a screen grab of a title image, presenting the title "Bi-Coastal" with an outline of the mainland US in an illustration behind it. this floats above a blurry cityscape
a medium close up shot, two white men with dark hair look at each other while one blonde woman looks up at one of them
the front cover of a book with the following text on it. "SCREENING CINEMA. SCREENING ADULT CINEMA. Edited by FARRAH FREIBERT, PETER ALILUNAS, and DESIRAE EMBREE." This text appears over a red background, and beside the editors names is the logo for the publisher Routledge. In the top half of the cover, a brown-skinned person with shaved sides of their head and a nose ring operates a camera.
a screenshot of the first page of a chapter. It reads: 18. BI-COASTAL (1985). Jacob Engelberg. DOI: 10.4324/9781003276302-18.
There is a fleeting moment in Linda Williams's influential article "Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess" in which she references a rapidly proliferating pornographic subgenre. "There is a new category of video called bisexual," Williams announces, before detailing its definitional conventions: "Men do it with women, women do it with men, men do it with men and then all do it with one another, in the process breaking down a fundamental taboo against male-to-male sex." First published in 1991, Williams's article arrived six years after the explosion of a subgenre calling itself bisexual video. Whereas depictions of female bisexuality have been present in straight pornographic films since the earliest days of stag (and continue to this day), depictions of male bisexuality have been fewer. "Bisexual" would thus come to name an industrial category whose sine qua non was the depiction of men having sex with both women and men. This chapter considers one of the formative releases of the early bisexual video boom: Tom DeSimone's Bi-Coastal (1985). The video follows Jill (Cara Lott), who has traveled, bicoastally, from Chicago to Los Angeles to meet her boyfriend Nick (Tico Patterson).
my chapter on one of the first instalments of the 80s bi video boom: BI-COASTAL (1985) is now available! featured in the wonderful SCREENING ADULT FILM, edited by @ffreibert.bsky.social, Peter Alilunas, & Desirae Embree. ask your library to buy it! www.routledge.com/Screening-Ad...