LOS ANGELES—It was fitting that the world’s largest streaming site of gay adult entertainment had no choice but to stream its big birthday bash. Earlier this week, gay VOD leader NakedSword put on a two-hour virtual party to reflect on two decades of success.
“It’s been such a weird year, and it’s interesting that we turned 20 in 2020 and all of this stuff happened—challenges for myself, for a lot of folks around me, for our company,” said CEO Tim Valenti as he opened the festivities on Sunday. “I think about what we thought about this year in terms of what we wanted to do moving forward, and the ideas that sort of burst out of everybody’s head—there’s just a lot of creative energy and excitement for the next 20 years.”
It’s a sign of the company’s reach and appeal that not only did the event draw many of the industry’s top names, but also appearances from Emmy winners, gay icons, a platinum-selling recording artist and even…a California state senator?! The show wasted no time pulling out the big guns, leading with a recorded message from comedian Kathy Griffin, who brought out the actual sword presented to her by the company.
“This sword is rather famous and significant in my life. I was involved in a little scandal where I took a photo with what looked like the president’s decapitated head,” she shared, relaying the story she chronicled in her special A Hell of a Story (which climaxes with references to the sword and her hosting gig at the 2007 GayVN Awards). “During the investigation, they asked me if I had any weapons—and I had to tell them how I go this one, where I got this one…and I was exonerated.”
Valenti was joined in his co-hosting duties by Sister Roma, Creative Director for Falcon|NakedSword. As Roma shared, the two met nearly 19 years ago “because our good friend John Rutherford suggested maybe I would be a good person to host this crazy show that you were working on.”
That was the online talk venture The Tim & Roma Show, which had over 100 episodes and featured the duo getting into all sorts of mayhem visiting adult events, red carpets, sex clubs, movie sets and more.
“I really felt like we needed to connect with the people,” Valenti said about the creation. “We were new to video streaming anyway, and I just thought, ‘Why don’t we have a real live element to this, something where we actually talk to our customers, we bring on the beautiful men that they’re watching, and show some of the behind-the-scenes craziness?’ And I was like, clearly, I am not the person to do that by myself…I’m like Dean Martin, and you’re like Jerry Lewis.”
The show was co-produced by award-winning director mr. Pam, who shared what the opportunity meant to her.
“That show literally changed my life. I was working at CBS News, CNET.com, and I wanted to quit. I went to Tim like, ‘We’re still gonna do this show, right? Because I really want to quit my corporate job and do gay porn stuff.’ And Tim said yes, and here we are—what is it, 17 years later—and the shenanigans of you two is amazing.”
Valenti later lured her back to help start NakedSword Originals in 2012.
“Pam had gone to New York to work with Michael (Lucas) for a couple of years, and of course Pam and I have always been really good friends and kept in touch, and I just wanted her to come back because I wanted to start a studio for NakedSword,” Valenti shared. “I had so many crazy ideas about what we could do, and I couldn’t imagine anyone in the entire business to do it with than Pam…NakedSword is a little bit of everything, which I think is really kind of cool. We’re not your normal porn slot machine; we do a lot.”
One of the highlights of that marriage was 2013’s Golden Gate 5: The Cover Up, which tackled a heated political issue.
“I had moved back from New York, I got this fucking awesome apartment right in the Castro, and I would just sit and look out at Castro Market, and there’d be naked people every Sunday. It was awesome!” shared Pam. “And all of a sudden, somebody came in and was going to have a nudity ban so the nudists couldn’t be naked in the Castro anymore—and I wanted to help in their cause.”
Then-San Francisco Supervisor Scott Wiener—not nearly as enamored with the public nudity as Pam was—served as the inspiration for the film’s anti-nudity crusader. Ever the good sport, Wiener—now a California State Senator—joined the party to reflect on the moment.
“I still remember the day when Tim called me and said, ‘Scott, I just want to tell you something, and I hope you’re not mad at us—but we’re going to portray you as Supervisor Scott Cox,’” he smiled. “I think most politicians would probably crap their pants, and I just thought it was the best thing ever. It was sort of like one time when I got voted ‘most admired politician’ on Grindr, and I thought that was awesome. But I said to Tim, ‘The only thing I ask is that you have a hot guy playing me, because that would be embarrassing if it wasn’t a hot guy.’ And they picked this guy Dale Cooper, who is beyond hot, so I was thrilled.”
The party also featured reflections on other notable NakedSword Originals features, including special taped messages from performers Bruce Beckham and Theo Ford talking about their roles in The Slutty Professor and Paris Perfect, respectively.
“That was kind of an incredible experience,” shared Ford of Paris, where he also served as a tour guide and interpreter for the company. “We had so much fun. The cast and crew was just incredible, and mr. Pam really managed all of us pretty well considering we’re pretty much all big personalities. It was a tough job for her, and I commend her for doing such an incredible job.”
2019 GayVN Performer of the Year Wesley Woods was on hand with director Chi Chi LaRue to talk about the Scared Stiff series, which stared in 2016.
“That’s a really wild story, because about 15 years ago, Jackie Beat wrote the script for me. It was for Channel 1 at the time, but I kept the script in my desk for like 13 years,” said LaRue. “I wasn’t working for Channel 1 anymore, and I brought the script to Tim. And Tim was excited—Tim gets excited about cool ideas. So he took it and was like, ‘Oh my God, we have to make this!’ And Jackie Beat was on board. She wanted to make some new references about Donald Trump and some things, and we put together I think the best cast for that movie.”
Beat offered a taped message of congratulations, with Valenti teasing an upcoming third installment in the series following last year’s Scared Stiff 2: The Amityville Whore (“She’s got one more in the bag for us, so we’ll be doing that hopefully next year”).
Director Marc MacNamara was also on hand to talk about his multi-nominated project from 2020, which marked his NakedSword debut.
“I’ve always wanted to work with Marc,” Valenti said. “Marc came up with a really awesome project that wasn’t a normal thing for us to do, and I thought, ‘This is a great way for us to start our relationship.’ I absolutely could not be happier with A Murdered Heart…you ended up making what I think sort of stands on its own in a lot of ways, and I’m just very proud to be attached to it—and I can’t wait to do more projects like that, in addition to some of the crazier fun stuff.”
The project is up for five 2021 GayVN Awards, including Best Feature and Best Director.
“A lot of people, when I pitched the idea, said, ‘You can’t make a movie about conversion therapy. This isn’t the place to do it. This is porn. That’s offensive.’ And I just thought, if we can’t talk about sexuality in porn, then where can we talk about it? And luckily you guys, Tim and everyone, really understood the story that we were trying to tell,” MacNamara shared, noting that over 700,000 LBGTQ individuals have been put into conversion therapy camps, and only 19 states have banned them.
“It was a great story of importance to tell, but it was also so beautiful to make for me to explore sexuality, because it wasn’t gratuitous. These people having sex, it had to make sense within the story. Colton Reece and Ty Mitchell, they have sex after they escape the camp—and they have been told their whole lives, ‘This is wrong, you can’t feel this way, you can’t do this, this is not how a man should act.’ But when their sexuality is given freedom, it’s so much more intense because they’ve been waiting their whole lives to touch a man. And I thought it was a beautiful way to celebrate homosexuality, and it just made a lot of sense to showcase that as a real thing that is happening across America.”
Other celebrity appearances included taped messages from comedian Margaret Cho, Scissor Sisters frontman Jake Shears, Emmy-winning writer Bruce Vilanch, RuPaul's Drag Race star Shangela, and Miss Coco Peru (happy to oblige with her infamous line from Trick).
The party also featured a taped “Zoom Family Reunion” with former NakedSword employees, and a live “Tim’s Partner’s in Crime” segment with NakedSword business manager Andy Fair; writer/filmmaker Michael Stabile; and Brett Drysdale, who produced the landmark Jet Set/NakedSword soap opera Wet Palms.
“There’s a reason we called it the ‘Family Zoom,’ because NakedSword and now Falcon|NakedSword have always been and continue to be such a wonderful working environment,” shared Roma. “That was just a tip of the iceberg of the people over 20 years—but as you notice, it was such an inclusive and encouraging environment. You’ll see everybody—every race, every age, transgender…everybody has worked in this company. It’s a completely diverse and inclusive, a wonderful and dysfunctional family—and that’s why people wanted to show up and share their memories.”
Dakota Payne was also on hand to introduce clips from The Gay Simple Life and share a taped performance (to a Britney Spears medley) as his alter ego, Gemini Dai—winner of NakedSword’s Miss Pineapple Pageant fundraiser this year. The event was one of the many forms of alternative programming that the company created since the start of the pandemic.
“I am so proud of the way we faced this pandemic,” Roma said. “Tim right away was like, ‘We need to close the office, everybody needs to be hooked up, we’re working from home.’ And then we started to talk about what kind of content can we do to keep our audience and our members engaged while we can’t be in our normal production schedule. So we devised a way to give people free content, recognizing that so may of you are struggling financially right now. So we said, every weekend, let’s put up a scene, give people a movie, let’s let them have something to watch, and then we started to get really creative.”
Valenti praised Roma for his role in helping to produce the Model Behavior series of scenes and other projects that ran across the Falcon|NakedSword family of sites.
“One of the jewels in our crown was (Roma) producing the Miss Pineapple Pageant. The Pride Stories was among my favorites, and we’re going to do more of that in 2021…we did all that and produced some pretty awesome hardcore content for free for our fans,” said Valenti.
“I’m super excited. A couple of years back, we merged NakedSword and Falcon together, and we put our teams together. You have two different groups of people, two different ways of looking at things, and finally I think we’ve come together as one family. And this year, we were going to do a lot of things together, and we got a little bit delayed. But the recipe is right there, and I know that there’s a lot of willing hearts to make a lot of great things happen for our company—but also to share with the community and the world in general what we want to do and what we want to say. And it’s all good and it’s all positive, it’s all helpful. And we’re here because we’re lucky—and we know that, and we give our all. That’s what will happen in 2021.”
