A love story about fetish porn… RAW! UNCUT! VIDEO! chronicles the rise and fall of homegrown gay porn studio Palm Drive Video, and explores how a devoted couple helped battle a devastating health crisis by promoting kinky sex.

Legendary leatherman Jack Fritscher met Mark Hemry in 1979 at Harvey Milk’s birthday party – and the two fell head over heels in love. When the AIDS epidemic swept through San Francisco, the couple left the city to begin a new venture: turning a rural ranch in Sonoma County into a safe-sex porn studio that offered viewers new sexual possibilities in an age of plague. Casting rugged non-professional models to explore their unique erotic fantasies on screen, the studio explored a wild array of queer kinks – and helped champion sex-positivity in the porn industry.

Director Statement

AIDS continues to pose a massive health threat around the globe and understanding the diversity of tactics that communities in the Global North used to battle the epidemic in the 1980s and 1990s remains critical in sustaining efforts to control the disease. 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.

Now, in light of the current COVID-19 pandemic, an exploration of how to safely experiment sexually during a global health crisis is more relevant than ever. We are inspired to create RAW! UNCUT! VIDEO! to examine the historical significance of gay fetish porn during the height of the AIDS crisis in the U.S., to trace the dedicated efforts of two leathermen (Fritscher and Hemry) to produce erotica that allowed queer folks to safely explore their sexual boundaries in an age of plague, and to recognize an assortment of sexual pioneers who demonstrated alternative practices by sharing their own kinks on screen. 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.