Film Review
Story by: Hank Trout
Photography by: Jack Fritscher
January 1, 2022
THIS IS NOT A DOCUMENTARY ABOUT AIDS. AND YET, THE SPECTER OF AIDS HOVERS OVER EVERY FRAME OF THIS IN-YOUR-FACE documentary by Ryan A. White and Alex Clausen.
RAW! UNCUT! VIDEO! a love story about fetish porn chronicles the rise and fall of homegrown gay porn studio Palm Drive Video and contextualizes gay fetish porn’s historic significance during the height of the AIDS crisis in the U.S. The story of how a devoted leather couple helped fight a devastating health crisis by promoting safe kinky sex is just as rowdy and boisterous, as eye-opening and wild — and just as important — as the original Palm Drive videos themselves.
As the AIDS pandemic decimated the gay community in San Francisco, legendary Drummer editor & writer Jack Fritscher and his uber-talented husband Mark Hemry moved north to a ranch in Sonoma County. One goal they shared, was to create “a safe-sex porn studio that offered viewers new sexual possibilities in an age of plague.” They birthed Palm Drive Video.
“We wanted to bring sex back into people’s lives at a time when everyone was scared of sex,” Mark Hemry says in the film. Hemry provided editing and technical services and had a hand in all aspects of creation and distribution for Palm Drive. Together he and Jack set about documenting a wild, wide array of queer kink fetishes and helped promote sex-positivity in the porn industry.
For most of the actors in their videos, Fritscher and Hemry sought out San Francisco men with HIV, most of whom have now passed, who wanted to be memorialized on screen in a safe-sex format. (The one straight model they filmed, Steve Thrasher, wanted to perform to honor his brother Billy, once Co-Chair of San Francisco Pride, who had died of AIDS.) One model, Chris Duffy, a prize-winning 6’1” 250-pound professional bodybuilder, “came out” in the video “Sunset Bull,” causing quite a stir in straight bodybuilding magazines, which ate up the so-called “scandal” of making gay porn. Another Palm Drive model, Steve Parker, said of his debut in “Lightning Rodz,” “I was 36 or 37 years old, I had just lost my husband to AIDS, and I was ready to explore my kinky side.”
Now, why would any mother not want her son to be in movies like this?
In general, Palm Drive hired ruggedly muscled, hairy, bearded non-professional models of all sizes and ages (one was a handyman on their ranch) to enact/verbalize their unique erotic fantasies, directly addressing the viewer, enabling him to participate in that kink. It seems nothing was deemed too far-out for these low-budget videos — ropes, chains, mud, urine, fetish gear, cigars, and much more get creatively utilized in the videos, celebrating a wide range of gay fetish figures such as cops, firemen, cowboys, wrestlers, bodybuilders, and more.
During his tenure as Editor of Drummer Magazine, Fritscher coined the term “homomasculinity” to differentiate the kind of man who read Drummer from, well, just about everyone else. “After my six years of studying both Latin and Greek in the seminary, I coined the word homomasculinity in 1977,” Jack told me. “I focused my high-concept term not on sex, as in the word homosexuality, but on gender identity for masculine-identified men. I designed homomasculinity as a calm and supportive word, unlike the word hyper-masculinity which, because of the prefix hyper, sounds like a clinical analysis of the bad, exaggerated, and swaggering machismo of insecure males straight and gay.” Throughout its years in operation, 1987 through 1995, Palm Drive Video celebrated that homomasculinity, providing safe-sex entertainment for men uninterested in typical, “vanilla” gay porn.
Even before the birth of Palm Drive, Jack had put a great deal of thought into the provocative, not-for-everyone kinds of pornographic art that he was writing, editing, nurturing, filming, and preserving. “We’ve got a lot to learn about the essential differences between art and morality, between homosexuality and homomasculinity, and especially between escapist entertainment that leaves your values alone and the intensity of art that changes you and your values by its mere existence,” Fritscher wrote for Drummer. “Entertainment photography, such as the sentimentalized work of Colt Studios, has a definite and pleasing place in our subculture. And precisely because of the sugary finesse of Colt’s Barbizon-Gentlemen’s Quarterly-Muscle Mag subjects and air-brushed style, we must also look at our subcultures’ other, darker side to bring in the balance.” Fritscher’s and Hemry’s provocative thinking on art and sex informs all of Palm Drive’s videos.
Although I’ve been a fan of Palm Drive Video for many years, the documentary still provided new experiences for me. For example, some of the clips in the documentary reminded me, for the first time, of Andy Warhol’s “Screen Tests,” his low-budget, grainy 8mm films in which a stationery camera gazes at the subject of the screen test. I was also surprised, and delighted, by Susan Shaw, the white-haired mother of Steve Thrasher, who watches a video of her son performing and says, “Now, why would any mother not want her son to be in movies like this?” Her presence in this very male-focused documentary is great fun.
“The intensity of art that changes you and your values by its mere existence”
– Jack Fritscher
In addition to the film’s interviews with Fritscher, Hemry, and others, and the domestic scenes of Fritscher and Hemry at home, the documentary features clips from some of Palm Drive’s most provocative and popular videos. For fans, these clips will kindle fond memories; for the uninitiated, they may be quite eye-opening. You may discover a fascinating kink you’ve never explored.
By 1995, Palm Drive had begun to unravel. For one thing, Fritscher and Hemry were exhausted, burnt out from all the work that Palm Drive required. They did everything — casting the models, setting up scenes, filming the action, editing the tapes, labeling VHS tapes, creating promotional brochures, and all the packaging and shipping — by themselves. Further, the rampant drug use in the ‘90s caused problems with models, who performed with little interest while demanding more money. Models on drugs may think they are having a great time, Fritscher says, but they’re not projecting it for the audience. “When the drugs became prevalent in the community, it was difficult to find men who looked jubilant on screen.” Hemry adds, “The models who were making themselves available to us cost more, and they would give us as little of themselves as possible.”
“The more you pay them,” Fritscher says in the film, “the less passion they have. Without passion, there is no Palm Drive.”
Along with the drugs also came the Internet. “What we saw with the Internet was that as soon as we sent out a DVD, our movies would end up all over the Internet. So to prevent that, we closed up shop.”
In a Directors’ Statement, White and Clausen said, “There has been scant mainstream coverage of efforts to mitigate infection by underground fetish and porn communities through the promotion of sex-positivity and alternative safe-sex practices.” They have produced the documentary “to recognize an assortment of sexual pioneers who demonstrated alternative practices by sharing their own kinks onscreen. At the same time, we hope to cast light on the importance of embracing non-normative sexualities and overcoming moralistic frameworks that only accept human relationships in extremely limited terms — and in turn, demonstrate that true love comes in many colors.”
On a personal level, I am grateful that this documentary has been made. White and Clausen have compiled an important history of a short-lived labor of love, a thank-you card to Jack and Mark, and their models, for giving horny gay men an alternative to the typical air-brushed muscle-mag gay porn that was available. There are abundant clips from some of Palm Drive’s videos that feature some of their most-liked models, in scenes that may shock but will never bore, and may even intrigue, anyone interested in the intersection of art, sex, and kink. But I think I will mostly remember the interviews with Jack and Mark, filmed mostly on their ranch. In them, Jack’s and Mark’s intelligence, their love for each other, and their pride in the art they’ve created are delightfully palpable.
True love comes in many colors.
Palm Drive Video made art that reflects Fritscher’s concept of “homomasculinity,” freeing their rugged models to explore and engage the viewer in their darkest, most NSFW sexual fantasies — and freeing the viewer to “share” that fantasy in private, in safety. As Mark put it, “at a time when everyone was scared of sex,” they made kink safe so the troops could “fight on.” This documentary pays deserved honor to that contribution.
RAW! UNCUT! VIDEO! has already won the Audience Award at the Wicked Queer Boston LGBTQI+ Film Festival and is scheduled for other festivals around the country. It had its West Coast premiere at Frameline45, the San Francisco International LGBTQ+ Film Festival.
For more information about the documentary, go to www.rawuncutvideo.com.
