“In one moment it was a little blip.” Next, Our Friends Are Dying: Gay Porn Soundtrack Composers Lose to the AIDS Crisis | Electronic music

MMichael Ealy knew from the first moment he met James Alan Taylor that he had found someone special. The couple had traveled separately to a gay bar with fake IDs in Sunset Beach, California. They communicated, danced, and came out to kiss each other in the thick fog. “I was only 18, but I knew I had just met my soul mate,” Eli says.

The pair remained a couple until 2015 when Taylor, nicknamed Spider, died of liver cancer. A new collection of Taylor’s music, Surge Studio Music, has been released, which are electronic tracks he composed for gay porn films. “I was like, ‘Hey, is there a fan base for gay porn in the ’80s?’ Eli laughs. “I had no idea. When Josh called me, I found the cassette tapes in a box in the back of the closet. They’d been there forever.”

Josh Cheon runs Dark Entries, a San Francisco-based record label focused on celebrating overlooked gay artists, including many who died of AIDS-related illnesses, and releasing their lesser-known forays into the world of gay porn soundtracks. In addition to Taylor’s Surge Studio Music material, there were releases by Hi-NRG, disco pioneer Patrick Cowley, electro innovator Man Parrish, and the compilation Deep Entries: Gay Electronic Excursions 1979-1985, described as “10 tracks of mystical musical bliss.”

“This has been on my agenda since day one of the label,” Cheon says. “There were all these groups of people doing rare Australian pop or Japanese new wave but I say: ‘What about gay people? Where is the gay voice in all of this? It’s all been erased, forgotten, lost to AIDS or discarded.” I’ve literally been working on this for 16 years trying to amplify this underground gay music scene.

Proceeds from many releases are donated to AIDS charities, but it’s also an opportunity to direct some money towards artists who may not have been very familiar with the business when they first took up the recording business. “The guy Parrish was like, ‘Oh, I think I got $50 and a blowjob,’” Cheon laughs. “Which he then spent on drugs.”

By working with queer film historian Elizabeth Burchell to track down and uncover old films and scores, Chion has found a niche within the field. “There are a lot of amazing things out there,” he says. “If I wanted to, I could just turn into a reissue company for gay porn soundtracks.” As if by magic, his phone rings to prove his point. “Oh my god, this is crazy,” Cheon smiled after quickly answering the call. “He’s another gay porn composer that everyone thinks is dead. No one has talked to him in 30 years. I literally get goosebumps right now.”

IIt was at the “Basic Plumbing” club in Los Angeles, where Taylor’s Surge Studio Music material was born. He was working at the club in the early 1980s when he met Al Parker, who ran the porn production company Surge Studios, with Steve Scott — both of whom would die of AIDS-related illnesses — and began making soundtracks for their films. Back in the day, “Al and Steve did their best, for the most part, to get the original material for the music,” says Cheon. “But they also stole music from Brian Eno, the B-52s and the Human League. They chopped up the song Being Boiled from the Human League, looped it, slowed it down, and took the sounds to manipulate them as an instrument. I think today it would be called a cosmic or Balearic remix.”

Taylor’s film music has a similar vibe—slow, moody, textural, and syncopated—but despite its enduring appeal, Eli remembers it as just a “side gig,” he says. “None of us were really interested in porn. It was just something to earn because we were starving musicians.” Taylor was most known for his impressive guitar playing, with Eddie Van Halen reportedly saying he was the greatest guitarist he had ever heard. Taylor and Eli were also fronting post-punk outfit Red Wedding at the time (1981-85) which was made up entirely of openly gay men – a rarity in the scene.

The couple lived openly from the beginning, even when same-sex relationships were still illegal in California. “We were very bold and were part of a wave of young gay couples living openly just two years after Stonewall,” Eli recalls. However, it was not without its challenges. “I pretty much lost my family,” Eli says. “We’ve faced a lot of hostility and a lot of damned things have happened to us over the years.” He then told me a horrific story about stealing their cat, killing it, and returning it in a cardboard box labeled “Shoot” and a noose around their pet’s neck.

But by the mid-1980s, when the scores for these films were recorded, they had a lovely community of like-minded friends and were part of a thriving underground music scene. “Then AIDS reared its ugly head,” Eli recalls. “One moment, it was like a little blip, we heard that something was happening in San Francisco. The next thing, friends of friends were dying, and then our friends were dying.” It was so painful that the couple ended up moving to Arizona and starting a new chapter away from bands and music. “We lost a lot of friends, and it affected us a lot,” Eli says. “We didn’t want to be in Los Angeles anymore. There were so many ghosts. Everywhere we looked were reminders of the people we loved who had died such terrible deaths.”

Another release the brand has just released is Brandy Dalton’s Fallen Angel, a collection of the soundtracks – spanning from melodic electronics to electro-static via minimal industrial techno – to the award-winning porn series of the same name. Dalton, who died of an AIDS-related illness in 2006, had his roots in the more radical and experimental part of Los Angeles’ gay community. His band Drance, an industrial and EBM band, will play at venues like the legendary Club Fuck! It is home to the skin, tattoo and body piercing crowds.

“It was pretty wild,” says John Mount, Dalton’s bandmate. “The dance troupe was very exciting, and we had gold-plated dancers or accompaniments to performance art pieces that involved extreme mutilation and mummification. I say that affectionately, but we would always find out where all the nerds were and play there.”

With so much of this type of music forgotten, or never released in the first place, it’s important that the works of these departed artists are celebrated. “It’s so nice to do Brandy’s workouts,” Mont says. “He continued to make music, but things got difficult for him. AIDS really devastated him and he needed to use a lot of medications to treat the severe pain. I loved him as a really close friend, and it was hard to watch.”

Likewise, for Eli this goes beyond just pornographic film music. “It means a lot to me,” he says. “He’s celebrating the spider again. I will always be in awe of him, I will always love him. He was an amazing, talented, loving person, and until the day I die I will still talk about him. I want people to remember him. I want people to hear his music. It’s the least I can do for him.”