How Chuck Holmes Founded the World's First Gay Porn Empire

“Falcon was the outlet for Chuck to bring us homosexuals what the world never considered,” adult director Marc MacNamara tells VICE: “Anal.” But it wasn’t just sex that Falcon offered, he says: “It was a community. It was a place to feel a part of something greater.”

Unlike the shaved chests of the actors in Falcon’s films, the Chuck Holmes’ story is far from smooth. He’s been described as the “gay Hugh Hefner” for his lucrative role at Falcon, and “a gay Rockefeller” for his philanthropic and political work, but his American dream is a complicated one. Holmes was one of the founders of Human Rights Campaign and a key fundraiser for Clinton’s presidency, but he also resisted the use of condoms in Falcon films during the AIDs crisis, and faced criticism for depicting a model of masculinity that was always squeaky clean and invariably white.

Nevertheless, Holmes’s impact is indisputable. His company didn’t just erect an entire industry, it helped bring gayness out of the closet. “In the 70s it was much less common for gays to be out and open about their sexuality,” MacNamara says. “We were someone’s fun uncle or the flamboyant neighbour, but never sexual beings.” Enter Falcon: “Falcon and Chuck changed our world and how the world saw us.”

On the outside, Holmes looked like an unlikely king of gay porn. In VICE TV’s new season of Sex Before the Internet, John Rutherford of Colt Studios describes what he calls “the Chuck Holmes outfit”: “He always wore – always – a Ralph Lauren polo shirt, khaki pants and a belt. And all he would do is change the colour of the polo shirt.” Still passing for a real estate agent, Chuck was at odds with San Fran’s 70s gay scene of mustachio-ed leather daddies. He was conservative. Clean-cut. But it was this clean-shaven look that would go on to make Holmes millions, with Falcon’s films becoming synonymous with a tanned, clean-shaven, Calvin Klein-wearing college boy image.

“I met him first when he was a guest speaker at a class named ‘Sexual Variations’ at San Francisco State University,” Rutherford tells VICE. “Chuck and I didn’t physically meet, but a few months after that I’d come out as gay and my partner brought me to Falcon’s office to interview for a job shooting movies for them.” Rutherford was also in his mid-twenties. “Chuck was in his office and as we passed by I was introduced,” he says. “It was very formal and he was very intimidating.”

The important thing though, is that he was hired. Rutherford would go on to become Head of Production and then President of Falcon Studios, but in the early 70s that was all ahead of him. “It wasn’t until much later that Chuck and I became close as friends and coworkers,” Rutherford says.

Having gathered a crack team of young creatives to his new company, Holmes pretty much stood back and let them get on with it. “Chuck wasn’t involved with the day to day and really trusted me to keep his vision on track,” Rutherford says. “He and I were very similar in our tastes, and after getting to know Chuck I realised he and I were very similar in many ways personally,” he recalls. “We were both only children of divorced mothers, and both somewhat insecure about our sexuality and what it meant to be a gay man.”

This insecurity was kind of justified – it was the early 70s. Same-sex sexual activity had only begun to be decriminalised in the US a decade earlier, and the threat of being charged under obscenity laws hung over every porn producer. In 1973, Holmes was indicted for sending “obscene material” through the mail, but, thanks to the assistance of Michael John Kennedy, the attorney who represented the Black Panthers, he never faced trial. But this experience, coupled with witnessing other pornographers get sent to jail for similar “crimes”, undoubtedly stuck with Holmes.

“Chuck was always in fear of something, but that kept him on his toes,” Rutherford says. Everyone at Falcon Studios in the early days had to be pretty savvy. “We stopped selling to states that were considered more religious or rightwing,” he recalls. “We also created two versions of some videos – ones that were more ‘clean’ and less ‘extreme’ for stores, and the ones with more graphic and ‘extreme’ content were only for mail order, direct to customers.”

Mail order may sound impossibly old-school today, but that was how Holmes built his gay porn empire. Ads for Falcon were tucked in the back of men’s magazines. Customers signed up, and waited for porn to arrive in the post. With Falcon, they didn’t have to wait long. While other studios would take two weeks, Holmes could turn around a mailing in 24 hours. Soon, he had the biggest mail list of all. “The first few days the postal clerk presented him with boxes full of envelopes that were all full of cash,” Rutherford says. “He was making tens of thousands of dollars per day, since each film loop was selling for upwards of $150 each.”

The biggest smash-hit of this era was a film called The Other Side of Aspen, a feature-length release that shows a ski instructor glancing in a chalet window and spying two men having sex. Later, he finds his clients having sex too, and joins in. Then – what would you know! – the two guys from the chalet turn up and they all have an orgy. It was deceptively simple, but revolutionary at the time. Most gay porn back then simply consisted of “loops” (short clips of sex scenes) – and many certainly weren’t high-production affairs featuring hot guys shagging in ski chalets.

“I don't think gay men had ever seen such beautiful men having sex,” Falcon Studios actor Tom Chase says of the film. “Fucking and fisting and three-ways, all played out by truly attractive men.” But it was the narrative element that seemed most revolutionary. “I hate using the word ‘normal’,” MacNamara acknowledges, “but it normalized gay sex. There was a tenderness, an intimate and a relatable connection between two men.”

This all meant that by the time VCRs and VHSs entered the scene in the 80s, the stage was set for Holmes’s porn business to blow up. “Now, customers could just pop a video into their living room machine,” Rutherford says. “No more were the days of setting up and threading a film projector, [or] even going to a public adult theatre to watch it.”

The impact this had on the gay community was huge. Getting tapes mailed to your house, in MacNamara’s telling, was both discreet but felt radically normal – part of everyday life, rather than a dirty secret. “To realise there are others out there like you – others out there who are ‘normal’ good people, who happen to want to stick a dick up another man’s ass,” he explains. “It made the taboo thoughts feel comfortable.”

The VHS boom had practical advantages too. “The company phone number was listed on the back of the video boxes,” Chase says. In the mid 90s, he called the number, and said he wanted to be in a movie. “I was told to send in an introductory letter with three Polaroid photos – they wanted a raw depiction of who I was.” Within two weeks of Falcon receiving Chase’s letter, he was hired and cast in his first film: Backwoods, which features him in “an outdoor sex adventure” beneath California’s forest canopy. After filming, Falcon Studios offered him an exclusive contract. “I was thrilled,” Chase says. “I was ready to make my dream come true.”

He’d certainly entered the business at an exciting time. “I was hired in 1995, just as Falcon Studios revenue and budget was at its highest,” Chase explains. “The studio spent up to $300,000 for blockbuster movies.” In almost no time, Chase had become a bona fide porn star. “I started receiving the perks of public fame in the second year of my career,” he says. “An LA maitre d' cleared a full table of people in order for me to be seated right away with my friends,” Chase recalls. “A flight attendant bumped me to first class.” 

In 1996, Chase also met Chuck for the first time. “He was handsome, smart, and successful,” Chase recalls. “I liked him right away, and he liked me.” By this point, Holmes was a giant in the industry, but Chase says he was “approachable”. He became Holmes’s personal trainer, and then his close friend. He even came to learn where Falcon’s iconic clean-cut, “guy next door” style came from.

“The squeaky clean look at Falcon can be traced to one night in particular when Chuck attended a stag party with his father in the mid 1960s,” Chase remembers. “They watched an 8mm film of straight porn. The women had dirty feet, and the men had dirt under their fingernails.” To Holmes, this was “stomach-churning”. “With Falcon, everything was glamorised and bodies were prepped – shaven, trimmed, worked out – to satisfy the need for palatable close-ups,” Chase says. It may also have been to satisfy Holmes’ own desires, too. “Chuck liked clean boys doing dirty things,” Rutherford says. “Them wearing white Calvin briefs was what he liked for the cut and tan lines they gave.”

Even if Falcon’s “look” stemmed from Holmes’s own personal desires, it had a cultural knock-on effect. “It had a major impact on the gay population in that it dictated fashion and hygiene for an entire generation,” Chase says. “Including me.”

“Body hair was a paradigm of masculinity,” MacNamara says, “but as Falcon mimicked Calvin Klein ads, we were presented with a man who was a trimmed alternative.” He believes this was “a necessary step,” showcasing “the many types of gay men”. This may be true. But for Holmes – ever the business man – it was also a bit of “you scratch my back if I scratch yours”. “Calvin Klein underwear was used because of Chuck's friendship with Calvin Klein,” Chase explains. “Promoting the label was the intention.”

So, was Reagan-era gay masculinity shaping Falcon, or the other way round? “I’m asked how much Falcon had influence on the gay community a lot and I am very on the fence about this,” Rutherford says. “It’s like the old saying: ‘What came first, the chicken or the egg?’ I think it’s both.”

Which brings us to the most common charge against Holmes’ porn empire. Simply put, it was very white. “The lack of diversity wasn’t because of anything in regard to the public or representation within the gay community at all,” Rutherford insists. “It was only that Chuck preferred blond boys doing dirty things.”

“Regardless of his motives,” MacNamara argues, “I do think he fell short and did a great injustice by limiting the men he cast. If he aimed to be diverse in his parade of masculinity, he was severely underrepresented in showcasing racial diversity.”

Whatever the reason, it took a long time for Falcon to cast men of colour. “Once in a while he would allow me to add a little diversity in there,” Rutherford remembers. Eventually, Black models such as Race Cooper would be offered exclusive contracts with Falcon. “In the end [Chuck] was fine with it as long as it made money and was well received,” Rutherford says.

For Holmes, what mattered most was the bottom line. Despite Falcon raking it in, and its founder living a lavish lifestyle himself, other team members “were paid less than they were worth,” Rutherford recalls. “For the holidays, Chuck would come into my office and present what he wanted to give each employee for a holiday bonus: It was $20 each. I laughed and told him that it was too low and he replied, ‘they can have that or a turkey’. That sums it up.”

This stinginess certainly didn’t translate to other arenas. “Chuck was very generous with his philanthropy,” Rutherford says. He became a major contributor to charities such San Francisco Community Center Project and Amnesty International, and gay advocacy groups like the LGBT Victory Fund and the Human Rights Campaign, where he also served on the Board of Directors. 

“I think he was buying his way into being accepted though,” Rutherford suggests. “He would pay any amount of money to be accepted into the community since he had faced such stigma about his career choices.” This stigma meant that, despite his staggering success, Holmes couldn’t shake a certain amount of shame. “He was always telling people that he was in the ‘Video Head Tape Cleaner’ business when asked by a non-adult industry person,” Rutherford says. “He hated the word ‘porn’ or ‘pornography’.”

If Holmes found it hard to shake off the stigma, it’s probably partly because of the time he was operating in. Having made it through the restrictive 70s, the boom times were all too brief before a new threat loomed. “The raw truth of AIDS busted the glass house we all called home for a short time,” Chase says.

In the late 1980s, Holmes tested positive for HIV, and he angered AIDS activists while battling the virus himself. “Chuck and Falcon were one of the last companies to use condoms in their movies,” Rutherford says. “Chuck just felt that if they started putting condoms on, nobody would pay to watch a Falcon movie. He was wrong with that one, obviously.”

As with Falcon’s all-white casting, eventually Holmes changed his tune. Rutherford’s first film as director ended up being the last one without condoms. “I remember they were using spermicide shot into the models’ butts to kill the virus, because this is what some thought would work,” he says. But they would only show protected sex moving forward: “We would consider everyone to be positive and use safe sex always.”

To many, it seemed like the AIDs crisis, and living with his own positive status, changed Chuck Holmes. Or, at least, it spurred him on to get even more actively involved with political movements and campaigns for LGBT rights. Aged 48 he went on his first protest march, and not only funded Democratic campaigns but also worked with former President Bill Clinton on AIDS research. “Later in life when he leaned into his philanthropy work, it showcased his continued commitment to making the world a better place for homosexuals, despite being in rooms and rubbing shoulders with others who condemned his work at Falcon,” MacNamara says.

In 2000, Holmes died of AIDs-related illnesses. He was 55. But Falcon Studios lives on – surviving into the internet porn era. And though he may not be as globally recognised as Hugh Hefner, Holmes’ legacy lives on too. “Chuck led the way to sexual liberation for most men in the 70s to the 90s,” Chase says. “He opened the doors for all of us to express ourselves freely without shame.”

“Chuck was in the right place at the right time and he was smart to use his business sense in an industry where nobody else was doing that,” Rutherford says finally. “Most other gay film makers in the adult industry were doing it to have sex and made a lot of money by accident. Chuck came for the sex, but while he was there made much more money using business decisions.” 

Chuck Holmes: business and pleasure. Ralph Lauren and gay sex; Calvin Klein underwear and dinners with Al Gore. “He is an icon who I don’t feel is praised enough,” MacNamara concludes. “Chuck was judged relentlessly but he held strong because he knew what he was providing wasn’t just pornography; it was changing the world for the gay community.”

The new season of Sex Before the Internet premieres Tuesday, January 23 at 9pm on VICE TV.