Legends: Men of Falcon

A high-gloss anthology from Berlin's Bruno Gmünder Verlag drawing on the photographic archive of Falcon Studios, the San Francisco company that, more than any other, manufactured the commercial image of American gay erotica in the closing decades of the twentieth century.

Promoted at publication as the first and only photo book of Falcon photographs, Legends collects 136 color images across 133 pages: studio promotional stills and set photography of the company's marquee models, among them Ken Ryker, Mike Branson, Jeremy Penn, Joey Stefano and Trent Black. The pictures codify the Falcon house style: athletic, all-American physique photography staged with locker-room and workwear props, the cover model posed with a football helmet and jockstrap. First issued in 1999, the book returned in this Berlin softcover edition of 2004, bound in navy pictorial wraps.

Falcon Studios was founded in San Francisco in 1971 by Chuck Holmes, who built it into the largest producer of gay adult film and whose philanthropy later put his name on the city's LGBT Community Center. Bruno Gmünder Verlag, the Berlin house founded in 1981, was for decades Europe's leading gay publisher, and its photo-book program (of which the Falcon titles, including the companion Young Men of Falcon, were a fixture) circulated this imagery well beyond the video-store context that produced it.