From the late ’60s to the mid-’80s, in the notorious Times Square area known as the Deuce, the eccentric, Greek-born Chelly Wilson built a straight and queer porn cinema empire and a reputation as one of the savviest and charismatic figures on the scene.
With a cigarette in hand and bags of money stashed in the corner, Chelly regularly held court in her bunkerlike apartment above the legendary 8th Avenue all-male Adonis Theatre, summoning a lively cabal of associates, entertainers, and fellow poker players, with her female lovers always hovering and grandchildren often underfoot.
Queen of the Deuce reveals Chelly’s origins as a taboo-breaking entrepreneur and traces the fraught events that lead to her departure from Europe on the eve of war and the unconventional trajectories of her American business ventures and personal life. With the rise of feminism, the sexual revolution, and gay pride in the frame, the film is an alternative take on cultural history as seen through Chelly Wilson’s empowering story of survival.
Director Valerie Kontakos combines great archive footage of New York and Greece, family interviews, vintage photographs, home videos, animation and archive interviews with Chelly herself, to tell the story of this fascinating Jewish woman and her family who escaped the Nazis and moved to NY to become key players in the porn world.
Work and family were Chelly’s life and so inextricably intertwined that despite her huge wealth, she preferred to live in an apartment above the Adonis Theatre close to crime–ridden 42nd St. There she mixed her coterie of mafia members, porn actors, producers, queer friends and grandchildren together – the matriarch always in the centre of the group. She was an early producer of soft porn films and gradually moved on to more hard-core heterosexual, and then gay porn, as social attitudes towards porn and queers relaxed in the late 60s/early 70s. She produced the films and also owned the movie theatres in which they were shown, including iconic all-male theatres such as Eros and Adonis. Always one step ahead of the game, and the authorities, the emotional, charismatic Chelly made a lot of money, and used her success to help other Greek and Jewish refugees from the war. The film gives us a fascinating insight into the Nazi’s arrival in Greece, and her escape to New York, and how she built a new life there, despite only arriving in Manhattan as a refugee with $5 to her name.
The documentary is very detailed up until the late 1970s and then inexplicably the 80s and early 90s up to her death in 1994 are glossed over very quickly in a couple of minutes. We, unfortunately, don’t get told any detail about Chelly’s move into gay porn or the acquisition and running of her queer movie theatres. Nonetheless, this is a very interesting documentary about a special woman from another era.
P.S. Check https://www.facebook.com/CinephilDoc for details of future screenings
Queerguru’s Contributing Editor Ris Fatah is a successful fashion/luxury business consultant (when he can be bothered) who divides and wastes his time between London and Ibiza. He is a lover of all things queer, feminist, and human rights in general. @ris.fatah
