A recent documentary, Peter de Rome: Grandfather of Gay Porn, has many wondering: Who was this Peter de Rome? At a Barbican retrospective, producer David McGillivray revealed details of a collaboration between de Rome, the Grandfather of Gay Porn, and famed English actor and theatre director John Gielgud.

The news may not immediately raise eyebrows outside of British culture, but the connection between de Rome and Gielgud adds to a salacious set of collected stories about John Gielgud's 'darker' side, which began publicly in 1953 with an arrest for cottaging or 'persistently importuning male persons for immoral purposes' in a public bathroom in the London's Chelsea neighborhood.


 Gielgud was arrested just three months after being knighted by Queen Elizabeth II. Gielgud, who never formally came out, suffered a nervous breakdown. The scandal was turned into a play in 2008,  Plague Over England, by Nicholas de Jongh.

With a career spanning over eight decades, Gielgud's (1904 - 2000) name spans generations both within and outside of the United Kingdom. He is considered one of "the greatest-ever interpreters of Shakespeare" and has even won an Oscar. However, Gielgud has reached new fame on a different, more risqué type of set. It turns out Gielgud wrote a gay porn film for Peter de Rome. 

De Rome is most widely known in adult film circles, but is considered one of the finest in the gay porn industry. He didn't start making pornography films until he was in his forties. De Rome, who died earlier this year, used an 8mm camera to shoot gay porn in New York in the 1960s and 70s, at a time when homosexual was illegal. Most of his films were shot with little to no budget on the streets and in the subways of New York City.

De Rome's films caught the attention of fixtures like Andy Warhol and William Burroughs. He stopped making porn in the early 80s

Although the gay porn industry has changed quite significantly since the 60s and 70s, de Rome's tales of skin and exhibitionism may be re-ignited. Quoted in The Guardian, David McGillivray talks about the reach of de Rome's influence while teasing audiences with the possibility of a re-imagining of a de Rome film, written by John Gielgud:

“Peter de Rome knew everybody when he was working, including John Gielgud, and John was so impressed with Peter’s work – which of course was porn – that he wrote Peter a screenplay,” McGillivray said. “Nobody knows anything about this script, it’s not in the John Gielgud letters, it’s not mentioned in the biographies, it’s an unknown script. John Gielgud’s only screenplay. So next year, we are going to make that."

The script is called Trouser Bar and according to McGillivray is named because "John Gielgud was obsessed with trousers, loved corduroy and leather. And so he wrote a film set in a menswear shop.”

Although few knew of Gielgud's secret porn script, he and de Rome weren't strangers. He once did a voice over for a de Rome film, Kensington Gorey, but insisted that he remain uncredited. In a statement, the BFI said that it isn't involved in Trouser Bar, although it has given its support to de Rome's work. In 2006, de Rome donated his Super-8 films to the BFI national archive. De Rome died earlier this year.

But are de Rome's films art or porn? This is a tense question with as many answers as there are viewers. When asked in an interview with Butt Magazine, de Rome said it's "mixture, really. I just felt like making my own little things, but I never had any highfalutin ideas about them at all." When asked who he made his films for, he replied:

"For myself, just for fun, until I took a few of them to the Amsterdam Wet Dream Festival in 1971. ‘Hot Pants’ won first prize… My silly little film which I shot in half an hour. Both John Russell Taylor and David Robinson reviewed it over here for the ‘Times’ and the ‘Financial Times’ and were very kind."