The Chicago Reader has a short but interesting article on HOM (aka House of Milan) and one of its founders – Barbara Behr. It’s a flashback to a pre-internet age, where kinky porn was rare and existed very much in the shadows.
House of Milan was on of the ‘big’ three publishers of bondage material from the mid 70’s through to mid 90’s. I put ‘big’ in quotation marks because all three – HOM, Harmony Concepts, Calstar – were tiny and very niche by modern standards. It’s an era I’ve heard referred to as The Golden Age of Bondage Productions, which strikes me as a very misleading title. It suggests a lot of great material was being produced, where the reality was that the bondage was often poor and the shots of low quality. Operating on the fringes of legality with limited sales channels and minimal competition doesn’t typically lead to a high quality product.
That said, I do find the era and the people who worked in it fascinating. A lot of the artists have since become recognized, but the models, editors and photographers are a lot harder to track down. I featured a post on John Blakemore back in 2012 and I’m happy to add this one on Barbara. She worked as an editor, organizer and general manager for HOM, and involved a lot of other women in the business before sadly passing away in the 90’s.
Most of the content produced was M/f, but there was the occasional femdom. For example, this magazine, which was edited by Barbara and published in 1983.
I’m not an expert in any of this, so other people might spot mistakes in what I’m saying. But I met someone in the business who told me that organized crime used to control porn distribution in big American cities. You couldn’t just open up your own porn store, you had to be blessed by the mob, and you had to use their distribution companies. This was definitely true in Chicago, where someone was actually killed for violating the rule.
The seediness of US BDSM, fetish, and Femdom porn compared to British publications like Atomage, was in some ways a result of that, because the organized crime people had ideas about what the content should be like. And in the old days they used to insist that magazine publishers give them a number of ad pages, often in the center of the magazines, that had ads, mostly for mob run phone sex services, which definitely contributed to the vibe of the magazines as a whole.
Their chokehold on the business started to break down in the 80s and early 90s, via a few different avenues. I remember the first time I saw Skin Two, and how revelatory it seemed to me. They obviously cared about the quality of their work, and they were trying to emulate more of a fashion magazine vibe. I saw it at a Chicago fetish clothing store called House of Whacks, then subscribed, so I got it via mail.
There were magazines that started to pop up that used the same kinds of distribution methods that were being figured out by the zine movement, like Taste of Latex, who branched out into videos as well. I remember there being magazines that weren’t like traditional ones, like the HOM magazines, that were sold in normal porn stores, Mistress Antoinette’s Reflections, DDI and Bootlovers, etc. I don’t know how they worked out their distribution, but they did. And eventually the internet came and turned over everything.
Skin Two was the first fetish magazine I saw that I felt like I could show to open minded people who weren’t kinky — it wasn’t tacky. The old magazines were great in their day and I still have some of them, but when they were really the only representation of your sexuality out there, it was kind of hard. I feel like the interest in those old magazines by young people is often about their camp value, which is definitely different than the way we interacted with them back in the day.
My interpretation of the changes that took place between that old HOM world and our own, is that we in America started from a place where our media and even our ability to communicate with one another were running through middlemen who weren’t kinky, and who seemed to hold us in contempt. People started to find ways around the middlemen in the 80s and 90s before the internet took off, and then the net came into our lives and accelerated things tremendously. There was a real golden age in the late 90s and 2000’s when we were all just using regular off the shelf tech to meet and talk to one another. It really was a revolutionary thing just to talk to other people into the same things we were. I’m talking about usenet groups, easy to start message board sites, personal web sites for professional dominants, etc.
Now we’re seeing some backsliding, as social media companies, along with big porn companies/credit card processors, are starting to impose rules and exert their control over the scene in various ways. But it’s not at all comparable to the way it used to be.
Thanks for sharing this long and thoughtful comment! I agree with almost everything you said.
Organized crime was definitely a big part of the early adult business in US. In all the histories I’ve read it seems to crop up in a lot of areas – clubs, films, magazines, peep shows, etc. Classic case of prohibition having the wrong kind of negative effect.
That said, I think there was always a difference between the people who were mainly in porn for the money and those who did it because they wanted to represent their kinks. The latter were either forced to compromise with the mob (as you suggest) or run very niche mail order businesses to select customer lists (as I believe Eric Stanton did for a time). It feels like there was simultaneously a weakening of the organized crime influence over time and also new distribution channels that opened up for things like Skin Two.
I totally agree that the late 90’s and early 2000’s was the true golden age for creation of kinky material. That was the sweet spot when it was easy to distribute and monetize material, but the government and credit card companies hadn’t got involved. Feels like all the various walled gardens (app stores, social media sites, etc.) that have sprung up since then have really regressed the possibilities.
Thanks again for stopping by and commenting,
-paltego
Paltego, couldn’t agree more re fascination with ‘early’ femdom media. Think I am a little older than you, but even I was too young for the likes of the underground pamphlets like exotique and bizzare. I have them both as published by TASCHEN, had a quick reread of some of them today following your post, and they’re still super fascinating to my eyes.
Got to say, Mistress Karen on the cover did make me laugh, not sure that epithet would work today.
As always, thank you
If I ever had the time it’d be fun to collect some of the old femdom material while it’s still around. Maybe a hobby for retirement! Be a shame for the likes of Mistress Karen and her photoshoots to be lost to the world.
Thanks for stopping by,
-paltego
I’m happy to send you my collection of skin two magazines, an easy thank you, and would honestly help me. Perhaps if interested dm me? I would hate to throw them away.
Sadly, I’ve got no time right now to clear space, get organized and start collecting such things. I barely get time to blog these days :-(. Maybe in a year or two, when I’m done with work, I’ll have the time and energy to start and can announce something. Thanks for the thought.
-paltego
No problem, looks like there is quite an active market on eBay…