’Porno Uncle Jim”: Thessaloniki Review

Dir/Scr: Stephan Bookas. US. 2021. 86mins

Porno Uncle Jim feels like an especially satisfying episode of the telelvision genealogy series Who Do You Think You Are? Director Stephan Bookas’ quest to discover more about his “infamous” great uncle, porn baron J.J. Proferes, uncovers a fascinating family history. It also opens a gateway to travel down the lost highways of gay life in the 1960s, the porn industry in the 1970s and the battle for first amendment freedoms in America. LGBTQI Festivals are an obvious fit for the film, but Proferes emerges as such an engaging, larger-than-life figure that the film’s reach should extend further.

Proferes’s rise and fall reflects a whole period in America and the fight for gay rights and civil liberties

Proferes appears to have been considered the black sheep of the family. His nephew Tim remembers him with a twinkling affection, but neice Genie Leussis is more censorious. Bookas’s interest was piqued by a newspaper article from 1975 in which Proferes was dubbed “ The Sultan of an X-Rated Empire”. Who wouldn’t want to discover more?

A mild-mannered, unobtrusive presence throughout the film, Bookas embarks on a quest framed as a detective story. His extended family provide him with memories, photographs, home movies and scrapbooks. Surviving friends of  Proferes, including former pastor Edgar Twine and Donald “ Red” Bassan, fill in details of what the family might not have known. The result is a profile of a genial, Baloo bear of a man whose rollercoaster life seems tailor-made for a Scorsese epic.

Bookas begins with archive footage of a stern Moral Conservative propaganda film from 1965, in which America is warned about a rising tide of filth that was perverting an entire generation. He then reveals how a trailblazing Proferes happily contributed to that rising tide. Growing up in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, where his family owned a sweet store, Proferes’ early life of military service and employment as a set designer for television shows is sketched in before Bookas quickly gets to the meat of the matter.

In the 1960s, Proferes began writing gay porn pulp fiction with catchy titles including ’Hey There Orgy Boy’, ’Hellbound In Leather ’and ’Of Hot Nights…And Damp Beds’. At one point he was “ vomiting out” a novel every week. Dispensing with the anonymity of a pseudonym, he proudly published under his own name. The books were sold by Guild Press, a porn publisher in Washington D.C. founded by Herman Lynn Womack. Bookas gradually uncovers the details of a pioneering gay press responsible for a Gay Coloring Book, Physique magazine and titles like ’Bath House Boys’. 

Proferes career grew to promoting X-rated movies (Song Of The Loon (1970) looks like a fun precursor of Brokeback Mountain) and owning a small empire of book stores and porn cinemas. Bookas vividly evokes the period, stitching together archive footage, newspaper adverts, teasing trailers for the films, lubricious book covers and magazine spreads.

Proferes’s rise and fall reflects a whole period in America and the fight for gay rights and civil liberties. Bookas conveys much of that, but pulls back from the wider picture to refocus on Proferes, the price he paid for his empire and the unexpected twists in his later life.What makes Proferes so appealing is the way he responded to both good times and setbacks with such unvarying equanimity. Porno Uncle Jim rescues him from obscurity, does justice to his story and leaves you wanting to know more.