Sex, guys and videotape: How a Sacramento porn mogul helped gay rights

If you’re an aficionado of gay porn from the 1970s and ‘80s—and who isn’t?—then you may have noticed the Sacramento River Delta serves as a pristine backdrop to some spirited buggering.

For that, you have the late Chuck Holmes to thank. A titan of male-centric adult entertainment, Holmes also enjoyed a longstanding love affair with the 916 and its waterways.

“He shot a lot of movies in Sacramento,” said Michael Stabile, a journalist who made his feature-length debut with a new documentary on Holmes, which has its local premiere during the Sacramento International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival on Friday. “From the early ’70s on, you would see these landscapes, these Sacramento landscapes,” Stabile said, before chuckling. “And that may well have been because it was a tax write-off.”

Sacramento is also where Holmes made his primary homestead during the final decade of his life, which ended in 2000 due to complications from HIV. But that’s just the epilogue to a fascinating story that intersects with critical moments of the early gay rights movement.

That story is the subject of Stabile’s Seed Money: The Chuck Holmes Story. It’s one of 24 feature-length and short films playing the 24th annual festival, which runs October 8-10.

The 71-minute film, which debuted at the Boston LGBT Film Festival in April, makes the case that Holmes is the most important gay rights benefactor whose contributions aren’t widely acknowledged, even within his own community. (In 2002, there was an uproar when a $1 million donation from Holmes’ estate led to his name being displayed over the entrance of a new gay and lesbian community center in San Francisco.)

In some ways, it’s easy to see why.

Holmes was a hard-nosed businessman who bucked the “model spokesperson” playbook by building his empire on explicit depictions of gay sex. He tangled with the FBI over obscenity charges and resisted using condoms in his movies during the AIDS epidemic. That notoriety often made him a pariah among the political candidates and causes that accepted his money, but spurned the man.

“It’s almost about the limits of assimilation,” Stabile said of Holmes’ story. “This thing that you helped build … becomes so respectable that you’re left out.”

But Holmes also made sure his movies depicted gay men as successful boy-next-door types, putting forth a positive portrayal that was rare for the times.

“He was probably the most important pornographer of the 20th century,” Stabile said.

Due to adult content, SIGLFF President Michael Dennis said Seed Money will screen as part of the festival’s new Late Night With Todd program, named in honor of former board president John “Todd” Lohse-Edwards, who died from brain cancer last year. “I did not know Chuck Holmes story at all,” Dennis wrote in an email. “When we saw this film, we had to show it. It is a compelling story.”

Not much is known of Holmes’ early life in Indiana, where he was raised on a farm. As a consequence, when Holmes moves to San Francisco during the height of the sexual revolution, there’s something almost literary about the young man’s arrival.

“I often think of him as a gay Gatsby,” Stabile said. “Like Gatsby, his past is sort of a mystery.”

Let’s paint the scene: It’s the early 1970s and people are pouring into the city, one of the only places where pornography is legal to show and sell. That created a kind of smut gold rush in San Francisco, or something akin to the first tech boom, Stabile says. There was money to be made, and Holmes knew how to make it.

Stabile heard different tales about how Holmes earned his living as a young man. Rumors swirled of shady business deals, money in mail orders and prefabricated houses in Indiana and Cincinnati, Ohio. Whatever the truth, Holmes was comfortable by the time he moved to the Bay Area. He was also a prodigious collector of pornography, which was damn hard to get your hands on at the time.

In most of the country, porn was treated like narcotics: illegal to possess, sell or send through the mail. As a result, it was trafficked like illicit Tupperware, during word-of-mouth gatherings inside hotel conference rooms or someone’s home. At one of these gatherings, Holmes told someone he was interested in getting into the porn business, Stabile says. The guy took one look at the clean-cut Holmes and told him, in so many words, that he didn’t have the sand for it. In San Francisco six months later, Holmes borrowed some money and started Falcon Studios in 1972.

Stabile says you can’t overstate the importance of Falcon Studios’ early films. At the time, peddlers were making easy cash with slapped-together 8-millimeter reels featuring street hustlers in grimy motel rooms. Unlike those pornographers, Holmes established a set of persnickety standards for his skin flicks, raunchy as they were. He demanded upscale settings and models who projected an all-American look—guys like him, in other words. They wore lacrosse shirts, piloted sports cars and speed boats, and lounged on yachts or frolicked on small islands speckled throughout the Sacramento River, a favorite spot of Holmes.

Stabile argues that this made them the “It Gets Better” promotional videos of their time, especially in small towns that the emerging gay culture hadn’t reached. While Stabile says there’s no doubt that Holmes was driven by profit and personal peccadilloes (he hated dirty feet, for instance), “presenting a vision of gay life that was positive was important to him, exceedingly so,” he said.

But his drive for success sometimes made him an antagonist of the same community.

Holmes learned he was HIV-positive in the mid-’80s. It was a death sentence, Stabile said, “and he was terrified of dying.”

Despite his personal terror—or perhaps because of it—Holmes resisted mounting pressure to use condoms in his movies until around 1990. Stabile believes the decision was motivated both by profit—the general belief is that people don’t like seeing condoms in their sex flicks—and denial, the same kind that was sweeping through the greater gay community, the director says. In this way, Holmes puts a face on “gay history in sharper relief,” Stabile argued, in that his struggles paralleled that of the community.

Take his battles with the FBI.

During the ’70s and ’80s, Stabile says the FBI was cracking down on pornography through federal prohibitions on mailing “obscene, lascivious, indecent, filthy or vile” materials.

The strategy was simple: FBI agents posing as buyers ordered movies through the mail, often having them sent to southern states where juries were more likely to frown on the gay lifestyle. Holmes was indicted for mailing a movie to Tennessee that featured an interracial couple. Stabile says he spent a lot of money on getting the legal venue switched to San Francisco, which effectively squashed the case.

Many of Holmes’ contemporaries weren’t so lucky, and Holmes bought up their businesses at bargain prices, expanding his empire.

“He [had] a real sense of self-preservation,” Stabile said.

That instinct factored into Holmes’ charitable giving, according to Steven Scarborough.

Scarborough met Holmes in 1976, becoming his romantic partner for life and business partner for seven years. He described Holmes as “a fervent Democrat” who emulated his grandfather’s politics. “But he also felt Democrats were less likely to prosecute someone in his business.”

That changed when Bill Clinton emerged on the political scene, Scarborough says. Like many in the gay community, Holmes saw in Clinton someone who would stand up for gay rights, Scarborough said. “And that really motivated him.”

The feeling wasn’t entirely mutual.

In 1992, then-candidate Clinton invited his top donors to fly out for a meet-and-greet. Holmes accepted the invitation, only to be ordered out of line during the gathering. “Events like those really crushed him,” Stabile said. “Because of where his money came from, his checkbook was often more welcome than he was. And sadly, I think that is still the case.”

Stabile said his interview requests were declined by several individuals and groups who feared their reputations would be smudged by any association with Holmes.

SN&R sought comment from Human Rights Watch and the Gay & Lesbian Victory Fund, on whose boards Holmes sat, without success.

Scarborough admits the rejections upset his partner. “But he was very pragmatic as well,” he said, adding that Holmes often reminded him that progress came in increments.

Later in his life, Holmes and Scarborough built two homes near the river in Sacramento, one for them and one for Holmes’ mother. And when he died, Scarborough noted, Holmes decreed in his will that half his ashes return home to Terre Haute, Ind., and that the other half be dispersed in the river that he loved.