Warning - may contain spoilers

In 2013 the MIX festival rejected my submission, but I still attended to check out the screenings and enjoy the party. While I there, I was chatting with Jim Hubbard, one of the founders of the festival, whom I'd known for many years. He mentioned to me the Berlin Porn Festival and suggested that I submit to it. I was immediately intrigued. Most people outside of the experimental gay filmmaking world would consider much of my back catalog to be porn, but I did not. I would begrudgingly accept the label of 'erotica,' but that was generally not what I was going for. The point is that I immediately started considering what I would do if I DID set out to produce a pornographic video. It got my creative juices flowing.

I started experiencing inspiration like I hadn't since the early days. Many ideas came into my head. I didn't want to concoct some facile plot line interspersed with sex scenes like so much straight porn did, but I did start thinking of narratives where explicit sex was directly integral to the story. I met a porn performer of Russian descent at the Key West Naked Weekend just a few weeks after the MIX festival. I thought through a whole story line involving him that I thought would work. But the fact was that the whole production would be rather involved, and even if he were available, the project would require more time and effort than I was willing or able to invest at that point in my life. I just procrastinated until I gave up on that kind of production.

Time was running short, and I had still made no progress on producing anything. However serendipity did grace me at one point. An old friend was staying with me for the summer. He was an accomplished filmmaker in his own right, and had a good quality camera we could use. At the same time, a new friend was going to stop by my place. He was a well-endowed African American whom I'd met at a naked party in Fort Lauderdale the previous year. I asked if he would be willing to appear in a porn video, and he agreed as long as I didn't show his face. I figured I would just perform deepthroat oral sex on him for a while, and that would be as elaborate as the production could be.

Still, I knew there had to be more to it than just me blowing him for 6-8 minutes. I generally found the repetitive nature of pornographic productions to be rather droll. While I wasn't going to do a big production, my work needed more substance to it than just the rote documentation of a sex act. I did have one idea. At around that same time, I had been experimenting with a fetish of sorts. I had been deepthroating dildos at home just because I didn't have anything better to do. Inserting a foreign object deep into the esophagus produces a lot of mucus. Ordinarily it just sort of gets in the way, and people usually spit out to get rid of it. But it felt kind of 'naughty' to embrace it, and I tried maximizing my contact with it. I started by using it liberally as a lubricant for my cock, but then progressed to smearing it all over my body. I would keep ramming the dildo down my throat to produce more and more mucus, spreading more and more of it on myself until I was positively drenched in it. The fetish would achieve a crescendo when I got it all over my face, dripping off my features like I was melting or something. It was quite an extreme activity, and I found it to be very arousing.

I figured I could do something similar in the porn shoot, only instead of drenching myself in my sputum I would get it all over the guy I was blowing. I asked him if this would be okay, assuring him that he could shower it all off afterwards. He didn't have a problem with it at all. My other friend was available, and he had another friend hanging out with him that day, so I put a second camera in his hand so we could get two vantage points. At that point it was just a matter of stripping naked, getting into position, and rolling tape.

As soon as I started performing, I quickly began to appreciate what Stephen Tobolowsky refers to as the difference between rehearsal and preparation. I was well rehearsed in the act of deepthroat oral sex, but I had not prepared for this particular performance. Typically I am deepthroating a cock as part of a sex act and it slips comfortably into my throat. This is in no small part because I'm sexually aroused at the time. In this case I was engaged in a video production, distracted, a little bit vexed by the logistics of it all. My scene partner got hard quite promptly, which was great, but as soon as I pushed his shaft past my epiglottis, my throat started rejecting it. It was not sexy at all. I immediately started choking and gagging. I was not enjoying it. But this was the only opportunity I had to get this footage. The show must go on, as they say. I just powered through it.

Despite my discomfort at having a hard object inserted into my body against its will, things generally went according to plan. My throat started producing a lot of mucus, and I applied it to my scene partner's dick and body, progressively covering more and more of him. My throat loosened up enough that I could start to mix up my techniques, and bring some variety to the performance. Truth be told the fact that I was gagging a fair amount really highlighted the extreme nature of what I was doing, and would make the experience more visceral for the viewer. Once we were fully into the swing of it I started hamming it up a little, making myself gag more than I actually needed to, like it was part of the gratification I was deriving from the sex act. There was sputum everywhere, I was smearing myself and my face all in it, and I was achieving my creative vision. My scene partner gave me the money shot at just the right time, and everything wrapped up perfectly. I called, "cut", and as soon as my friend put the camera down he looked at me and said, "What the fuck was that???" I had not warned him in advance of the nature of the performance, and his reaction told me that I had created something above and beyond a typical oral sex porn video.

I edited it together, switching back and forth between camera shots to mix it up, slapped a slate on the front and credits at the end, and it was done. The running time was solidly in the ballpark of a typical porn scene. It took a little while to settle on a title. I brought my wry sense of humor to it in the spirit of artists doing multiple "studys" of a particular subject matter. The reference to a private collection in the video description was a ruse. I put some thought into the number 27. I wanted to have seven in there just to add another sylable. The number should be big enough to be a little eye-popping but not so big as to be absurd. I decided that 17 wasn't enough, but 37 was too much, so it wound up being 27.

I sent it off to the Berlin Porn Festival. I was not terribly optimistic that it would be accepted considering it was so minimal in its presentation, but it must have been good enough because they did accept it. I would have loved to fly to Berlin to be present at the screening, but the timing of the festival was just after I returned from a week in San Francisco to attend the Folsom Street Fair. I was exhausted and jetlagged, and just didn't have it in me to fly off in the opposite direction for even more jetlag and the challenge of navigating a different country where I didn't speak the language.

Apparently it went well, because a few weeks later I was contacted by the New York Porn Festival requesting that it be included in their show. This time I was sure I would be able to attend the screening considering it was just 4 hour drive away, and I knew the city very well. But the show was scheduled in February of all times. That morning the outside temperature was below zero and the pipes in my house were frozen. I had that thawed out relatively quickly, but I just couldn't bear to go out and travel in that kind of cold weather, so again I stayed home. But again it apparently went over well, because I was quickly contacted by the organizer of an arts program in Amsterdam requesting that he show it. He told me that my video "caused a sensation." Everything else he saw at the New York festival was either trying to be what pornography is conventionally seen as being, or parodying that. My piece was so direct and raw that it stood in stark contrast, and it was so extreme that it demanded attention. Everyone was talking about it. The irony was that if I had fulfilled my original vision of a sexually explicit narrative piece that it probably would have gotten lost in all the others. By compromising to a "lesser" format I actually achieved more.

I did attend the screening in Amsterdam, and it was a real treat for me. It actually played in Amsterdam again just a month later, and in Sao Paulo Brazil the month after that, but I didn't attend either of those screenings. Reflecting back on what it was that I created, my intention was to produce a pornographic video as opposed to an art piece, but depending on how you look at it, it might be the most artistic thing I've ever produced.