Porn Soundtracks Are Coming Back

When David Flint was a London teenager in 1980, he was rifling through vinyl LPs at Virgin Records, and he stumbled upon his first porn movie soundtrack: Deep Throat. Because albums weren’t age-restricted, Flint immediately purchased it. In England, Deep Throat was banned and many other porn films were censored. So Flint, like many others, turned to records—it was the closest he could get to watching the film. Deep Throat wasn’t like a traditional soundtrack—it featured all the dialogue and sound from the movie.  

Flint began collecting porn movie soundtracks, including one for porno chic classic The Devil in Miss Jones, which ended up surprising him. “The music is fantastic. It’s got a great theme song, really melancholic,” Flint tells SPIN.  

Now the porn movie soundtracks Flint has been collecting since his youth have made a comeback. “It’s old enough to be cool,” he says. People who collect cult movie soundtracks are also collecting porn soundtracks. 

Josh Cheon, founder of the Dark Entries label, has released a half-dozen porn movie soundtracks and compilations on vinyl in the past few years. Cheon got into porn music unexpectedly: He discovered Patrick Cowley’s music, but he didn’t realize the composer had created porn scores until years later. When Cheon first heard Cowley’s music, he became obsessed. “Wow, this is everything. It kind of sounds like Human League, but also like Pet Shop Boys,” Cheon remembers thinking. After moving to San Francisco, Cheon made it his mission to track down all the Cowley recordings. He thought he’d discovered all of Cowley’s records when, in 2007, at a release party for one of Cowley’s albums, he learned otherwise. 

Cheon released a Cowley gay porn album through Dark Entries. “It was the most successful record I’d ever done,” he says. “This whole new generation who maybe didn’t know Patrick Cowley were now going to be exposed to [him].” 

He learned that Cowley had tested his music first in gay bathhouses to see “if people are fucking to it,” Cheon says. Once Cowley saw they were, he knew he had the right music. Cowley was a pioneer during the AIDS era, unapologetically making music for the porn world. “There were still raids on the gay bars at the Castro, where he was hanging out. … He was definitely living on the edges of society making this very radical music,” Cheon says. 

Cheon began preserving other gay porn soundtracks too. The only problem? It wasn’t easy finding them. “Most of the soundtracks are all just lifted. … They would just drop a needle on a record—Donna Summer, Village People, B-52s, Human League—and they would just record that audio … illegally,” Cheon says. 

One day a few years ago, Parrish got an email out of the blue from Cheon, asking if he’d be interested in having his porn soundtracks released on vinyl. Parrish was surprised that there was interest nearly four decades after they came out. He said yes, and Turned On, featuring music from that film, was released in November 2022. Soon after, he received a call from a friend’s daughter who went to NYU: “I love your new album. Everyone’s listening to it,” she said. “Oh my god, all these straight girls and guys are listening to gay porn music,” Parrish thought. 

It’s a full-circle moment for Parrish, whose work in gay porn led to a record deal in the early 1980s. When Parrish first composed porn music, he was a homeless musician squatting above an art gallery with a synthesizer and a dream. His friend was interviewing director Joe Gage for Inches magazine, when Gage said he needed electronic music for an upcoming film called Heatstroke. The friend suggested Parrish, who was in his early 20s. Porn back then wasn’t like porn today, Parrish says. It had storylines, characters. But the music was usually awful: “elevator music.”

Parrish was offered $1,000 for the soundtrack in 1982. “I can actually pay some rent and eat,” he thought. “I’m gonna watch porn and jerk off all day and make music.” Yet his experience wasn’t like that. He didn’t get to see the movie until after he composed the soundtrack. 

Parrish’s soundtrack was all synthesizer à la Giorgio Moroder’s “I Feel Love,” a refreshing sound during the disco era. “I heard music that I tried to emulate—Jean-Michel Jarre, Vangelis, Kraftwerk—so a lot of that trippy, ethereal music [I wrote] is an accident. … I was making sounds which happened to work in porn,” Parrish says. The final product is a mix of otherworldly, hypnotizing electronic sounds sometimes topped by a woman singing. Parrish says the music is heavy on atmosphere: “And in porn, you’re creating a vibe, right? You want people to feel sexy,” he says. 

Fast forward to 2024, and Parish’s vinyl is still doing well. “I think it’s really ahead of its time,” Cheon says. “[Vintage gay porn releases] have launched a new genre of house music.” And musician Jake Muir is one of the guys leading the charge. 

When Muir was looking to create a new sound for a DJ mix of his third album, he turned to vintage gay porn music and dialogue. The album, The Hum of Your Veiled Voice, released on Sferic, was about exploring “music that could be used for more intimate purposes,” he says. The initial version was fairly vague about just what those intimate purposes were; he used samples from jazz and mainstream music soundtracks.

For the DJ mix, Muir wanted a “more sexy, nighttime” vibe—”I thought it would be cute,” he says, “if I put campy dialogue samples from old vintage pornos throughout.” He scoured porn films, struggling to find the synthesizer-based sound he was looking for. Most films that fit his criteria were from the ‘70s and ‘80s, including the iconic gay porn Boys in the Sand. He took dialogue, video static, and ticking clock sounds, and ended up with a dark, mysterious mood, because those were the vibes of the source music. The pieces are long because he wanted them to evoke the flow and editing of a film. “Aesthetically I tried to make decisions that I felt kind of reflected sounds related to gay sex,” he says. One clip is from a cruising scene that has sounds of bird chirping and footsteps, showing the anticipation before an outdoor hookup. 

“I feel like the vast majority of [gay sex music] is centered more around dance music, so part of [my album] was a curiosity about, can more abstract and experimental music suit the vibe? And it seems like the answer is yes,” he says. He even met a guy at a club, a gooner—a person who enjoys edging during masturbation for long periods of time so they get into a hypnotic type state—who mentioned that he’d had sex to Muir’s music. “It was kind of flattering,” he says.

For Cheon, releasing porn soundtracks on vinyl is not only about preserving great music—it’s also about saving queer history. “All these archives usually are destroyed,” Cheon says. But if they haven’t been, he’ll be there to track them down.