BijouBlog

Who is Paul Rappalo? Paul calls himself, in an interview with Manshots magazine in December 1992, an iconoclast, and based on the variety of and attitude toward his porn making, I would agree.

Manshots caught up with Paul aka David Rappalo aka Rappalo aka Rappalo Fox when he was doing a show at NYC's Show Palace, and the interviewer noted that he spoke Japanese to the guy at the sushi bar.

There's the paradox: he does shows that show off his tautly sculpted, Greek god physique, he speaks a language which is not easily learned, and, looking at his oeuvre on the trusty Gay Erotic Video Index, a good number of his films are bondage/BDSM flicks. Who is Paul Rappalo?

Paul divulges plenty in the interview, but what is interesting is the information he claims he doesn't want revealed. For example, he mentions he is Cherokee Indian. He also claims he likes high heels (he likes others to wear them).

He learned Japanese, one of five languages he also speaks, as part of his personal protection/anti-terrorism training. Rappalo is unclear as to what this training entails and its results, which adds to the mystery. No, he is not lying.

He hustled for a while (he claimed both guys and gays had long admired his cock).

He was also imprisoned for an assault case, and the prison doctor knew about his by then extensive porm film career; in the interview, he imitates the doctor's “minty” voice, “With all the money you've been making, seems that you would have been bailed out a long time ago.”

In the annals of porn history, however, some of his best work (and that includes acting, and he did do a bit of “legitimate” acting in Los Angeles) occurs in Toby Ross's award-winning Tough Guys Do Dance.
 

The second vignette in this flick, “Love Bug,” tells the story of a man who bugs his straight neighbor's house in an effort to share vicariously in the man's lovemaking to his wife. When the neighbor's wife leaves him, however, the gay man comes over to console and seduce him. Paul Rappalo plays the sensitive straight neighbor and David Bach is the wily gay man.

Now, what could be a sleazy take off on Reagan-era yuppie drama is actually sensitively done, and Rappalo manages to be both vulnerable and confidently sexy at the same time.
 

I like to think of him as the many faces of the Eternal Male. He wears a white shirt and tie and exudes sexiness wearing it, but when he gets naked, he can submit to getting tied up by an older, more experienced guy, enjoys, even relishes sex with women, but, as he honestly reflects in his interview, “one thing I would change is that it takes me forever to learn one lesson.”

Based on his variegated interests, I would counter that he wasn't afraid to keep learning. And that for him, life was best lived when one is aware that it is a theater where one discovers oneself by acting so many roles.
 

 

Johnny Dawes, famous face in 1980s pre-condom gay porn, was born in Akron, Ohio, on March 22, 1955. His birth name was Brian Lee.

His career in gay porn started in the late seventies, was in a loop called “Toilet Training,: part of Falcon Video Pac #23. Acccording to Gay Erotic Video Index, in 1978, he made a film for Falcon Studios, Dirt Bikes, aka F Truck.

Thus began a prodigious career for many studios, pretty much the major ones of the late 1970s and 1980s, such as HIS Video, LeSalon, Mustang, and Marathon, and and other less known ones such as Ari Productions and Stardust.

Johnny has starred with a number of actors which include Jose Garcia, Magdalena Montezuma Montez as well as Sharon Kane.

Paired together eight times, Chris Burns has had the privilege of being seen most frequently with Johnny Dawes, in flicks such as Pleasure Beach (HIS Video).

The collection of movies in which they have appeared together also includes The Private Pleasures of John Holmes (Stardust), School Of Hard Cocks (HIS Video), and Revenge of the Nighthawk in Leather (HIS Video).

Dawes retired in 1986, but came out of retirement in 1989, to make several films. In fact, a vintage gay porn magazine of that period, Thrust, celebrates his return, “the return of a bluemovie sensation,” in Who's Dat Boy.
 

Bijou Video shows him at this versatile best in Knockout, originally released by Pan Pacific Productions. Touted as the “only homoerotic boxing film,” Knockout reveals the intense world of boxing, where a sport of knocking out merges into knockout sex. Johnny Dawes plays the previous boxing champion, and he joins Eric Stryker, playing the new lightweight boxing champion David West, and David's trainer, Mark, played by Andrew Ryan, in a three-way jack off. Johnny returns to fuck Eric on a bed; the ex-champion thus shows his real dominance by deftly topping the new champion in this scene.
 

Other Bijou Video classics he appears in are Games, where he plays a swimmer who fools around with Mike Davis in a locker room, and Bad Bad Boys aka Bad Boys, directed by Tom DeSimone (Mustang), where he plays a runaway who seeks solace in the company of a street gang called The Red Devils, undergoing an intense sexual initiation as well as rebelling against the gang's evil boss (and Dawes shows his acting chops here).
 

And speaking of acting chops, according to the January 1990 edition of Manshots, he acted in the Los Angeles production of Night Sweat; he was a documentary filmmaker (A Dance with Death) and, most interestingly, an opera historian. He wrote an article on the Jewish-American soprano Alma Gluck, who sang at the beginning of the last century, for Opera Digest.
 

Wow! An embarrassment of riches; so much talent in that lithe yet sculpted body (not to mention his aesthetically pleasing cock, a shiny pole of power). Overall, in his performances, he manages to combine vulnerability with an easy, confident masculinity.
 

Brian Lee aka Johnny Dawes died of AIDS-related complications on July 25, 1989.

He performed this finely crafted poem in the AIDS play Night Sweat, four years before his untimely death from that disease:
 

Oh, let night speak of me for day
Knows not how breaks with woe my heart,
Knows not how I mournful stray,
Weeping for thee, so dear thou art.
The sad night weeps with me, and lays
His tear wet cheek against my own;
Although I walk in sunlit ways,
Still doth my heart in darkness moan.
The night shall speak of me and say
All things to thee I dare not show,
And to thy dreams my love display,
Till thou art melted by my woe.
 

We are just finished producing our vintage Nova 2019 calendar, essentially a pin-up piece featuring some of the hottest studs from Nova Studios.
 

The popular Nova series is noted for its reliability, primitive aura and raw quality. The quality is consistent and the type of performer tends to be athletic, hung, horny, and lustful. Each Nova film contains several short subjects with the accent on youth and real man-love.

Emphasizing fierce fucking, rimming, kinky outdoor action, cum eating, and, at times, humor, the films are usually silent or have voice-over dialogue and music.

Beginning with Brian's Boys, however, Nova turned to making feature films with fully synchronized sound tracks.

In many ways, Ty Arthur encapsulates the qualities of the Nova guy. He's got all-American looks, but not in a statuesque way; there's a humor and a kind of sexual derring-do in his appearances.
 

He made he debut in Beached, and what a debut: sex underwater!
 

Bill Lake spies on the handsome, muscular stud as he strips down to do some scuba diving and they end up doing male muff diving instead -- in an underwater fantasy! They 69 underwater, then proceed to land for mutual cocksucking and Ty to hump asshole.

And if those striped soccer uniforms and tube socks and the studs who fill them out suit your fancy, he then appeared in the loop, Soccer Games; one of Ty's teammates enjoys a fantasy that turns into reality, unbridled sex in the locker room and the shower.

Specifically, Eric Clements and Ty Arthur have sex in the locker room, in the whirlpool and in the showers before they wear each other out; Eric goes down on Ty's boner and then licks his ass. (This scene is featured in our title, Hot Lunch.)

Apparently he made quite an impression, because the March 1981 issue of Honcho featured a spread of him, called, appropriately, “The Power of Ty.”
 

The photo of him in the our calendar shows his other side as a cock tease; the hot dog he holds in his muscular hands is actually smaller than his erect cock, and he blends in quite well with the wild 70s florid wallpaper.
 

I have been not been able to locate any biographical information on him; he made a splash (literally) in the early eighties, and then disappeared from view.

Ty, wherever you are, your fans are still watching … and pulling their puds.

Once in a Blue Moon, directed by Toby Ross, is truly a gem in our collection of vintage gay porn. Each vignette is essentially a “short story” that probes different dynamics in gay relationships, feeding off archetypal images that can be found in so much “mainstream” art, movies, and literature: a scene in hell, a soldier tortured by an enemy interrogator, and a prison inmate finally meeting his pen-pal. 
 

The second vignette in this movie is called “Better Sooner Than Later,” and stars Marcus Braun as a soon-to-be-departing executive headed for a new assignment in Paris, and Johnny Rahm as the coworker he is leaving behind. Their intimate, realistic and passionate dialogue reveals that not only are both gay, but that they have longed for one another for some time. They lovingly share cocksucking and fucking, switching off throughout the segment. The scene concludes with the title comment, “Jerry and Bob eventually both settled in Boston and lived happily ever after.” 
 

What makes this vignette particularly poignant is the life story of Johnny Rahm. (In my opinion, he has some of the most intense eyes not just in porn movies, but in all movies. Maybe it is the way his cheekbones set them off. According to an interview in Manshots in 1991, he is 30 to 40 percent Cherokee Native-American. Whatever the case, he is gorgeous!) 
 

Johnny Rahm's real name was Barry “J.T.” Rogers, and like so many guys born in the 1960s who became porn stars, he ended up fleeing a straight white Christian upbringing, but in this case, a particularly strict one. 

According to his obituary in SouthernVoice.com, he actually attended Bob Jones University, the place to go for particularly fundamentalist Baptists like Rogers aka Rahm's parents, who, Rahm reveals in the interview, hated him for being gay. 

The California gay scene called him the in the late 1980s, and he worked for ten years in the gay porn industry, kind of falling into spontaneously after an interview with J.J. Casting. 

He chose the name Rahm, but really wanted it to be Ra-m, but that didn't fly, and in the interview he relishes the irony of the name, as most viewers assume he would be a top, that is someone who does the ramming! 

In fact, Johnny was a hot bottom who admittedly liked dominant tops (especially those with mustaches) in his films and in real life, perhaps someone like his co-star in Once in a Blue Moon, Marcus Braun (Johnny and Marcus pictured below). 
 

 

The interview with Manshots reveals a high-spirited, honest, and intelligent artist who is really trying to work on his craft. 

Some particularly cogent quotes from the piece: 

Manshots: When did you come out? 

Rahm: I think I realized something was different about me when I was thirteen or fourteen. I didn't have the really serious sexual fantasies about guys until I was about seventeen. I remember wanting so bad to be on the baseball team in high school, because there were three or four guys on the team I really wanted to see in the shower. My first experience though was when I was twenty. It was with an amateur bodybuilder who lives in Atlanta, Georgia. It was phenomenal. 

Manshots: In your relatively short career in video so far, you've already made a reputation for yourself as an actor. My favorite was in Bedtime Stories for Catalina, where you played a black cat. You stayed in character as the cat through much of the actual sex. How much acting training have you had? 
 

Rahm: I'd say I started “studying” – and that's in quotes – when I was six years old. I used to have an old cassette recorder, and I'd record TV shows off the air and lock myself in my bedroom and turn the player on and act out the shows – playing all the parts....I was a big Monty Python fan... I was only kid in my junior high school who was weaned on public television. 

Manshots: Having something of a background in Monty Python style humor, do you ever get this moment on a set in the process of making pornography, where you get an overwhelming sense of absurdity? 

Rahm: Extremely, yeah, I get the idea that sometimes people who rent these videos think the work is so glamorous. But it's hard work – getting a hard on in a scene where it feels like it's twenty degrees below zero in the room. 

Manshots: What was working with Toby Ross on Once in a Blue Moon like? 

Rahm: It was a very good experience. His group was very laid back... He (Ross) asked us a lot of questions like “What would you like to do?” and “How can we make you more comfortable?” – and I liked that, and I've seen the movie and I liked it, but as usual, I'm never happy with the scenes I'm in. 

Manshots: Oh? 

Rahm: I'm never happy with my hair. Boy, is that the queeny phrase of all time or what? 

Some of his notable videos, in addition to Once in a Blue Moon, include The Devil and Danny Walker, Straight to the Zone, Badlands, and Hey Tony,What's the Story?. 

What happened to him is really sad, especially as the interview reveals his ambitions to work behind the scenes and put his background in film and acting to use as a directory. 

Johnny committed suicide in Atlanta in November 7, 2004, at the age of 39, by hanging himself with a wire on the fence line of the Atlanta Botanical Garden. At that time, according to his roommate, Adam Kahn, he was struggling financially. He was HIV positive, but in good physical health. 

Johnny, who lived happily ever after with his ideal man on screen, never found that happiness in his real life. 

But in all his life work, he really wanted to make his audience happy (and turned on, of course). In a talk with his cousin, he reflected, “It's good to know that I made a difference to some gay guys out there … even it was inadvertent. I feel honored to have that kind of devotion.” 
 

 

Gordon Grant! He's the total rock solid muscle hunk with a 9 inch uncut cock who's featured in several magazines and brochures we carry and on the covers of our titles Pleasures in the Sun and Hot Truckin'. In Hot Truckin', tough-looking Gordon, called Buck, is a handsome deliverman who sucks and fucks blue-collar types while on the job - first a carpenter, then a painter - both young, handsome, and horny. He and his co-worker (Nick Rodgers) end up picking up a hitchhiker … in more ways than one.
 

Born in Alaska of Dutch and Nez Perce Indigenous heritage, he appeared in such films many of the FalconPacs, like The Lifeguard, Working Late, and The Crotchwatcher in the 1970s and 1980s.
 

He also appeared in Dirty Words, billed as Falcon's first feature film (as opposed to loops). He also went by the name of Don Bowman.

According to a vintage Colt magazine, he worked for two years as a construction worker on the Trans-Alaska pipeline. Ripe fantasy material …

Gordon also did some stunning Colt photo spreads, often modeling two figures in the Village People gamut: cowboy and construction worker. Wow! Such big arms!
 

 

He pretty much epitomizes the original Colt man, a direct descendant of all those muscle beefcake types that appeared in magazines like Physique Pictorial and Tomorrow's Man.

Gordon has passed on, but information is obscure. A couple of sources claim he died in the early 1990s from AIDS related causes, the fate of so many porn stars of that generation, but I could find nothing specific.

Still, he pretty much has entered the Mount Olympus of gay porn icons.