Raw! Uncut! Video!

Jack Fritscher and Mark Hemry’s Palm Drive Video produced solo gay fetish porn on video at a time when the collectivity of sex was challenged on several fronts. Raw! Uncut! Video! chronicles the rise and fall of the safe-sex studio and the couple who made it.

Video’s curious place in-between the public and the private is nowhere more obvious than in the realm of porn. Just think of the way anything to do with sex in a more explicit fashion was dealt with in a video store, that curtained-off entry to the hardcore section…

Raw! Uncut! Video! deals with a very special stratum of erotica: the production of Palm Drive Video which consisted of gay fetish porn with a focus on solo pleasure. Founded by leather model supreme Jack Fritscher and his life’s big love Mark Hemry, in reaction to the collapse of gay collective sex life in the early years of the 1980s HIV/AIDS epidemic. Palm Drive Video created a very particular kind of VHS community: solitary self-lovers united in a shared sense of perversion and pleasure. Video as a medium was actually quite important for the endeavour, and the somewhat scuzzy look of early video added a musky, raunchy aroma to the practices on display.

– Olaf Möller

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