ACTS OF DESIRE
GAY PORN INTO THE 2020s
Alam Wernik and other next-gen pornstars revolutionising the adult industry.
Wernik’s personalised dildo and Fleshjack follows a tried-andtested tradition that dates back to Jeff Stryker and the 1980s.
Can the traditional porn studios and the sex tube sites survive the onslaught of self-produced adult content of OnlyFans and sex apps? Are the next-gen porn icons rewriting the business model on how to make a buck from a fuck? Dr Joseph Brennan assesses the state of play.
The scene opens on a nondescript bedroom. The video is distinctly amateur due to an under-lit webcam. But you like that quality; its more authentic. No pictures adorn the wall, there are no personal effects in the room, just a fresh-faced young man on his bed, taking sex requests in real-time. He could be anywhere; the other side of the world or just across town.
There was something about him that made you click through, to choose him from the seemingly endless grid-stream of other young men on beds in nondescript settings, using the internet to make some extra money.
He is not what everyone would consider attractive – does he remind you of an ex, or that guy you fantasised about throughout uni but never had the courage to approach?
Once you’ve clicked through, you read his profile and browse the menu of sex acts he’s willing to perform, and their cost. You like what you see, and after “finishing”, tell yourself you will return. And perhaps you actually do, and so begins something that will become special in your life. You set reminders in your phone and join his fan club to see his private shows. Purchasing from his tipping menu gives you a rush each time. “That was just for me,” you think. And, if you tip enough, he’ll even thank you, using your screen name, while performing the sexual act. In that moment, despite the many others also watching, you feel like it is just you and him.
It’s an intimacy that the “professional” porn industry has never delivered you.
Most of us would recognise this as a Chaturbate scenario. The sex cam site has been on the scene since 2011 and is now a firm favourite for many of us searching for masturbatory pleasure – and for some who are in search of something more.
A recent peak for the site was in late October/ early November 2019, when internet analytics company Alexa ranked it as the 22nd most visited, globally, compared with Pornhub, which hovered around 42nd/43rd for the same period – a glimpse of an end to our obsession with tube sites, perhaps?
A few years after Chaturbate, OnlyFans arrived on the scene, throwing down the gauntlet to the professional industry by providing a platform where, it claims, performers are given greater earning control and the power to create their own content via a pay-per-view and subscription model, just for fans.
Steady growth has followed, along with spirited uptake of the service by industry and webcam performers alike, forcing a shake-up of the sector.
Alam Wernik is one of the medium’s success stories. Looking barely legal, he has 193,000 followers on Twitter and has posted a mindboggling 419 videos on his OnlyFans page. He now straddles traditional industry gigs with Falcon and the production of his own videos on OnlyFans. But can the traditional porn industry survive this “amateur wave” into the 2020s?
MY APPROACH
I was delighted when DNA invited me to contribute a feature on gay porn to the Next
Big Things issue. It has been nine years since I last contributed to DNA. Since then I have completed a PhD and had my research into gay porn published in numerous high-impact, peer-reviewed journals – three papers in Porn Studies, two in Journal Of Homosexuality and two in Psychology And Sexuality (where I serve on the editorial board), to name a select few.
Bringing research out of the ivory towers of academic publishing (and beyond its extortionate pay walls) and into the world where it can have real impact is important; so it is a genuine privilege, at the dawn of a new decade, to be able to share with DNA readers my thoughts on the rise of Chaturbate and OnlyFans.
But before we jump in, let me set out my own viewing position. Building a name for yourself as an authority on gay porn comes with an increasing call to comment in the media. Journalists often approach me with scepticism about my interest in the topics I research (extreme porn among them). One example is a profile Vice ran on my research in 2017, in which my profiler eventually wrote: “In our interview, Brennan could be frustratingly obtuse about his motivations for studying porn, and you get the sense that this evasiveness comes with being a self-appointed dispassionate observer.”
I confess to approaching interviews with trepidation – after all, what journalist is not looking for a “gotcha” moment from an extreme
media researcher. But what my Vice interviewer failed to realise was that my approach to gay porn – even outside of my personal viewing – is far from “dispassionate”. But it is underscored by my training as a media scholar. And what any media scholar worth their salt is wont to do when assigned with looking at the Next Big Thing in gay porn, is to put it in context.
It is only when these “new” platforms are positioned in line with a longer history of representation that we can have any chance of assessing, in a meaningful way, what is new, and what is not.
THE NEW AND THE OLD
OnlyFans launched in 2016 and was promoted as a means for performers to take control of their sexual mediation – and income – while providing fans with a unique, intimate viewing position: whereby viewers’ own money could shape sexual performances.
For men like Wernik, OnlyFans provided an industry “in”. He is now an exclusive model for the huge Falcon Studios while continuing to retain his OnlyFans channel as supplementary income. Can both coexist as a-best-of-both-worlds, and what’s new here?
Let’s start with the performers and their freedoms of choice and ownership over content. What strikes me about Chaturbate and OnlyFans is that they highlight some of the potentially exploitative aspects of “big porn”, and therefore have certain benefits for the individual
(and his fans). The ability to be performer and pornographer, to self-promote at a micro level and to wield control over one’s own image is a relatively new phenomenon and a distinct advantage of the “socialising” of technology. In other words, social media has become the kingmaker of porn stars, constituting a distinct shift in power structures.
It was Wernik who was approached by Falcon after he had built a name for himself through social media channels, and already established himself as a key influencer of gay appeal. That he has since signed as an exclusive Falcon model does show that certain market forces remain at play, but this is not necessarily a bad thing. This industry, after all, has always had a special place within gay culture and, deep down, who among us would truly wish it to fail?
In the same breath, I should point out that this phenomenon of self-capitalising is only somewhat new. Gay porn performers have rarely relied on studio films alone for a career and income, but instead have leveraged the often-fleeting exposure they receive to gay audiences as a means to seek out more lucrative and long-term career prospects elsewhere.
Jeffrey Escoffier set this out in 2007 when he traced a common career trajectory of performers from porn star to stripper to escort, which was based on the situation these men faced between 1995 and 2005.
What has changed in the 15 years since 2005 is that the democratising force of social media has come of age, and brought with it the “new” possibility for porn performers to remain digital, or in media, rather than needing to go out into the world and forge a career-based-on-porn-recognition in a more fleshy sense.
There are obvious benefits to this. Without getting into the complexities of male sex work (which warrants its own article) there are certain built-in safeguards with the nondescript
setting of my opening scenario: of privacy and protection from risky sexual encounters, for instance.
We have a newly matured digital age to thank for this.
AUDIENCE FREEDOMS
Now let’s consider audience freedoms of choice. At first glance these new platforms, Chaturbate especially, offer a plethora of sex and bodies. We are awash with choice, with all tastes apparently catered for – the legal ones, at least.
In Susanna Paasonen’s words, “online porn has meant unprecedented visibility of sexual subcultures, diverse sexual preferences, niches, and tastes”. But scratch the surface of usergenerated tube and cam sites and you’ll find that those who dominate in the popularity stakes, and then transition to the industryproper, mostly conform to certain porn archetypes.
Wernik, for example, while having certain refreshing cultural and ethnic elements is, in body, a typical gay clone (the tall, muscular, healthy ideal); and much of his porn narrative is around the mixing of cultures, which is hardly new, having been a mainstay of studio pornography for decades: think of the foreignerabroad-alliances of Eastern Europe’s Bel Ami with various American studios.
Observing Wernik in action, both on OnlyFans and for Falcon, you’ll notice that he most often performs in line with another archetype: the powerbottom twink. Youthful, smooth, blond and with a bubble butt that can withstand a pounding. Convention dictates that these traits are best complemented by a prototypical top; men who have rougher sex, are more mature and hirsute, and are especially well-endowed, such as Woody Fox and Max Konner. (Konner also embodies a Black male archetype.)
In fact, there are many similarities between ‘new’ platforms and ‘old’ industry. For example, the (ostensibly) straight male succeeds in both, with OnlyFans favourites such as Ben Dudman and Brock Cooper reflecting the sexual veneration of straight-associated men within our community.
Dudman’s “UK Fitness Model” banner on his OnlyFans profile refashions the wink-andnudge physique beefcake magazines of gay iconography. Also, Paasonen’s comment on the diversification of online porn can apply to the traditional industry as well. We tend to remember the big studio names; but thanks to the internet, together with cheaper means of distribution and flexible revenue streams, industry has been embracing niche audiences and tastes outside of the mainstream since the days of dial-up.
TECHNOLOGY
The personal interface of Chaturbate and OnlyFans offers certain possibilities unavailable to industry players, sure.
For example, “teledildonics”. This is the ability to control sex toys remotely via the internet. By tipping a Chaturbate performer, viewers can activate vibrators or prostate stimulators that are connected to the account and see the effects of this on the performer in real time. This enables the kinds of immersive porn experiences that these new platforms have helped make possible. Yet, while perhaps such intimacies are out of reach for the industry, this does not stop the incorporation of this theming within films.
The MEN site Drill My Hole released Ass Controller, starring Paul Canon and Kit Cohen, in 2017. It combines teledildonic technology with a traditional porn narrative setup: one man’s butt plug is being remotely activated by the other during a job interview. Thanks to theming, and heavy marketing, the video remains the site’s most popular today, with 180,000 views – more than double the next contender.
Another tool available to industry is merchandising. Wernik’s release of a personalised dildo and Fleshjack follows a tried-and-tested tradition of intimacyformation between industry performers and fans that dates back to Jeff Stryker and the 1980s. Stryker had his own action figure (anatomically accurate, of course), and a personalised dildo that is now considered an art phallus by some.
Any celebration of new technology should also be tempered by concern with its trappings. Christopher N Kendall and Rus Funk argue that “gay porn uses real people, many vulnerable and easily exploited”. And while I am the first to advocate for the positives of porn, there is no doubt that this is true in some respects.
Add to this the viral spread of clips from amateur sources across tube sites, which can never be redacted, together with new legislation to curb revenge porn, and the issues associated with these amateur platforms become clear. In fact, as I have explored elsewhere, the future of amateur is perhaps in the hands of “mobile pornographers”: men preferring to use apps like Grindr to profit from their video and sex work, so as to avoid a digital trace.
PORN FUTURES
No media is immune to the tides of change, especially new media. Some new media, like Facebook and Instagram are proving extremely conservative. If Twitter were to follow
Facebook’s “community standards” guidelines and tighten its terms of service to prohibit adult content, how would this impact performers’ means of spreading the news about their homegrown products? Services like Chaturbate have monetary benchmarks in place, below which performers are not paid.
Such a move is not without precedent. The latest issue of Porn Studies (in which I have an article) includes an obituary to “Tumblr as a space for the discussion and exploration of sexualities” following its “controversial ban on adult content introduced in late 2018”.
At a pinch, what I hope to have shown here is that while porn futures are uncertain, history suggests that both self-pornography and professional, industry porn will find a way to co-exist and service their audiences, at least until 2030.
Should I be invited back for a 2030 “what’s new” assessment, my prediction is that gay porn will have continued to be a hybrid of what gay men have always enjoyed, mixed with the advantages of new technologies. These technologies, at their best, promise a fairer distribution of wealth among the men performing acts of desire and the corporate decision makers who have historically hoarded the profits.
MORE: Dr Joseph Brennan is a media scholar specialising in porn and fan studies. His first book, Queerbaiting And Fandom: Teasing Fans Through Homoerotic Possibilities, was published by University of Iowa Press in December 2019.