NSFW: This essay includes explicit language, images, hyperlinks, verbatim-era slurs, and graphic descriptions of sexual material.
I’d known the name John Summers long before I knew who he was.
Summers was attached to movies that were polished, popular, and, in some cases, quietly influential, including The Bigger The Better, Two Handfuls, Rock Hard, and Don’t Kiss Me, I’m Straight. His name was ubiquitous, like Matt Sterling, John Travis, and William Higgins—the most influential directors of the Golden Age of gay adult cinema.
I learned more about Summers while watching Seed Money: The Chuck Holmes Story, a 2015 documentary about the life of Holmes, founder of Falcon Studios—the most famous and significant gay porn studio in history. There, in the foreground of Falcon’s origin story, was John Summers—described as a co-founder of Falcon.
As I continued watching Seed Money, they began showing photos of Summers. That’s when I experienced a shock: John Summers was Black. I was so startled by that fact that I momentarily lost focus on the film itself. Top of Form
It’s understandable if, like me, consumers of gay porn assumed Summers was White. The Falcon aesthetic of the 1970s and 1980s—almost exclusively White, blond, and collegial—offered little reason to imagine otherwise.
And yet one of the men helping to build that empire, scouting talent, refining the look of Falcon men, and producing early films, was Black.
Birds of Prey
By the time Falcon Studios was formed in 1971, John Summers—born Vaughn Kincey—was already embedded in the machinery that made such a studio possible. Kincey arrived in San Francisco in the late 1960s with a background in fashion and design. He was working at an art gallery on Sutter Street.
“I was a curator,” Kincey later recalled. “Every lunch time we’d go to Union Square to eat lunch and shop at I. Magnin’s, the upscale San Francisco department store. “This one guy was a school teacher and I think he was holding up convenience stores to raise money. He told me about a place on Castro Street that was a place of frequency: a whorehouse. And mmmmmm… I was interested.”
“The place was just dark and dingy. And the sissies were flying around there like birds and I thought, ‘who would want to buy one of these fucking sissies?’ So we talked and said why don’t we become partners. I can bring in art and sheets and beautiful towels. Two months later we opened our place.”
He soon met Bob Damron, publisher of the Damron Gay Travel Guide, who photographed some of the men connected to Kincey’s houses. The broader enterprise was known as Golden Boys. J. Brian, Kincey said, “was the architect of it.”
Kincey was operating two of three “houses of frequency” when J. Brian—photographer, filmmaker, and magazine publisher—lost his business and needed a place to stay.
“He moved into one of my bordellos with his dog,” Kincey revealed. When Brian had a falling out with his partner, he brought Kincey with him to retrieve his belongings. “We went in one night and kicked the door to get his film. And on the way out the door, Brian says, ‘Grab that mailing list. And make a copy of it. You’ll need it someday.’”
Around this time, Jim Hodges—later known professionally as John Travis—was working on J. Brian’s magazine Golden Boys. Through Brian, Hodges met Kincey. “So they introduced me to Jim and we just were friends right away,” Kincey said. “He spent most of his time at one of my houses and actually almost moved in. I don’t think he went home but once or twice a month. He just stayed there all the time.”
Kincey was already thinking about film. He encouraged Hodges to shoot 8mm hardcore loops that could be sold through mail order. Hodges began traveling the country with a twenty-minute demo reel of loops, screening them in hotel rooms. In Cincinnati, he met Chuck Holmes, who declared he wanted in.
Within months, Holmes relocated to San Francisco. At the time, he was selling prefab homes, factory-built houses assembled on site. When the early-1970s recession undercut that market, Holmes was out of work.
Kincey suggested mail-order distribution of gay hardcore films. Holmes later remembered thinking, “Maybe I should do this for a year or two, until I can get back into the corporate world.”
Kincey remembered it differently: “I don’t even remember what we discussed. It was so unprofessional. I said I’m going to set you up, give you all the contacts. I want $5,000 and a little percentage of whatever. And we just started doing it. It just blossomed. You know sex sells. It just blossomed overnight.”
Still, the company needed a name. Kincey said, “We were just walking, talking and one day he said, ‘What should we call the company?’ I said, ‘I want a bird of prey.’ He said, ‘Eagle?’ I said, ‘No.’ Then he said, ‘Falcon,’ and I said, ‘That’s it.’ And that’s what we named it.”
Madness & Method
In addition to Falcon, Kincey’s mailing list seeded Dimension Films, formed by Jack Dufault—later known as porn directing legend Matt Sterling. The list also became the foundation for Spectra, a lesser-known studio in the early 1970s. Falcon aggressively acquired additional mailing lists, folding them into a growing master database.
Adult industry veteran Doug Lawrence later observed that Dufault, along with Kincey, Hodges, and Holmes, could almost be said to have founded the gay porn industry in California in the 1960s and ‘70s.
The founding quartet—Holmes, Kincey, Hodges, and Dufault—worked in overlapping, sometimes competing arrangements. Dufault hired Hodges as a cameraman while Hodges also shot for Holmes’s Falcon Studios. Escoffier described the period as a “sometimes acrimonious, sometimes friendly rivalry.”
Kincey and Hodges were shooting hardcore loops, running brothels, managing talent, and trying to avoid federal agents. Director Steven Scarborough later recounted an episode in which federal agents waited downstairs at a motel while Kincey disguised himself as housekeeping, placing tapes into a laundry basket and wheeling them past surveillance.
Dufault’s Dimension eventually evolved into Brentwood Studios, a prolific mid-1970s operation later raided by federal authorities. Some Brentwood films were subsequently distributed by Falcon and Bijou.
Kincey remained involved across competing camps, scouting new talent throughout San Francisco. “I just went on the streets and picked them up in bars and cable cars and walking and baseball fields. Once you pick up a guy, you never know what’s going to happen. Is it going to be sex or is it gonna be no? Most times, it was yes.”
Former porn model and director Paul Barresi shared that when he was cast in Dufault’s Challenger (1977), it was Kincey who had seen his Colt Studios photographs and approached him about performing in his first gay hardcore film. Barresi was amenable but demanded $1,000 cash up front. Dufault handed him the money.
“Pornography was still, technically, considered a kind of prostitution,” said historian Jeffrey Escoffier. “It was sex for money. Anybody who made pornography at this point in time had, not only to worry about being arrested under prostitution laws, but still had to worry about obscenity, vice squads… It was a dangerous occupation.”
As Kincey later put it: “It was like the McCarthy era for making sex films.”
At the time, Kincey was operating in proximity to Falcon, Brentwood, and Rugby—a Castro clothing boutique he had initially sold to Dufault but continued running while Dufault served a prison sentence after being convicted in a Texas mail-obscenity case. Holmes had also faced federal obscenity charges, though in a separate case filed in Tennessee; his attorney successfully moved the proceedings to California, where the charges were later dismissed.
Around this same period, Kincey briefly worked as advertising editor for Drummer magazine in early 1976, placing him within another hub of San Francisco’s rapidly expanding sexual media network.
The Rugby boutique sat below Steven Scarborough’s health food store, Good Provider, which employed Robert Russell before he became future porn model and directing legend Kristen Bjorn. Across the street was Harvey Milk’s Castro Camera. Through Kincey and Dufault, Scarborough met Holmes.
Frank Ricky Fitts worked the counter at Rugby before appearing as Dick Fisk in Falcon films, most notably The Other Side of Aspen (1978), which also starred Casey Donovan and Al Parker. During casting for Aspen, Holmes later credited Kincey with locating a model who could really ski:
“He had just heard about a boy from Seattle, who was a really good skier. Also that this guy had a big dick and wanted to do a gay film. So we interviewed him, and yes, he could ski, and yes, he was sexy, and yes, he had a big dick. And yes, he became Jeff Turk.”
From its earliest years, Falcon operated under a deliberate policy of anonymity. Holmes mandated that there be no production credits on Falcon films—neither director, casting, cinematographer, nor producer were identified onscreen. For many years, the name “Bill Clayton” functioned as a studio-wide pseudonym, used to identify anyone speaking publicly for Falcon—whether Holmes himself or directors and producers.
The practice was partly protective in an era of obscenity prosecutions, but it also reflected Holmes’s philosophy that the brand outweighed individual authorship.
The Falcon Look
By the late 1970s, Falcon had developed a recognizable aesthetic, and those closest to the studio credited Vaughn Kincey with shaping it.
“Chuck [Holmes] was not a creative person at all,” Scarborough later said. “He was a business person, but Vaughn brought the sheets and the art and the pictures and the orchids.”
Holmes himself described Kincey as “one of the great conceptualizers in the business.” Directing legend William Higgins later called Kincey the model “bird dog“ par excellence. “He could find them, wine and dine them.”
Kincey was direct about his role. “I picked the guys and I picked the clothes. Cut their hair, pluck their eyebrows, shaved ’em. Scrubbed their feet and bleached them so they had nice, white feet. Tan them up and oil them down…”
Outside of Falcon, Kincey and Dufault were still running Rugby, a sleek Castro clothing boutique with a mail-order catalog that photographed young men in fitted shirts and athletic wear. But the economic downturn of the early ‘80s hit both retail and film.
“There were no new films on the market,” Kincey later explained. “Something was going to have to give.”
Around the same time, Calvin Klein entered the men’s underwear market, launching a campaign shot by photographer Bruce Weber featuring Olympic pole vaulter Tom Hintnaus in white briefs. “I had watched the Calvin Klein campaign and how he brought forth real clean, wholesome, American boys — men,” Kincey said. “I noticed how the public just went crazy for it.”
Kincey took the idea to Falcon. “I convinced Falcon to let me do a new film called Style… I wanted to build a film around the fashion business, because so many people are interested in these upscale, good-looking, all-American, healthy guys. The business really needed something new.”
“Vaughn could sell it,” Scarborough remembered. “When you talked to Vaughn, he’s like, ‘Oh girl, just imagine, white, crisp linens on tan skin. Ooh, girl!’ He’d tell Chuck and Chuck could almost — he almost hypnotized Chuck with it… ‘OK, do it!’ He convinced him to spend the money for it.”
Calvin Klein had sent Kincey a box of underwear, “a hundred pair,” he noted. “I liked the way the guys looked in them and I started using them. It was not planned, it was just something I liked the way it looked visually.”
Kincey hired Kyle Martin, an assistant to Bruce Weber, to help style the film. “I didn’t want the people who had normally been shooting sex films to style this film,” he said. “I wanted all fresh, new ideas. I wanted a make-up artist, a hair stylist. The look — it was just different — and it sold. You can’t believe how it sold.”
Kincey insisted on bodies being groomed, feet scrubbed and bleached, and hair coiffed, a departure from the mustached, hypermasculine “clone” aesthetic that had dominated gay porn in the 1970s. He was also deliberate about set design. Director Jerry Douglas once quipped that Kincey “has involved himself in just about every aspect of erotic filmmaking except performing.”
Released in 1982, Style marked a visible shift—clean-shaven bodies, careful styling, white interiors, sculpted presentation—that would ripple through gay adult film in the 1980s and well into the next decade.
Kincey served as creative director and Paul Norman (born Paul Apstein) directed, though per Falcon’s policy, neither received credit for their work.
Hard Up
In scene three of Style, “Watercolors,” Art Williams—a Black model—rims Leo Ford and Tim Kramer. They do not reciprocate. Promotional stills suggest Ford rimmed Williams, but that moment does not appear in the final cut.
In Seed Money, Chi Chi LaRue described Holmes’ internal casting rules: “If I would bring in a fabulous black model, a black model couldn’t be just in the cast. There had to be a reason for the black model to be in the cast. The black guys were never to get fucked. And the white boys were to never lick the black guys’ ass. That’s what he wanted.”
Steven Scarborough later reflected about his time at Falcon: “We had letters for years and years and years about ‘Where are people of color? They’re absent in your movies.’ Chuck wouldn’t hear it. He said, ‘Listen, there’s movies for everybody. If you don’t like what I do, buy somebody else’s movies.’”
Veteran erotica reviewer John Karr asks: “How does that depiction of sexuality reflect gay men? What does it say about us? What does it say about the filmmaker?”
It’s notable that Holmes’s casting directives existed despite Vaughn Kincey being in the room. But one Black man’s presence inside a company does not override the final authority of its owner. Holmes decided what made it into Falcon films. That much is clear in Seed Money.
The result was visible on screen. Black men—and men of color—were limited in when and how they appeared in scenes with mostly White men. Falcon would later allow scenes that eased up on earlier restrictions—notably in Night Flight (1985).
By the mid-1980s, Falcon was wildly successful yet unstable. In Seed Money, Kincey described what was happening without theatrics. Every weekend there were parties that lasted until Monday, after which Kincey would have to get Holmes out of bed to tend to business.
Kincey revealed that “Chuck was lucky if he could bounce a check. He spent all the money he had coming to Falcon chasing boys and going to New York and drugs. He spent up all the money, didn’t have anything left. He had to make payroll. Had to pay the rent. Did he have to make a new film? There was no money.”
Scarborough confirmed: “Falcon was in disarray. They had [video] orders that were six months old and at this time they were only making two or three movies a year.”
Kincey finally said: “I just couldn’t take it anymore. It was just too much. It was not going anywhere and everything was just going deeper, so I left him.”
Bigger is Better
Under the professional name John Summers, Kincey built his own banner as a producer and director. In 1984, The Bigger The Better was released—produced and conceived by Summers and directed by Dufault, now going by the name Matt Sterling. Sterling said he did it as a favor to Summers and some of the ideas came from Summers—including the jaw-dropping scene where Rick Donovan stuffs Matt Ramsey every which way in a makeshift classroom.
Summers discovered Ramsey through a gym connection where the latter worked as an instructor. Ramsey would go on to become Peter North, one of the most popular straight adult performers of all time. Summers later told North, “It took me a month to get your pants off, and now you can’t keep ’em on.”
Summers, along with Jim Hodges, introduced Matt Sterling to straight-identified, married Marine Bill Henson who appeared in Sterling’s A Matter of Size (1983) and Henson became a bona fide superstar. Summers later marveled, “There are very few times you see a bottom man that becomes a big star. But he was so fabulous.”
Summers also discovered Mike Henson who appeared with Brian Maxon in Two Handfuls (1986), directed by Hodges under his new pseudonym, John Travis. Summers produced, conceived, and co-wrote Two Handfuls, which was nominated for an Adult Video News (AVN) award for Best Gay Video, losing to Powertool (1987), another Travis-directed film. In Full Grown Full Blown (1987), Summers introduced the porn world to Vladimir Correa. Full Grown Full Blown, written and directed by Summers for William Higgins’s Laguna Pacific studio, also features porn model Francois Papillion in one of his few gay porn appearances.
Then came Rock Hard (1987), which centered solo performances at the height of the HIV/AIDS crisis. Summers financed Rock Hard with his own money. When pitching the film to straight newcomer Allan Fox, Summers reassured him, “There’s not much involved, just a little mutual masturbation. With the health crisis, that’s all we’ll do.”
Rock Hard won two AVNs in 1988: Best Gay Video and Best Director: Gay Video. In doing so, Summers won an AVN before Falcon, which won the following year for Touch Me (1988), directed by friend Steven Scarborough. Other solo-focused films followed: Young Gladiators (1988) and Backstrokes (1988), both featuring Ramsey in his final scenes in gay porn.
Falcon did not adopt condom use until 1990, beginning with the studio’s film Revenge.
Summers films became so notable that Briefs: The Best of John Summers was released in 1988, and included memorable scenes from The Bigger the Better, Two Handfuls, Rock Hard, and Backstrokes.
Revelle
Jerry Douglas called Summers the “Renaissance Man of Porn,” noting that Summers “involved himself in just about every aspect of erotic filmmaking.” Parallel to this work, Summers maintained a career as an interior designer.
Karen Mason of Circus of Books, a prominent gay adult franchise in Los Angeles, credited Summers with persuading her and husband Brad to begin distributing hardcore gay VHS. He brought them finished films, including his friend Sterling’s Stryker Force (1987) starring megastar Jeff Stryker. The Masons later described Circus of Books as, for a time, the largest distributor of gay hardcore films in the country.
In 1990, more than a decade after casting Paul Barresi in Challenger, Summers approached him about getting behind the camera. “You have a pretty good artistic eye,” Summers told him. Barresi told Douglas he had not considered directing until Summers intervened. His first film, Razor Close (1992), won Best Specialty Video at the Gay Video Guide Awards. In 1996, Summers again urged him to develop a military-themed script resulting in seminal film Marine Code of Silence: Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, ushering a string of military-based films from Barresi.
Summers also began expanding his scope of creative and erotic range. He moved into softcore (Advocate Men Live, 1990), wrestling (Slammers, 1991), straight-first-timers (Straight Studs, 1990), military-themed (Marine Code of Silence, 1996), foot fixation (Cops, Jocks, and Military, 1992), and autofellatio (Dreamsicle, 2001).
Unlike peers Sterling, Travis, and Higgins, Summers featured Black men and men of color in his films, most notably in Moments of Truth (1993), Black Muscle Machine (1996, one of GayVN Hall of Famer Jack Simmons’s first films), Latin Balls Huevos (1998), and Brazilian Heatwave (2000).
Magnified
Kincey rarely stepped in front of the camera. In 2005, he made a public appearance at the memorial for cinematographer and director Barry Knight. He told adult film historian Mickey Skee that he had a new video coming out after several years on hiatus. Kincey’s final film, Gladiators School, was released in 2009.
Vaughn Kincey died on the morning of August 22, 2010, at the age of 68, of an apparent heart attack. By the time Seed Money premiered in April 2015, Kincey had already been gone nearly five years.
Seed Money director Mike Stabile interviewed Kincey in the spring of 2010, only months prior to his death. In his memorial, Stabile wrote that Kincey “was one of the people most responsible for the Falcon look. He brought a style and class to post-Aspen movies that really set the studio apart.” He noted that Kincey was “always a pleasure to deal with. He loved art and orchids and preppies with big, big dicks. I’ll miss him a lot.”
Near the end of Seed Money, Kincey’s name appears on a black screen:
In Memory of Chuck Holmes, Vaughn Kincey (“John Summers”) and Jack Dufault (“Matt Sterling”).
Jim Hodges died two years later, in 2017.
The public memory of Falcon Studios invariably narrowed to one man—Chuck Holmes—whose business acumen, longevity, and visibility made him the enduring emblem of the brand. Holmes professionalized the infrastructure, marketed strategically, and believed in the longitudinal potential of gay adult cinema. Falcon is one of the longest-running and successful studios in adult film history.
Falcon’s aesthetic grammar—the grooming, tanned bodies, crisp sheets, styled interiors, and talent cultivation—did not materialize from a single imagination. Vaughn Kincey was there at inception, as were Hodges and Dufault. Kincey facilitated crafting the look, casting, and atmosphere. He helped name the company, and provided the mailing list that launched Falcon.
Kincey stood comfortably among powerful White men in an industry that rarely centered men who looked like him. Most consumers of 1980s and 1990s gay adult film likely never knew John Summers was Black. Many probably assumed he was not. His pseudonym did not signal race, his public persona did not foreground it, nor did his films advertise it.
But the fact remains: A Black man helped architect the most powerful aesthetic in gay porn’s formative decades. Still, Kincey’s name is not mentioned in retrospectives about Falcon, the development of the “Falcon look,” or even Falcon’s Wiki page.
Moreover, Kincey’s name does not appear in the GayVN Hall of Fame alongside fellow pioneers, peers, and directors he mentored: Matt Sterling (1995), John Travis (1996), Paul Norman (1997), and Paul Barresi (2008).
Vaughn Kincey did not crave the spotlight. Instead, he thrived behind the scenes. For more than 40 years, he cultivated talent, styled images, discovered performers, stabilized distribution networks, mentored directors, designed sets, scored music, and helped define what a generation of gay men would see—and desire—on screen and in life.
The story of Vaughn Kincey has been present all along: in credits, interviews, mailing lists, and quiet acknowledgments from those who worked beside him. What has been less visible is the throughline—and the recognition.
Until now.
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Photo (thumbnail): Promotional still from Style (1982). Pictured (left to right): Art Williams, Leo Ford, and Tim Kramer. Falcon Studios via Collectors Realm 3.
Special Acknowledgements: Research for this essay was supported by archival and industry databases including Gay Empire, GEVI, IAFD, Rialto Report, and Smut Junkies which helped determine release dates, award records, and historical documentation.
References
Adam Gay Video Erotica (AGV), Dirk Yates: From Sgt. Swann to God Was I Drunk. Los Angeles: Knight Publishing, December 1999).
Baran, Adam. Talking About The Death Of Porn Stores With Karen Mason, Owner Of L.A.’S Circus Of Books. The Sword, March 3, 2015.
Barker, Keith. “The Emperor of Erotica,” Blueboy, October 2001.
Cachapero, Joanne. Profile: Steven Scarborough. XBIZ, November 26, 2007.
Connelly, Tim, (editor). The AVN Guide to the 500 Greatest Adult Films of All Time. New York, New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press Avalon Book Publishing Group, January 9, 2006.
Douglas, Jerry. Directing Sex: Interviews with the Directors of Gay Pornography. The Manshots Magazine Collection, June 3, 2020, pp. 125-132, 133-137, 170-177, 262-263.
Douglas, Jerry. “Behind the Camera: John Travis. Manshots, vol. 2, no. 6, March 1990, pp.6-10, 72.
Drummer magazine, Volume 1, Number 4, January/February 1976, p. 3. Acquired at JackFritscher.com.
Drummer magazine, Volume 1, Number 5, March/April 1976, p. 3. Acquired at JackFritscher.com
Escoffier, Jeffrey. Bigger Than Life: The History of Gay Porn Cinema from Beefcake to Hardcore, 2009, pp. 81, 129, 130, 169, 259, 321.
Goldston, James & Baker, Steve (executive producers). “The Hef of Gay Porn.” Sex Before the Internet, season 2, episode 8, Vice TV, March 12, 2024.
Hendy, Eloise. How Chuck Holmes Founded the World’s First Gay Porn Empire. VICE, January 16, 2024
Lawrence, Doug. Gay Porn Pioneer Matt Sterling Dies. Gay Adult Video News (GayVN), December 6, 2006.
Sandel, Adam. Seed Money: The Chuck Holmes Story Exposes The Gay Porn King. The Advocate, June 20, 2015.
Skee, Mickey. Mickey Skee’s Gossip: September 2005. GayVN, September 2, 2005.
Stabile, Michael. A Few Good Men: An Oral History of Early Gay Porn. Out Magazine, July 8, 2015.
Stabile, Michael. In Memoriam: Gay Director John Summers. Gay Porn Blog, August 23, 2010.
Stabile, Michael (director). Seed Money: The Chuck Holmes Story. Breaking Glass Pictures and Naked Sword, 2015.
Street, Sharan. Veteran Director, Studio 2000 Founder John Travis Passes. Gay Porn Blog, January 8, 2007.
Smut Capital of America (film short). Directed by Mike Stabile, 2011.
Unzipped Magazine. “Falcon: The Bird’s-Eye View, How Founder Chuck Holmes Built a Sex-Video Giant,” Unzipped, April 13, 1999.
Waxner-Herman, J.W. Exclusive: Talking With Filmmaker (and Sword Co-Founder) Michael Stabile About His New Porn Documentary ‘Seed Money: The Chuck Holmes Story.’ The Sword, April 8, 2015.
Recommended Viewing
wow! Had no idea john summers was black; and while it may be true that Falcon's no credits policy contributed to that - you are right - it never would have occurred to me. Fantastic article, and I wonder if you used one of those conspiracy bulletin boards to make and keep all the connections and pseudonyms between all the names, places, and films.
If only I had worked in a clothing store in the Castro in the 70's, my life might've been entirely different!
Appreciate all your hard work - keep it up!
Great essay!
"The Other Side of Aspen" and "The Bigger the Better" are definitely classics.