Vintage Gay Loops

The movies here are digitally remastered, so some of the crackle and pop has gone from them, but you must remember that they were filmed on actual film, or more latterly on video tape, and then converted to a digital format for uploading to the site. Which is a way of saying that you've got the best quality productions possible, though it may not be up to the same standards of today’s high definition filming. But don’t let that put you off taking a good, hard look at this site, as what it has collected is well worth viewing.

There were 179 scenes when I called in to the site, and talk about blasts from the past! You can tell from the hair styles and the costumes that these movies date back to the 1970’s and 1980’s, at least. But if big hair and huge moustaches are not your thing, don’t worry, they are not all like that. Look through the grain and the scratches (as remastering doesn’t always get rid of everything) and you see some very cute younger guys and some very sexy older men who would do well in today’s porn market, were they not in their dotage by now. The thing that really hits you with these films is their simplicity and the fact that, though they are clearly old, they are still timeless. The same old sex, but without condoms of course, and the same mixture of twinks and bears, jocks and hunks as you would find today.

You also find easy ways to view them. There is a decent Flash stream which worked very quickly and buffered with no problems on my mid-range connection. There were also downloads for two different resolutions, and the advice is to go for the larger one, even if it means a wait. The lower quality movie will be small and grainier by default and not so good at full screen, but obviously quicker to download. Movies come with a trailer as well, but as the scenes were shorter in those days, around 10 to 15 minutes only, you’re better off going straight for the full scene version.

And be prepared for music! The kind of porn music we now take the fun out of. That’s how it was in those days, repetitive cheesy and yet somehow the perfect accompaniment to the action that you see on your screen. I would have liked to have found out more about the movies. That’s about my only suggestion for how the site could be improved. Names of the actors must be traceable, as are the names of the movies, the studios and directors. It would be really good to have this kind of detail as this is a site that will appeal to collectors and historians, as well as to guy who simply like vintage porn. You do have a description of each scene, but only the basic outline of the ‘plot’, and you do have screen caps from each scene but no model index. Or am I asking too much?

But you do also find a small collection of vintage images, only one page of them at the moment, and there must be hundreds of sets out there that the site could find. But it’s a start. And the really neat extra that Vintage Gay Loops gives you is the Pride Timelines page. A simple text page, with dates going back to 600 BC that follow the progress of ‘gay’ from Sappho (debatable, according to academics, but hey!) to, currently, 2009 and the election of the world’s first, openly gay head of sate. Again, a nice thing for historians and folk more interested in history as well as porn.

Finally, the site is easy to navigate and has a good, clear, modern feel to it, despite the age of its content. It looks to be updating regularly and all technical things worked well for me. More images and more information would really be a boost, but stay around for more of those old, still horny and great to find, remastered and now preserved forever, gay DVDs from, possibly, before you were born.