AWOLMarines.com Celebrates Birthday (by me!)
2005-12-02
AwolMarines.com Celebrates Bobby Garcia’s Legacy on Re-launch Birthday
By: Ken Knox
Posted: 11:13 am PST 12-2-2005
The legacy of revolutionary gay indie pornographer Bobby Garcia and his Frat House Boys line of military men videos is having its first-year celebration with the re-launch of AWOLMarines.com. The popular website is home to all the Frat House Boys titles, which ushered in the straight-guy niche movement that now dominates the gay Internet.
Acquired last year from Frat House Boys by Company No. 4, the site has since flourished after previously floundering under former ownership, according to its new owners.
“The site had been around for just under a year until we bought it, but it was getting neglected,” says Company No. 4 partner Brian Dunlap (also known as the marketing director and the voice behind the Garcia-inspired CorbinFisher.com). “Frat House Boys had been doing offline sales forever, and they decided to give the Internet a try, and it wasn’t working for them.”
That’s when Dunlap – a longtime fan of Garcia’s work – happened to stumble across the site.
“I had come along and found it, and I loved Bobby’s stuff, and I started a relationship with the owners by offering to help them out pro bono,” he recalls. “Then it got to the point where they were like, ‘You could really turn this into something good, so why don’t you take it and run with it?’”
After Company No. 4 purchased the exclusive license to distribute Garcia’s entire catalogue online (Frat House Boys retained video distribution rights), Dunlap and crew immediately set about redesigning and re-launching the site, complete with an affiliate program. Since then, they have introduced the renegade filmmaker to a brand new generation of eager fans.
“I think the site has done a great job in introducing Bobby to a whole new generation,” Dunlap says. “He had a huge cult following from the 15 to 20 years he’s been filming this stuff, but outside of the circle of people who bought the mail-order VHS tapes, people didn’t know much about him. I think now that it’s online and a lot of other webmasters have introduced it to their surfers, there are tons of people seeing the stuff for the first time.”
The decidedly amateurish content, filmed mostly in the basement of Garcia’s military base-adjacent house in San Diego, is enough to make any man “stand at attention,” featuring an array of men recruited from the likes of Camp Pendleton and the Marine Recruitment Depot settling back on Bobby’s bed and masturbating while watching heterosexual porn flicks. In some instances, they let Bobby perform fellatio on them, while in others, Garcia actually convinces them to try getting it on with another guy.
The VHS tapes, originally distributed from Xeroxed pamphlets sent through the mail, quickly became underground classics and gained Garcia a reputation as a guerilla filmmaker with a knack for convincing the hottest straight military boys to do things for him they would never do for anyone else.
If the formula sounds familiar, that’s because nearly every other straight-guy niche site online today – from BukBuddies.com and MilitaryClassified.com to Dunlap’s own CorbinFisher.com – takes its cue from Bobby’s Frat House Boys releases.
“Bobby was the original,” Dunlap notes. “Over the last year especially, the proliferation of reality sites and military sites and straight-guy sites influenced by Bobby has been huge, but he’s been filling that niche for years now. It’s the ultimate reality. And he’s been doing it by his own formula; he created the formula. He does this stuff because he enjoys it and gets off on it. He never cared about building a huge empire from it. He films the stuff, then hands it over to us and says, ‘Do whatever you want with it. I’m going back to film more guys.’”
Dunlap tells AVNOnline.com that, while Garcia has “slowed down considerably” in light of the military’s involvement in Iraq, there is more than enough content to keep surfers coming back for more – and just coming – for quite a long time.
“We make sure we put a new video up every day, along with three more every Friday,” he says. “That kind of tells you how long Bobby’s been doing this. He’s slowed down, but we have years’ and years’ worth of footage to update the site with.”
In Dunlap’s opinion, the content continues to entice gay surfers because of its raw nature.
“The reasons it continues to lure fans are the very same reasons some find it heinous or repulsive,” he chuckles. “There’s this weird little Bobby guy who gets these hot military guys to jerk off for him, and sometime he gets to suck them off or convinces them to play with another guy. And it’s so real. If Bobby walks into a lamp and knocks it over, that’s still in there. That’s where I think appeal comes from: It’s totally authentic, unrehearsed, real, raw footage.
“It’s almost kind of creepy,” Dunlap continues, laughing. “He lures these marines down to his basement and gets them to take off their clothes and perform for him. You’re not sure whether to be freaked out by it or turned on.”
Though Dunlap concedes that many of today’s Garcia-influenced sites have successfully mainstreamed the Frat House Boys formula with better lighting and better equipment, he maintains there’s nothing quite like the original.
“It’s obviously something that people like, since so many are using Bobby’s formula,” he says. “If you’re looking for polished stuff that uses the ultra-super-duper-high-quality digital equipment, this is not going to be the site for you. But if you really want to be a fly on the wall and see all the crazy, unrehearsed things happening between these marines and military men in Bobby’s house, then there it is.”
In other words, it’s really all about returning to your roots. “I think it’s about looking at the original reality guy maestro, and seeing him work his magic,” Dunlap says. “There’s no better guy at it than Bobby.”
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