Radical Sex Styles (1979)

Director	Armand Weston
Producer	Howard Winters
Contributors	Grove Press, credited as a Westfilm Production
Length	50 minutes
B&W/Color	Black & White
UO Library Catalog description:	Consists of “six candid interviews with people willing to frankly discuss a private world formerly hidden.”
Call #	Md51
Genre	Documentary
Rare	yes
Online	no
Copyright status	public domain
Physical condition	fair
Oregon-related	no

Notes:

Armand Weston was a mostly pornographic director born in 1932.  The first public notice of him was as a paperback artist in the mid-sixties.  He later continued painting movie posters later into his life.

Weston worked on Joe Sarno films before writing/directing/producing full time.  Sarno was “one of the most prolific and distinctive auteurs to emerge from the proto-pornographic sexploitation film genre of the 1960s.

Weston won the award for Best Director from the Adult Film Association of America for his film Take Off (a hardcore pornographic adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray).  He shot the first adult film on video titled Blue Voodoo.  He went on to direct campy horror films in the 1980’s and died in 1988.

One thing worth noting after screening this documentary is that there is no pornography in this film (except the filming the filming of a pornographic film for a couple minutes out of the entire documentary).  At first glance I excepted this film to be interviews with people of alternative sexual lifestyles cut with pornographic sequences involving the interviewees.  Instead, Weston sits with his subjects and asks them questions more logistical and practical than titillating.  He asks a two women and a man in a polygamous relationship the types of problems they encounter as a family and household.  He asks a transvestite whether she had ever found herself in a dangerous situation because of a sexual partner discovering her male genitals and a submissive homosexual the same because of the type of sexual activity he participates in.  He discusses a lesbian’s difficulty with guilt as a younger woman and her appreciation for gay rights groups who are providing for younger homosexuals the opportunity to talk to someone.

Wston’s  experience in the sex industry had informed so as to be able  to ask poignant questions pertaining to the interviewee’s private lives and also of more encompassing themes concerning prejudice against alternative lifestyles, the dangers that might spring from those lifestyles, and the changing sexual climate at that time in America.