Craigslist 75
WARNING
This story details explicit gay sex between men, teens and boys. If you find this kind of thing distasteful, or if you are underage wherever you live, then stop reading this now, and delete this file. The story is completely fictional; the author does not condone or encourage any of the acts contained herein.
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Craigslist
Chapter 75
By: Tim Keppler (nemoami@yahoo.com)
Edited by: Bob Leahy
When we introduce Thanh to Jeremy, the guy we've chosen as the dominant partner in our upcoming video, the sparks that fly could light up the room. You have just never seen two guys more attracted to each other. Jeremy claims to be straight, to be between girlfriends. In Thanh, I think he's just found her...umm...him...umm... We do the same thing with them that we did with the other guys, we get them naked, and have them do a scene in which they kiss and fondle. Goodness, do they fondle! First off, they're both really beautiful. And then, they can't keep their hands off of each other. The kiss goes on for nearly a full minute, and the fondling? I think it comes very close to orgasm. Jeremy starts by simply stroking Thanh, running his hands down his torso. He plays with Thanh's nipples, squeezes his ass cheeks, strokes his dick, and finally, kneeling, he starts to suck him.
"No, baby, no," Thanh groans, pushing Jeremy away. "I want you to fuck me." I throw Jeremy a condom, and that's what he does. He rolls the condom onto his dick, pushing Thanh onto the bed on his back. He mounts him from the front, sealing his lips to Thanh's as he enters him. Thanh gasps as Jeremy's dick slides into him, but there's no pain, I think. It's just surprise...or...maybe delight. And then Thanh begins to moan as Jeremy establishes their rhythm. We've filmed all the auditions so that we can review them more closely after the fact, but this is a serious sex scene, and I could kick myself for not having more than one camera capturing this, because it is just...so...hot! Thanh is writhing on the bed, and Jeremy is completely oblivious to us. He is so into this, so into Thanh, that we cease to exist. Probably the world ceases to exist.
Then Thanh cums, shrieking with excitement. He reaches up, grabs Jeremy, pulls him close, and hugs him as Jeremy cums, groaning loudly. I guess...maybe...there's chemistry between these two guys. This will probably work...probably...
Besides establishing that there is chemistry, that Thanh and Jeremy are definitely attracted to each other, we also establish that Thanh can act. Thanh's character is less complex than Jeremy's because Thanh's motivation remains constant throughout the whole movie. It's Jeremy's motivation and character that change. Still, Thanh's delivery of lines is very...natural. It's as if he was saying these things in real life. He's very expressive, but not overdone. He's very good.
So, with Jeremy and Thanh on board, we have the majority of our cast. Now it's just a matter of casting the minor roles, and for that we can be a little creative. We need someone to play Jeremy's boss. We draft an unknown actor -- one Mr. Tim Jensen -- for that role. And we need someone to play Thanh's brother. I'd initially suggested Jason, but Jason doesn't look anything like Thanh. Thanh looks very Vietnamese. Jason looks Chinese, which is what he is. Kenny has the same problem. Ultimately, Dinh agrees to play the brother. Then, we need someone to play the next door neighbor, and Becky, our own neighbor, agrees to do that. Finally, we need a "one-night stand," a guy Thanh meets and sleeps with -- once. We don't really want to pay an actor to play that role, and Jeffrey, our next door neighbor, won't let his partner play the role. I think he's a little apprehensive because Thanh is really cute. So, I agree to do it. It's such a minor character. He's only on screen for maybe five minutes. I can do that and still direct the photography. And that's pretty much it. The rest are extras -- supernumeraries -- and we can draw those out of our pool of friends.
The final challenges are all technical. Lighting is pretty straightforward. We rent lights, booms, a couple of reflectors, and we're done. All these are portable, so we can move them between our basement and Tim's. We'll do most of the filming in our basement, but we'll also be filming in Tim's "dungeon". Sound, too, is pretty easy. We need a couple of microphones, and that's it. What's a little more serious from the technical perspective are the cameras. We'd always planned to rent these, but they won't come cheap. They need to be high-definition cameras. We need four of them. And, we need humans to actually carry them while filming. Right now, I'm the only cameraman.
I ask around, and find, to my surprise, that Becky has had some experience with camera work. Becky is a very-smart lesbian lawyer who lives across the street from us. She's single and likes animals better than humans. She volunteers to operate one of the cameras. "Umm...Becky...this video is gay male porn."
"Are your actors shy?" she asks, giggling.
"No, I was thinking of you."
"I'm not shy," she says with a snort, "I've seen your equipment before. I wouldn't want to make physical contact with it, but I don't mind being in the same room with it. I assume that these boys have the same...paraphernalia as most?"
"Yes," I respond, laughing. "That's probably a safe assumption."
"Well, it should be okay, then. We'll abide by the `look but don't touch' rule."
In addition to Becky, I enlist Kenny and Jason into the "corps of engineers". They'll need a little more training in camera technique, but mostly the lessons involve moving smoothly. Porn, for the most part, requires hand-held cameras. The key is to be stable. Jerky movement will destroy a shot. But, they'll have time for rehearsal. We'll all have time for rehearsal, because we're actually going to rehearse the scenes.
Have you ever wondered why there's so little dialogue in porn movies? It's because they were filmed in a couple of hours. There's no rehearsal and no scripted dialog. You put two guys in a room and tell them to fuck each other. That's the plot. This video will be different. We have actual dialog, actual lines to memorize, and actual direction. This is not going to be improvisational. It's going to be a real movie. If you think about it, there are two type of gay films. There's mainline gay cinema -- movies like Angels in America, The Boys in the Band, Suddenly Last Summer, Lilies, Far from Heaven, Wild Reeds, and the like. And then you have porn -- Frisky Summer, Cover Boys, Peep Show, Personal Trainer and More Lukas Stories. What we're looking to make is something that falls between the two genres. It will be pornographic, but it won't start there. It'll start with a story and become pornographic, because that's how life works, doesn't it? You can't fuck him before you meet him, before you form some kind of relationship with him, before you get to know him. Well, you can, but it's not much fun. The premise of this video is that there is a relationship, so it's not purely porn, but there's a whole lot more sex than you find in the mainline stuff, and in the case of this video, the sex is a bit...kinky.
Dinh begins rehearsals on Monday evening. He only plans to rehearse for about two hours every couple of days. He doesn't want to kill the spontaneity, but he does want to make sure that the actors know their lines by the time we begin filming. From my perspective, this gives me the opportunity to insure that my camera crew get the opportunity to...explore. I've developed a shooting script that specifies where each camera should be during the filming of the video. The hard part is that the crew -- Becky, Jason, and Kenny -- need to understand what they'll be filming, and actually see the scenes. So, the rehearsals are intended to help the actors learn their lines, and learn the physical directions -- where they're supposed to be, and how they're supposed to move (what is in theater called "blocking"). The rehearsals are also intended to help the camera-bearers to follow the shooting script and understand what they should be doing even before we have the cameras. Ultimately, the camera crew know more about the scenes than the actors because Dinh will not let Jeremy and Thanh rehearse the sex and punishment scenes together. Instead, he runs through the scenes with Jeremy himself because, again, he wants to preserve the spontaneity. He prohibits any more fucking and fondling between his two lead actors before we film, and even orders them not to see each other outside of rehearsals. He wants them to get to know each other as part of the movie, which makes good sense to me.
What doesn't make a lot of sense to me is Jeremy's response to his first meeting with Dinh. "He is so cute!" he says. "I've never been attracted to another guy before, but I'm really attracted to him. I don't know what causes that sexual excitement, but I sure feel it when we're together. There's just one thing, though. I'm really sensitive about...excrement, and was a little grossed out when I found some of his on my condom after we...umm...fucked. Is there something we can do about that?"
Dinh mentioned this to Tim the evening he had this conversation with Jeremy, and Tim smiled. "Some guys are like that, and it's not always just excrement that bothers them. My second boyfriend was really...strange about getting my cum on him. I can remember early in our relationship jerking off with him, and he was very self-conscious about my ejaculation. He didn't want the cum to touch him. I told him about the invention of soap and water, but this just made him more self-conscious. He got over it after a while, but at first he was pretty...freaky. You could always ask Thanh to douche before their scenes together, but there's also another interesting avenue you might head down. Compression algorithms for MP4 encoders have gotten pretty advanced these days. You can get a lot more on a DVD that you could even a couple of years ago. That's why a lot of the bigger movie companies are putting `extras' on the DVD along with the film. Extras might include funny outtakes and errors, film trailers used to advertise the movie, even commentary from directors and actors. One of the porn sites that specializes in filming straight boys fucking each other often has a `behind the scenes' segment. These explore the stuff that goes on in putting a video together. It might be stretching a virgin ass so it can be fucked without much pain. Or maybe it's the ways in which the characters build relationships that will allow them to interact with each other -- joking around, wrestling, tickling -- bonding. In this video, you could include a staged `behind the scenes' segment that would explore this problem of excrement in a rather graphic way. This wouldn't be `real,' and wouldn't be practical as a replacement for having Thanh douche before their scenes together, but as an `extra' segment, it might add some spice for those in your audience with an...interest...in this problem. You should probably film the `extra" scene after the main movie because I know you want Thanh's experiences to be as realistic as possible, and this might detract from his real performance."
When Tim describes what he has in mind, Dinh wrinkles his nose. "Not your cup of tea, I know," Tim responds, "but there are a lot of guys out there who are turned on by stuff that won't get you off, and vice versa. If you think this is more...'specialized' than what you like, ask Becky how erotic she'd find being spanked until she's sobbing. You'll get an earful."
As we near our filming date, everything begins to come together. The cameras are rented, the lighting and sound equipment are in place, we have a makeup artist hired from Craigslist -- a student at Santa Clara University who does this very quietly on the side. And we have actors who have rehearsed and are really quite good. By the time we actually start filming, it's clear sailing. We've planned that the shoot will take a week, with an additional week to redo stuff that either didn't work, or that we screwed up for one reason or another. That means that we have the cameras for two weeks. We have that much time to make this work.
And it does work, mostly. We film the video in sequence so everyone understands the progress of the plot. Most of the location work takes place in the first day and a half -- almost all of it at Stanford. Jeremy and Thanh's characters, whom we name Michael and Anh, meet at the Stanford coffee house over a spilled cup of Oolong. They talk, get to know each other, and sparks fly -- and those sparks aren't acting. Those sparks are the real thing. Jeremy and Thanh are seriously attracted to each other, and are able to integrate that attraction into the scripted dialog. They take a walk back to Anh's dorm room, where they exchange a brief kiss, before going their separate ways for the evening. Two nights later they have their first official date. Anh takes Michael to a little noodle shop, where they continue to get to know each other over bowls of noodles. The restaurant itself is Loo Noodle in Mountain View where we film after hours. Leslie knows the owners and talks them into letting us use the restaurant as a set. Once we have Anh and Michael seated, we don't need the location anymore and can move them to a set in my basement. It's a romantic evening, and once again, after dinner and a movie, we move back to Anh's dormitory, where they kiss and part. Then, we film several little vignettes intended to show the movement of time -- moonlight walks in and around Stanford, classes and homework for Anh, dreamy looks for Michael, and laughing at a frantic dog we found tied to a pole in the Stanford Quad. Finally, we find ourselves (apparently) at Michael's apartment. The boys are sitting on a sofa, and begin to kiss. It's not the chaste kisses they've been exchanging outside Ahn's dorm. These are steamy kisses, so steamy that we have to clean the condensation off the lenses several times.
"I need to tell you something," Anh confesses, finally breaking their kiss (which we shot from three angles for a full 36 seconds). "I...umm...think I'm falling for you...but...there's something you don't know about me."
Then we begin the discussion of what love means...and about what love...can mean. Anh confesses that he's been with two other guys, both older than he, and confesses to the nature of those relationships. "They were dominant. There was a lot of...umm...pain."
Michael looks shocked, and then sad. "I'm sorry, Anh. They had no right to hurt you. I hope that those experiences won't spoil what we have."
"No, you don't understand. I wanted them to hurt me. I wanted to be hurt. It's how I build trust. I...umm...want you to...hurt me, too."
Again, Michael is shocked, and leaves soon after that discussion. Anh is convinced that he's lost Michael, bewailing the loss to his best friend, Dang. "He's gone," he cries. "I really thought I was falling in love, but he's gone. I'll never see him again."
He does, though. Three days later, Michael calls and asks to take Anh out. Anh accepts, but is apprehensive. They have dinner at an Italian place Michael likes, and then Michael takes Anh to a revival showing of Frisk at the Guild Theater in Menlo Park. It's a film based on a Dennis Cooper novel made several years ago by Todd Verow. It documents the sometimes-brutal sexual fantasies (and realities) of a teen with sadomasochistic tendencies. It was much reviled when it was shown at the San Francisco Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, primarily, I think, because the audience thought that it would brand gay people as perverts. But, it's not perverted. (Well, it is, but it's also a depiction of reality for many gay men.) It is brutal and, among other things, raises the unsettling question of the role of pornography and the media in shaping an individual's psyche. We get snippets of scenes from the film, very provocative scenes, and reaction shots from both Michael, who has seen it before, and from Anh, who has not. After the movie, Michael and Anh go back to Michael's apartment for tea.
"What'd you think?" Michael asks.
Anh gives him a long, pensive look. "Why'd you take me to that movie?"
"Because I thought you might like it."
"And...umm...if I did, what would you think of me?"
Michael is quiet for a long moment. "I guess I'd think what I thought before," he says, pausing for seconds, "that I love you. But...umm...you're going to have to teach me how to love you, because I don't...umm...know. How. I don't know how. I mean, I know how I'd want to be shown love, but I don't know how to make you...umm...feel...loved. But...uhh...I really don't want to lose you just because I don't...understand you. Could you...teach me to...understand you?"
In the course of this short speech, Michael has teared up, and so has Anh.
"Yeeaaahhhh," Anh whines, launching himself into Michael's lap, and kissing him passionately. It's this scene that leads us into a series of S/M vignettes that, while rather formulaic, form the primary porn content for the film. This is also the scene in which Michael's transformation begins, where he comes to terms with the fact that love needs to be bestowed in a way that's meaningful to the one you love. Over the course of the rest of the video, that realization changes Michael. He becomes more aggressive and authoritative in his love. And Anh becomes more...submissive.
These vignettes begin with a montage of rapid-fire images, seminal pornographic photos from Tom of Finland, James Bidgood, Kevin Williams, Falcon stuff, anything anyone is likely to recognize as gay, porn, and hard-core. We've stolen a lot of images from the public-domain sites for Grapik Arts Productions, and Sean Cody. The more provocative, the better, and when I say "rapid-fire," I mean it. Some of these images are on screen for less than a second. We want them to be subliminal, to register on the back of your eyes, but not in your brain. Finally we find ourselves in Tim's dungeon with Anh standing on tip-toes, bound to the spanking frame. He's crying as Michael spanks him with Tim's razor strop. He's hard, and just as he starts to cum spontaneously (something Dinh obviously didn't know would happen), we dissolve the image, and transition through another montage of classic porn images. Then we find Anh on Tim's punishment table on his back. His belly is rotund -- for real. He has a double-balloon enema nozzle up his ass, and is holding a massive enema -- apparently.
"I'll be back in half an hour," Michael says, authoritatively.
"No...no...," Anh screams. "Please don't leave me like this!"
Michael stops, moves to the table, and kisses Anh, a really long kiss as he strokes Anh's bloated belly. Then he leaves the shot as Anh starts to sob. "Please!" he screams. Thanh has never had an enema before. This is his first. The volume of liquid is significant and the cramping is serious, but when Dinh asked him about it later, Thanh's grin was ear to ear. "It was intense. I do not think anything ever hurt so much. I loved it!"
From this scene, we fade out, and back in to show the passing of time. Michael has returned, and is once again kissing Anh, stroking his belly. Finally he breaks the kiss. Anh is crying. Michael unbuckles the restraints that bind Anh to the table. "Don't move," he says. He deflates the enema nozzle and removes it. Then he helps Anh to sit up. He lifts him off the table, points to the toilet in the corner, and Anh runs to it, releasing the liquid in an audible gush as we fade out of the scene.
We run through several other S/M vignettes, including another spanking with Anh lying on Michael's bed. When that spanking is over, and Anh is sobbing, Michael lifts him off the bed and carries him to a chair in the corner where they sit and cuddle. It's a touching scene that Dinh says reminds him of Tim. "This is what happens to me every week. We do something painful, I start to sob, and the next thing I know I'm on Tim's lap being comforted. Jason once asked me if I ever wished that I wasn't like this, if I ever wished that I could love more...temperately. It was sort of like asking if you'd take a pill that would make you straight. I like who I am. I have no desire to change that. Jason says we're `sexually adventurous.' What's wrong with that?"
The last scene in the video is of Anh and Michael in Michael's bedroom. They're making love. Michael has Anh pinned to the mattress and is kissing him, a really sensuous kiss that has Anh hard and dripping. Then Michael begins to lick Anh's chest, and to nibble on his nipples. He licks his way south, driving his tongue into Anh's belly button, and then lower, while assiduously avoiding his dick. He licks his thighs, and then his inner thighs. He spreads Anh's legs and begins to lick along his ass crack. Finally, he licks his pucker, and Anh, who has been thrashing his head back and forth, goes nearly crazy. "Oh, fuck!" he screams, spreading his legs wider to give Michael better access. Then Thanh starts to improvise. He's obviously nearly mad with lust, and what comes out of his mouth is classic porn dialog. I've always thought that this stuff is written by morons for voice-overs because, as the film is edited, the directors feels that the actors aren't showing enough...exuberance. But, in this case, Thanh is nearly incoherent. "Oh, fuck me, baby. Please fuck me. I want you inside me. Please..." What saves Thanh's dialog is his delivery, which is completely unconscious. Rather than the low and husky voice of countless voice-overs, a voice intended to be seductive, Thanh's voice is whiny, almost a shriek. He is desperate. He wants Jeremy to fuck him more than he wants anything in the world, more than he wants to breathe. And that's what Jeremy does. He flips around, rolls on a condom, lifts Thanh's legs onto his shoulders, and enters him in one slow thrust. Thanh screams, a long and guttural scream, a scream laced with longing and satisfaction. Reaching forward, Thanh grabs Jeremy's hips and pulls him in tight so that Jeremy's dick is as far inside him as it can go. He holds him here for several seconds as he squirms. Then, finally, he releases him, allowing Jeremy to begin to fuck him in a rhythm that starts out slow but quickly picks up speed. Thanh is sobbing, but still thrashing his head from side to side. Suddenly he stops thrashing, and reaches up to pull Jeremy into a kiss, a kiss that is so urgent, so breathless, that it's almost more erotic than the fucking. Finally, breaking the kiss at last, Thanh leans back staring at Jeremy, still sobbing. "I love you baby," Thanh says through his tears. "I am so in love with you."
This is Thanh speaking to Jeremy, not Anh speaking to Michael. This is not Thanh in character; this is Thanh in lust...and in love. Just seconds after uttering those words of endearment, he begins to cum, shrieking, wriggling like an eel, and Jeremy is right behind him. "Oh...oh...Jesus!" Jeremy groans, his body rigid as he cums, his sheathed dick buried deep inside Thanh. It's an orgasm that goes on for several seconds, and when it subsides, Jeremy slumps on top of Thanh, and Thanh hugs him.
"Fuck," Thanh exhales, exhausted.
Looking at this scene later, when I'm editing the film, I realize that I've been completely confused about my relationship with Leslie and Ian, and probably about Dinh's relationship with Tim. I've also been confused about this film. I thought that the kink was going to be the erotic part. That's how I'd written it. The spankings, the enema, the sex-play with toys -- those were the turn-ons. Not true. This last scene was the most erotic thing in the video. It's one of the most erotic things I've ever seen. And it was completely un-scripted, completely spontaneous. Would it have been this erotic without the kink? I doubt it. I think Thanh and Jeremy needed the kink as a preamble. They needed it to get them in the mood, to get them to a level of sexual frustration that made the intensity of the actual sex scene possible. Thanh agrees when I ask him about it.
"Oh, my god, yes!" he says. "The discipline got me really keyed up, and Dinh told me I couldn't get off until the scene with Jeremy. He told me not to jerk off, and not to see Jeremy `after hours.' You can't know how much I needed to cum by the time we got to that last scene. And then, of course, there's Jeremy. He is just so hot!"
Once the last scene is "in the can," so to speak, we have some retakes to shoot based on viewing what we have, and we have some filler to shoot -- shots of Thanh and Jeremy staring into the distance, shots of them staring at each other. And, of course, we have our "extra" footage, the scene that Tim suggested for inclusion on the DVD, but not as part of the actual video. That will involve Thanh but not Jeremy.
The "behind-the-scenes" extra segment that Tim suggested will require another enema. The dialog will be between Thanh and me, the "producer" of the video. Ostensibly, I'm getting Thanh ready for the enema scene with Jeremy, who is squeamish about excrement. We need to clean Thanh out before Jeremy will do the real enema scene with him. This scene takes place in Tim's dungeon shortly before the enema scene is to be filmed, at least that's the premise. It's shot by Jason and Kenny. (Thanh couldn't face the prospect of having Becky actually see this, so she doesn't film this scene.)
"It's okay, Thanh. It's no big deal, is it? Jeremy is just a little shy about...shit. He doesn't want to get splashed. We just need to get you cleaned out. Okay?"
"Okay," Thanh responds, reluctantly.
"This can also be sort of a rehearsal for the enema that we'll film for the video. You've never had an enema, right? Isn't that what you said?"
"Yeah," he responds. "Okay. Let's do it."
"Get up on the table. Lie on your back. Spread your legs, feet flat on the surface of the table, knees bent. Yeah, that's right." I cross the room, and roll an IV stand over to the table. It has a bulging enema bag hanging from it, and a double-balloon nozzle draped over it, the same nozzle we use in the actual enema scene. I lube the nozzle, slide it up Thanh's ass, and inflate the balloons. "Ready?" I ask.
"Okay," Thanh says.
I release the liquid and after about 45 seconds, the bag is empty. Thanh is full, his belly distended. "Ow...oww...oh, shit this hurts."
"Just hold it for a few minutes to let the water circulate a bit. You okay? Are you cramping?"
"Yeah," he pants. "Please, how much longer?"
"Give it a couple of minutes more."
Thanh begins to writhe, to squirm. He's obviously in pain. After maybe thirty seconds, I deflate the nozzle, help Thanh off the table, and point him to the toilet in the corner, but...he doesn't make it. Midway between the table and the toilet, he doubles over in pain, and releases his bowels, and the shit...flows...everywhere. Thanh is sobbing, humiliated, but he's still releasing the enema. Finally, he runs to the toilet, and drains the last of the liquid from his belly, but there really isn't much left for him to release. Most of it's on the floor, and looks really foul. Thanh continues to sob. "I'm so sorry," he wails. "That last cramp hit and I thought I was going to die. I'm sooo sorry."
"It's okay, Thanh," I say, crossing the room to where he sits on the toilet, and hugging him. "It's fine. We can clean this up."
Thanh continues to sob while hugging me. "I'm so sorry," he whimpers over and over again. That's where we fade out.
"Cut!" Dinh cries.
That's the scene. It's intended for those in the audience who are into scat, which includes no one in the room at this moment, but probably includes a lot of people who'll see this video. Whatever floats your boat. It smells pretty nasty, right now, though, and once the cameras are out of the way, Kenny connects a hose to the sink against the back wall, and hoses down the floor. Thankfully, there's a drain in the middle of the floor that we can wash this mess into. This is the last bit of filming left, and it takes us all of a couple of hours. Next up will be editing, but that's a job for just Dinh and me. So, to celebrate the end of the shoot, everyone is invited to Tim's for dinner. It's going to be a Jason meal, which is always a treat.
Thanh, his boyfriend Howe, and Jeremy all arrive together, which is curious. Leslie and Ian, arrive maybe ten minutes later. I've been at Tim's all afternoon viewing what we filmed. Dinner starts coming out of the kitchen at about 7:30pm, and it is sumptuous, but nothing more than you'd expect from Jason. We dish up, and begin to eat. Feng is sitting next to Kai, and they're giggling. Tan and Quan are sitting with Kevin, and Kev proves to be a really good influence, keeping things orderly. Jeremy is sitting across from me, between Thanh and Howe.
"How was it for you?" I ask Jeremy. "The filming, I mean. Was it okay? Would you consider doing another video?"
He gives me a long, pensive look, chewing on a mouthful of...something. "You know, if you'd asked me that last week, I'd have said no. I'd have told you I'd never do this again. Depending on the day you'd asked, I might have said that I didn't even want to finish this video. I was pretty freaked at the beginning of this."
"Why?" I ask, confused. "Was it that unpleasant for you?"
He pauses. "No. It was that...great."
I'm completely lost, and it shows. Tim seems to understand, though.
"Do you love him?" he asks Jeremy.
"Them," Jeremy responds. "Yeah, I think so."
Tim nods.
Dinh and I look at each other, and then back at Jeremy. I've no idea what he's talking about.
"The on-screen chemistry was pretty good between Thanh and me, you said," Jeremy remarks, looking at Dinh. "It was good because I was falling...umm...in love with him. The video forced me to explore a side of myself I didn't know existed, and when I thought about it, I thought it made me...gay. I didn't want to be gay. I mean, how could I be gay? I'd spent the last twenty years thinking I was straight. But, suddenly I was not only fucking a guy, I was in love with the guy I was fucking. It was really confusing. Howe helped me through it. Howe was seeing changes in Thanh, and came to my place to talk about it. He was afraid of losing Thanh. We were both a little uneasy at first...talking about what was happening, but when he brought it up, I started to lose it. I started to cry. Suddenly, I was someone I didn't know. He forced me to face that, to come to terms with it. He forced me to realize that it was okay to be whoever I'd become. If I was gay, that was fine." Jeremy glances at Howe, and then takes another bite, chewing.
"Jeremy was pretty...upset," Howe continues. "You don't turn gay overnight. He was `conflicted'," he says, giggling. "But, Thanh wasn't conflicted. It was easy to see that Thanh was in love with Jeremy. He was crazy about him. But -- and this is the thing that confused me -- the closer he got to Jeremy in the course of the filming, the closer we seemed to get. Thanh was more affectionate than I remember him being in a long time, and it didn't seem like he was overcompensating. It seemed sincere. He seemed to be in love with both of us."
"I was in love with both of you," Thanh avers. "I am in love with both of you."
Howe nods. "So, I went to see Jeremy to try to figure out what his feelings were, and when I confronted him with Thanh's feelings, he started to cry. I hugged him, and he hugged me back. One thing led to another, and pretty soon we were both naked on his living-room carpet, kissing. We didn't do anything else. We just kissed and rubbed. It was that evening that I realized why Thanh had fallen in love with Jeremy. Jeremy is very sensitive. He's very caring. He's really pretty...uhh...lovable."
Jeremy is, by now, beet red. We're talking about him as though he's not in the room. It's pretty funny.
"So, the bottom line," Thanh says, looking across the table at Dinh. "We ignored your request that we not see each other off-set. We've been together for the last seven nights. I think we're in love. We're going to test that. Jeremy is moving in with Howe and me, and we're going to see how it goes."
Dinh and I both look surprised, I guess, looking at the three of them. Relationships are strange, and you never know how things will work out. Howe is reading our minds, I think, and starts to giggle.
"Yeah, it's weird, hunh? Thing is," Howe says, flushing a bit, "I'm not really top material. I know I probably gave you that impression," he says, looking from Dinh to me, "but, I'm not into supplying the pain that Thanh enjoys. I love Thanh, but I don't like to hurt him, even though he wants me to."
"But Jeremy does," Thanh says, giggling. "He's into it, aren't you?" he asks Jeremy.
Jeremy goes three shades of red. "Umm...sorta," he replies. Thanh cuffs him playfully.
"So, we're all going to live together," Thanh says, "the three of us, and see where this goes. If this week was any indication, I think this'll be really cool." Thanh leans over and kisses Jeremy.
"Me, too! This should be way cool!" Howe agrees, leaning over and kissing Jeremy.
"Yeah, me, too!" Jeremy says softly, sandwiched between these two adoring lovers. "Really, really cool!"
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Editing the video takes two weeks. Why so long? Because I'm not very good with the software, yet. I have to learn it as I go. And...umm...because I get distracted a lot. I just can't resist Quan, Feng and Tan. When they want to play, so do I. There was a quote in People Magazine by Steve Harvey that just resonates with me. "Small kids are the funniest people to me, especially when they're eating -- like when they miss their mouths, or discover flavors. And watching my kids grow is hysterical because I see myself so much. No matter how much I tell them what's going to happen, they have to try it anyway!"
This guy has got it down! Tan, our three and a half year old, is trying to learn to use chop sticks. Mostly we still feed him, as we do Quan, but both of them are really envious of Feng, who's pretty proficient with chop sticks -- awkward, but proficient. But, we have to be careful because Tan and Quan are likely to stab themselves in the face with these instruments of doom and start to cry. They miss their mouths a lot. And, when you give them some new food, something they haven't tried before, their eyes open really, really wide. I fed Tan a piece of stir-fried calf's liver, and he spit it in my face. He hated it! I guess I looked pretty surprised, because he started to laugh. "You are mean!" I screamed, laughing, wiping myself off. He laughed even harder. He's pretty cute.
So, after two weeks, I have a cut of the video, and we show it to Ben and Jeffrey, our next-door neighbors. They're gay, and interracial, and into...S/M. In their case, it's 5'6" Jeffrey, a Filipino, who dominates 6'1" Ben, an Italian-American. It seems a little backwards to me, but it's not my job to judge these things. Jason has added a musical score that his symphony recorded for us and that really does evoke a level of emotion that...surprises me. I mean, I'm into music, but nothing like Jason, obviously. The music makes this a whole `nother video. It's not like the cheesy music of most porn videos -- all bouncy and disco. This is symphonic music. It's amazing and adds a depth of feeling to the video that it absolutely didn't have before. It makes Tim cry, and that's usually a good test for a piece of music. It also makes Ben and Jeffrey cry, especially Jeffrey. "I don't believe that you made this," he says, choking back tears. "This is spectacularly good. It's so...real. It's so us. Really, where did it come from?"
"Shawn and I made it," Dinh reassures him. "Shawn wrote it, I directed it, and Shawn edited it. And, of course, Jason added the music. Did you really like it?"
Jeffrey is in tears. "I loved it! It's so touching. It's not really porn, is it? Well, I guess it is. It's pretty graphic. But, it has a real story, a story that's just...so...true-to-life. It's wonderful!"
That's the reaction we get from most of our friends, even those not in authoritarian relationships. It's not going to fly with straight couples for the most part, although a number of Jason's female friends love it. The reaction from our gay friends, though, is universally positive.
"Would you buy it?" Dinh asks them.
The answer is consistently `Yes'.
"What would you be willing to pay for it?" he asks.
The average price he hears is $26.00, $2.00 more than we were initially planning to charge. That becomes our price point. We put it out on our brand-new website, and begin advertising it on small sites -- extremeboyz.com, gay365.com, nifty.org, and about three others. It takes about a week, and then we find the download traffic to be intense, so intense that the ISP that's hosting our site tells us that we need to upgrade to a different service plan. It's an additional expense, but if you think about it, this is a good problem to have, a really good problem. And, when we check our cash flow, we realize just how good a problem this is. The week after we put the video out on our site, we made $126.00. The second week, we made $1930.00. The third week, we made $175,297.00. We're waiting for the week four results. We covered our costs in 2.1 weeks of sales. We are absolutely elated, and planning the next film. We couldn't be happier.
So, I guess, maybe we'll become pornographers. It could be worse -- I could have wanted to be president. But, prostitution has just never really resonated with me...
Published first at: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Nemo-stories/