Peter de Rome took to the camera when homosexuality was still outlawed during the 1960s, yet painted his experience as a gay man into a series of poetic, chimerical, sexually charged vignettes. The avant-garde filmmaker, who passed away this summer weeks before his 90th birthday, was a bespectacled, quintessentially English man admired by Warhol and British actor John Gielgud. Starting as a sui generis hobby, his legacy has been immortalized in the canon of gay erotica that is seen in director Ethan Reid’s titillating documentary, Peter de Rome: Grandfather of Gay Porn. Accompanying an excerpt of the film—seen here for the first time with a look at one of the director’s most infamous and enthralling works, Underground (1972)—are De Rome’s musings on early beginnings and the fantasy of erotica.

My very first proper, improper, film was a little thing called Butch Easter. One day, I was sitting in a park and it was Easter Day and a boy came along. I was using my movie camera, and he walked right into my lens, and out again. I followed him, and we walked into the Easter parade and I followed him back to the Rockefeller Plaza and he came home with me. It was a very pleasant Easter Sunday.

I experimented with putting myself in front of the camera in the middle of a film before I sent it through to Kodak and it came back unharmed, and uncut. So I thought, “I can get a little further than this.” I would shoot something innocuous in the beginning of the film, and the naughty bits would be in the middle.

For me the key word in the visual and literary treatment of sex is erotic. Pornography is to eroticism as vulgarity is to wit. Eroticism is to arousal as pornography is to performance. Sex has such an enormous affinity to fantasy and is largely comprised of it, that arousal before the act can be all-important, sometimes even more exciting than the act itself. I know I’ve been labeled the grandfather of porn. I’d rather preferred the granddaddy of porn but I had no say in that.

Peter de Rome: Grandfather of Gay Porn screens at aGLIFF (Austin Gay and Lesbian International Film Festival), Texas, on September 13.