TIM's Fuck Off Homo Resurrects the Orgy

Treasure Island Media's recent release 'Fuck Off Homo' lives up to that studio's reputation for superb production values, interesting match ups with established pornstars and new meat, and covering all the bases with daddies, pups, preppies, raunch, all familiar yet fresh.  What really connected with me, however, was the group scene defined as a '10 Man Orgy,' because director Max Sohl, either by design or inadvertently, recreated what was the standard means of barebacking during the early Condom Era...the no holes barred orgy.

Those of us who are of a certain age, recall the late 1990's as a transitional era when enough gay men were just beginning to reinvent their sex lives.  Bars and clubs as hook up venues had suffered greatly during the age of AIDS, and lest we forget, all the bath houses in San Francisco had been shut down completely (they still are!).  But at the same time, the internet was establishing itself as the primary means of communication.  In the beginning, there were the yahoo groups, and there were suggestions of bareback sex, as guys would post stories about their sexual adventures, but everybody was still pretty timid.  Then some guys started hosting parties in private homes using the yahoo groups to get the word out.  Believe me, it was very private; it was anonymity taken to the next step: anonymous group sex.  Of course, we were all strangers at first, but we didn't stay strangers for long and a whole culture developed: the orgy, always in a private home.  Then travelling businessmen starting hosting orgies in their hotel rooms but one still had to communicate through the internet, via the interest group or friends of friends.  The early bareback pornstar and founder of an early bareback hookup website called Bareback City, Kenboy, opened up his house in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles.  He called it the LA SexHouse and that is exactly what it was...an all around the clock open house for sex.  I used to haunt house orgies hosted by a guy named Marshall in San Francisco's Castro district. The very early bareback videos of Michael McKey were all recorded sex orgies that took place in his private home in the Phoenix area, and you could tell by the participants that the connection was all about bareback sex without too much attention to 'type' although bears (some really BIG bears) and leather predominated, it was all about fucking and getting fucked, nobody much cared what you looked like.  A looky-loo wouldn't go there, not to mention the Chatty Matties and the virtual sexhound.  It was exclusive without trying to be.  And it still had the edge of riskiness and danger.

And then came Paul Morris and Dawson, and everything pretty much changed.  There was such a thing as a 'featured bottom' in the massive sex parties hosted by John Singleton and the late Bill Gardner in Palm Springs.  There was always a large leather covered platform with a porn star bottom on all fours taking anybody's load, but that wasn't the focus of the party, just a nice added feature.
Then Dawson refined the gangbang, and now we have recurrent pump and dumps in hotels across America posted online by self-styled cumdumps on PReP.  Wow, times really have changed.

Max Sohl's ten man orgy takes place in a hotel suite, and the action moves from the living room to the bedrooms and then to the showers, and that is exactly how it happened back in the day.  Whole houses were turned into an orgy venue, and sometimes the pool, backyard and garage.  Men of all types would show up, and there was no tolerance for attitude; it was all about barebacking.  While this format still exists here and there...places in Los Angeles and New York come to mind, and probably Provincetown, Fire Island, Key West and Fort Lauderdale (these places are beyond my circle of influence), it's not quite the same.  A lot of times, the guys don't even bother to take off their clothes.

The best thing about Fuck Off Homo (at least, for me) is the orgy scene because it brought back so many great memories.  Believe me, Max Sohl, you did it right; actually, you did it better.  Every orgy should have the All-American boy freshness of a Kyle Ferris contrasted to the street sluttiness of a Draven Torres, on their backs, side by side, taking one swollen plumped up cock after another, with so many combinations of lust that you'd need a seating chart to figure out who's who.  This scene alone puts Fuck Off Homo among my favorites and I hope you'll agree.  There is one thing the TIM crowd didn't have to worry about, and that is the consequence of ten or twelve men fucking on a California king sized bed, at the same time.  Ah, bring back those memories.

The End of Condom Porn

A few years hence, historians will look back to 2015 and declare that sometime during that year, gay condom pornography just sort of petered out.  By next September, you'll be hard pressed to find condoms in gay porn, and by the end of 2016, there will a few condom fetish sites (I mean, yeah, there ARE some sexy things you can do with condoms), but that will be it.  It all has to do with Neg+Prep; it's happening right now and bareback sex and by extension, porn, won't be the same.  Hey, it's still sex, and nobody's complaining, and maybe such discussion will become merely academic.  But..along with the condom fetish, there will be more dedicated poz bareback fetish sites, and there will still be chasers and gifters, and conversion parties will become more acknowledged and maybe typical, and the poz bareback cult will intensify, but I'll leave that discussion for another time.

So, the Condom Era lasted from 1989 until 2015 and at that era's dawn, I was a big Falcon Videos fan, and I remember big stars like Jeff Stryker crossing over from bareback (the term didn't even exist then!) to condom, but a lot of big names from the Pre-Condom Era already had their tickets punched for the Big Nowhere.  They had been dropping off since the mid-80's, and let me tell you youngins out there, them was creepy times...you gotta remember they were still trying to figure out what the hell AIDS was, much less working on a test or medications.  But enough about that for now...the Pre-Condom Era produced some really great stars who will live on forever, thanks to video...and I just can't help thinking: oh what Paul Morris could have done with Chad Douglas, Jon King, Kevin Williams or Chris Burns.  Shit! The mind boggles.

So we watched the old Falcon stuff all through the Condom Era, and were aware of names like Rob Cryston but didn't much care.  ChiChi LaRue became a millionairess without any help from me.  By the mid-90's, things began to change.  The advent of new drugs changed life expectations, lifestyles and sex.  The Bareback Era started somewhere around late 1997, I would say, with a couple of fisting videos directed by Steven Scarborough and videographed by Michael McKey.  I just checked Scarborough's videography on a couple websites where he's credited on about a hundred videos, and Depth Charge I & II are not listed.  I could be wrong about giving Scarborough credit, or maybe the politically-correct powers-that-be deleted both Depth Charges.  Anyway...both videos were (just about) exclusively barefisting, with a little bit of bareback fucking and one pearl of cum that somehow made it through the editing.  Now Plain Wrapped video had been releasing fetish and fisting videos for a while, but wrapped is wright; it was all condom.  Depth Charge was bare fisting, deep and real, and we were shocked.

Then Michael McKey, based in Phoenix, produced a few of his own videos; the production values and qualities were superb but his cast of players, all friends and ordinary guys, ranged from semi-hot to butt ugly.  Most of them would qualify as bears today (a few were downright obese), but that term was not widely in use in 1998.  Cigar fetishist Titpig became the first bareback star to an audience craving more.  Around the same time, Bill Gardner and John Singleton, professional cinematographers based out of Palm Springs, started Hot Desert Knights with a video called 'Bareback Buddies' and a guy in San Francisco named Paul Morris produced a little VHS tape entitled 'Raunch Lunch,' featuring a performer with my favorite nom de porn of all time...Wyatt Trash.

It was all shocking to me, based on the climate of the times, but I had been living an insular life for a few years, having unknowingly converted, losing weight, sleeping 12 hours a day, falling asleep at my computer, and not interested in sex...finally ending up in the emergency room (collapsing at work!), then living on a weird schedule of nine pills a day, and abstaining from sex all together, thinking I was just plain gonna die.  I just wanted to get through the year and not embarrass my family with an AIDS-related death.  It was 1997, a transitional year, and a lot of us were fucked up mentally.

Bareback sex was totally, inarguably and positively taboo.  If you indulged in barebacking you were signing your death lease for a condo in the deepest reaches of Hades.  It was ignorant, irresponsible and immoral.  Barebackers were fucked up shitheads who didn't give a damn.  They were ballin' down the highway, a one-way road to Hell.  Hell.  Hell.  Hell.  You're gonna die a miserable death and you're gonna end up in goddamned Hell!

So.  Escape to video.

Imagine the shock of watching for the first time, Paul Morris' second video, Breed Me, when a dude works his ass with a dildo, and a torrent of sticky, slimy, messy cum just flows out for about five minutes.  No sound except the tolling of bells...like at a funeral.  Death.  Do not ask for whom the bell tolls, etc. We were all going to hell, together.

You know the rest.  The early porn characters were our sex life by proxy, then an inspiration, then as we gained confidence, role models.  Dick Kraver, Mac Curtis, Big Ken, Billy Boyd, Tom Shannon, Will West, Chad Adams, Ray Butler, names that now sound pre-historic.  Dawson was still a few years down the trail.  Websites were still pretty basic, if they existed at all.  And you couldn't buy these videos at the porn shop.  I ordered my first TIM video from an ad in one of the many amateur 'zines circulating then, and it came back by mail order.  Then Paul would send us a notice of the next video through the mail with a self-addressed stamped (if you can imagine that!!) envelope to his mail drop on Market Street.  And of course we ordered them as they came out and eagerly awaited the next.  There was an underground aspect to all of this.  Barebackers were shameful, nasty, dirty guys and keeping it hush.

Well, I and millions of others are still here.  I resumed by sex life in 2000...that's how long it took for me to overcome the fear of barebacking, from '97 to double aught, well, just 3 years...some guys still haven't come to grips with it.  Neg+Prep will change all that, too.  In the meantime, thanks Paul, Mike, Bill (r.i.p.), and John, for 17 years of adventure, inspiration, exploration and a lot of really hot sex!!

Ah-men.

HDK's Bill Gardner Remembered

It's been over a week now since HDK founder, and Grandaddy of Bareback Porn, Bill Gardner, died of lung cancer in Delaware. Bill had returned Back East after his cancer diagnosis, about a year ago, but for years, he was a mainstay of the gay community and culture of Palm Springs, which is where I met him.
Bill was maybe the kindest, most unaffected guy I ever met, and his passing is a real loss for everybody, not just the gay community.
If you want to see and listen to this guy, check out "Sex/Life in LA Part 2," where Bill talks about bareback porn/ His good-natured self just comes across effortlessly and naturally. A reviewer of this video called him a 'happy chappie' and that about sums it up.
I did a little porn for HDK around the turn of the century, and was a loyal and frequent participant at the bareback parties hosted by Bill and partner John Singleton. These were truly the nastiest sex parties ever, thanks to the design and lighting of the expansive play space and all the pervs that seemed to come out of the woodwork to fuck like adrenalin-fueled fiends. I actually used to close the parties...at 4 a.m. as I recall...pig that I am and hoping for one last plug...I was NEVER disappointed. I never left sayin' 'well, that wasn't very hot.' Once I left a dildo behind...the play spaces were divided by hanging fabric (black, of course) creating piles of fabric on the floor, and my Doc Johnson get lost in there. I called Bill about the dildo...yeah, the guys had found it, and he sent it back to me by FedEx overnight...what a guy.
Bill never played during these orgies...he used to man the 'registration desk' and at times pulled security outside...this was in the north end of Palm Springs, an estate closed off by tall walls of trees, if you know the city, then you know how windy it gets up there.
He didn't play at the last party I saw him, either...at a subsequent house John & Bill had moved into on the more suburban south end. These parties were also fisting parties and I topfisted a hungry older bottom on the fuckbench, really working him over. I was too involved and didn't notice that Bill had been watching me. "I hope you'll fist me like that some day,' he said. He said this in a very affectionate way, almost fatherly, as ludicrous as that may sound. "Sure, Bill,' I said, meaning it too. Alas, it was never to happen.
Take care, Bill. I'll make it up to you when we meet again in that Big Playroom-in-the-Sky.

What is a Pornstar? Some Comments on the Death of Chad Noel/Donny Price

'I think it's always funny when we call call them pornstars' muses pornstar Damian Ford in Jochen Hick's documentary 'Sex/Life in LA 2:Cycles of Porn' (highly recommended, by the way, if you can find it). 'I mean, what is a star? How many movies do you have to do to be a star? One, in porn.' Right you are, Damian. I haven't seen every bareback porn video (I have an aversion to twink porn, crap like Eurocreme) but I've seen all the good ones (the Knightbreeders have escaped me because I won't do Paypal, the only reason) and I know most of the pornstars. So when there was internet buzz about the 'AIDS-related death of 'pornstar' Chad Noel, I was taken aback. Who? Chad Noel. AKA Donny Price. Who? It turns out Chad was in the Brent Corrigan video that was pulled off the shelves when it was learned that Brent was underage. If you have this video...something about a pool boy and under my radar because it qualified as twink porn, in my book...better throw it away because if it ends up in the wrong hands, you could be in a lot of trouble. But back to Chad Noel/Donny Price...and his 'AIDS-related' death: it didn't take long for the sermonizing do-gooders to get online with their tittering about the evils of barebacking, etc., you know the drill by now. They're out there in droves...these professional humanitarians clogging the circuits with their rhetoric. It turns out that Chad/Donny was indeed HIV-positive, but his death was not AIDS-related...some guys, who've claimed to be his friend, attest that the demise was probably drug-related, which certainly rings true. Drug abuse is the real problem, not calculated risky sex. It's been a while since we've lost a pornstar to AIDS...lately, the deaths have been related to drugs, abusive relationships and alas, that scourge of a younger generation...suicide. All of these causes can be avoided with appropriately-directed sermons. There are some good aspects to the bareback culture which I've discussed in earlier blogs.
Google 'Dead Porn Stars' and you'll find the website that lists all of the departed greats and near greats, and those of you of a certain age, will be taken down a path called 'memory lane.' It's a long list, including the best top in porn history, a guy named Chad Douglas. And the best bottom, well OK, it's a toss up between Chris (Danny) Burns and Jon (Gaines) King. What Bill Gardner or Paul Morris could have done with these guys. As of right now, I have known still more dead pornstars than living pornstars, but I'm constantly working to change that. Nothing brightens up your day more than a pornstar's dick up your mancunt. Yeah. I'd better work.