An even closer look at Dick of the Week
NakedTony

So what was NakedTony like before he got famous? Was he a nice guy? Was he cute? Did he have a boyfriend? Was he nice to the "little people" in his world before he became internationally famous?

Well, yeah -- as far as I know! I first remember meeting Tony at a gay naked gathering in 1999. I saw him at the Gathering's first cocktail party, wearing signs down the side of his leg reading "www.nakedtony.com" -- along with his hunky supermodel (and best friend) Todd:

299 x 683 23K S

293 x 658 25K S

609 x 504 28K S

I made sure to introduce myself, and something about us "clicked." Lots of people were familiar with NakedTony.com, and as soon as I got home from the Gathering I checked it out. Cool site! I remembered that I had visited it once before, but had never dreamed at the time that I would one day actually meet him.

However, something about Tony rang a bell, but I couldn't put my finger on it until a couple of months later. I was looking through some older Gathering photos when I suddenly thought I recognized... Tony!! I looked closer. I had covered his face with a yellow happyface, probably because I didn't have permission to put him on my (very early) website. But it certainly looked like him -- even the thumbnail looked like him, even though I had ever so slightly fuzzed it out to make him unrecognizable there, too.

I mentioned this to Tony in an e-mail and he verified that yes, indeed, he had attended that Gathering. And he guessed which cocktail party it probably had been. Even without looking at the photo, he surmised that the other fellow showing off with him was probably his boyfriend Steve.

I went back to the photos and compared them with photos of Steve on Tony's website. Sure looked like him!

These photos are from the very earliest stages of Jim's Pen is Central -- back from the days when it was hosted on AOL, so I couldn't show anyone's dick. I was, however, testing the limits of AOL censorship: seeing what I could get away with. I wanted to go right up to the edge of the limit without going over it. I eventually overstepped the boundary a bit too often; someone complained to AOL, they wiped out my site and sent me a stern warning, I put it back up and tried to stay legal, I mis-read the limits a second time and then got bumped off for good.

Thumbnail to click on	To avoid AOL censorship	Original enlargement
You'll notice that Tony's dick is "completely" visible in this one. But this wasn't enough to get me bumped off AOL. Although they don't say so, AOL doesn't really kick you off if the image of the pen is is less than 6 pixels high -- a limit I determined by trial and error. But I knew that I had to cover up Tony's dick in the enlargement. Just for fun, I left in all of Steve's dick! This turned out to be OK -- probably because one could imagine that it showed Steve's finger or thumb, not his dick.
Actually, I made Steve's dick clearer and thus lengthened it a bit...	... as you can see by comparing this photo (as it appeared on AOL)...	...with this one, which shows the photo before I covered up the crotch.

And so the independent version of Jim's Pen is Central was born! I registered phdtop.com as my domain, noticed that AOL wouldn't (and still won't, as of 2001) let me or anyone else use the screen name phdtop@aol.com, and never looked back.

However, I still didn't know (or remember) who was in the photo, and I wasn't sure he'd approve of having his face sprayed all over the Internet. So I didn't remove the yellow happyface I had put over his smile.

Now that I knew that this photo was of Tony and Steve, how could I unmask them? Where could I find the original original of that photo?

That took me longer than I had expected, but in mid-April 2001 I finally succeeded. It turns out I had taken two photos of the two of them making out near the back of that cocktail party.