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Stroke Records
Coll2015-020
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Table of contents
Language of Material:
English
Contributing Institution:
ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives, USC Libraries, University of Southern California
Title: Stroke records
Identifier/Call Number: Coll2015-020
Physical Description:
9 Linear Feet
8 boxes
Date (inclusive): 1980-2000
Abstract: Records of Southern California-based gay erotic magazine Stroke, bulk 1980-1997, including model release keys, photographic
prints, negatives, slides, artwork, press releases, erotic studio film stills, and reader-contributed letters and polaroids.
Stroke was a 100-page glossy gay erotic magazine based in Southern California and produced between 1980 and 1997. The content
included photosets, fiction, reviews, artwork, and reader contributions in the form of photographs and personal stories.
Records containing the unpublished names and contact information of models have been separated into restricted boxes. Consult
an archivist with questions concerning access.
Records of Southern California-based gay erotic magazine Stroke, bulk 1980-1997, including model release keys, photographic
prints, negatives, slides, artwork, press releases, erotic studio film stills, and reader-contributed letters and polaroids.
Stroke magazines were separated to the ONE Archives periodical collection.
The following studio photographs were separated to the Gay erotic studio photography collection and filed under their particular
studio name.
Athletic Model Guild (AMG), 21 photographs;
Bruce of LA, 3 photographs;
Kensington Road, 7 photographs;
Pat Milo, 3 photographs;
Western Photography Guild (WPG), 1 photograph;
ARAX, 2 photographs;
John Barrington, 14 photographs;
Champion, 15 photographs;
Lon of NY, 4 photographs;
Dave Martin, 1 photograph;
Ritter, 1 photograph;
MANCO, 1 photograph;
Vizuns, 18 photographs;
Russ Warner, 11 photographs;
Lane Nelson, 1 photograph.
The collection was originally organized by Christopher Harrity, a former employee of Stroke. Processing and finding aid completed
by Scott Reed, 2016.
Researchers wishing to publish materials must obtain permission in writing from ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives as the
physical owner. Researchers must also obtain clearance from the holder(s) of any copyrights in the materials. Note that ONE
National Gay and Lesbian Archives can grant copyright clearance only for those materials for which we hold the copyright.
It is the responsibility of the researcher to obtain copyright clearance for all other materials directly from the copyright
holder(s).
Collection is arranged in three series:
Series 1. Studio photographs and records
Series 2. Stroke photographs and records
Series 3. Reader contributed letters and photographs
The Stroke Story
By Christopher Harrity
How it Began.
I went to art school in San Francisco in the early ’70s at the Academy of Art. Majoring in illustration, graphic design, and
advertising, my first job was with an automotive advertising agency in North Beach. I hated it. The guys were homophobic and
the work was excruciatingly dull.
Coinciding with the bad break-up with the man who had been keeping me in a fashion I had hoped to become accustomed to, I
fled to Hollywood with an old high school friend and started looking for work. The first and only job interview I went on
was at a porn-producing company.
I went to work in 1976 for Eros Publishing in Encino, owned by porn kingpin, Ruben Sturman, run by Lenny Burtman, and I directly
reported to Veronica Starr, the new wife of notorious filmmaker and drag performer Kim Christy. We produced softcore but low
grade sex and fetish magazines, swinger contact magazines, and gay softcore periodicals.
Early in 1997 I was sent to work in New York with the staff of Eros magazine in order that the magazine staff could be transferred
to the west coast. It was to be a two week trip that ended up lasting four years. In that time I worked for Eros (kink, gender
fluid), High Society (celebrity flesh), Purple (porn humor), Variations (digest-sized reader experience letters), and Gallery
Magazine (based on reader contributions.)
Most importantly I worked for Puritan magazine, the first high quality, perfect bound hardcore heterosexual quarterly created
by Jeffrey Michelson and Dian Hansen. Allen Ginsberg, Norman Mailer, and Al Goldstein of Screw magazine were all contributors.
The unique aspect of Puritan was that it was non-returnable after its newsstand date, not unlike a book. The magazine sold
well and the profits were immediately discernable because of the non-returnable policy. Older issues were collectable and
sought after and few adult bookstores had many left on the shelves.
Ruben Sturman wanted to replicate the publishing model of Puritan for a gay 100 page hardcore, non-returnable quarterly, and
soon I had an offer from Veronica Starr to come back to California for two weeks to set the dials for what was to become Stroke
magazine. Again, a two-week gig turned into a full time job. I relocated to California and worked closely with Veronica and
especially her spouse, Kim Christy, to create Stroke.
Creating Stroke in 1980 was challenging, as most quality photographers were not shooting hardcore. Plus, video was on the
rise and was soon going to overtake printed material and 8mm film as the most sought media for adult material.
Hardcore photographic material was scarce because it was a period of very strict laws. Sturman and Burtman had both been arrested
multiple times, and like cohort Larry Flynt, were willing to go to court and fight the charges. That we can see hardcore images
at all is due in large part to their legal battles. Meanwhile the laws were so strict that if you were even suspected of producing
obscene material, your assets could be frozen and your children put in foster care while the courts decided what they wanted
to do.
Nevertheless, in the first few years Kim Christy and I found quality photographers and set up unique photo shoots with local
talent to fill the pages of Stroke. Fashion photographers shooting on the down low and more art-driven photographers like
Steven Arnold created photo sets for the magazine.
The first issue had a lot of expectations, but soon after I felt I could explore my own tastes and fantasies. I had grown
up exposed at a very early age, six as best as I can recall, exposed to my gay father’s gay paperbacks and Physique Pictorials,
among other body building magazines. My step-father, when I was eight, brought in his own selection of adult materials that
tended more toward the art-driven side. Grove Press books, uncensored illustrations by Aubrey Beardlsey, and Victorian novels
like My Secret Life.
By the time I was 12 I was well versed in a variety of adult material, straight, gay, and all inclusive.
I began to contact older studios and producers whose work I had admired when I was first exposed to it in my father’s cache
of porn secreted away in his sock drawer. I visited Bob Mizer, took trips to see Harry Bush in San Juan Capistrano, spent
time with Neel Bate in New York and Sam Steward in Berkeley.
I was also influenced by the magazines I had worked at in New York. Puritan, of course, made me take full advantage of the
high quality paper and four color process. Inspired by High Society, I ran vintage celebrity photos. My time at the porn/humor
magazine Purple, led me to parodies and humor pieces. Porn was considered such heavy material that few people produced anything
with a lightness of touch. But the biggest influence was Gallery magazine. It was touted at “The magazine of the girl next
door.”
Gallery appealed to swingers, and the ’70s was all about swinging. The centerfold each month was picked from photos that
husbands had sent of their wives. The best would be selected and then a shoot would be arranged, either by traveling to them
or bringing them to New York. The month’s other runners up would be used as surrounding photo material.
I was fascinated by the amateur photos of wives posing for their husbands on unmade beds, in trailers, in swimming pools.
They were charged with eroticism, and we got a ton of them each month. It surprised me there were that many exhibitionists
out there. It took a full time staff person just to make sure the legal paperwork was in order.
So I started actively mining what I could in the reader contributions field. Variations was a kinkier version of Penthouse
Forum from the same publisher. It was fun, but it was overly edited, and formulaic. It had to be for the market. My girlfriend
at the time was editor in chief, and she would show me the actual letters which were so much more erotic. Just seeing their
handwriting made them come alive.
When I was still in art school, one of my teachers showed m a digest sized “chapbook” called Straight to Hell. Boyd McDonald’s
genius production was the filthiest reading ever, packed with humor, politics, and social commentary. The porn available in
the early ’70s: Blueboy, Mandate, etc., Straight to Hell had a grit to it. That and Drummer magazine were always in the nightstand.
So they each had a big influence on Stroke.
By the time Stroke took off, Ruben Sturman and Lenny Burtman had sliced and diced the company in so many pieces to keep the
feds off their tracks. As long as they were not the identified owners, the could get away with murder. And according to a
New Yorker profile on Sturman from 2003, murder was literally involved.
Kim Christy was spun off into his own film producing company. Veronica Starr became a freelance packager, and I now worked
for the same kind of guys that ran the automotive advertising agency. Basically shame-based, uneducated, homophobes that had
revulsion about the product. Their wives barely had an idea of what they did for a living. So if the titles were selling well,
and there were no legal issues, they pretty much ignored me.
I began offering a free issue to anyone who contributed letters or photos we used. The magazine was ten dollars. In 1982 that
was still a lot of money. So I began getting all sorts of contributions. Photos, letters, used underwear, and once a box of
hundreds of filled and knotted condoms. The letters introduced me to fetishes I had never dreamed of. The photos were so full
of human information; I fell in love thousands of times. When I published the photos, I would either crop off the heads or
use Hollywood Confidential-style black rectangles, that way I could avoid a lot of the legal problems that might occur. They
still had to sign a form, but I knew that would not stand up without notarization.
Some guys were long-term contributors, sending me photos for over ten years. I developed relationships with them. And some
guys began to send me artwork, which was very popular in the magazine. My father was a regular contributor with stories of
his years cruising glory holes, and his work came with detailed overhead diagrams of
I got to meet and work with the old guard, like Jim French of Colt (who always offered me a job. I regularly dug through the
chaotic stacks of images at Bob Mizer’s bunker downtown at the Athletic Model Guild. J. Brian made regular trips to the office
in Chatsworth, as did Joe Tiffenbach. Boyd McDonald let us excerpt new compilations of Straight to Hell before they were published.
Jim Yousling, the imaginative editor at In Touch magazine traded contacts with me and we developed a mutual fan club.
But while I was paying homage to the past and the men who had created the images I grew up with, William Higgins and Chuck
Holmes were moving the audience away from the printed page to video cassette.
I soon found that our budgets were getting smaller. Shooting a photo set was expensive, especially when the video companies
would give you a photo set to run in exchange for an ad placement. I found myself spending more and more time going from porn
production company to porn production company all over the valley to gather up photo material and make ad trades. It was the
end of the customized shoot, but the beginning of great relationships with the studios. I especially remember the great times
with Larry Paciotti, a nice drag queen from Minneapolis who went by the name of Chi Chi LaRue who worked in Higgins’s offices
at Catalina video. He told me he was going to be a big porn director one day as he was working in the warehouse packing video
cassettes. I had my doubts.
Because everyone was running the same material from the big video companies, I started finding small specialty companies that
focused on one kink or fetish. Control T Studio provided very twisted spanking scenes, and I ended up freelancing for them
for years making one-day wonders in their Sylmar studio. Manco had jockstrap fetish material. Then there were a few contributors
that contacted me with material too far out to pass muster with the straight cigar-smoking managers I worked for. Bondage
with blood and torture, goat castrator devices, and suspiciously young models.
The fallout from publishing kinkier images was that the reader contributions got more edgy as well. Both the photo submissions
and the reader letters soon started depicting ideas and scenes that would be shocking to the fans of Falcons shaved-body-white-jockey-shorts
material.
The beginning of the end was when paper prices and shipping fees became too much. The publishers at Magcorp found the could
recover older issues in stock and still make money, so they began skipping issues. I fortunately had started a full time gig
at The Advocate working on the magazine as well as their erotic titles, Men and Freshmen.
I recall going out to Santa Clarita in the late ’90s on a lunch hour to pick up my check one week and the bookkeeper told
me she didn’t have it. I asked her when I should come back. She said there was no plan to cut a check for my services. She
cried a little, she felt bad. But that was the whimpering end. One day they just stopped paying me.
Ultimately it was a great time to get out. DVDs were soon going to disrupt the empire of the video cassette. Then the internet
was going to blow everyone out of the water. I still work at The Advocate as a web producer. It is very fulfilling and I work
with amazing people. I also have health insurance, a 401k, and regular tech support—all things that porn was never going to
offer me.
I got to work with and meet many of the directors and stars of the ’70s, and even more of the directors and stars of the ’80
and ’90s. I got to have a heart to heart with Joe Gage and tell him that my father had proclaimed the trilogy —Kansas City
Trucking Co., LA Tool & Die, and El Paso Wrecking Corp.— to be the greatest gay porn of all times. Indeed Kansas City Trucking
Co was the very last video cassette that was to be ejected when I dismantled my father’s singlewide trailer the weekend after
he died. The VCR was still on. I got to spend hours with the demented but loveable Harry Bush and have somewhere stacks of
his obsessive letters typed with a missing letter or two that he would go back through and hand-enter. I got to meet and work
with Casey Donovan (Cal Culver), Fred Halsted and Joey Yale, John Holmes, Al Parker, Rex Chandler, and the redoubtable Paul
Barresi, as well as thousands of guys who had sex on camera that will never be known anywhere. I have letters from John Rechy,
Sam Steward, Boyd McDonald, and Dennis Cooper that I almost can’t read as they are so complimentary about Stroke.
I should note that the period I worked on Stroke, from 1981 through around 1997 were the years that AIDS became a huge factor
in what we did in photos and on film. At Stroke, we fetishized the condom. We started turning down pre-condom sets. And we
always published safer sex guidelines in every issue. But even with that, we all watched in horror as the old guard actors
that had been performing for years without condoms began to die off. How interesting it would be to be able to talk to Al
Parker and Casey Donovan now, to see what they thought of their early brave careers. Now it is almost a rite of passage for
young men to make a few appearances on screen as a pro or an amateur. In the days of Roger, Richard Locke, and Jack Wrangler
it meant your were cast into a lower level of society for life.
Ultimately, I was able to work though a lot of my childhood obsessions and sexual fixations and get paid for it. Few people
recall the magazine now. It has been eclipsed by the wealth of free material and corporatized porn on the internet. But there
was a period of about ten years after the magazine had died when I could still dine out on its legend. Indeed it was a Stroke
fan, Jeff Yarbrough who gave me a job based on his love for the magazine, as I had no resume or portfolio in 1992 when I started
to work at The Advocate.
I got to create a character or two that performed as the voice of Stroke. When people who were familiar with the magazine
would meet me, they were both interested and disappointed. I was not who they pictured. I realized in those moments the interiority
of the erotic experience. That inside everyone is a world of sexual possibility and fantasy, but each is as unique as a fingerprint.
Immediate Source of Acquisition
Date of acquisition unknown, gift of Christopher Harrity.
Box #, folder #, Gay erotic studio photography collection, ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives, Los Angeles, California.
Stroke Records, Coll2015-020, ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives, USC Libraries, University of Southern California.