Let's Go Stag!

For much of the 20th century, the underground pornography industry – made up of amateurs and hobbyists who created hardcore, explicit “stag films” – went about its business hounded by reformers and law enforcement, from local police departments all the way up to the FBI. Rumors of this illicit activity circulated and became the stuff of urban myth, but this period of pornography history remains murky.

Let’s Go Stag! reveals the secrets of this underground world. Using the archives of civic groups, law enforcement, bygone government studies and similarly neglected evidence, archivist Dan Erdman reconstructs the means by which stag films were produced, distributed and exhibited, as well as demonstrate the way in which these practices changed with the times, eventually paving the way for the pornographic explosion of the 1970s and beyond. Let’s Go Stag! is sure to point the way for countless future researchers and remain the standard work of history for this era of adult film for a long time to come.

Author Biography

Dan Erdman is an A/V archivist and video preservationist at Media Burn Archive, Chicago, USA, where he is responsible for a variety of media materials as they are reformatted, cataloged and ingested into the digital repository. He has published film reviews in Senses of Cinema, The Moving Image, Public Books and Democratiya, and co-wrote a chapter for Internet Spaceships are Serious Business: An EVE Online Reader (2016).