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.