Document Type

Article

Publication Date

12-17-2020

Department

Humanities

Abstract

Once gracing the covers of numerous gay newspapers and magazines, Brian Reynolds was a key figure of Los Angeles’ emergent gay adult film industry of the late 1960s. He had all but disappeared from gay adult film historiography until he re-emerged as a cover model for a scholarly journal in 2012, to illustrate pioneering scholarship that initiated contemporary Pat Rocco studies. This article puts the story of Brian Reynolds in dialogue with critical star studies in order to offer a recovery history of Reynolds. Reynolds’ rise to celebrity and sudden relegation to obscurity underscores the historical instability of gay pornographic stardom; in this case an instability that resulted from interpersonal relationship shifts, performer turnover, and the industry’s profit-oriented dependence on economic inequality.

Comments

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Porn Studies. It is deposited under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution- Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

The Version of Record was published online by Porn Studies on December 17, 2020, available online: https://doi.org/10.1080/23268743.2020.1844591 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23268743.2020.1844591

Original Publication Information

Finley Freibert (2020) Brian Reynolds, public visibility, and gay stardom, Porn Studies, DOI: 10.1080/23268743.2020.1844591

DOI

10.1080/23268743.2020.1844591

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