Flashback Friday Remembers Adult Film Icon Al Parker

February 9, 2024
HANK ORSO

Parker in a rare interview about why he started directing and producing.

For this week’s Flashback Friday, allow me the indulgence of some personal memories of gay porn icon, Al Parker. We all have indelible memories of those first exposures to adult fare, those men that stuck in our heads, that formed us into adulthood. Parker was one of mine.

It was 1985 and yer boy Hank here was in his first year of college, still living at home in the Chicago suburbs. I’d been out and about since my teens in New Orleans, but Chicago didn’t afford the easily accessible gratuitous fun I was used to from down south. I’d heard of an adult bookstore, the Bijou Theater in the city’s Old Towne neighborhood, and decided I was going to sneak off and give it a try.

It was a very blustery, snowy night. I got off work and attempted to race downtown from the ‘burbs, my heart racing in anticipation. When my car did a 180° turn and skidded to a stop in the middle of the highway, oncoming cars approaching slowly for the weather, but approaching nonetheless, it was by some miracle that the car started up and I got it moving again…still heading downtown. Yes, I was not going to let the weather keep me from my appointed rounds!

I found the theater, a remarkably well-lit and grimly festive place a couple of blocks from where the bars and restaurants began. I paid, I entered the dark theater and noticed the several patrons who had braved the weather as I had. I sat, taking in the feel and smell of masculine eroticism and flagrant sex happening a row behind me, and settled in to actually watch the movie. It was Al Parker’s Rangers from his Surge Studios, and it changed my life.

Parker had started Surge in ’79 with his real-life partner Steve Taylor. He’d already developed a career and popularity since the mid-seventies, discovered by Rip Colt who gave him his nom d’porn in groundbreaking films like Inches. He fashioned what became known as the “clone look,” and his sexual style was enamored by many. Not only was he handsome, and handsomely endowed, he had a lean and muscular body and a bevy of scene partners that appeared blue collar, the everyman, hard at work and hard at play. He had an emotionally detached quality in his film work, giving the idea that this guy was a regular Joe with an enormous libido who took what he want, and moved on.

Photo courtesy of Falcon Studios.

In reality he was often described as a nice and affable guy, a professional and kind individual. What I saw up on that screen was everything I wanted that I wasn’t seeing in the bars. I saw plaid. I saw hairy bodies. I saw facial hair. The blonde, thick, and furry Chris West was a visual godsend to my eyes! To watch this burly, furry dude who looked like he could be my HS coach takign it from both ends?! Incredible.

Chris West in Rangers.

While Parker himself wasn’t hirsute, the men in his films were, for me, the predecessors of what we’d later call Bears. What I saw on that screen that night were men of different looks all enjoying each other to the fullest, sometimes with shades of kink that titillated and made me eager to discover more. (Oh man, what he did with that leather cord, stringing up his low-hanging scrotum to the end of his erection, creating a hole through which Daniel Holt could penetrate and be orally gratified by Chris Allen!)

Parker had quite a life. Born Andrew Robert Okun in 1952 in Massachusetts, he was young when his mother encouraged him to take her car to what seemed like an exciting and artistic classical music event in NY. That event turned out to be Woodstock, where the young man had what he described as his first really gratifying sexual experience in a car! When he went west he wound up as a projectionist and butler at Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Mansion. And from there the rest really is gay porn history.

My memories of Parker end with my meeting him very briefly at the Belmont Rocks, the gay “beach” on Chicago’s lakefront in 1988. I was hosting a party that weekend, a going away before I moved to Hawaii. I saw, remarkably, he and another guy hanging out and laughing. I happened to have some invites in my bag and nervously sauntered over. I introduced myself; he was kind and warm and accepted my invitation. He didn't come; I didn’t think he would. But it was a big deal to simply reach out to that man from the screen who gave me such joy, and still does.

We lost Parker in 1992, and his indelible contribution to adult films and images lives to this day.

Check out some of Al Parker's work at Falcon Studios.