Join us for the revised and updated version of the brief history of gay porn that Kyle Renick originally presented at the Bureau in May!

This time the event is ticketed, so you’re guaranteed a seat! Purchase here for $5:

https://www.artful.ly/store/events/10250

Almost every guy who has made a pornographic film or video is referred to as a “gay porn star”. He isn’t of course; but occasionally he is. Starting with the moment of Casey Donovan emerging from the waters off Fire Island in 1971 and commencing the Classic Era of modern gay porn, through the Budapest boys of Bel Ami and the tattooed hunks of New York’s Cocky Boys proclaiming the merger of gay porn with reality television, the brief modern history of gay porn can best be understood with a look at the boys and men who made it popular, and the consumers who told them what they wanted.

KYLE RENICK served as Executive Director of WPA Theatre (Workshop of the Players Art Foundation, Inc.) for 25 years, producing more than one hundred Off-Broadway plays and musicals, including such long-running successes as Little Shop of Horrors by Howard Ashman and Alan Menken, and Steel Magnolias by Robert Harling. He produced new works by Yoko Ono, Larry Kramer, Charles Busch, Paul Rudnick, Larry Ketron, Doug Wright, Israel Horovitz and Reynolds Price, as well as revivals by Tennessee Williams, Lillian Hellman and Edward Albee. Born and raised in St. Louis, he attended Tufts University in Boston and graduated Phi Beta Kappa with degrees in Drama and Music. Mr. Renick has been a consultant for both the New York State Council on the Arts and National Endowment for the Arts, and served for 12 years on the Board of Directors of the Alliance of Resident Theatres/New York. He has written extensively on movie music for Film Score Monthly, and has had articles published in Theatre Times and Back Stage, among other publications. Mr. Renick is a Charter Member of Early Music America, and he does volunteer work for the Boston Early Music Festival. He is currently writing a book about actors, writers and other artists he worked with at WPA Theatre.

Event image: Bel Ami’s Lukas Ridgeston and Johan Paulik, photography by Kyle Renick