celluloid ghosts

In the early 1980s, I was acquainted with a guy in Los Angeles who was a serious and avid collector of gay porn. One of the more precious strains of his vast collection was gay porn that had a macabre or tragic real life story attached to it. Of course I was particularly fascinated by those items. The guy was kind of a scholar of gay porn and had done a lot of research and amateur detective work on how the porn in his collection was made and who the people involved were. When I moved to NYC in 1983, he gave me duplicates he had of some of those items as a going away present. I found them in a box on my recent LA trip, and I thought I'd share some with you. According to the collector, the floppy haired model in the above photo sequence above who is seduced by the two models dressed as mailmen was one of two Native American brothers who had short gay porn careers in the early 70s: Paul and Raymond Tall Chief. Featured here is Paul, the older of the two brothers. Paul and Raymond shared an apartment in Hollywood, and one day several months after the above photos were taken, Paul's body was discovered in the laundry room of the apartment savagely beaten to death. Brother Raymond, a heavy drinker with a very bad temper, was the immediate suspect, but he disappeared around the time of the murder. He remained on the run for close to a year when he was arrested on robbery charges and thereafter brought to trial for the murder of Paul. At his trial, Raymond claimed that he and his brother had been doing laundry when invisible spirits attacked Paul, killing his brother before his eyes. The boys' parents testified at the trial that they had raised the spirits in a ritual and sent them to save both Paul and Raymond because they had discovered the boys were making gay pornography and believed them to be possessed by evil spirits. Raymond and his parents both claimed that the evil spirits possessing Paul had accidentally killed him while trying to prevent the good spirits from expelling them from his body. Even though Raymond and his parents both took and passed lie detector tests, Raymond was convicted of the murder and given a life sentence. At some point not long after Raymond went to prison, his father confessed to police that Paul's murder had actually been committed by himself, his wife, and Raymond. The parents had discovered the boys were making gay pornography, driven to Hollywood from their home in Arizona, and confronted the boys. Raymond had renounced the evil spirits causing him to make porn, but Paul had refused, and they had accidentally beaten him to death while trying to force the evil out of his body. For whatever reason, the police didn't believe the father, and Raymond's conviction stood. The father later self-published a strange chapbook titled 'Ha-ne-go-ate-geh and the Homosexuals', a brief, very XXX-rated story about his sons' life in the gay porn industry during which he claimed to be attempting to prove his guilt in Paul's murder but spent much more space describing in steamy detail the gay porn magazines his sons had appeared in, including the not especially steamy porn pictured above.