How Sites Like OnlyFans and JustForFans Are Democratizing Gay Porn

How Sites Like OnlyFans and JustForFans Are Democratizing Gay Porn

As late as the summer of 2017, Macho was working a customer-service job at the Philadelphia branch of PECO, an electric and natural gas utility company in Pennsylvania. The 9-to-5 was Macho's shot at the American dream, but waking up every day to stare at a computer screen and field phone calls wasn't for him. Since then, the 23-year-old's online popularity -- which he grew on Instagram, expanded on Twitter (as @jesus_really_), and finally monetized via the website OnlyFans -- has shifted his life to one of self-employment, in which he uploads content, mostly explicit in nature, to paying subscribers.

"Basically with Instagram, I was reinventing myself," Macho says over pizza in his hometown of Philly. "At first, it was just videos of me talking shit and being stupid. But then I started to show off my body, sort of like the vixens that you see on TV, or the girls in music videos with fake butts or fake boobs, who are confident and don't care what anybody says. It made me happy to be the gay version of that."

Macho's early postings built up a following and a fandom. (His first Instagram account racked up 14,000 followers before it was suspended, and it drew 40,000 when it resurfaced before a final deletion.) But when he began to post photos of his ass, followers started to DM him asking for nudes and wanting to trade videos. This went further when he joined the less-filtered Twitter, where he was able to really understand the size of his audience. "I never started this intending to show my penis or my bulge or anything like that," he says, "but as I started to become more comfortable with my body and my ass, and realized nothing [bad happened when I showed them], I stopped worrying about it."

In September 2017, the budding entrepreneur uploaded a photo of himself "inching," as he calls it. In the image, Macho (who stands at 5-foot-2 and is of Puerto Rican descent) shows the base and first few inches of his penis above the waistband of a pair of dark gray sweatpants. Since it was posted, the tweet has accumulated well over 3.5 million impressions and 17,000 likes. "That's when I realized this was something I really could do, because people are obviously looking," he says.

That "something" sees the popular-boy-about-social-media posting a series of nude photos and explicit videos -- both solo and with other Grindr-connected guys who can host -- to his OnlyFans account, where he currently charges more than 100 subscribers $25 a month for access. The follower count can fluctuate (when he started, Macho's OnlyFans viewer fee of $7.99 brought in more than 500 followers, but the $25 price tag garners up to 300 ), and he's had to outmaneuver others who pirate and sell his videos. But since February, OnlyFans has provided him with enough financial support to serve as a legitimate full-time job. And along with it have come other opportunities and offers, such as flying to Orlando to film for Raging Stallion and releasing merchandise.

(Photographed here: Macho)

Macho's story is one of many that have emerged from a cottage industry of sites that have essentially brought the influencer-culture phenomenon to adult entertainment. Former studio performers, amateur adult models, and social media influencers are now using sites like OnlyFans, many making thousands of dollars a month for content. This
genre of fan sites is not only an example of a shift in consumer tastes, it also represents a new model when it comes to porn.

"There's definitely been a trend over the last eight years of consumers liking more amateur movies," says Dominic Ford, both the owner of his eponymous film studio for gay pornography (which even he describes as "pretty vanilla") and the founder of OnlyFans competitor site Just For Fans. He adds, "I've seen the steady decline of studio porn, just having been in it for a decade. Things seem to have stagnated while amateur porn really has taken off."

(Photographed here: Rocco Steele)

OnlyFans launched in 2016 as a site for social media influencers to monetize their followings. It mimicked celebrities who had tried similar ventures (like the Jenner-Kardashian clan, who've launched their own apps and sites), but this new platform allowed for anyone with a phone to charge for content. It became an ideal tool for people like fitness experts and independent musicians with avid supporters of all kinds. Some began calling it "Twitter that you pay for." And, much like Twitter, a subset of these users was pushing an increasing amount of amateur gay porn and other erotic material.

"There are really two main ways I've seen it used well," says Ty Mitchell, a studio porn performer who has worked with the likes of Lucas Entertainment and Treasure Island Media but now has both OnlyFans and Just For Fans accounts. "It's either porn performers who are using it as a way of maintaining their careers and making an additional income, or thirst-trap guys who don't have experience doing porn but see a high demand for their nude image and have figured out how to satisfy that in a way that makes them extra coin."

Macho falls into the latter category. "I started getting thirsty DMs," he says. "I still get them, even though I have OnlyFans -- people in my DMs [on other platforms] asking for something personal. It's annoying, but I decided, Oh, if you want to see this, you can pay." Others, like Jamari, a dancer who has worked with Sam Smith and Keke Palmer, have started accounts, but instead of creating porn, they've kept things PG. Jamari's account includes suggestive photos as well as content depicting his work as a go-go dancer.

But big business is also being made by porn performers, both amateur and studio, who have begun to use these websites much the way that escorting work was used in the past -- to supplement infrequent and low-paying jobs. After launching his own OnlyFans account in October 2017, Ford started Just For Fans on Valentine's Day. This new site aimed to address performers' mounting concerns with OnlyFans, like overusage, which frequently causes server problems and slow load times; the lack of a public company face to hold accountable for issues like delayed payments; and a gray area about whether or not explicit content was actually allowed. It also provided new, additional features, some of which had only been previously accessible by signing up with multiple services.

(Photographed here: Ty Mitchell)

Photo courtesy of Ty Mitchell, photographed by Dave McMahon.

"OnlyFans was Twitter that you paid for. ManyVids and Clips4Sale were pay-per-view content services, and a website called SextPanther allowed models to text for money," Ford says. "Plus, there's eBay, where people could sell actual product and autographs. As opposed to having models and performers subscribe to all of these different sites, I wanted to create a house where all the rooms could live under the same roof." And that house -- that home base -- is Just For Fans, which in six months has amassed more than 130,000 subscribers, brought in more than 2,000 models, and paid some of its top performers upwards of $70,000.

"It's unbelievably more than I used to make doing studio work," says Rocco Steele, a heavily awarded porn performer who has operated RoccoSteeleStudio.com and
My10Inches.com since his 2014 industry debut. "It's the type of thing that feels like it's all going to come crashing down because it's too good to be true."

(Photographed here: Griffin Barrows)

According to Ford, of the roughly 2,000 performers on Just For Fans, more than 1,500 are cisgender men making content for other men. On average, they boast 100 to 300 followers and charge each of them approximately $9.99 a month, with Ford taking 30 percent of their earnings. This means that the average performer is banking anywhere from $700 to $2,100 a month for uploading content, which can span anywhere from under a minute to more than an hour in length. And the lion's share of the work can be done via smartphone, which means it's an international business.

Popular go-go boy and ginger-haired pinup model Seth Fornea made his X-rated debut on OnlyFans in January, and says that the autonomy it provided, in part, allowed him to relocate from New York to Brazil. Diggory, a performer in London who was doing amateur porn-cam work prior to joining both OnlyFans and Just For Fans this year, says that his city has a community, of sorts, where performers network with one another to find scene partners. And while their average profit is certainly more than pocket money (there is little to no overhead), the perfect viral moment can shoot the right creator into much higher earnings.

"It's really a viable way to figure out your own niche and play to your own strengths," says Griffin Barrows, who has been a studio performer, on and off, since 2014, starting with ChaosMen before moving on to Men.com and Next Door Studios. He's now one of the top three performers on Just For Fans, thanks in part to a November 2017 upload that went viral. The footage, originally available in full exclusively on OnlyFans and in clips on Twitter and Tumblr, showed him giving a faceless partner a hand job for 40 minutes. Barrows describes his scene mate as a "young, closeted college student," and says the clip became famous because of the student's...substantial orgasm. "There's this really high volume. My surprise there is genuine," Barrows says. "You don't really get genuine surprise in studio porn, and once I posted that clip, it just went crazy." The footage attracted more than 500,000 notes on Tumblr before it got removed, and to date, it has more than 3.9 million views on Twitter.

(Photographed here: Jamari)

That video has become emblematic of the most successful accounts on these fan sites, which essentially bring better lighting to content that viewers feel is organic, authentic, and even somewhat personal, since they follow the performers. This genre has institutionalized homemade amateur porn in a way that ties it directly to the cult of personality. The effect democratizes the porn industry, meaning that any and all genres can be explored. RopeTrainKeep, an account that focuses on bondage, is one of the top performers on Just For Fans. And, according to Ford, other fetishes that were thought to be niche, like fisting and masked performers, also do well. Additionally, this new model provides performers with consistent compensation in an industry suffering from exploitative practices and falling rates.

But with this new autonomy -- in which each actor is allowed to choose when, how, and with whom he will perform -- comes an ongoing demand for content. "When I started, I was immediately hit with a lot of anxiety about posting good videos that would make my profile competitive with other people," says Mitchell, who posts about four times a month, with an emphasis on duo scenes. "That's kind of a con about participating in this," he says. "On one hand, I'm in competition with porn performers who are really established in the industry and have a lot more access to other performers. And on the other hand, I'm in competition with guys who can just post a nude, and because their naked body isn't as available online, that's enough satisfaction for their fans."

(Photographed here: Diggory)

Many of the performers interviewed for this story try to upload anywhere from two to four times a week, and most include at least one penetrative clip. Some, like Diggory, use their local network of fan-site performers, while others, like Steele, travel frequently to meet up with studio performers in other places. Almost all also perform with non-studio performers. And while too much editing can be a turnoff to fans (many of the more successful streams are low on editing to maintain a homemade feeling), the need to create content, edit it, and constantly promote it has many people feeling that this new genre won't replace studio porn.

"[Self-promotion] is a big part of it," Barrows says. "Someone who is willing to hustle a bit more. A lot of guys don't want to do all this work. They want to show up, film, and get paid." But for those who are willing to put in the time, the payoff can be as limitless as the number of people who click "Subscribe."

(Photographed here: Macho)

Photography of Macho by Dusty St. Amand