Liam Cole interviewed by Susan Donam,

Liam Cole, director of BAD INFLUENCE, was recently interviewed by Susan Donam. The article was published in The Evidence Autumn 2008.


Treasure Island Media (T.I.M.)is the most controversial gay porn studio in the world. Based in San Francisco, its raw documentary style videos present promiscuous unprotected ("bareback") sex between men. This goes against the safe-sex message that has been targeted at the gay community for more than twenty years in the fight against HIV and AIDs.

T.I.M.’s stated aim is to "document male sexuality in the 21st century", but critics claim that titles such as Dawson’s 50 Load Weekend put actors at risk and encourage reckless behaviour in viewers.

Liam Cole recently joined T.I.M. as a director and his first video, Bad Influence, is scheduled for release in autumn. I met Liam in London, where excerpts from the video were recently screened at Elevator Gallery and The Whitechapel Gallery.

Susan Donam: How did you get into making porn?

Liam Cole: I wrote fanmail to Paul Morris [founder and owner of T.I.M.]. He said I should try making porn, so that afternoon I made a tape of a man jerking off and sent it over. He liked it.

SD: Morris is notoriously reclusive. Is it true that he never appears publicly in connection with the studio and there are no known photographs of him?

LC: As far as I know, yes. He’s a faceless villain.

SD: He also has something of a personal mythology built up around him; that T.I.M. is as much a cult as it is a porn studio [many of the models are tattooed with the studio’s logo, which Liam drew on his forehead, Charles Manson style, while I was photographing him] and that Morris is the charismatic maverick at its centre, attracting devotees to his sexual philosophy.




LC: That’s not a myth.

SD: Is Morris’s a philosophy of excess?

LC: What do you mean?

SD: For example, the standardisation of condom-use in 90’s gay porn established a limit on showing physical intimacy. Paul Morris defined T.I.M. by exceeding that limit, focusing on the exchange of semen in a way that was more extreme than anything even from pre-AIDs porn.

LC: I’m not sure I agree that T.I.M. is defined by that, but in any case the arguments made against bareback porn revolve around the idea of excessive risk, not excessive intimacy. The premise is that unconstrained sexual intimacy is of limited value and therefore not worth risking too much over. Paul raised the stakes on that by setting a higher value on sex. Then there’s the general attraction of risk itself. The "fuck it, I want this" effect. Why do people drive too fast? Or have affairs? Danger is fun.

SD: There is also a logic of excess, a pattern of exceeding precedents, evident in T.I.M. videos: Dawson’s 20 Load Weekend is necessarily followed by Dawson’s 50 Load Weekend and then Loaded in which the load count goes up to about 75.

LC: Right, more each time. But those videos show Dawson’s sexual appetite as it really is. It’s not a concept that Max [Sohl, the videos’ director] thought up and forced onto Dawson. There’s no script. Nobody says, "in this video you’re going to have to play the part of a man who wants 75 strangers to cum in his ass". Dawson is that man.

SD: It sounds like the antithesis of "gay-for-pay".

LC: Forget "gay-for-pay". Any man you see getting fucked in a T.I.M. video is there because he wants it, and there are plenty of others who contact us requesting to be gangbanged – more than we have time to shoot. These men have a compulsion. If there is a logic of excess, it comes from them.

SD: If that’s the case, why did you recently feel it necessary to send an 18 year old man to a hypnotherapist to encourage him to be fucked by a group of men on camera? That seems excessively manipulative, and deliberately so. A parody of the pornographer as exploiter.

LC: Tommy Haine already wanted to be fucked by a group on camera. The hypnotism was an extra little experiment, because he was interested in giving up control. The first time I shot with Tommy was a 1-on-1. Afterwards he told me that it had been too vanilla, and that he wanted to go further, be treated like an object, get used by a group. He asked for it.

SD: Did you grant that request?

LC: I shot more with him, yes. He’s been fucked a fair bit. I don’t know how much of it will be in Bad Influence because this video’s not a huge gangbang type of thing, and it’s still being edited. Alot gets shot, alot gets cut, and nothing gets released without Paul Morris’s approval.