A new documentary Raw! Uncut! Video! follows renowned leatherman, Jack Fritscher, and his husband, Mark Hemry, who founded the porn studio, Palm Drive Video, at the start of the AIDS epidemic.

With unlimited access to the Fritscher-Hemry archive, and interviews with the couple today, directors and producers of Raw! Uncut! Video! Ryan White and Alex Clausen piece together the early history of fetish porn creating a film that highlights a neglected piece of LGBTQ+ history.

As unease concerning the spread of AIDS grew across gay communities in America in the 1980s, Fritscher and Hemry began creating safe-sex porn that allowed models and viewers to explore new sexual possibilities at a time when sex was the subject of anxiety rather than pleasure. The film unapologetically documents the couples experiments with queer fetishes which pushed the boundaries of adult cinema.

From leathered cowboys and BDSM to medical torture Palm Drive Video created pornography that championed the expression of queer kink unabetted by shame or social and cultural condemnation and where safely getting off to your fantasies was encouraged.

While drawing attention to the sex-positivity of the studio Raw! Uncut! Video! highlights how pornography and queer fetish were important forms of AIDS activism. As director Ryan White argues, “Media outlets have reported extensively on the role of governments and activists in promoting safe-sex practices to help combat the transmission of AIDS. But, 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.”

But Fritscher and Hermy not only created new forms of porn they also documented wider gay and homosocial culture. With recordings of men at public fairs and body-building competitions contained in Palm Drive Video’s archive, it serves as a catalogue of male bodies and queer desires at the end of the twentieth century.

Yet for Palm Drive’s pioneering work, the studio’s models were often inexperienced in porn, picked up by Fritscher and Hermy at the body-building contests, bars and fairgrounds that they documented. It was these ‘amateur’ models that would establish the studio’s image of blue-collar masculinity, as the couple cast men of diverse body types that were a refreshing departure from mainstream porn of the 1980’s.

Raw! Uncut! Video! provides more than a record of past erotica but contextualises fetish porn calling attention to the role it played during the AIDS epidemic as the kind of sex queer people had was changing. For this reason archiving films of the Palm Drive Video porn studio so that they can be preserved rather than left to deteriorate is one of the final calls the documentary makes. As the company’s co-founder Mark Hermy notes at the films close, “gay culture expresses itself through sex, our sex is worth documenting and saving.”

On April 28th Raw! Uncut! Video! premiered at the 23rd OUTshine Miami LGBTQ+ Film Festival you can watch a Q&A with the directors and participants here. The film also won the audience award at this years Boston LGBT Film Festival Wicked Queer. The film will have its international premiere at the 50th Kyiv International Film Festival next week.

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