A $10 thrift store PC seemed as ordinary as they come, until the owner found a veritable ‘Library of Alexandria’ of early 2000s gay porn reviews

Do you ever stop and think about the ways we seep into our personal electronics? There’s that old Reddit line (at least I first saw it on Reddit) “If I die, wipe my hard drive,” and I really feel that—not even in the sense of having compromising stuff in there, but in that it can provide such an uncomfortably intimate picture of you: all the half-done to-do lists, failed aspirations, and the idiosyncratic way you order your life. These thoughts came unbidden to me when I saw the Casey Jones Podcast on Twitter share their discovery of gigabytes of early 2000s direct-to-DVD gay porn and attending critique on a desktop they found at Goodwill.

“Man, I wanted to install Quake on this thing but now I feel bad for disturbing the Tomb of Gay King Tut,” the podcaster tweeted of this discovery. The rig itself just oozes early aughts—it’s one of those gray and black office enterprise numbers, very OptiPlex-adjacent, and the inside is incredibly clean. It even has tidy cable management that would make a PC building influencer blush despite being from the era of top mount power supplies with non-modular, rainbow spaghetti cords.

And then you’ve got the digital contents: gigabytes of DVD rips and written critiques chronicling a past era of adult entertainment, “thousands upon thousands of pages of extremely professional work” breaking down titillating titles like “Soaked in Sex” and “On the Couch” volumes one and two. The work has the character of a professional website with its layout—I really get the impression that these were drafts for such a site or an enthusiast blog covering the industry. This wasn’t like finding someone’s porno stash at the bottom of seven subfolders labeled like “tax documents,” this is a portfolio. Though ironically one of the Casey J. Pod’s screenshots does show the document “Gay Movies 301-400” sandwiched between “Financial Overview 2016” and “IRS Letter.”

Multiple commenters compared it to a “Library of Alexandria” but for gay porn reviews, and all jokes aside, it really does feel like some kind of time capsule. I mean, who gets porn on DVD anymore? I get this sense of surprise and delight at seeing the former owner cut loose behind the staid facade of this aging office desktop, but there’s also discomfort, like you’re in somebody’s house while they’re away. That discomfort’s also magnified by the question of what happened to the former owner—it had to have been something pretty abrupt to get them to give up a PC of two decades without wiping it first, and the Casey J. Pod doesn’t mince words: “the owner of this PC is in all likelihood dead.”

I have this nagging concern for the privacy of this computer’s original owner and whether they ever wanted their work to be made public like this, despite the running theory for the reviews’ intended purpose. At the same time, the Casey J. Pod’s recounting of the discovery—as well as sharing a selection of the DVD rips and reviews redacted of potentially identifying information to Archive.org—feels like a celebration of the body of work, a snapshot of the scene surrounding gay porn at a very specific moment in time, serendipitously stumbled on in a $10 Goodwill desktop right at the beginning of Pride month. 

“It goes without saying that our late professional porn reviewer was someone who took great care with his work, regardless of what anyone else thought,” The Casey J. Pod wrote of the collection, later continuing: “Our departed author had a LOT of friends, and was able to reliably lean on them when things were tough.”

So here’s to that anonymous pornographer and their extensive body of work. If you think you knew this PC’s former owner, the Casey Jones Pod would like to get in touch with you, as they also found photos of potentially sentimental value.

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