Contemporary moral crusaders may wring their hands about how the Internet has made pornography pervasive, leading to a general loosening of morals, but plenty of people would argue that the golden age of vice has long passed. Ask anybody who waxes nostalgic about the old sex clubs and grindhouse theaters of Times Square in the '70s, or the anything-goes speakeasies and brothels of the Jazz Age. Or ask Dave Thompson, whose book Black And White And Blue: Adult Cinema From The Victorian Age To The VCR offers a history of the stag film, finding a whole subculture of small-town porn kingpins, amateur exhibitionists, and clandestine lodge meetings, all operating relatively openly during some of the most conservative eras in recent American history.
Thompson is a rock-music reporter by trade, and he argues persuasively for stag films as a spiritual kin to punk. Unlike the more polished loops and feature-length adult films that emerged in the '70s, stags tended to be DIY affairs, made by amateurs and opportunists with a camera and a sense of daring. They didn't necessarily record what they thought an audience would want to see, but what they themselves thought was sexy, which means that a century of stags, watched consecutively, make up a record of human desire—as well as a record of where people lived, what they wore, and what they thought qualified as a good dirty joke.
Because of the shady nature of the productions, Thompson has to rely largely on conjecture and anonymous recollections to piece together his narrative, which means it's impossible to call Black And White And Blue definitive. But it's definitely enlightening, and entertaining. Eschewing strict chronology, Thompson follows the trail down its many detours, talking about censorship battles, the evolution of fetishes, the regional and international variations of the stag formula, and how the post-Deep Throat boom in above-ground porn dampened the entrepreneurial, enthusiastic spirit of the stags. (Though Thompson smartly notes that the 10-minute amateur porn clips that have proliferated on the Internet are essentially stags reborn.) Mostly, Thompson notes how fly-by-night porn has served a useful function for more than a century, if only by clarifying the sexual norms for the inexperienced and cautiously curious.