Younger gay men, who had listened to stories of an earlier, sexually liberated time as if it were a lost era of paleontology, were more than willing to explore whatever modern version might await them. Reclaiming a bold sexuality - something many gay men believed had been lost forever - was a tonic for the post-traumatic stress they suffered. Circuit parties were born of celebration (before succumbing to their own excesses), safer sex behaviors relaxed, and there was a palpable longing to escape the horrors of the previous years. Many viewers simply returned to their stash of pre-AIDS pornography, which was condom-less but "justified."Īs AIDS deaths subsided with the advent of new medications in 1996, gay male culture responded with a vengeance. The videos mirrored our own lack of interest in gallivanting about with the pizza man or diving into an orgy with strangers, with or without condoms. For well over a decade after the crisis began, gay porn videos featured not only tightly wrapped penises, but their storylines - indeed, the actors themselves - suffered from a sort of dramatic malaise, as if sleepwalking through their sexual routine while trying to pay no attention to the man with KS lesions behind the curtain. Prior to the onset of AIDS, condom usage in gay pornography was nonexistent - but that was before bodily fluids became synonymous with death and disease. Let's see how many men he can take.'"Īnd that is how Dawson's 20 Load Weekend was born. "The Black Party was coming," Sohl explained in a recent interview, referring to the annual New York City weekend of leather men, parties and sexual adventures, "and I thought, 'Okay.
Sohl met with the aspiring model and asked him to complete a form that included a simple question: What is one of your fantasy scenes? In response, the young man wrote simply, "me getting nailed and seeded by a gang of hot guys." The photo was sent to Max Sohl, a sometime porn actor with a theater background whom Morris had commissioned to conceive and direct what would be Sohl's first porn film. In it, the grinning young man with a leather cap appears to have found his long lost tribe, and O'Toole looks as if he has found a seven-course meal. TIM star Jesse O'Toole was on hand and someone snapped a photograph of the two of them together (right). He liked the TIM videos, he liked them very much indeed, and he hoped to one day document a few fantasies of his own. Then, like the legend of Lana Turner fortuitously cozying up to the counter at Schwab's, a beautiful and achingly masculine young man approached the TIM booth. This particular specialty was the singular driving force behind his smashingly successful and relatively new company. In the middle of this rowdy bacchanalia in the fall of 2003, Paul Morris stood at the booth for Treasure Island Media (TIM), the gay porn outfit he founded that features unprotected sex (barebacking) between its actors.