Forbidden Dreams

The rise and fall of homegrown gay porn studio Palm Drive Video. An exploration of how a devoted couple helped battle a devastating health crisis by promoting kinky sex.

Self-effacing, boyish Sean moves to LA to pursue a career in movies but finds it tougher than he imagined. He stumbles onto porn star Johnny Rebel - a handsome, muscled dream of men and women alike - who awakens Sean’s deep obsession.

I'm a Porn Star follows the lives of guys in the neighborhood who are likely a lot more famous than you - at least on the Internet. There are an estimated 370 million pornographic websites on-line. Porn is now a thirteen BILLION dollar business. So who's doing all this moonlighting? Turns out -- probably some people you know.

Welcome to the curious, surprising and always outspoken world of straight men who go Gay4Pay. Curiously, there is a disproportionate percentage of men working in gay porn who identify as straight. Why would a straight man do gay porn? What motivates him to try this or make a career of it? Why is there such keen interest and debate into the sexuality and personal lives of these men? And what does it say about us, the viewer that so much of gay porn is dominated by images of straight men?

Lalo is a sex influencer: he posts photos of his naked body and homemade porn videos for his thousands of social media followers. Lalo directs his own life, but in private, when out of character, he seems to live in constant melancholy.

Ezequiel, a sixteen-year-old gay teenager in his sexual awakening, meets a boy of twenty-one. They quickly start a relationship and the situation unravels unexpectedly.

Between 1975 and 1983 a new kind of film could be seen in French cinema: home-grown gay pornography. They were essentially the work of three production companies: Les Films de La Troika (Norbert Terry), AMT Productions (Anne-Marie Tensi) and Les Films du Vertbois (principally Jacques Scandelari). The genre met an untimely end with the advent of video, the last being made in 1983 'Mon Ami, Mon Amour (My Friend, my Lover)'.

Two gay dads fumble to provide their straight son with meaningful support after the loss of his first real love.

Documentary look at doomed male prostitutes in Prague, ages 15 to 18, who troll at the public swimming pool, the train station, a video arcade, and a disco. After the boys talk about how they got in the game, the camera follows them to the home of Pavel Rousek. Under the name Hans Miller, he makes gay porno videos, primarily for German distribution. Intercut with a movie shoot chez Rousek is an interview that follows him to his day job at a morgue, where he performs an autopsy as he talks about his work. The sex is without protection; the boys are without family. They talk about their bodies and souls, money, their sexual orientation, AIDS, their dreams, and death.

Sites like OnlyFans, Flirt4Free, and JustforFans have destabilized the traditional production, distribution, and monetization of X-rated entertainment. The potential and risk to make the big bucks, along with all the headaches of running a business, is now in the hands of porn stars and starry-eyed newcomers working from home. Performers have become their own studios, producing, shooting, and casting their own work - often from their homes. And just like a Netflix account - people pay to watch. Sure, porn is still popular but it’s a one-way experience and guys don’t want to pay for it. They want the opportunity to get to know somebody they’ve seen in a magazine, on TV, or on social media. Meet your roster of online boyfriends.

Mario (Thiago Cazado) is in debt. To pay the bills, he displays the body on a famous porn site.

Every image in The Fall of Communism as Seen in Gay Pornography comes from gay erotic videos produced in Eastern Europe since the introduction of capitalism. The video provides a glimpse of young men responding to the pressures of an unfamiliar world, one in which money, power and sex are now connected.