November 13, 2018 | The Biz

The life and times of porn producer William Higgins

William Higgins has been making gay porn for 40 years now. That's four decades of cock and balls and taints and cum shots. And he's always done it with style.

He was recently interviewed by AVN about his lengthy career. Here are just a few highlights.

He got the idea to make adult videos following a trip to the local porn theater.

"[...] I thought, ‘Well, these films are really horrible -- certainly I can do better!’ I would also say that I was about 34 years old, and I had been a customer of Falcon in Dallas, and one day I received a letter from Falcon saying that no future orders would be shipped to Texas, Tennessee or Florida…and that really made me angry. So, I decided, ‘Well, the movies are so bad and Falcon won’t sell me their 8-millimeter films, I’ll just go out and I’ll make gay porn on my own.’”

Of course, it wasn't that simple. His first film, which would eventually become A Married Man, with Jack Wrangler (pictured, above), almost never got made. A mansion he had scouted was seized by U.S. Marshalls the same day of shooting because of the owner's bankruptcy. Higgins went all experimental with one scene filming it under red lights (which, he admitted, was a terrible idea). And when he took the film in for processing he was told it was under-exposed because it had been loaded into the camera backwards!

Obviously, he refused to take the message and kept at it. He not only learned to make quality films, he was able to get them into theaters to be seen by horny men.

Eventually VHS took over from film. Higgins was reluctant to explore the new medium at first, but realized that a lot of profit could be had moving to tape after Falcon released The Other Side of Aspen.