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This article considers how the 1972 film Bijou works as a gay art porn film. It argues that the film draws from conventions of both hardcore cinema and postwar underground cinema, bringing the denotative qualities of hardcore into play with the connotative qualities of what P. Adams Sitney called the ‘trance film’. Through an exploration of Linda Williams’ concept ‘hard-core eroticism’, this article examines how Bijou expands on the common trance film trope of the male-desiring wanderer, and how it modulates the connotative focus and sustains the aestheticism of the trance film in order to draw attention to more polymorphously perverse ways of thinking about socio-sexual activity.