Jerry Douglas (director)
Jerry Douglas | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | November 15, 1935 Iowa, U.S. |
| Other names | Doug Richards |
Jerry Douglas is an American director and writer, notably of gay pornographic films[1], as well as a novelist, playwright, and theatre director. He has won numerous adult film industry awards, and has been inducted into the Grabby Awards Hall of Fame[2] and the GayVN Awards Hall of Fame.[3]
Life and career
A native of Des Moines, Iowa, Douglas attended Drake University and did his graduate work at the Yale School of Drama. Among the Broadway and Off-Broadway plays he has written and/or directed are Rondelay, Circle in the Water, Score, Tubstrip, Max’s Millions, and most recently, the New York and Los Angeles productions of The Deep Throat Sex Scandal. He also wrote the screenplay for Radley Metzger’s film version of Score. In the early 1970s, he directed two adult films, The Back Row (starring Casey Donovan and George Payne) and Both Ways (starring Andrea True and Gerald Grant), then left the industry to focus on his career as a free-lance journalist and editor for such publications as The Advocate, Update, FirstHand, and Stallion.
He did not make another film until 1989, when he was urged out of his self-imposed retirement by Rick Ford of All Worlds Video. Between 1989 and 2007, he made on average one film per year, six of which were named Best Picture by industry organizations such as the Adult Video New Awards, Gay Video Guide Awards, and the Grabby Awards: More of a Man, Kiss-Off, Honorable Discharge, Flesh and Blood, Dream Team, and BuckleRoos.[4] Five of the actors who played leading roles in his productions have been named Best Actor: Tim Lowe (Fratrimony), Joey Stefano (More of a Man), Michael Brawn (Kiss-Off), Kurt Young (Flesh and Blood), and Dean Phoenix (BuckleRoos).
Douglas was also the creator and editor of Manshots magazine, and his collection of short stories, Mantalk, was published in 1991. His first novel, The Legend of the Ditto Twins was published by Bruno Gmünder Verlag of Berlin, Germany, in 2012. He married his partner of thirty-five years, attorney John Stellar, in November 2011, and they currently live in New York City.
Plays
- Never Say Dye (1964) - director, book writer, lyricist
- Rondelay (1969) - book writer, lyricist
- Circle in the Water (1970) - director, adapter
- Score (1970) - director, playwright
- Tubstrip (1973) - director, playwright [under pseudonym A. J. Kronengold]
- Max's Millions (1985) - director, co-author with Raymond Wood
- The Deep Throat Sex Scandal (2010) - director
Films
- The Back Row (1973) [under pseudonym Doug Richards]
- Score (1974) [screenwriter only]
- Both Ways (1975)
- Fratrimony (1989)
- More of a Man (1991)
- Trade-Off (1992)
- Kiss-Off (1992)
- Jock-A-Holics (1993)
- Honorable Discharge (1993)
- The Diamond Stud (1995)
- Flesh & Blood (1996)
- Family Values (1997)
- Dream Team (1999)
- Top Secret (2000)
- BuckleRoos Part 1 (2004)
- BuckleRoos Part 2 (2004)
- Beyond Perfect (2005)
- Brotherhood (2007)
Published Works
- Mantalk (FirstHand, 1991)
- The Legend of the Ditto Twins (Bruno Gmünder Verlag, 2012)
Critical Analysis
Mandy Merck's Perversions: Deviant Readings (1993) includes the chapter "More of A Man: Gay Porn Cruises Gay Politics," analyzing the intersection of gay political activism and pornography in Douglas' 1991 film.[5]
Media scholar Jeffrey Escoffier describes Douglas' 1973 film The Back Row as the first example of homorealist gay pornographic cinema, which “created a synthesis of a documentary-like view (in this case focusing on the gay sexual subculture) and the more psychopolitical themes of sexual liberation.”[6]
Theatre scholar Jordan Schildcrout discusses Douglas' 1973 play Tubstrip, a comedy set in a gay bathhouse that ran for approximately 500 performances, as the most widely-seen example of gay erotic theatre, a theatrical sub-genre in the early years of gay liberation, which offered "the most exuberant and affirming depictions of same-sex sexuality heretofore seen in the American theatre."[7]
References
- ^ "Flavorwire Interview: Gay Adult Cinema Pioneer Jerry Douglas on Working with Radley Metzger, Making Porn in the Seedy '70s, and the Musical Quality of Sex Scenes". Flavorwire. 2017-08-25. Retrieved 2017-09-03.
- ^ "Grabby Awards Wall of Fame" Accessed February 25, 2013.
- ^ "GAYVN Awards Wall of Fame" Archived 2011-11-05 at the Wayback Machine Accessed February 25, 2013.
- ^ "Jerry Douglas". IMDb. Retrieved 2017-11-16.
- ^ Mandy., Merck,. Perversions : deviant readings. New York. ISBN 9780415907927. OCLC 28063401.
{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: extra punctuation (link) CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) - ^ Escoffier, Jeffrey (January 2017). "Sex in the Seventies: Gay Porn Cinema as an Archive for the History of American Sexuality". Journal of the History of Sexuality. 26.1.
- ^ Schildcrout, Jordan. "Legitimate: Jerry Douglas' Tubstrip and the Erotic Theatre of Gay Liberation". Journal of American Drama and Theatre. 29.3.