queermuseum:

THE LAST PICTURE SHOW



Vince Miranda’s Pussycat Theater, on a stretch of Santa Monica Blvd that remains stubbornly ungentrified even in tony West Hollywood, isn’t much to look at now. The once grand auditorium has been subdivided into several smaller rooms, the outer shell painted negative-space black. But in the 70s, it was the crown jewel of Miranda’s porn theater empire: red and gold carpets, beveled glass, chandeliers and oil paintings.

At one time Miranda and lover George Tate ran almost fifty theaters in California, but in the early 70s porn was popping up all over the country. Gay liberation wasn’t televised, but screened: at the Adonis in New York, at the Nob Hill in San Francisco, at the Century in LA, at the Bijou in Chicago.

Porn theaters are given short shrift these days. Much of our cultural memory is drawn from the later years of Times Square: crime and grime. But in their early years, they were a place that helped pollinate gay liberation. Theaters were places where the possibilities of gay life were projected, where alternate narratives were shown, and where you might try and act out a scene of your own in the balcony. The Pussycat was straight, but only nominally. Once the lights went down, sexuality flickered.

Miranda was felled by obscenity prosecutions and, eventually, the IRS. The theater business fell victim to the VCR. (It was also one of the culture’s only preservers. Today the only place you can see the inside of Chicago’s legendary Halstead Theater is in a porno: A Night At Halstead’s.)

But the Monica Pussycat, as it was known, still stands. In the 80s, it came out as the TomKat, a gay theater. Today, 7734 Santa Monica is Studs, one of the last gay porn theaters in the country, and a reminder of the time when porn theaters were way stations for pilgrims escaping smaller towns for larger lives, and men like Miranda were innkeepers, feeding us in the dark so that we could some day be strong enough for the light.

— Mike