Flashback Friday: From Paris To New York (1977)

The ’70s were pretty wild, eh? Though I wasn’t even alive for the decade, my limited research has proven that gay culture was significantly different back then. It’s as easy to take for granted what we have now as it is to glamorize the days of yore, and you’ll likely find yourself doing the latter after watching the trailer for the 1977 gay porn film From Paris To New York.

Much like 1983’s Times Square Strip, this flick depicts a New York that’s essentially dead, often mourned over by anyone who was around to experience it. Sure, you could probably still get head in the bathroom of a NYC bar—ask Ricky Roman if you don’t believe us—but it’s just not the same, you know?

(I don’t actually know. But maybe you know.)

– Dewitt

Photo credit: Bijou World

Read more and watch a trailer for From Paris To New York below:

This film epitomizes the “gay macho” period of the 1970s in the looks of the cast and their sexual activity. A Frenchman comes to New York and discovers sex in a warehouse, a bathhouse, on the docks, and in a leather bar in this film.

Structured around the week-long journey of Jerome (hairy and uncut Christopher Dock) in search of his lover, Paul, From Paris to New York shows all of the raw, gritty — and occasionally bizarre — sex that he encounters along the way, as he’s guided by excerpts of letters from Paul and words from a mysterious oracle of a man who he meets in a store.

Jerome begins his journey with a taxi driver, who takes him to a meat packing plant where they fuck while holding onto hanging slabs of raw beef.

Next, Jerome cruises through the docks and in a waterfront warehouse, where he picks up a man and then follows him to his apartment for more action. They share a tender, intimate moment together afterwards.

Later, in a bar, Jerome fondles a hairy guy’s body and rubs a pool cue on his stomach.

Subsequently, in a toilet, Jerome jacks off the large dick of a burly black man in a stall. The black man fucks a youthful guy in the ass as Jerome fucks the face of another man.

The scene then shifts to a bathhouse, where several men are shown dancing (mostly nude) to disco songs. They shower together and Jerome watches an orgy ensue, and then sucks cock in a room heavily covered in lewd graffiti.

Finally, Jerome finds a leather bar where a wild party is taking place, featuring chaotic live music, a row of occupied glory holes, devil masks, bootlicking, and collared and leashed men. Jerome pours beer on one man; he then spots Paul across the room.

He takes Paul and Paul’s master home and dominates them both in a rough threesome scene.

From Paris to New York is an emotionally and politically poignant film that sometimes feels like a love letter to New York City of the 1970s, lingering on plenty of scenic views of the city and one moment of documentary-like discussion of its gay scene. It features atmospheric cinematography and a cast of masculine men, and boasts an outstanding disco soundtrack. The opening of the film, showing real photographs of the cast leads as children and then adults, posing uncomfortably with female dates, then more naturally with men, layered with the soundtrack’s repetition of “I did not choose the way I am/I said I am what I am” emphasizes the theme of a search for freedom in Jerome’s (and Paul’s) journeys in New York.

If interested, snag a copy of From Paris To New York from Bijou World

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