Pioneer gay porn director William Higgins has died aged 77. The adult film director reportedly died of a heart attack on December 21st according to LGBTI historian Will Kohler at Back2Stonewall.

Just a day earlier Higgins had uploaded a video blog to his website wishing everyone a great Christmas and Happy Hanukkah, signing off with “This is Bill Higgins in Prague, saying to you ‘Merry Christmas and bye bye.”

Higgins launched his career as a director of pornographic films in the mid 1970’s when other studios including Falcon stopped shipping films to several states in the south of the USA.

New laws had made it illegal to send pornographic materials across state lines, and in response Higgins started in his own studio in Florida, one of the areas affected by the new laws. In interviews he would share that he started to make his own films because the films being created by competitors were so bad.

He shot his film adult film A Married Man in 1974 and went on to make several films that have been considered classics including Sailor in the Wild, These Bases Are Loaded and The Pizza Boy. Higgins earlier works were put out under the brand Catalina Video.

After his studios were raided in 1988, the resulting charges were later dropped, Higgins decided to look overseas for locations that were more accepting of his work.

After ruling out Australia and Thailand as a potential location, he settled in Amsterdam and started using European models. He later relocated his business to Prague, a city that was cheaper to live in. Here, up until his death, he produced works under his own name brand William Higgins.

OIP Staff