Photographer Explores Athens’ Gay Porn Booths
Image: Photo: Helias Doulis
Helias Doulis, a London-based gay artist, photographer and filmmaker has explored Athens’ surviving gay sex cinemas and porn booths in his work ‘A Faggot’s Destiny‘.
In many cities around the world, gay sex cinemas were once popular meeting places for gay men. Though gay dating apps and the internet have largely replaced these cruising places, some of the remaining gay porn booths from the 1980s are still used by gay, bisexual and other men who have sex with men.
Doulis told Dreck Magazine that he entered a porn cinema as a client for the first time in central Paris around four years ago.
“I was there all by myself, to observe and relate to who I thought I was, or who I thought I could be among men. Men who were there hiding from their wives, boys that were there to explore who they’d grow as or pay their rent with, f*ggots of all kinds.”
View this post on Instagram
“Cruising, that is now fading and becomes less and less popular with sex apps becoming stronger by the minute; it’s all cultural. We’re formed to hide out of a need to survive, yet some of us don’t anymore,” Doulis, who splits his time between London and Athens, told the magazine.
View this post on Instagram
In an interview with PNPPL ZINE, Doulis said he “might have grown up as a voyeur“.
View this post on Instagram
“I remember having a membership at the DVD club of our neighbourhood, casually finding excuses to pass by the XXX area so I get to see the covers of the porn films behind the blinds. I would take walks in downtown London and Athens later on as an adult, staring at them the way a child would look at candy.”
View this post on Instagram
“I visited the porn cabins of Pigalle in France a few years back and fell in love with how rusty, horny and filthy it felt, all covered in some strange melancholy. I have a soft spot for such places; I am not the kind of man who loves participating. I might just be the pervert standing in the corner, enjoying himself in the distance,” said Doulis.
View this post on Instagram
The photographer, who is also a collector of vintage homoerotic photography said that his “documentation is a tribute to the once and forever thrilling pornographic era of men being used to share intimacy behind closed doors and glory holes, rather than their modern ways of untouched egos on sex apps and social media practices.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BPbVls_I4BQ
Doulis’ short film The Beauty Of Stigma, about a retired gay porn star premiered at film festivals in 2021.
Doulis recently announced that he will soon be “casting for boys to shoot in Athens” as part of his ongoing project ‘A Faggot’s Destiny‘.
