foreground elegiac, pedagogic, and ethical dimensions. The broadcast of Jerker on radio station KPFK-FM, however, spurred a legal redefinition of indecency in 1987 and further imperiled safe-sex advocacy that refused to skirt eroticism. In an era when “Silence = Death,” Chesley's Jerker revealed the complexities of the mediated voice as a tool for survival, remembrance, and unbounded pleasure.

During the 1980s US feminist sex wars, pornography edited its own history, leaving a distorted record both less problematic and less queer than scholars have yet recognized. Academic inquiry into pornography coincided with home-video boom years, and research often took place in adult backrooms, necessarily because pornography was so poorly archived. Yet even as access has shifted from VHS to digital, the field has yet to reckon with how its interpretive frameworks were shaped by a material history in which the films that scholars watched were often altered from the versions patrons had seen in theaters. Gone from both straight and gay films were many transgressive sex acts that had frequently been staples of the genre, affecting the perceived oeuvre of nearly every hardcore filmmaker of the era. This article recovers the lost history of sexual media editing, arguing for a more carefully historicized interrogation of the commercial sources of our porn archives.