Stumbled across a couple of lost pornographic films?

There's one porno film i've been trying to find that did get a DVD release but i've been unable to find it online or on DVD anywhere called Shemale-ican Idol:film

So if anyone knows where to find that film, please do let me know.

I have a feeling you may have a harder time with that than even the 50-year old stuff mentioned earlier in the thread.

I have no idea if this is so or not, but it would be my best guess that post-Golden Age porn (from videotape onward, for those not familiar with the terminology) is harder to come by than that of the Golden Age. I say that because 1) there's just so much more of it, and 2) it was so disposable and ubiquitous, and 3) it's been so long since most of it was ever distributed. I believe these factors led to compounding issues over time like no one knowing almost any of them, at least not well enough to connect names/performers to any specific scenes they remember of the limited pool they saw.

I doubt a significant chunk of the videotape stuff was ever ported to a digital server or entered into a comprehensive database like IMDb before completely falling into obscurity. The same can probably be said of the early digital age stuff at least, if not up to and including what's made in the present day. It's so proliferative that the individual movies are blotted out and so expendable that no one cares to keep track of it. The Golden Age films, by contrast, are fairly limited and each one was a big event in a smaller market with recognizable stars and big name directors (by porn standards) attached, so they had more fans and were more likely to survive.

Thatd be a shame if so. Trans/intersex/gender nonconforming/whatever people need love too, and if they were also consenting adults agreeing to film it I don't see the harm. The argument of it being degrading or fetishizing of a certain body type could literally apply to virtually all other porn as well.

Agreed, of course I could be wrong and Vivid just don't see any value in keeping their older titles available digitally online.  Anyways I sent them an email asking about that film so we'll see if I actually get a response.

From the perspective of a historian of pornography and a historian of Queer stuff it can be pretty interesting. An average gay man could probably get a job and keep it in that period as long as their employer didn't know they were gay, but transpeople generally had to get into pornography/sexwork because of transphobia. Some of the transwomen also were very beautiful and it makes me wonder what happened to them. Did they get enough money to live comfortably off of and fully transition enough to blend into mainstream society? (Yes I know pornography is about fantasy and you have to look good to be appealing enough to people to buy the product.)

In general (can't really figure out how to multiquote for some reason), a lot of the movies could be lost because they were put out on poor quality videotape, as anyone of a certain age can attest to. VHS is good for aesthetic and stuff, but if you're recording in the modern age please try to source metal oxide tape. Also in general, a lot of weird old stuff can be found on certain streaming sites - yes, as it turns out, people have been weird perverts for a very long time, LGBT stuff just didn't magically appear in 2015!

yes we know they made it because there are photos of the front and back of the DVD with their logo so it does exist, although it is possible Vivid were forced by American Idol's production company to stop selling the film, which would explain its absence from porn movie streaming sites like Hotmovies.