I haven’t seen any really heavy gay porn since my first ­visits to New York in the early seventies, when I was ­discovering the real big city, with its countless possibilities for all sorts of vice, when I ran through the streets of Manhattan like a horny rooster, wrung out after three days of too much walking, too much drinking, too much sex, not enough food and convinced I’d caught every kind of bug and disease in the book. Which was too often the case, and I’d come home to Montreal more tired and depressed than when I’d left, a well-deserved present blossoming between my legs. But a shot of penicillin and I was ready to resume my activities, needless to say, like any person who’s been too careful all his life and is suddenly turned on to the thrill of danger. I’d been hearing a lot in the past few months about the Cinéma du Village on Sainte-Catherine Street—it used to be the Théâtre National, a mecca of Québécois music hall in the forties and fifties, converted now into a porn house—where for some time apparently they’d been showing uncut films that every gay man in Montreal made it a point of honour to see at least once, probably to make them feel as if they were back in some dark corner of New York or San Francisco.

I was skeptical. I’d seen so many butchered sex scenes in Montreal, so many straight films that gave spectators an occasional glimpse of a woman’s crotch but scrupulously banished the male genitalia, or gay films that had ­practically nothing left after the censor’s scissors had had their ­frenzied way, that I figured there was no chance this theatre would show films intact. Especially the kind that leave me with a slightly bitter aftertaste, as if I were still awash in their aggressive breeziness and their raw familiarity.