Porn Valley- I spoke to Bill Gardner who heads up the gay company Hot Desert Knights, www.hotdesertknights.com. Gardner’s company produces bare back videos, and Gardner directs under the name Bill Hunter.

Before we got into that subject, we chatted a little about the murdered Bryan Kocis whose company Cobra Video also produced bareback vids.

“We used to distribute Cobra Video,” Gardner tells me. “We did all his replication as well.”

[Hot Desert Knights is Gardner’s production company which has offices on the east coast and west coast. The distribution company is located in Palm Springs.]

“As you know he [Kocis] got murdered the night before last,” Gardner continues. “I got an e-mail from him the day before that. He had been out to Internext and he just got home and was getting back into the swing of things. The next day he gets killed. None of us know what to expect. Was it somebody who got pissed off that he was making bareback videos? At this point nobody knows but people are looking at Brent Corrigan. I hope he has a helluva alibi.”

Gardner notes that Kocis had a MySpace page.

“I don’t know if it was the night of or the day after the killing- someone went in and added: what goes around comes around- a little scary.”

On the subject of his own product, Gardner talks about how magazines- GayVN included- want his advertising.

“But they won’t editorialize anything we do,” he says. “They say they do reviews on barebacking but they’re very few and far between.”

“GayVN has this guy- I think his name is Doug Lawrence and he’s absolutely opposed to bare backing,” Gardner continues. “We’ve known this for a number of years so we just don’t advertise in GayVN- we’re not too concerned about it. We go to the shows- that’s about it.”

To wit, Gardner says he once got an e-mail from Lawrence telling him if given a choice between barebacks and non-bareback films, people always go with the none-bareback films.

My knowledge of the gay industry is obviously limited, but I always had the idea there was more barebacking than not in the industry, I say to Gardner.

“When AIDs first started and we found out where it was coming from, the gay studios did not just automatically switch and go to condoms,” Gardner relates.

“At that point they were all condom-less. Or what we now call bareback. The straight industry was all non-condom at that point and I’d say probably 80-85% of it still is. The gay industry kind of got dragged kicking and screaming into being forced into using condoms. All the AIDs activists started coming down on them. They did switch and for a long time most of the gay films did show condoms. We always called it the ‘mystery condom’- the guy was just getting ready to stick his dick in somebody’s butt. There was no condom there. They cutaway to his face, and they cut back to the insertion shot and there was a condom.”

The major gay studios, according to Gardner, now use condoms.

“We were the first studio to really start the bareback trend if you will,” says Gardner. “It was almost by accident how we started. Then other companies followed suit. But our main complaint is the hypocrisy within the industry. The magazines want our advertising dollars but they won’t treat us the same as the other studios who do use condoms.”

According to Gardner, GayVN used to review his product all the time.

“There was a fellow named Jeremy Spencer. He always reviewed our product. Or one of his reviewers did. We were in there. Then he left GayVN. I think that’s when Doug Lawrence came aboard. We continued to send our stuff then after a year realized, hey, we’re not getting reviewed at all.”

After some discussion, Gardner was told his product would not be reviewed.

“But, of course, off the record their salesmen would always tell us they love our product.”

This prompted Gardner to write a letter saying the salesmen are contacting him wanting him to spend money but in good conscience he couldn’t do so because of the way he had been treated. Gardner says he got a reply from Lawrence stating that the magazine did indeed review bareback films.

“Few and far between and, true, the ones who advertise,” Gardner notes.

With the awards show coming up, Gardner says his company hasn’t been nominated for anything.

“We stopped sending screeners a year ago,” he explains. “And only once were we nominated and that was a pre-nom. And then we just disappeared. We were never mentioned again. We just said to hell with it. We’re not going to financially support an organization that is not going to support me. I believe they have a right to their own opinion. However discrimination is wrong in any case.”

Gardner thinks with this kind of attitude prevailing the next thing you’ll see are states enacting sodomy laws.

“Where it’s illegal for two guys to have sex,” he continues. “You can’t give up one right without risking all of them. And that’s out whole point. We don’t encourage people to bareback. If you’ve ever seen our films, we make it really clear- on the boxcover and the film- what goes on between informed, consenting adults is their business and nobody else’s. We make a big deal of saying if you are HIV-negative you need to do everything in your power to stay that way. And we believe that.”

According to Gardner, on set performers on his company shoots are sorted according to their HIV status.

“We get them together to talk about what they’re going to do and talk about their health history and all of that. We don’t want them to be necessarily divulging that to us. We’re very serious about it. We tell them: condoms are the only way we know to prevent the transmission of STDs. Our company doesn’t use condoms and they know this going in. People know what we do.”

Gardner talks about how there are guys in the gay community known as “bug chasers” who want to convert their status from negative to positive.

“They want to get it,” he states. “They refuse to use condoms. Period.”

On the other side of the coin are guys known as the “gift givers.” And the definition should be obvious.

“But the hypocrisy is that the major studios complain about what we do,” says Gardner. “And we have their models tell us all the time- because we’re all exchanging models back and forth- they tell us on set the condoms are always going to come off before the insertion. But when they’re fluffing each other and getting ready before the camera comes on, they’re not using condoms. And the director is aware of it. The producer is aware of it. They don’t have a problem with it. And most of these guys in their real lives don’t wear condoms.”

And Gardner isn’t using the term fluffing in the conventional sense. He means one guy fucking another.

“By that I mean they’re doing whatever they need to get hard,” Gardner adds. “We’re told by models that goes on all the time. Yet the minute they throw the camera on, all the condoms appear.

In his opinion Chi Chi LaRue has been a stauch critic of his company.

“Yet there have been rumors circulating about Chi Chi for years about drugs supplied on the set,” Gardner contends. “Whether they’re true or not I don’t have a clue. But I’ve had models tell me, in fact, that fluffing is going on and condoms aren’t being used. While at the same time, Chi Chi has accused us of promoting barebacking. Especially among the 18-25 year-olds. To blame us on this incidence is just absurd. If you want to blame someone, blame the Bush administration which doesn’t allow safer sex to be taught in the public school syste. If they mention condoms, they lose their federal funding.”

Gardner began his company in 1998. His partner John and himself, both HIV positive, moved to Palm Springs to retire.

“We owned a company that made transporation safety films,” he says. We sold that company and some properties, retired and went out there. We got bored pretty quick.”

In their home, Gardner and his parner began having sex parties that were neither bareback parties or condom parties.

“Condoms were there for the guys who wanted to use them,” says Gardner. “If they didn’t want to use them they didn’t have to.”

The parties grew to the point of about 200 people, most of them not using condoms. At the end of one of the parties, Gardner was approached with the idea of making, specifically, bareback videos because no one was doing it.

“That’s what people want to see- and that’s how the company started,” explains Gardner. “My parner and I were bored to tears, retired. From the very beginning, we very careful about models that we put with each other.”

Gardner also points out that his is the only studio that does drug testing.

“We don’t do it on every model but those that we suspect are under the influence. We don’t allow any types of drugs on the set.”

Along those lines, Gardner has donated tens of thousands of dollars to various AIDs organizations. Not surprisingly, some of the money has been refused because of the source.