One of those unforgettable Higgins movies — and titles. (Image via Catalina)

Back2Stonewall's Will Kohler has confirmed the death at 77 of iconic gay-porn director William Higgins, famous for such classics as Sailor in the Wild (1983) and Big Guns (1987). Higgins reportedly suffered a heart attack early Saturday ...

William Higgins — December 19, 1942-December 21, 2019 (Image via AVN)

Higgins, previously a hobby shop owner in Texas, went into the field of gay pornography because he was dissatisfied with the product on the market in the early '70s, and because Falcon stopped servicing his state due to harsh obscenity laws.

When he first attempted to shoot porn, he ran into resistance. He told AVN in 2018:

I had bought a book that had strongly implied that porno is legal nowadays, so I put notices up on the bulletin boards in several of the gay bars in Houston looking for models, and one day I got a call saying that the Texas Rangers were on their way to my house and would be there in 45 minutes. I packed up my old red pickup truck and took off in about 42 minutes.

He headed for San Francisco, but he got hung up in L.A. when he saw all the young guys selling their wares on Santa Monica Blvd.; he realized he'd found a suitable HQ.

History's 225 Greatest Gay-Porn Stars! A LIST

Inspired by the 1967 art flick I Am Curious (Yellow), his first work was A Married Man, shot and released in 1974. He went on to produce well over 100 titles — self-financing against the advice of a movie professional — many released by Catalina, a company he co-founded, and others by Falcon. He became a rich man thanks to the profitability boom in gay porn during the video age.

He told AVN:

... They would say to me, “You should have seen the 1990s! There was so much money then, there’s not as nearly as much money now.” And I said, “Honey, you should have been there for the ’80s when we would ship 15,000 films out the door wholesale at $35 each.”

“Feels good more 'n it hurts ...” (GIF via GIPHY)

Though he worked for years in Fort Lauderdale and then L.A. — where he owned and operated the popular store Drake's — he moved to Amsterdam and Prague to avoid legal issues after being raided and harassed by authorities on the grounds that his work was obscene, and thanks to what he described as a governmental set-up that implicated him in an underage porn shoot. That, and President Reagan's demand that the Top 10 pornographers in the U.S. be locked upnd I was like No. 9 or No. 10 on the list, so they started after me. “And there are only two people on that list that didn’t go to jail … one was me,” he told AVN. “And it took until a couple of years into Bill Clinton’s first term for them to drop that investigation. And in the meantime, I was very well established in Europe and had no intention of going back to the United States.”

A partial list of Higgins's most famous work would include Boys of Venice (1978), Pacific Coast Highway (1981), Brothers Should Do It (1981), The Best Little Warehouse in L.A. (1982), These Bases Are Loaded (1982), Cousins (1983), Sailor in the Wild (1983), Frat House Memories (1984), The Class of '84 (1984), Pizza Boy: He Delivers (1985), Young and the Hung (1985), Big Guns (1987) and William Higgins: Screen Test (1988). He directed gay-household names such as Bill Henson, Jeff Quinn, Mike Henson, John Davenport, Rick Donovan, Kip Noll, Peter North and Jack Wrangler.

From Prague, he released his new title Uncut and Raw in 2016, and his old titles have been top sellers for years.

And the U.S. government never got him.

In the extensive piece for AVN that I have linked here throughout, Higgins summed up his legacy a year before his death, saying:

I think there’s an arc to everybody’s career. My name is still known and I get contacted by many traveling firemen who happens to be in Prague, so I don’t think I’ll be forgotten for a long time. Actually, what I most proud of is being one of the last men standing. I don’t know virtually anybody else who’s still around when I was around back then, maybe Joe Gage. But he had been out of the business for 20 years and he came back; who knows if he’s still working. And I had been working more or less for the whole 40 years in the business, and I am very proud of that. What I really am hoping to be the capping of my career is to be the last man standing. I hope to continue until I drop.