July 17, 2012 | The Biz

How one 'Weekend' changed gay porn

Writer Mark S. King, who blogs about his life living with HIV, took some time to explore what he considers to be the most important gay XXX film of all time, Dawson's 20 Load Weekend. King doesn't argue that the movie is the best ever made, or that its effects on gay porn are laudable; however, he points out that it did prove instrumental in taking barebacking and bareback porn from the underground and making it more mainstream.

"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," he explains. "For well over a decade after the crisis began, gay porn videos not only featured 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."

Things began to change in 1998 when two companies, Hot Desert Knights and Treasure Island Media (TIM), started to produce bareback videos exclusively.

"The videos were uniform in their low production values, the older ages of the actors, and the fact that several of them appeared to have the physical manifestations of HIV," King adds. "Their exploits were perceived as an underground fetish that would never break the surface of more mainstream gay pornography."

And then came Dawson ...

Dawson was a young, good looking man who approached TIM at the 2003 Folsom Street Fair. Dawson's fantasy: to get "nailed and seeded by a gang of hot guys."

Dawson's 20 Load Weekend was born. "Depending on your point of view, it is either a transgressive act of eroticism or an incredibly irresponsible act that demonstrates how to become infected with HIV. Or perhaps both," writes King.

In 2004 the video was released. It was hugely popular, in large part due to Dawson (who later admitted he was HIV+ at the time the video what shot).

"He was a higher-quality male model that hadn't been seen in that kind of extreme scene," said Max Sohl, who directed the film. "The movie changed things because of Dawson."

Explains King: "Adult bookstores that had previously shunned TIM videos responded to customer demand and began stocking them, even creating bareback sections on their shelves. Gay porn sites that once refused to feature bareback clips began including them."

"How foolish, prescient, liberating, enlightening, or destructive barebacking may ultimately become is something that may only be revealed in the next chapter of our gay community's troubled history," adds King.

You can read more of King's account on the evolution of bareback porn, and its social implications, here.