Born July 19, 1939. Died April 13, 1985.
Story by: Nick Wafle
April 8, 2020
If you peruse the pages of Drummer from the 1970s, leatherman, model, and porn star Val Martin is inescapable. As the rugged star of Roger Earl’s 1975 landmark S&M film Born to Raise Hell, Martin’s diverse career made him a true leather icon.
Earl discovered Martin in 1974 among the crowd at Larry’s, a short-lived leather bar on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles, California, that was known for the elaborate bondage equipment that decorated it. Earl was intimidated by Martin at first, but he soon discovered what a gentleman he was.
During the first five minutes of Born to Raise Hell, the opening credits appear scrawled across Martin’s chiseled body as he emerges as a cocksure, brutal sadist. Initially dressed in a California clone style—skin-tight Levis, studded belt, denim vest, and cowboy hat—Martin is all business during the bar scene when he ties the sub to the pool table and tortures him. He hardly blinks from scene to scene and exudes the sort of cool confidence that I think every leatherman aspires to. This guy knows exactly what he’s doing. A still from Born to Raise Hell graces the cover of Drummer issue three.
Martin also appeared in the notorious bunk-bed fisting scene in Fred Halsted’s 1975 art film, Sex Tool. Halsted’s treatment of Martin is iconic. It’s not nearly as explicit as some fisting porn today; bodies are cropped in a way that alludes to the action without showing every last detail. A still from that movie can also be found on the cover of Drummer issue two, and a newly restored version of the film resides in the Museum of Modern Art’s permanent collection in New York City.
“He hardly blinks from scene to scene and exudes the sort of cool confidence that I think every leatherman aspires to.”
Martin wasn’t just an iconic porn star; he was an active part of the California leather scene. The same year that those films were made, Martin was voted Mr. Leather at the Hawks MC annual Leather Sabbath in Hollywood and went on to represent Drummer and the SoCal Leather community at the CMC Carnival in San Francisco in November.
As the “Slave Auctioneer,” Martin was also among those arrested by the LAPD on April 10, 1976, at the infamous Drummer charity event held at the Mark IV Baths on Melrose Avenue. In his words:
“…[A] very groovy guy comes to me with a leather jacket and a leather cap, torn jeans, very good-looking. And he comes to me and asks what is the price of these slaves, so I told him… As soon as I said ‘sold’ and received the money from him, the whole thing comes down.
“Martin wasn’t just an iconic porn star; he was an active part of the California leather scene.”
“He gives a hand signal to the rest of the police, and a couple of helicopters, three or four TV cameras, and 120 policemen surrounded the premises, even on top of it.”
Police harassment led Drummer publisher John Embry to relocate the magazine from Los Angeles to San Francisco in 1977, and in ’79, the magazine appointed Martin as the first Mr. Drummer without holding a contest. Martin was also featured on four covers of Drummer over the first decade of the magazine in ’75, ’76, ’78, and ’83, which includes the two mentioned above.
A fitting coda for Martin’s film career would be his cameo in the 1980 film American Gigolo, during a scene in which Richard Gere’s character visits the throbbing after-hours leather disco, Probe, to settle a score. On the dancefloor, Gere weaves past a shirtless and sweaty Martin as he jams a bottle of poppers up some blonde kid’s nose—an underground leather icon gone mainstream.
Like many first-generation leathermen, Martin was taken too soon by AIDS in 1985. Earl memorialized Martin in a panel for the AIDS Quilt, and he lives on in the imagination of many leathermen as a true icon.“Martin was also featured on four covers of Drummer over the first decade of the magazine in ’75, ’76, ’78, and ’83,”
