1.01: Introduction

Early promo poster

I’m Tristan, a guy who was exposed to the films and still images produced by Lyric Productions/Lyric International/ DOM-Lyric in the mid 1970’s when i was in my early teens. The experience was profound for me on several levels, and something i never forgot.

At an early age i was rudely ushered into the sexual world and by my early teens was an accomplished self-pleasurer and through fantasies, aware of my sexual preferences. those intense hours of discovery with the images discussed here kicked down the door to my sexual identity, and confirmed without a shred of doubt just who i was. I was jolted out of a childhood world filled with Matchbox cars, Levi’s cut-offs and Converse Allstars basketball shoes in the too short summers, and Schwinn Apple Crate bicycles year round, and dropped ready or not into a world of teenage passions and desires that i couldn’t understand, but knew i needed to satisfy.. somehow.

I sat alone in that mans rec-room while a friend was busy with him upstairs and devoured those magazines and films. I learned to feed and restart those 8mm reels, and as the pages trembled and the projector hummed, I focused, I throbbed, I squirmed and adjusted. I ate every square inch of those images. I pulled them inside me as if by osmosis. When my friend was done upstairs, he would come to collect me, and on our walk home i would do my futile best to hide my excitement, while both of us pretended i didn’t know what he’d been busy doing up those stairs. The minute i found solitude, and sometimes well before, nature took its course and i’d be painting the town and jelly-legged. Then an hour later i’d do it all over again as if to make sure those exquisite feelings were really possible.

I recognised the nude boys in those films and magazines. I somehow knew them. Like meeting a relative for the first time, looking into their eyes, anticipating their familiar body language, knowing there is a reflection of yourself in their facial structure, their voice, how they laugh, and knowing without a doubt that there is common blood there. They were wearing my skin. A skin i should be in. The experience was short lived but an epiphany, forever filed away in my brain. I must have a selective photographic memory, for I can forget what i walked into the kitchen to do, but i can describe in perfect detail the images i passionately consumed during those few weeks over 30 years ago.

Three decades of existence later, a life full of hard and easy, good luck and bad, dust and diamonds, i would wonder now and then… Who were those beautiful boys? Who made those films and photos? How did they find eachother? Didn’t someone see them playing around on those beaches stark naked? How did those boys stay so relaxed? Where were these sun-kissed, heavenly beaches? And finally…What ever happened to “the boys”? Are they now my age and standing naked on a beach somewhere waiting for someone with an eye for beauty and a camera?

So flash forward with me to the present. All those years gone by and my eyes are dimming like a wick slowly starving for wax, my body has had many miles of asphalt, forest and ocean pass underneath it, and i’m surfing the web and up pops an image. The image is “The Genesis Children” movie poster. I sat dead still. A flood of emotions rushed in, ugly and beautiful and confusing. I hadn’t seen that image, or the images linked to it, in decades. I said an uncomfortable hello to some old friends.

I clicked and Googled and chased the mouse feverishly. Bits here. Parts there. Wikipedia. More Google. A name. An article. An arrest. A nasty trial. A dead boy. Tyler, Texas, Illinois, San Fransisco and Los Angeles. A boy dangled over a cliff by the LAPD. The UK, Italy… And names… Billy Byars Jr., Guy Strait aka The DOM (Dirty Old Man), Harlan “Slim” Pfeiffer, Uncle Terry, Anthony Aikman, and the “boys”… Peter Glawson, Greg Hill, Billy Marshal aka Jack Good, Mike Good, Butch Burr, Max Adams, Bubba Collins… And on it went.. parts, blurbs, drips and drops… some drips fit.. Lots of drops didn’t…Myths.. Dates, places, Books, congressional hearings, flights to avoid prosecution… Now deceased former U.S. F.B.I. directer J. Edgar Hoover? What?

So whats the story? NO NO… The whole story! You know, from beginning to end… Starting with “Once upon a naked time”… And with an ending like… “And they all lived nakedly ever after”?

Well try hard as you can to peel your eyes away from the pictures here and i’ll try to tell a little story…..