sex
Inside the Vegas Party With Social Media's Favorite Porn Stars
Having paid out almost $4 million to performers, at its anniversary JustFor.Fans looks to porn's changing future.
March 21 2019 2:34 PM EST
May 26 2023 1:46 PM EST
MikelleStreet
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Having paid out almost $4 million to performers, at its anniversary JustFor.Fans looks to porn's changing future.
Some of the links embedded in this story may be NSFW.
The crowd parted for Drew Dixon as he walked through Charlie's, a local gay club in Las Vegas, last Wednesday. A few club goers pointed as he caught their eye. One actually put his hand on his chest feigning as if he were clutching pearls as whispers surrounded Dixon. While he waited to order a drink at the bar, a slightly inebriated guy looked down at his ass -- on view in a rubber thong with the JustFor.Fans logo (Dixon has a page on the platform) branded on his butt cheek in a temporary tattoo -- and then back up at him suggestively. The curly haired porn actor smiled and looked away. A second later, someone wordlessly mouthed "Oh my god," to another onlooker behind his back.
Dixon, was no doubt, eating all of the attention up.
"I'm an exhibitionist," he told Out the night before, in a three-bedroom penthouse suite where the fan site JustFor.Fans hosted its one year anniversary at the Hard Rock Hotel. There, he's more covered up in a button down shirt, yellow harness, and skin-tight denim shorts. "I want people to watch me."
Watch him they did. At Charlie's, Dixon, who had come to the club as a part of a "JustFor.Fans Invasion," where models from the site danced, made out, and groped each other in a slightly elevated VIP section, competed in the night's sexy shower competition. He went up against almost a dozen other contestants, all performing one at a time under a stream of shower water. Dixon had come with his own track, which had the viral audio clip "OPALEEENCE" by Mercedes Iman Diamond of RuPaul's Drag Race spliced into it. The trick, along with Dixon's hair swinging, twerking, and body rolling, proved to be a favorite of the night, landing the star in the top two. It was quite the impression.
The invasion and reception were the first time that JustFor.Fans performers had gathered en masse. The reception, with it's open bar and charcuterie table, boasted 86 attendees on Wednesday night, beats by DJ and pornographer Dominic Pacifico, as well as a single-lane bowling alley, a pool table, and two jacuzzis. The crowd was ... eclectic.
"It's an interesting group of people," Jason, an older, bearded gentleman in a sweater says over drinks by the hot tub. "When I signed up to come here, I thought it would be like your typical ripped porn stars but this is a bunch of ... sort of average people which is reflective of society and fantastic. I love it."
The event's attendees were just a sampling of the 4,038 verified models on JustFor.Fans, a platform where people can film, upload and monetize video and photo content, usually of the pornographic variety. It is a part of a genre of fan sites that include OnlyFans and 4MyFans, which were recently parodied by Saturday Night Live. And while those attendees did include some of the more muscled bodies one might expect from porn -- one performer in particular was walking around the party with a stretched out muscle tee over a leather harness, downing a milk jug of liquid -- it really ran the gamut. One slender, tall guy was dressed in a Spiderman spandex suit, another gentleman was playing pool in a button-down shirt and slacks, while a third wore a floral shirt over a thick leather harness. Much like the on the website, ages (two older attendees were wearing kilts), body types, and experience level in porn varied widely, but what they all had in common was that they were all making money on JustFor.Fans.
"I've done my own porn on XTube and Tumblr for about 12 years," Jason says. Based in Seattle and operating under the name RealMenFullBush, he boasts around 2,400 followers at about $10 a month between his OnlyFans and JustFor.Fans pages, populated with his daddy-son roleplay-centric content. "I used to get on Tumblr and I would see pictures of myself that I had sent people on 'the apps' [mostly websites at the time] back then. So I thought fuck it, it's out there anyway I might as well start curating it."
Before Tumblr banned adult content, Jason built up a following of over 110,000 accounts, around 20,000 of whom were wiped out the day the ban went into effect -- these were among the reported 150 million people who have abandoned the platform in the wake of the ban.
While Jason still runs his own custom furniture business which caters mostly to gay men, fan sites comprise the majority of his income and time. He publishes about two to three videos a week requiring sometimes around 20 hours of effort between editing, posting, filming, and answering fan correspondence.
Since its launch on Valentine's Day 2018, JustFor.Fans has distributed over $3.7 million to models and has gained more than 100,000 paying subscribers. Beyond these numbers, though, JustFor.Fans and sites like it have provided performers with a reversal of power in the industry that effectively democratizes porn.
"My goal for year one was to create a site where people could have a stable self-sustaining income and healthcare," the site's founder Dominic Ford said in a speech during the reception -- Ford also hosts his own page on the platform. And he's been able to provide both of those things, the latter of which came through a partnership with the Free Speech Coalition. "It's not insurance, but it's a supplemental program and it's cheap and there's more coming on that front."
And on the former goal, providing a stable, self-sustaining income, Ford has provided in spades.
"It's a more direct means of managing my income," Dirk Caber, who has been doing studio porn for about a decade, says of using JustFor.Fans which he recently began. He points out that in studio porn, models are paid for the day and don't see much residuals while fan sites allow models to continuously benefit off their work. "I'm also having sex with people I like and that I choose. I'm basically documenting sex that I would be having anyway. And in terms of what I represent sexually, I'm getting to be an older guy and I wanted to show sex as something that you can do with your friends, not only with your one and only, but as an expression of affection on more than one level. This is a way of representing that."
Performers at the party ranged from people like Jason who had just put their amateur work up for free in the past, but also included others like a linguist from Hawaii and Jackson Hood who saw it as an opportunity to monetize the fact that guys had already seen his nudes via Grindr. Photographer Jeremy Lucido, the founder of Starrfucker Magazine, launched pages for himself and for his magazine to bring in a new stream of revenue. Some attendees were studio performers, like Caber and Dixon using the platform to bolster their own income. But they were all also in Vegas and to a lesser extent on the site to support a community, an idea that Ford said he plans to lean into for the new year.
In addition, the platform has integrated a functionality where models can "friend" each other to connect and share information or profits. "I don't know how to overstress that community is an idea for me that means a group of people that can help each other succeed," Ford said in an interview Thursday afternoon before the Charlie's invasion. Both the reception and reception and the bar event were a means to foster that community in person, allowing performers to meet one another.
"I don't really go out, clubs and parties aren't my thing," said Dillon Anderson, who built his own following first through selling videos over email before getting into sites like ConnectPal, OnlyFans and JustFor.Fans over the past two and a half years. "But I know Dominic, and I know he's a great guy and I thought this would be a great opportunity to meet him and a lot of other models." But that was only one part of an overall plan.
In an effort to support the models, Ford said he hopes to reorient at least a segment of an industry around them. According to him, if the models are calling the shots then service providers like photographers, videographers, video and photo editors as well as social media managers have to "regear themselves so that their client can not be the studio but be the model." To do that, he has rolled out a directory that makes finding those contacts easier. The site is also integrating a philanthropic arm in for the coming year to reach out into the greater community, setting up a JFF Charitable Foundation that will allow models to give a portion of all of their income to selected charities.
And that community is not without regulation. Though Ford hopes this was a one-off, in early March, he removed user @BigCMen from the platform over controversial statements on Twitter. In the midsts of a confrontation via tweets, BigCMen used other performers' histories of addiction and mental health as an attack. To set a standard on the sort of community he was attempting to build, Ford took action in a move that was widely praised.
But to be clear, at the core of all of this -- the charity, the community, and its growing economy -- is sex.
"And I came to create content," Anderson says. At a private after party following Wednesday's reception, performers roamed around mostly naked, having sex. Occasionally they would pull out their light-equipped phones to film, and one went so far as to mount his phone on a wall to record.
"It's definitely been worth it."
Back at Charlie's, Dixon, who is both a fan site model as well as a studio model, working across the United States and Europe, was progressing well through the competition. In the lapse between his performance and the finals, other performers chatted and made out, sometimes going into the crowd. A few talked to the night's go-go boy, who also is a performer on JustFor.Fans.
While Dixon ended up making the top two of the competition, after performing a lap dance for a random audience member, practically sitting on the guy's face at one point, he lost out to a local, who at one point took to mock-rimming his victim. Back in VIP, the other performers had gotten a bit handsy, and someone's underwear had gotten pulled down while someone else was on their knees. Seconds later, others performers crowded around, blocking the view of what was going on, interlocking their arms around one another's shoulders.
Undoubtedly, sex was at the center.
RELATED | How Sites Like OnlyFans and JustForFans Are Democratizing Gay Porn
Mikelle is the former editorial director of digital for PrideMedia, guiding digital editorial and social across Out, The Advocate, Pride.com, Out Traveler, and Plus. After starting as a freelancer for Out in 2013, he joined the staff as Senior Editor working across print and digital in 2018. In early 2021 he became Out's digital director, marking a pivot to content that centered queer and trans stories and figures, exclusively. In September 2021, he was promoted to editorial director of PrideMedia. He has written cover stories on Ricky Martin, Miss Fame, Nyle DiMarco, Jeremy O. Harris, Law Roach, and Symone.
Mikelle is the former editorial director of digital for PrideMedia, guiding digital editorial and social across Out, The Advocate, Pride.com, Out Traveler, and Plus. After starting as a freelancer for Out in 2013, he joined the staff as Senior Editor working across print and digital in 2018. In early 2021 he became Out's digital director, marking a pivot to content that centered queer and trans stories and figures, exclusively. In September 2021, he was promoted to editorial director of PrideMedia. He has written cover stories on Ricky Martin, Miss Fame, Nyle DiMarco, Jeremy O. Harris, Law Roach, and Symone.
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