Gillis himself:
“Q: You have the reputation among the actresses as being one of the best lovers, one of the guys they really enjoy working with.
A: That’s because I usually care about whether or not the scene is working. The sexual scene or the scene of the film, so…I want it to work, so usually that means that you want the girl to get off or be into it. And usually I am into it. I’m very sexual, I guess, so it’s not that hard. I like to fuck.”
Part of my motivation for doing a post on Jamie Gillis came from the discovery that some materials were available online now that I hadn’t been aware of before. Gillis has been more forthcoming about his past than had previously been the case, and indeed has a new credit this year, appearing in a documentary about Jack Wrangler, the iconic 1970s gay pornstar (who also appeared in straight porn).
Commenting in January 2000, Gillis told Gene Ross:
“My feelings are that we’re talking about sexual fantasies that are being acted out by paid performers. This has nothing to do with dragging girls off the street and beating them up. There are a lot of girls, a lot of men, for that matter, who love being abused, sexually both in fantasy and actuality. And why people who are not into that particular thing feel that they cannot allow this, is stupid, outrageous, hypocritical crap. I can’t tell you how many girls have come to me over the years because I have that reputation. They tell me they can’t find this kind of treatment, that men are wimps, men won’t do this. ‘You try to get a guy to do something like this and they don’t want to do it. They don’t understand it.’”
And from an earlier interview:
Q: I saw you do dominance in a movie and it was very convincing. I sort of expected you to be almost that type.
A: Well, I am. I get cast into that a lot, because I do a lot of that.
Q: Is it a real aspect of you that we see?
A: I have lots of aspects, and it’s one real aspect. I could be very dominant or I could be a lot of things-very passive, whatever, little boy. Whatever works, whatever works.
Over the last ten years, Gillis has become increasingly comfortable opening up about his past in interviews and various pages online (who knew he was such a big Thin Lizzy fan for instance?).
As he recently revealed in an excellent interview with Susie Bright:
“I’ve always had this funny image of myself as a straight guy who just happens to have more fag sex than any fag I know. Because when I was coming up, gays were the only ones that were really sexually crazy. Before there was a Plato’s Retreat, there was a place called Continental Baths. It was the exact same location. And I used to go to the Continental Baths, because that’s where you could have crazy, wild sex! Nobody else was doing that. And I remember walking around that fucking place thinking, “If only there was a heterosexual place like this. Wouldn’t that be amazing?” And I didn’t even dream that it would happen — but it did, like about two years later, with Plato’s Retreat. It was this straight place with all these hundreds of girls going there. In my ideal world, if you were walking down the street, there’d be a place where you could just touch people. There would be a grope club.”
This willingness to go either way sexually is yet another division between Jamie Gillis and your ‘average porn star’; in the 1970s, Gillis may have restricted himself to interactions with men on his off-time, or the very occasional on-screen encounter (most famously getting blown by Zebedy Colt in 1975’s The Story of Johanna). Of course that’s not to say that there had to be gay sex onscreen to attract the attention of gay men!
He quickly became known as a superior woodsman and moved up to doing porn feature films; subsequently, Gillis has become one of the most prolific actors in the business, with nearly 500 films to his credit at the IMDB, and countless more private films and loops besides. As well as porno, Gillis has also appeared in a few ‘mainstream’ films (perhaps most notably Sylvester Stallone’s Nighthawks) and the ocassional cheesy B-movie as well.
After an incredible run in the 1970s, working on many of the greatest porn movies ever made, Gillis went on to work in video as the 1980s progressed and gradually lost interest in endless films with dire scripts. His solution was to go out in a limousine with a beautiful porn actress and attempt to convince perfect strangers on the street (or in adult video stores) to have sex. Sound familiar?
Gillis told San Francisco’s Spectator magazine 10/99:
“On The Prowl was the first video of its kind to be labelled “gonzo.” These days, however, everyone else is really not doing what I consider gonzo. My idea was to do live, spontaneous stuff with real people who were not connected to the porn industry. I wanted to find people on the street and say, “Hey, buddy, you wanna get laid?” I mean, that doesn’t always work, either; people are a little bit mystified by the whole thing. But the upside is that they’re not performers with really fake energy which you see so much of in porn today, which I hate. It’s that ‘ooh-ah, ooh-ah, do-me-baby’ thing. Gimme a break. It was boring for the most part - and today it’s even worse. And after I did the original On The Prowl, other people caught on and made it more of a set-up situation, more of a commercial product.”
Gillis went with the gonzo direction for several years - also helping to get the Buttman and Dirty Debutantes series started - and then switched directions again about 1990 and began making underground films of intense degradation, sometimes wearing a mask to do so.
The nastier side that came out so theatrically in the 1970s and verbally in the 1980s was now reaching a fuller expression in increasingly harsh fare of the 1990s. Gillis worked with Bizarre and Redboard, and was to specialize in such films upwards of the late 1990s and even into the 21st century (2001’s Edge Play with Marilyn Chambers was, by contrast, rather vanilla).
It’s important to note here that Jamie was again happy to play both sides of the fence, acting in the submissive role with aplomb as well as the dominant.
[In his later years] Jamie seemed content and relaxed, indulging interests like poker or boxing. A possible autobiography and/or book of verbal abuse/scat transcripts (with which author Peter Sotos was tied at one point, Sotos referring to the book as being called Total Filth) has been the subject of much speculation over the last few years; will it ever come out? How much of the dirt will Gillis dish? How far will he go? For those that have followed his thirty-year-plus career in porn, you know the answer is Very Far Indeed. Probably farther than you’d like to go. Maybe even farther than you’d feel comfortable reading about. Hopefully it won’t cost $700 like Vanessa Del Rio’s.
Asked about how he has changed with age (from the recent Susie Bright interview):
“I don’t feel I have to fuck everybody I meet. Of course, also, the girls also don’t feel they have to fuck me as much. But you’re a little more in control, particularly if you’ve had as many women as I’ve had. You sort of know what they’re like. And you can appreciate them more just for themselves. You can talk to them and have a good time. And you can just sort of look at one of them and have a good idea of what it’s like to fuck that one. And you can think about that and not have to go through with it.”
For those that might still consider the man a misogynistic pig with a sex addiction, it’s interesting to note that at least twice now Jamie Gillis has given up porn at the insistence of a girlfriend - the first time (lasting a year), he sold everything he had, and wound up broke and kicked out; the second time was only a few months ago, for famed restauranteur Zarela Martinez.
I’ll give the last word to the man himself, here again with Susie Bright:
SB: As you get older, does the sizzle endure?
JG: It never ends. I remember — there used to be an old Jewish dominatrix in New York called Belle du Jour. And she was popular. I would go to her place just to hang out sometimes because it was interesting. Guys would come in. This old guy who must have been close to ninety comes in, and he goes in the back with her. And she has these black, thigh-high boots on. And he falls onto the floor, and he’s lapping at her boots. And I’m thinking, “My god. It never ends.” You know, you’d think when you were ninety, you’d have a little dignity. Something would change. But it doesn’t! It just goes on.
A selected filmography of highlights should suffice to impress the uninitiated:
Illusions of A Lady
The Seduction of Lynn Carter
1001 Erotic Nights 2: The Forbidden Tales
Angel on Fire aka Angel No. 9
Defiance of the Good
Sometimes Sweet Susan
The Private Afternoons of Pamela Mann, The Opening Of Misty Beethoven, Barbara Broadcast, all directed by the great Henry Paris aka Radley Metzger
Boynapped
Taxi Girls
Wine Me, Dine Me, 69 Me
The Story of Joanna
Bad Girls 4
Sex Asylum 2: Sheer Bedlam
Slick Honey
Through the Looking Glass
Waterpower and Midnight Desires, both directed by Shaun Costello
The Violation of Claudia
the infamously ‘lost’ first 35mm first 3D male sex film Manhole
Ecstasy Girls and Ecstasy Girls 2
Erotic City
Vista Valley PTA
Roommates
Amanda By Night
New Wave Hookers
RIP Jamie Gillis...
ADG