Jerry Douglas (director)

A native of Des Moines, Iowa, Douglas attended Drake University and did his graduate work at the Yale School of Drama. Among the Broadway and Off-Broadway plays he wrote and/or directed are Rondelay, Circle in the Water, Score, Tubstrip, Max's Millions, and most recently, the New York and Los Angeles productions of The Deep Throat Sex Scandal. He also wrote the screenplay for Radley Metzger's film version of Score. In the early 1970s, he directed two adult films, The Back Row (starring Casey Donovan and George Payne) and Both Ways (starring Andrea True and Gerald Grant), then left the industry to focus on his career as a free-lance journalist and editor for such publications as The Advocate, Update, FirstHand, and Stallion.

He did not make another film until 1989, when he was urged out of his self-imposed retirement by Rick Ford of All Worlds Video. Between 1989 and 2007, he made on average one film per year, six of which were named Best Picture by industry organizations such as the Adult Video New Awards, Gay Video Guide Awards, and the Grabby Awards: More of a Man, Kiss-Off, Honorable Discharge, Flesh and Blood, Dream Team, and BuckleRoos.{{Cite web|url=https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0235113/awards|title=Jerry Douglas|website=IMDb|access-date=2017-11-16}} Five of the actors who played leading roles in his productions have been named Best Actor: Tim Lowe (Fratrimony), Joey Stefano (More of a Man), Michael Brawn (Kiss-Off), Kurt Young (Flesh and Blood), and Dean Phoenix (BuckleRoos).

Douglas was the creator and editor of Manshots magazine from 1988 to 2001. His collection of short stories, Mantalk, was published in 1991. His first novel, The Legend of the Ditto Twins was published by Bruno Gmünder Verlag of Berlin, Germany, in 2012. In 2019, Chelsea Station Editions published his play, Tubstrip, with a foreword by theatre scholar Jordan Schildcrout.{{Cite web |title=Tubstrip: About |url=https://tubstrip.com/about |access-date=July 18, 2022 |website=Tubstrip Website}}

In 2021, Douglas (with co-editor Jeffrey Escoffier) published two massive books: "Directing Sex: Interviews with the Directors of Gay Pornography" (475 pages; interviews with more than 30 directors, including William Huggins, Kristen Bjorn, Chi Chi LaRue, Steven Scarborough, Dirk Yates, John Rutherford, George Duroy, etc.) and "Close-Up: Interviews with the Performers of Gay Pornography" (285 pages, interviews with more than 60 performers including Peter Berlin, Scorpio, Leo Ford, Kevin Williams, Richard Locke, Ken Ryker, Jeff Palmer, etc.) These are all interviews Douglas conducted and originally ran in "Manshots" over the years.

In June 2022, Seidelman & Company published "The Collected Gay History Novels of Jerry Douglas," including Son and Heir, Lesser Evils, and Fixing Matthew.

Douglas lived in New York City, where he married his partner of forty years, attorney John Stellar, in November 2011. He died on January 9, 2021, at the age of 85.{{cite web |title=Special Magazine 2022 |url=https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1444689-special-2022/87? |website=SAG-AFTRA |access-date=28 February 2022}}

• Never Say Dye (1964) – director, book writer, lyricist
• Rondelay (1969) – book writer, lyricist
• Circle in the Water (1970) – director, adapter
• Score (1970) – director, playwright
• Tubstrip (1973) – director, playwright [under pseudonym A. J. Kronengold]
• Max's Millions (1985) – director, co-author with Raymond Wood
• The Deep Throat Sex Scandal (2010) – director

• The Back Row (1973) [under pseudonym Doug Richards]
• Score (1974) [screenwriter only]
• Both Ways (1975)
• Fratrimony (1989)
• More of a Man (1991)
• Trade-Off (1992)
• Kiss-Off (1992)
• Jock-A-Holics (1993)
• Honorable Discharge (1993)
• The Diamond Stud (1995)
• Flesh & Blood (1996)
• Family Values (1997)
• Dream Team (1999)
• Top Secret (2000)
• BuckleRoos Part 1 (2004)
• BuckleRoos Part 2 (2004)
• Beyond Perfect (2005)
• Brotherhood (2007)

• Mantalk (FirstHand, 1991)
• The Legend of the Ditto Twins (Bruno Gmünder Verlag, 2012)
• Tubstrip (Chelsea Station Editions, 2019)
• Directing Sex: Interviews with the Directors of Gay Pornography (Editors Moustache, 2021)
• Close-Up: Interviews with the Performers of Gay Pornography (Editors Moustache, 2021)
• Son and Heir (Seidelman & Company 2022)
• Lesser Evils (Seidelman & Company 2022)
• Fixing Matthew (Seidelman & Company 2022)

Mandy Merck's Perversions: Deviant Readings (1993) includes the chapter "More of A Man: Gay Porn Cruises Gay Politics," analyzing the intersection of gay political activism and pornography in Douglas' 1991 film.{{Cite book|title=Perversions : deviant readings|last=Mandy.|first=Merck|isbn=9780415907927|location=New York|oclc=28063401|year = 1993}}

Media scholar Jeffrey Escoffier describes Douglas' 1973 film The Back Row as the first example of homorealist gay pornographic cinema, which "created a synthesis of a documentary-like view (in this case focusing on the gay sexual subculture) and the more psychopolitical themes of sexual liberation."{{Cite journal|last=Escoffier|first=Jeffrey|date=January 2017|title=Sex in the Seventies: Gay Porn Cinema as an Archive for the History of American Sexuality|url=https://muse.jhu.edu/article/645007|journal=Journal of the History of Sexuality|volume=26|issue=1|pages=88–113 |doi=10.7560/JHS26104 |s2cid=152203364 }}

Theatre scholar Jordan Schildcrout discusses Douglas' 1973 play Tubstrip, a comedy set in a gay bathhouse that ran for approximately 500 performances, as the most widely seen example of gay erotic theatre, a theatrical sub-genre in the early years of gay liberation, which offered "the most exuberant and affirming depictions of same-sex sexuality heretofore seen in the American theatre."{{Cite journal|last=Schildcrout|first=Jordan|title=Legitimate: Jerry Douglas' Tubstrip and the Erotic Theatre of Gay Liberation|url=http://jadtjournal.org/2017/12/11/legitimate-jerry-douglass-tubstrip-and-the-erotic-theatre-of-gay-liberation/|journal=Journal of American Drama and Theatre|date=11 December 2017 |volume=30|issue=1}}

{{reflist}}

• [http://www.tlavideo.com/gay-jerry-douglas/person-36836-3 Jerry Douglas at TLAvideo.com]
• [https://web.archive.org/web/20190120175947/http://grabbys.com/WallofFame.html#d Grabby Awards Wall of Fame]
• [https://web.archive.org/web/20111105121614/http://gayvnawards.avn.com/noms/hall-of-fame.html GAYVN Awards website]
• {{IMDb name|id=0235113|name=Jerry Douglas}}
• [https://tubstrip.com/ Tubstrip website]

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Category:1935 births

Category:2021 deaths

Category:LGBTQ people from Iowa

Category:American pornographic film directors

Category:Directors of gay pornographic films

Category:Writers from Des Moines, Iowa

Category:Drake University alumni

Category:David Geffen School of Drama at Yale University alumni