The Adult Film History Project

Eventually, just about every adult film historian encounters a familiar, frustrating scenario. While conducting research, tantalizing traces of evidence—crucial contemporary press accounts, invaluable legal papers, or other primary documents—will come to light, only to vanish again, slipping through the historian’s fingers as if they never existed. Generally speaking, the adult film industries did not create conventional paper trails, nor did they embrace their own long-term legacies.¹ In almost all cases, the bits and pieces they did leave behind have not been preserved or archived with conventional methods.² The result for historians has been a methodologically complicated landscape defined by particular challenges. In this essay, we describe the creation of the Adult Film History Project (AFHP), a crowdsourced, online repository of adult film–related materials with the goal of remedying at least some of these challenges.

The potential of this project—and particularly the linking together of personal collections—stems from the overwhelming scarcity of necessary research material. For example, a scholar researching the distribution and marketing of a non–adult film such as E.T. (Steven Spielberg, 1982) might be able to assemble, within hours and completely online, a thick dossier of advertisements, detailed box-office grosses, reviews, and trade discourses. A rich variety of physical archives and bricks-and-mortar libraries might also hold material applicable to the project. Should that same scholar research E.X. (Domingo Lobo, 1985), a hard-core parody of E.T., they would struggle in vain to find any traces online and would likely find no more success in traditional libraries or archives. This shot-on-video production had no theatrical release, left almost no historical footprint, and was ignored by mainstream publications, as were tens of thousands of adult films.

Digging out the histories and contexts of adult films such as E.X. requires patience, creativity, a willingness to work (and occasionally compete) with collectors and dealers, and unflagging persistence and flexibility. These efforts still use time-tested historiographical methods, just applied in new directions and with new targets. Elsewhere, I (Alilunas) have described this process as “trace historiography,” a method that examines fragments of seemingly disparate evidence in an effort to reconstruct a past that seems impossible to locate clearly in predictable and typical ways.³ A crucial part of trace historiography is something that every historian—of adult film or any other kind—understands intimately: the construction of a personal archive. For the adult film historian, however, this personal archive often serves as the only option.

Traditional archives of material related to adult film’s industrial histories do exist; the best known remains the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction at Indiana University, Bloomington, home to perhaps the most significant collection of sex-related materials in the United States. As Linda Williams, Thomas Waugh, David Church, and others have noted, however, the institute does not make its collection easy for scholars to access and employs confusing and perplexing metadata and filing protocols.⁴ More recently, the Kinsey Institute has taken disturbing, politically motivated steps to make itself less public and less about sex.⁵ A handful of collections at other institutions focus on topics related to sex or adult film.⁶ As with any type of archival research, there are barriers to entry: scholars must have the means and opportunity to travel, the time to work in them, and the general knowledge to quickly assess the collected material. That combination can be difficult even for senior scholars and often remains close to impossible for graduate students.

While this small group of “official” collections related to adult film exists, the truth is that extant material exists in all kinds of archives, often set aside in out-of-the-way shelves, uncataloged, ignored, or forgotten, as the archivist Dwight Sanson has described.⁷ Scholars are often quick to attribute such laxity to prudishness on the part of the collection managers, but this neglect can occur for a variety of less exciting reasons. Many archives rely on grants and donations, and managers may be hesitant to upset...