In a large-scale reportage, the men’s magazine GQ portrays nine male porn stars and explores the question of how male porn stars live today in today’s porn industry. What are the working conditions and income streams like? How do men in the industry deal with the increasing sensitivity to the issues of consent? What are gender concepts like? But also stereotypical all-time classics such as: What effects does this kind of work have on the psyche? How does it affect relationships and family life? Do you get erectile dysfunction? An unbalanced yet exciting feature by the glossy magazine.
The fact that women’s and lifestyle magazines have had a very close relationship to the sex toy and porn industry for years, especially online, should not be new. Now the glossy magazine GQ has taken a look at the everyday life of male porn stars in 2019. The result is an interesting portrait of some of the most famous and busiest porn stars in the industry: Tommy Pistol, Michael Vegas, Lance Hart, Johnny Stone, Ricky Johnson, Ryan Driller, Derrick Pierce, Eddie Wood and Small Hands.
Michael Vegas: Hipster porn star with a fondness for anal sex
Michael Vegas is portrayed in the article as some kind of hipster porn star. Huge glasses and a red jogging suit, a specialist for pegging and trade shoots. Trade shoots are one of the newer forms of porn production that can do without studios and directors. Several porn stars meet to shoot sex scenes. Nobody receives a salary, all film or let film and use the material for their own channels, clip pages, websites, fan pages, and tube page profiles.
Since the tube sites have basically destroyed the traditional studio business, a colorful universe of clip and fan sites has evolved where thousands of performers sell their content directly to customers and build their own community of followers. Proximity to the fan pays off. Also for male actors. On sites such as ManyVids, Clips4Sale, Kinkbomb, iWantClips, OnlyFans, and Modelcentro, performers can keep most of their content revenues to themselves. Most site operators take 20-30%, the rest goes directly to the performer or model. Those who, like Vegas, also have one foot in the old studio and star system can sometimes earn double and combine the best of both worlds.
The new independence from the studios brings not only more creative freedom and personal creativity, but also a new self-confidence for performers. In an interview with GQ, Vegas says: »Guys in porn don’t just end up here. It’s really hard to get here.«
Vegas is a pegging specialist. His own page is called PegHim.com. In other words, Vegas is known for being penetrated anally by its shooting partners with strap-on dildos. »So many buttholes are oppressed. There’s so much shame surrounding all of it. I’m trying to normalize dudes taking it in the butt so people can actually talk about it. There are so many guys that want their buttholes touched or any amount of attention towards their butts. It’s their body part, they love it, and they want other people to love it, too.«
Part of life as a porn star is routines, including paperwork. Proof of age, health certificates, contracts. Preliminary talks about the scenes. Declarations of consent. Bookkeeping. Those who work on their own without a studio system and agent must familiarise themselves with all this and take care of it themselves. But this also leads to all-round knowledge and versatile trained actors who can represent themselves.
Tommy Pistol: The rough-and-ready gentleman
Tommy Pistol is one of the most famous porn stars of his generation. He already presents himself as a kind of dirty, rough gentleman in his field. He makes no secret of the fact that he regards his profession as equivalent to other art forms in the entertainment industry. And the fact that the Hollywood nobility exposed by the Harvey Weinstein affair was pushed a bit off the pedestal seems to him to be quite pleasing. He says to GQ: »I like it a little that the curtain is being pulled back on Hollywood. Everyone’s looking in like, ‘Oh, you’re a bunch of sick fucks.’« And not without malice, he adds: »I guarantee you nobody in our industry adopted a child, raised them, and then married them. There’s no wranglers on our sets that have to keep actors and directors under control from touching people. There’s no need in our industry for supervisors to keep actors and directors from touching people unasked.«
Lance Hart: Escort work as a lucrative but dangerous side income
The frequently booked actor Lance Hart also gets his say in the reportage. He compares his work with that of a callboy and considers his work as a porn actor to be safer and ultimately more profitable. »If you’re in Manhattan, you can make $10k in a weekend, escorting. If you’re willing to work your butt off. You also have to be very confident that you can get hard. Generally, the going rate for a non–porn star is like $300 an hour. I can get a higher rate because I have a following and I’m a porn star. But $600 – is it really worth the stress of showing up at a hotel room – what’s on the other side of this door? What if he doesn’t want to let me leave and he’s gonna get physical? It’s happened to a couple of my friends. It’s scary. But I have an ad up. And once in a blue moon, some celebrity will hit me up and be like, ‘I really just want to get dinner with you and can you like jerk me off afterward?’ And I’m like, okay.«
Johnny Stone: JOI for women & gay fanbase
Johnny Stone comments in the report on his followers. »A lot of my fanbase is gay guys. But I have paved the way for female fans in the porn industry. That was one of the markets that people didn’t see: Directing porn towards women. Women like porn and sex just as much as men. Women are a lot more mental when it comes to sexuality, and all you gotta do is play on that. So I made videos directed towards a female audience. Jerk-off instructions for girls. I capitalize on that.«
Stone is one of those models who also work in the non-nude field. He uses the mainstream platforms Snapchat, YouTube and Twitch. »I want to see the industry given the respect and the credit that it deserves. It’s an entertainment industry and a really big one at that. And everybody tucks it under the rug. I think we do deserve our spotlight and our recognition. It could go a long way in proving to people that sex work is a real career, a real job. It’s a real demand that people need to supply.«
Ricky Johnson: How do you get into the business? Do black performers earn less?
With Ricky Johnson, GQ mainly talked about the psychological pressures of sex work in front of the camera and gives insights into how hard it can be to find your way into the industry at all. The porn star says: »Porn is 90 percent mental. Cuz everybody can have sex. There’s not that many male talent. Every director has their favorites. So you want to join that rotation. They’re like, ‘Who are you? This production costs thousands of dollars, and if you fail you’ll cost us money. So why would we risk it if we have a good core four or five guys who are solid performers?’«
The black porn star also comments on the different earning opportunities for black performers. »It can be true in a sense. It’s hard to answer that because there’s less black guys in general. And there’s white guys that get paid less than other white guys. And there’s black guys that get paid a lot. Like, I have a decent rate. But more black guys do group scenes, and in group scenes you get paid less.«
Ryan Driller: VR as a niche for specialists who value privacy
Ryan Driller tells the GQ reporter about his beginnings. »I started trying to get into the industry through Craigslist. There really weren’t too many auditions. The closest thing to an audition is they throw you in a giant group scene. So that way, if you fail, there’s a couple other guys there to pick up. It’s kind of throwing you to the wolves. My big motivations were, first and foremost, I want to get laid every day. But I had to think it over: Am I going to be okay with everybody finding it? I work a lot in virtual reality now. You don’t see my face at all. I’m one of the few guys that can do it. You can’t make any noise, even breathing.« But for Driller it has clear advantages. You don’t see his face so often, which he likes, because he wants to start a family after his porn career.
Eddie Wood: Transgender men in the porn business
Eddie Wood is one of the few transgender men who are real porn stars. For him, the porn industry was and is a freer world. »I like being in the sex industry because it’s more accepting of trans people than mainstream society. People can see our value here. Even if it’s just at the dollar bill level. Everyone’s learning that they need to be inclusive.«
He added: »I had my top surgery about six weeks before I did my first scene. I didn’t want anyone to see my boobs. But once I had my top surgery and had the flat masculine chest, I was like, oh, actually I’m kind of proud of my body now. And kind of get off on showing it off. Maybe it has to do with all the shame I had about my body for so long when I was having to live as a woman.«
Derrick Pierce: Incest as hype – Does America love the fantasy of abuse?
Porn actor Derrick Pierce reflects on the darker sides of current porn productions. In the interview, he says: »If you want to know what the American psyche is about, look at the porn that’s selling. It’s all incest. Stepmom, stepdad, stepbrother, stepsister. People of authority. The level of darkness to the stuff we’re shooting… We made a movie this year called Anne, and I play Daddy Warbucks.«
Though critical about some aspects GQ celebrates the colorful new variety of pornography
However, the portrait fortunately ends with an emphasis on the new freedom and diversity of the different scenarios and fetishes as well as those of the body types depicted. The fact that an established porn star like Small Hands can talk openly about his fears and neuroses is a good sign for the industry, whose reputation is often denigrated with words like »harsh« or »superficial«. “You have to be some kind of alpha animal for this job. I certainly wasn’t. I had panic attacks before the shooting. I thought I couldn’t do that. I’m right there in a room with bright light and 15 people. It’s almost a kind of ninja ability to get stiff in front of everyone. The biggest challenge is to get it up.”
And so pornography remains the eternal double-faced beast. It is the perversion of our hidden and repressed desires. Their popularization makes these desires less hidden and repressed. An immense opportunity. The break-up of the traditional exploitation chain only boosts this development.
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