Just for once I’m going to blow my own. Quiet at the back. For the past five years I’ve had a relationship with Peter de Rome, who’s been called a legendary pioneer of gay porn and quite rightly so. Peter was making gay porn films before almost anyone else. Now I’ve made a film about Peter and I’d like you to see it. This story started five years ago and this is how it came about.

In March, 2007, I went to see Peter introducing some of his films at the London Lesbian & Gay Film Festival. This was a major event for anyone interested in the history of porn because Peter’s films had never been seen in the UK before.

They were made in the 1960s and 70s, when porn was illegal here. Peter was taking a bit of a risk shooting this kind of stuff. He processed it in New York, where he lived and where obscenity laws weren’t quite as strict.

But he still had to smuggle his films in and out of the Kodak factory. He did this by filming a bit of innocuous stuff at the beginning and end of the reel. Anyone making a spot check would spin through the middle of the reel, where the porn was hiding. Amazingly he got away with it.

Peter showed his films to friends at parties. Some of the guests were quite famous. David Hockney, Derek Jarman, Manolo Blahnik, John Gielgud! (Sir John will crop up again in this story). A producer, Jack Deveau, offered Peter the opportunity of releasing some of his films to cinemas.

It was now 1973 and American censorship was loosening up. The Boys in the Sand and Deep Throat were playing in New York.  Several of Peter’s films were joined together as The Erotic Films of Peter de Rome and got very good reviews.

These were the films we saw for the first time in London in 2007. They were a mixed bunch. But they showed that Peter had a real ability for inventing an unusual, erotic scenario and filming it with an artist’s eye. Generally his films stand the test of time.

Prometheus is as raunchy as it was when it was shot 40 years ago. And then of course there’s Peter’s most famous film, Underground, in which two guys have real sex on a real subway train. On stage at the Festival Peter spoke so interestingly about his career that I arranged to interview him. The interview was in the August, 2007, issue of QXMEN.

“John Gielgud was so taken by Peter’s work that he wrote a script, called Trouser Bar, about an orgy in a clothes shop (dear Johnny loved leather and corduroy).”

Peter and I got on quite well and I found out that he began as an actor. Under my real name, David McGillivray (Haydon Bridge is a railway station in Northumberland), I produce films; and by December of 2007 I was in New York shooting a horror film, Abracadaver!, with Peter in the lead. It was a complete disaster.

I’ve had enough time in court to last me the rest of my life and so I’m not going to name names. Suffice it to say, however, that not everybody on the crew knew what they were doing. At one point during the horrible shoot Peter, aged 83 and flimsily dressed, was almost literally freezing to death in the snow. I thought he would never forgive me. Surprisingly he took it quite well.

In his apartment Peter showed me a trunk containing dozens of reels of 8mm film, the remains of projects that had never been finished or never been shown. “What are you going to do with all this stuff?” I asked him. “Nothing”, he replied. The time wasn’t right for me to do something with this treasure trove of porn goodies. But four years later, the time arrived.

The British Film Institute, sponsors of the LL&GFF, had done a deal for the UK DVD release of The Erotic Films of Peter de Rome, and, knowing of my interest, asked me to write something for the accompanying booklet. I told them I’d rather make a film. So last November director Ethan Reid and I went to New York and made Fragments: The Incomplete Films of Peter de Rome.

I’m happy to say that this time I had fun. You just wouldn’t believe the amount of stuff that Peter had hidden away. We found an old 8mm projector and threw some of the films on the wall in the same way that Peter used to do all those years before when he did the rounds of parties.

One of his earliest films, Scopo, shot in London in 1966, is arguably one of the finest gay erotic films ever made, worthy of comparison with Genet’s Un chant d’amour. Peter also shot nearly an hour of footage on Fire Island, New York’s gay holiday resort, in the mid-1960s.

An entire documentary could be made out of this rare material alone. Peter’s last film, Brown Study (1979), stars sexy bad boy Ken White, who could have been a porn star if he hadn’t ended up in jail. You’ll see extracts from all these films and more in Fragments.

Even more tantalising are the projects Peter never got in front of a camera. He has a letter from William Burroughs, who wanted Peter to make a film of one of his books. Peter knew Casey Donovan, star of The Boys in the Sand, and at one time Casey was going to co-star with Peter Berlin in Peter’s gay re-make of Grand Hotel.

It was to be called Grand Motel. But best of all, John Gielgud was so taken by Peter’s work that he wrote a script, called Trouser Bar, about an orgy in  a clothes shop (dear Johnny loved leather and corduroy), and gave it to Peter to film. Alas, it never happened.

But at the end of Fragments a group of Peter’s friends tries to persuade him to at last make the movie. Wouldn’t you pay to see John Gielgud’s only gay porn film? I would. Who cares if Peter is now 87? Manoel de Oliveira is still churning out films. And he’s nearly 104!

Peter will be coming to London for the premiere of Fragments, supported by four or five of his shorts (details weren’t confirmed at the time of going to press), at the 26th LL&GFF this month. We’ll be filming him for a longer version of Fragments, to be released in 2013.

And an American film crew will be following him around as well. The grandfather of gay porn is well and truly back. Come and meet him! I like him and I think you will too.

Sadly, for me at least, this is my last Raunch Pad. Being a Virgo, I like tidiness and therefore like the idea that Peter de Rome has been the subject of both my first and last features for QXMEN. I’ve met a lot of nice people while I’ve been digging around in the less familiar corners of the porn scene and I hope you’ve enjoyed reading about them. Keep in touch. I’m on Facebook!

• The Erotic Films of Peter de Rome is released on DVD by the BFI on 26th March. Fragments: The Incomplete Films of Peter de Rome is at BFI Southbank on 28th March. www.bfi.org.uk/llgff