Wheels of Fortune

Spokes is an absolutely sensational, white-hot gay porn classic. A team of five cyclists - “The Club” - pull in at an abandoned barn to initiate a new member by gang fucking him half to death. According to club tradition, the first guy to get a hard on fucks the new member first, then the rest follow. Cheeky Mark Hunter plays the insatiable inductee, and Lee Ryder springs a quick fat one and is the first cab off the rank. Little do they all know that a well-hung drifter - played by a clone who looks like he’s on his way to a Skatt Bros. audition - is hiding behind a hay bale, ready to emerge and join in the private fun.

Given this latter part of the storyline and the film’s spunky frat-boy energy, it’s no surprise to learn that Bill Clayton, the director, is actually Matt Sterling. When the drifter, played by Pete Gable, makes himself visible, Leo Ford, the peroxided leader of the gang confronts him and demands sex as payment for his intrusion. This situation was quoted almost frame-for-frame in Sterling’s later, and equally superlative Inch By Inch right down to Tony Stefano barking “who the fuck are you?”, in exactly the same words and intonation used here by Ford.

The orgy continues and every character gets to cum about two or three times. The spritely Spokes clocks in at just under an hour, but as the location is limited to the barn (which comes with bucolic decorations such as an hilarious fake meadow backdrop and bird calls on the soundtrack) and as there’s no time-wasting set-up bits or scene changes, it doesn’t feel like a short porn but more like a very long action packed single scene.

Filmed in 1983, there’s a really erotic polymorphous pre-AIDS piggery to the sex with come being smeared over arses and mouths and come-dripping dicks being inserted straight back into open-wide arse holes. Hay and straw sticks to sweaty butt cheeks and there’s none of the dreaded spare-hand-behind-the-back staged fucking of robotic modern porn. The bulk of the movie is held in mid shot with most of the actors all visible at once and there’s a minimum of extreme close-up shots that carve the action up into un-sexy, faceless body parts.

It all looks wonderfully real and spontaneous and you get the impression that the guys have been directed to let the good times roll and are having the time of their lives, especially Ford, who scampers from hay bale to hay bale like a platinum-haired, six-foot field mouse.

Best of all, the brief feature is followed by the original trailers for over a dozen other Falcon porns of this vintage. The films look pretty hot, but it’s the earnest, too-groovy voiceover narration by a Tom Brokaw soundalike that is the real bonus. Half the time, it sounds like an old seventies radio advertisement for cigarettes or scotch whiskey. Soundbytes this priceless deserve their own permanent installation at the New York Museum of Modern Art:

Phillip plunges fast and deep into Brian’s channel as Michael thrusts his powerful manhood between Phillip’s eager melon-shaped cheeks. Phillip’s sensation of taking a huge cock up his ass while he’s ramming Brian’s hard athletic ass is the ultimate in total masculine pleasure. The feverish pitch winds and winds until their sweaty bodies explode in proud, creamy ecstasy

or,

Larry has a problem. He gets a raging hard on during class, so his teacher keeps the young man after school for a little blackboard discipline.

They could play as accompaniment to a huge screen print of the equally historically valuable health warning that pops up at the start of the movie:

The video you are about to view from the Falcon family of companies is one of our “pre-condom classic” titles. It was conceived and produced over a decade ago and as such is a historic representation of gay life and fantasies as they existed and were practiced in years past. We in no way condone or endorse the risky practice of anal intercourse without the use of condoms as may be depicted in this production.

A lot of the previewed films feature bizarre-looking self-fucking, with semi-tumescent fat cocks being bent around into their owners’ own arses. I guess if you’re hung enough, fucking yourself is probably fun and certainly handy. But on film it looks grotesque, with testicles, penis and anus indistinguishable among a bulbous mass of engorged ruby-pink flesh that seems to be all mashed together like some kind of horrific deformity. When the other guy sticks his cock in there as well, it all just looks quite disturbing. But the snatches of hungry sex between innumberable swarthy clones - most replete with moustache, gallons of thick white cum and the accoutrements of some kind of blue-collar or sex-fantasy profession - that stud the trailers are as hot and retro-fabulous as Spokes itself.

And don’t you love this phrase “pre-condom” - why can’t we say “pre-AIDS?”

SPOKES

USA, 1983
Director: Bill Clayton (Matt Sterling)
Stars: Mark Hunter, Leo Ford, Dick Fisk, Lee Ryder, Ron Greer

Available on DVD - order here