Porn is never more than a couple of taps or clicks away.
Spare a thought for our grandfathers who had much less choice and a far harder job getting access to the good stuff. These days, we can stream the entire filmographies of Golden Era porn stars… on a handheld phone. Who needs a trip to the sex cinema?!
It would blow Grampy’s dirty mind.
Yep, watching vintage porn is easier than ever. If you are looking for some nostalgic erotica, several sites specialize in retro movies. There’s just something about the crackly footage from decades ago; it adds an extra ‘oomph’ to each scene.
I took the chance to explore some of the most popular vintage porn sites paying homage to these forgotten classics. Want to relive them for yourself? Check out my top picks below.
What Are The Best Vintage Porn Sites?
“They don’t make ’em like they used to…”
“What’s that, Dad?“
“Pornos.” 😳
I was born in the eighties, which means any adult movie released on VHS qualifies as ‘vintage’ in my book. A mate of mine recently referred to his Kazaa download stash from the noughties as ‘old classics’.
It made me think: vintage is truly in the eye of the beholder.
For the purpose of this guide, though, we’re going to be looking much further back to the respective eras of antique, classic and retro porn. These are the eras most porn connoisseurs would point to when they imply vintage.
I’ve spent several days exploring the most cherished archives of porn classics on the web. These vintage porn sites are a true blast from the past, packed full of both nostalgia and tits — I dare you not to get a little misty-eyed as we take a horny wander down Memory Lane.
1. Delta of Venus
This truly vintage repository of movies spans the early 1900s through to the 1970s and delivers some fantastic antique vintage porn as well as classic clips from the Golden Age of skin flicks.
There are over 900 movies to watch, and they include everything from explicit retro sex to the teasing art of burlesque and Victorian smut. There’s even vintage erotica animation as well as erotic art and postcards.
Precious few retro porn sites are going as far back in time as Delta of Venus. Granted, some of the oldest material is not what I’d call fap-worthy, but it’s historically interesting nonetheless.
Content is in the form of movies and photos plus articles, audio files, erotic literature and more. The collection is equally as diverse in origin and comes from the USA, Europe, and Asia. The scenes and content also cover everything from the rude to the lewd, the obscure to the mainstream, and everything in between, including straight sex, BDSM, and fine art.
Delta of Venus is a real delight for anyone who enjoys true vintage porn. A monthly membership costs $14.95.
2. Private Classics
One of the biggest European porn magazines and (latterly) studios of the last few decades, Private has been making adult content since the 1960s. The Private Classics site is an archive of all of their best material from those early days right the way through to the millennium.
Restored and converted from VHS to digital, the movie library is big and contains some of the great titles produced by this legendary porn studio over the years. If you’ve got sweet memories of the 80s, you’ll no doubt feel nostalgic for those retro girls with their big bushes.
Private has a decent amount of hardcore content, but much of the older content (from the 1960s and 1970s) is taken from their magazines, faithfully digitized in high-res photosets. Times might have changed since then, but this is a stunning glimpse of the leading smut magazines from that time.
In total, there are:
- 250+ magazines
- 1500+ photosets
- 200+ pornstars
- 100+ movies
- 800+ scenes
It’s a great archive of vintage porn from a European perspective, and better yet, the site holds up against any modern porn site. Large glossy photos and massive high-res thumbnails make for a dirty little rabbit hole that I found surprisingly addictive to explore. A monthly subscription costs $29.95.
3. The Classic Porn
The Classic Porn has one of the largest archives of premium retro erotica available online with:
- 8,300+ DVDs/Movies
- 11,500+ photos
- 8,000+ pornstars
Their earliest content is from 1965, but you can find around 170+ movies from this decade, with most of their titles being from the 1990s.
It’s a great site for filtering and search functions, with all the movies being well-categorized and curated. Choose from interracial porn, DP flicks or everything from fisting to shaving, lesbian to squirting. Porn genres have expanded since the Golden Era, but this site does a cracking job of categorizing the evergreen content of yesteryear.
You’ll certainly find all the legends of porn being represented by some of their most famous titles, including leading male stars John Holmes, Rocco Siffredi, Buck Adams, and Harry Reems, as well as female porn icons Brigitte Lahaie, P.J. Sparxx, Isis Nile, Tonisha Mills, and Bianca Trump (no relation to the President).
A monthly subscription costs $34.95. It’s a little on the pricy side, but you can pay just $3 for three days of access — good option if there is a particular retro title you are desperate to see.
4. Herzog
Known for being the home of ‘Heidi’ porn, Herzog was founded in 1979 and has produced over 250 titles, most of which were released in the 1980s and 1990s.
Once a big name in Europe, Herzog Videos is a German studio that was responsible for some classic ‘old school’ porn from this specialist genre. It’s not the oldest porn on our list, but those randy Germans are certainly giving me some nostalgic vibes.
Often shot outdoors with a backdrop that might be better suited to The Sound of Music, the action is hardcore (sometimes hairy) and often features pigtails, lederhosen, and Bavarian country girls. The site is a celebration of these feature movies, and they’re presented through a sleek modern interface that has had a nice facelift since I last reviewed the site a couple of years ago.
The company has been faithfully restoring their older titles to ensure the best quality is preserved, and these porno films are well worth their second chance at a new lease of life. $29.95 monthly.
5. Rodox
From Germany to Denmark, Rodox is a celebration of Danish pornography from the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s covering retro and classic vintage porn. All of the material on this site is in the form of photosets or photo stories taken from popular magazines such as:
- Color Climax
- Lesbian Love
- Teenage Sex
- Sex Bizarre
- Blue Climax
Though not movies, the action is pretty hardcore and, in some cases, extremely explicit and ‘taboo.’
In total, there are 700+ stories and several thousand pictures; though not exclusive content, this is one of the very few places online where you can access such a large archive of vintage Danish porn.
Rodox is part of the same network that brings you Retro Raw and Vintage Classic Porn (see below), so you get access to all three sites for the same price: €19.95 per month.
6. Bruce Seven Films
Winner of the 2007 Adam Film World “Lifetime Achievement Award”, Bruce Seven was a porn director who worked in the 1980s primarily producing lesbian-themed content as well shooting bondage features for Bizarre Video.
Seven went on to specialize in S&M, as well as fetish films, and worked with Evil Angel during the 1990s. He is probably best known for his directorial role in House of Dark Dreams as well as some of the Buttman and Buttwoman titles.
This premium vintage porn site gives you all of Bruce Seven’s movies in one place, and you can follow his career over 100+ films. As well as downloadable DVD quality movies, you can also access high-resolution photos from plus get access to 5 bonus sites (Ed Powers, Luke Hardy, 3 AM, and Sexy Momma).
Though Bruce Seven died in 2000, his work is well worth checking out, especially if you’re looking for more of a dark and twisted BDSM-take on the old porn classics.
7. Hall of Fame Stars
Not explicitly a vintage porn site, I’d describe Hall of Fame Stars as closer to retro porn.
This premium service curates content produced by or starring those directors and performers who have been inducted into the AVN Hall of Fame.
For a long time, it was kinda unclear which Hall of Fame they were referring to. The mind instantly wanders to AVN, but it could have been the Adam Film World Hall of Fame, XBiz or some other adult film industry organisation. The website has now clarified that it is, indeed, ‘the big one’: AVN.
Their list of stars reads like a who’s who of the porn industry, and there are some big names here, including Jenna Jameson, Asia Carrera, and Christy Canyon (all seriously retro these days), as well as proper vintage legends like Ginger Lynn, Debi Diamond and Vanessa del Rio.
Most movies are from the late 1980s through the 1990s, and the content here is not exclusive; however, there are over 400 DVD titles to watch — although annoyingly, not in full.
A monthly subscription costs $29.95. Members also get access to the ‘Pornstar Legends’ site (see below).
8. Retro Raw
Retro Raw is one of my favorite archives of historic erotica, with content from some classic retro labels such as Sunshine Films, Caballero Classics and Swedish Erotica.
As with some of the other premium sites on here, the majority of the content is from the mainstream studios with big-name DVD titles and popular porn stars like Lisa de Leeuw, Seka, Annette Haven, and Bridgette Monet.
The range is great, and membership includes access to Vintage Classic Porn as well as Rodox, the Danish retro porn magazine archive. Much of the content is sydicated across these sites. I wouldn’t be surprised if they ended up dumping all of the material in to a single vintage porn streaming site (as is the norm with many pay networks these days) — definitely a service I’d pay for.
9. Pornstar Legends
Pornstar Legends is part of the same network as Hall of Fame Stars — New Sensations. It’s another premium vintage porn site offering an archive of scenes and movies from the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s.
The line-up of stars and studios is very similar to the Hall of Fame site, but there are some more obscure performers and titles on here. Not all of your retro porn favorites will qualify as Hall of Famers, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t worth a cheeky second-look…
In total you get access to more than 780 pornstars in 2,206 scenes.
I tapped through clips from Nina Hartley, Amber Lynn, John Holmes, Crystal Wilder and Jeanna Fine from popular titles and series, including:
- Face Sitter Series
- Diamond Collection
- Deep Throat Collection
- Debbie Does Series
- Seka’s Diary
- Sorority Sex Kittens Series
- Talk Dirty to Me Series
- White Men Can’t Hump
They aren’t exclusive clips, but they are well-curated and cover quite a wide range of tastes, from softcore to hardcore. It’s mostly mainstream titles, fairly vanilla, with little in the way of kink.
10. Adult Empire
Finally, we have a giant adult VOD platform that can’t really described as a vintage porn site, and yet somehow manages to serve up more classics than most of the specialist archives.
Adult Empire is… bloody huge. It’s home to over 165,000 movies and 700,000 clips. Only a small percentage of these clips fall under their Classic or Vintage Porn categories, but let’s look at the numbers for some perspective:
- Adult Empire Classics: 20,626 movies
- Adult Empire Vintage: 4,917 movies
From our list, only TheClassicPorn gets close to matching AdultEmpire’s extensive library (the largest of any adult VOD sites we reviewed). So what gives? Why is it not an automatic shoo-in as the #1 choice?
Unlike the other sites we’ve covered, Adult Empire operates on a pay-per-view model. If you want to unlock the classics, you’ll need to rent or buy them individually. This gets expensive fast when you’re paying $10-$15 for a single retro porn movie.
Adult Empire offers an Unlimited subscription service at $24.99 monthly. This is much more palatable on the old wallet, but it doesn’t include their entire library of content.
When I tried to access their Vintage category through my Unlimited subscription, the selection was reduced to around 500 movies. Still a decent choice, don’t get me wrong, but not the whole shebang.
What I will say, though, is that Adult Empire is fantastic if you already know which old porn classic you’re looking for (and you can’t find it anywhere else).
What Qualifies As Vintage Porn?
Speak to someone in their 40s or 50s, and vintage porn is anything in black and white, whilst retro porn will take them back to their teens and cover the 1970s and 1980s.
However, anyone under 30 would undoubtedly classify the 70s as vintage and consider adult movies from the 1990s ‘retro.’
We can classify vintage porn into three categories loosely:
- Antique Vintage Porn
- Classic Vintage Porn
- Retro Vintage Porn
If you want to watch the best porn from previous decades (and according to Pornhub, many of you are!), you will find a LOT of recommendations in my individual decade guides:
Antique Vintage Porn
By antique vintage porn, I mean adult movies that were made pre-1960. This can refer to black-and-white flicks as well as color. Adult films made during this period were not intended to be shown in a home-movie setting, as the home video player wasn’t a common appliance until the 1970s.
These films would have been produced for projection screens, with the main markets being adult cinemas. Though intended for larger audiences, some still had quite hardcore content, but most were far softer than you would find in modern porno films.
By comparison, nudity is also kept to a minimum, and often, there are no explicit shots of genitalia, just the odd breast, nipple, ass, and sometimes cock and pussy.
Of a low quality, often with poor sound (some with no sound), these porno flicks are a reminder that, even in days gone by (and you can find antique vintage porn over 100 years old), there has always been an appetite for erotic material.
Classic Vintage Porn
Often referred to as the ‘Golden Age of Porn’, this period covers the revolution of porn production when adult movies really began to shine.
With ownership of VHS players on the rise, porn aficionados could readily access adult content in their own homes, and this fact helped push porn production rates through the roof.
Made during the 1970s and 1980s, classic vintage porn comes from across Europe and the USA (specifically from San Fernando in California) and is often the stereotype of porn we imagine — the music, the lighting, the muffled grunts and plenty of pubic hair, and chest hair (the men, not the women).
A lot of classic vintage porn is heavily plot-based, and a full-length feature film of over an hour will likely only have four or five sex scenes.
They can be softcore or hardcore and, depending on where they were produced, can also include some very risqué and taboo scenes. Notably, some European studios produced highly explicit content during this period.
The male performers are less ‘buff’ or ‘ripped’ than you might find in contemporary porn but the women are still busty, leggy and good-looking but also mainly ‘natural’.
Retro Vintage Porn
Referring to adult movies made during the late 1980s to 1990s when porn production was in its prime, retro vintage porn is starting to get of a much higher quality and, in hard format, is available on DVD as well as VHS.
In this period, we can see a much more varied output of porn titles with less of a reliance on plot and more hardcore scenes being the norm.
In general mainstream, men are getting less hairy but more muscled, and there is an increased number of women who have had breast augmentation (this is particularly true in porno films shot in Los Angeles).
There is more humor in adult movies made during this time, and the porn parody starts to come into its own as adult film directors pay homage to their favorite movie scripts by dedicating whole pornos to them.
For the purposes of our guide, anything made after 1999 is most definitely modern porn… sorry, guys. You can head over to our porn section for comprehensive coverage of everything that came after 2000.
Like a good bottle of wine, leave those millennium porn flicks on the shelf and let them age a while longer. 😉
That wraps up our adventure into the hottest vintage porn sites. Are there any libraries of old classics I’ve missed? Got a favorite that you want to share?
Let’s hear your favorites!
