Long Overdue!
By: Tommy “Tj” Sotomayor

What It’s Like to Be a Male Porn Star in 2019

How does working in the adult industry affect your mental health? What are your relationships like? What do you tell your kids? What lessons can be gleaned around consent? To find out, Benjy Hansen-Bundy flew down to Vegas for a glimpse inside the professional world of male porn stars—and it turns out they have a lot they can teach us.

BY BENJY HANSEN-BUNDY

PHOTOGRAPHY BY ROGER KISBYFebruary 28, 2019

In a hotel room in Las Vegas, a barefoot man in a red tracksuit is frantically searching through his luggage. He checks the closets and drawers without success. He disappears into the bathroom. When he comes back a few seconds later, he tells me that we have a problem. The enema is missing.

Otherwise, the set—a standard king on the sixth floor of the Trump International Tower—is pretty much ready to go. Studio lights and a digital 4K camera on a tripod face the gray couch in front of the windows. Power cords snake across the floor.

Michael Vegas, the man in the red tracksuit, is about to shoot a porno. Except no one is getting paid today: This is a trade shoot, also known as a content trade, which means that the performers organize the shoot on their own time, shoot it with their own gear, and handle their own paperwork. They get together, have sex on camera, and then publish the content on the paid streaming websites they own. No director. No studio. And the performers own the content, meaning they earn residuals, which is not the case on a regular studio shoot.

Ever since tube sites like Pornhub upended the adult industry by making Internet porn free, porn stars have found different ways to evolve and adapt. Trade shoots, I learn, are ubiquitous now. Clip sites, subscription streaming sites, and hosting platforms like ManyVids, OnlyFans, and ModelCentro allow performers to directly monetize their homemade content, albeit while taking a cut anywhere from 20 to 40 percent. In addition to restructuring the adult economy, these new platforms have also drawn in a whole new generation of performers. Given that he regularly shoots with the major studios and also has his own personal website (hosted by ModelCentro), Vegas is something of a bridge between the old porn industry and the new one.

While we wait for his co-star, Vegas gives me his backstory, pausing first to take a dab. A mop of curly blond hair falls forward as he leans over to inhale vaporized THC wax.

Vegas comes from a loving middle-class family. His parents, he says, are open-minded, the type to hold down demanding jobs but also make time for Burning Man every year. His first career was as a fireman. He was married and he’d just finished his fire training, and everything seemed to be working out. Then he was in a motorcycle accident, and he broke his neck and his back and spent ten days in a coma.ADVERTISEMENT

After that, firefighting was impossible. His marriage fell apart. And he moved in with his parents.

“I’m like a broken person,” Vegas says, looking back. “I wore a neck brace for six months. So I had to come up with a different career, something that would be fulfilling to me. I’m not a desk-job type person if you might have noticed.”

He started smoking weed, in part because he was allergic to most opioids. The weed lessened the lingering neck pain, but it also cracked open this emotional life that Vegas had been suppressing.

“I felt like I was reborn as a person,” he says. “It’s like I’m feeling every emotion that I’ve ever felt in my entire life. So overwhelming. It makes me burst into tears. And I want to spread that feeling to everybody. I want everybody to understand what real unconditional love and compassion from another human being is.”

When he looks up at me, he has this light in his eyes, both delighted and conspiratorial, like the look a friend would give you 30 minutes after you’ve both taken LSD and the patterns on the carpet start turning into fractals.

Then he says, “So I was like, ‘Fuck this, man.’ You know what I’ve always wanted to make? Movies. You know what seems attainable and like I can actually get there? Porno.”

At this point I should probably give you a trigger warning of some kind. Because this scene is graphic. Let me put it this way: Michael Vegas’s personal website is called PegHim.com. He needs the enema because he’s about to shoot an anal scene with Codi Vore. But she’s not the one who will be cleaning out her lower intestine this afternoon.

Vegas, who is straight, loves being pegged and fisted by cis women. Loves it. “So many buttholes are oppressed,” he says. “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.”

He flashes me the We Just Ate Some Acid look again.

At that moment, a woman in a matching red tracksuit comes in with a plastic bag full of drugstore enemas.

This is Siouxsie Q, Vegas’s partner and frequent PegHim.com co-star. Vegas goes into the bathroom for at least 45 minutes of what sounds like a lot of splashing and flushing. Meanwhile, Siouxsie Q explains how the FOSTA-SESTA bills, which passed Congress last year and effectively outlaw advertising for prostitution on websites like Craigslist and Backpage, has made life much more difficult, and dangerous, for sex workers. (The ability to screen clients online added a layer of safety for sex workers who, deprived of those platforms, are often forced to find work on the street.) When she’s not filming or podcasting, Siouxsie Q advocates across the country for legislation that decriminalizes sex work. She’s looking forward to what she calls the Whore Singularity, which is when everyone, especially the politicians, has their nudes online and it’s no longer a big deal.ADVERTISEMENT

Until then, sex work remains dangerous—especially if you’re a person of color or are gender non-conforming—and socially taboo. “The minute you have sex on camera,” she says, “you become a second-class citizen.”

Vegas comes out of the bathroom and photographs Siouxsie Q for some promotional work they’re doing. Codi Vore, a self-identified prepper who drives a diesel truck and is hoping to start a sex-worker commune in the desert, arrives. She and Vegas sign paperwork on his tablet: a 2257 age-verification form, and then a model release form. They provide each other with the clean results of an STD test that’s less than two weeks old. More dabs are taken. Weed gummies are ingested. And then they discuss the two scenes they’ll be shooting.

The first is for Vore’s website. It’s a brother-sister incest scene with a relatively expedient preamble and about 25 minutes of mostly vanilla sex. Vegas is careful to go over Vore’s list of dos and don’ts before they start. Vore requests that at the end of the scene Vegas come on her face. He acquiesces.

They shoot, shower, and return for Vegas’s scene. Vore dons a massive flesh-colored strap-on. It is the size of my forearm. Vegas shoots stills of her for the thumbnails on his website. Then Siouxsie Q takes the 4K digital camera off the tripod and films.

I will refrain from describing in detail what transpires next, other than to say that Vegas’s face looks, at times, something like the visage in Caravaggio’s Mary Magdalen in Ecstasy. And that when Vore withdraws the strap-on completely and I glimpse, briefly, what is known in the industry as the “gape,” it is like looking into the pulsing center of the universe.

Later that night, exhausted and dehydrated, I wonder where Vegas gets the courage to be that vulnerable. To surrender so completely. And I think back to something he said to me on the phone before I arrived in Nevada.

“So many people just assume, ‘Oh, everybody in porn is there because they can’t do anything else,’ ” he said. “It’s like, ‘No, I was doing everything I wanted to.’ When I came back from being dead, it was like this veil was lifted on the world and I just saw so much bullshit. People were unhappy and creating their own unhappiness. I just needed to do the thing I secretly had this desire to fulfill.”

“Everybody’s just doing their best, man.”

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I came to Las Vegas to find out what it’s like to be a male porn star today. A lot of the coverage of the industry concerns male viewers of pornography, especially boys—whether they’re addicted, if porn is ruining their intimate lives, teaching them the wrong things about sex, or giving them erectile dysfunction.

But I was curious about male performers: what their lives are like, whether they find their work fulfilling, how they structure their personal relationships and families, how making porn impacts their mental health. What’s it like to shoot three or four scenes in a day? What’s it like to take Viagra for work? What’s it like to inject your penis with Caverject, a vasodilator that opens blood vessels, which some performers use to stay hard?

It’s not that male porn stars have never breached the mainstream consciousness. James Deen was profiled in the pages of this magazine, and a few years after that, Paul Schrader gave him the lead opposite Lindsay Lohan in The Canyons. At the time, the world of pop culture seemed eager to view him as a Normal Star, and then allegations of sexual abuse made by his colleagues began to surface, most notably from his former girlfriend Stoya. When they did, we got a glimpse into porn’s dark side, at how alleged predatory behavior can be covered up and enabled if the individual in question is powerful enough. As of today, Deen is still working.ADVERTISEMENT

In the porn industry, unlike in the rest of the American economy, male workers are typically paid less. (At least, that’s the case in cis hetero porn, which I’ll focus on in this piece because that’s the kind of porn I usually watch.) Traditionally, as many of the older generation of male performers in their late 30s and 40s will tell me, a porno film is not about the guy. He’s secondary to the female performer. Derrick Pierce, who’s been in porn for more than a decade, put it this way: The women are the quarterbacks and running backs of porn, and the men are the offensive linemen. In most cases, she’s the one the audience came to see.

The Hard Rock Hotel hosts the Adult Video News Expo (porn’s premier convention) and the AVN Awards (basically the porn Oscars) in late January, and I figured I could get a critical mass of male perspectives in one dry, sunny location.

One of the guys I meet is Tommy Pistol. He has kids, two boys. He’s been starring in porno films for fourteen years and is known for his parodies, like Pee-Wee’s XXX Adventure. He’s 42, and his kids are still young, not quite at the age where he’s ready to tell them what he does for a living.

“I know I’m gonna have to have this conversation,” he says. “I know it’s coming up. The best advice I got from people who have kids in this industry is to let them know before somebody tells them at school. Let them have the ammunition to deal with it. I’m gonna be honest with them: ‘This is what I do. This is what provides. It’s also kind of our secret right now. You don’t need to tell anybody, because other people don’t understand. Other parents might freak out. And that sucks, but that’s just how people are.’ ”

As far as mainstream crossover success for male porn stars is concerned, Pistol is about as close as possible. He’s in SAG-AFTRA. He made a grindhouse horror movie called The Gruesome Death of Tommy Pistol.

But he’s scared of what will happen when his kids find out about his career and have to live with that knowledge. “It scares the shit out of me. Whatever vindictive bullshit they might get from people, it would kind of be my fault. And that hurts me. Kids are fuckin’ mean. It doesn’t matter if I still had my union job and I dealt with trash for a living, I’m sure somebody would still talk shit.”

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The kids thing is a dilemma. Porn stars handle it a variety of ways. Some people in the industry try to make sure that they’re behind the camera, producing and directing, by the time their kids reach smartphone age. Others, like Lance Hart—who produces and performs in straight, gay, and bisexual porn—have decided against raising a family. The longer a performer sticks around, the more complicated their relationship to their porn career inevitably becomes: Traditional markers of success like owning homes and starting families come into conflict with the stigma of their chosen career path. Among the newcomers I speak with, however, the mood is more buoyant.

Johnny Stone, 21, is planning his career around one optimistic premise: That the adult industry will normalize in the next ten years, and there will be more opportunities to cross over. He points to the fact that Cardi B is playing the AVN Awards on Saturday—she used to strip, remember? (Other recent crossover moments include Lil Wayne performing at last year’s AVNs and Kanye West as the creative director for the 2018 Pornhub Awards.)

Stone’s approach to the adult industry is unlike everyone else’s I meet over the weekend. I find him at the Chaturbate booth on the Expo floor. Chaturbate, for the unfamiliar, is a webcam site where fans can interact in real time with their favorite performers and compensate them as things heat up. Stone applies the antics of the goofy YouTube prankster—jumping on tables in crowded areas and dancing “real sexy”—to a platform that is otherwise mostly limited to performers masturbating on camera.

He gets booked on occasion for studio porn shoots, but he doesn’t have an agent. “Most men who get into the industry get agents, and they get way undercut,” he explains to me at Hard Rock’s Circle Bar. “They get underpaid. They get taken advantage of. And they’re just meat sticks. I know my worth, and I went in knowing that.”

Stone has a point. In an earlier era, the male porn star was mostly anonymous. When Susan Faludi wrote about male performers 25 years ago for The New Yorker, the salient image was of the long hallway outside an audition filled with nobodies who would never make it. When Lexington Steele first got into porn back in the late ’90s, he decided to move to L.A. and try it out for a year. If he didn’t like it, he told me over the phone, he wasn’t worried about moving back to New York and returning to his job as a bond salesman on Wall Street. There was simply no way that anyone would find out—and even if they did, his bosses wouldn’t care. They hired anyone who could sell bonds (his client interaction was over the phone, not in person), and name-brand Male Porn Stars weren’t really a thing at the time. There was Ron Jeremy (who has also been accused of sexual misconduct) and Peter North, of course, but that was pretty much it.

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Now, though, the most important thing for Stone is to control his image and his brand. “One of the things that makes it so easy to do what I do is that I get to be myself. I don’t have to put on a mask. That’s what makes me good at being a model online. I’m just being myself all the time,” he says. “When I was debating starting camming, I was worried about the image that it would present, how people would perceive me. But the direction that society is moving, we’re opening up a lot more to sexuality and fluidity. By the time I’m getting the recognition I’m after, it’ll be more of an empowerment thing than something that people would discourage.”

To that end—getting famous on a sex-positive Internet—Stone is also developing non-nude content. He’s got a Twitch account. He’s got a YouTube channel and a paid Snapchat account, too, but he hasn’t fully launched on those platforms yet. Stone, in other words, is like any ambitious young person trying to make it in the brave new ecosystem of personal branding and self-production. The only difference is he’s willing to bring the viewer all the way into his bedroom. Which, to him, doesn’t seem like that big a deal.

“I want to see the industry given the respect and the credit that it deserves,” he says. “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.”

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Since Ricky Johnson, 27, started doing porn, he’s had three major relationships. In the first one, his girlfriend wasn’t in the industry.

“She didn’t handle it well,” he says. We’re in his hotel room at the Hard Rock. It’s the day of the AVN Awards, and Johnson is up for Best Supporting Actor and Male Performer of the Year.

“At the time I didn’t understand, because I would just go to work and it would just be work, you know? I took it as: I’m having sex with a girl, getting my paycheck, and going home. But for her, I’m fucking other people and putting my soul, or however she says it, in somebody else.”

That one didn’t work out. In his next relationship, the dynamic flipped: He found himself falling for a very popular porn performer. “When you love somebody and they’re fucking other people on a consistent basis, it’s kind of hard to deal with,” he says. “My ex, she did gangbangs and blowbangs. She was more of an extreme performer. I know practically everybody in the industry. It’s a little more intense when it’s with everybody you know. We’re hanging out or whatever, and you’re going to go fuck my girl.”

That one didn’t work out either. But Johnson feels good about the industry. He likes his job. Likes the people he works with. Like Stone and Vegas, he wants to normalize porn. Social media helps, he says. It humanizes performers. I ask him what it’ll take for porn to become less of a taboo subject. He thinks it would take prominent people outside the industry talking about it. “Like, if the president ever said, ‘It’s cool, I watch porn.’ ”

Of course, there are other downsides. I bring up an unconfirmed rumor I’ve heard, that performers of color get paid less than white performers. The answer is complicated.

“It can be true in a sense,” says Johnson, who is black. “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.”

But that doesn’t impact Johnson directly. He prefers not to do group scenes, in part because of all the egos involved among the other male performers. When he was new to the industry, older, more established guys would box him out because they were worried that he would take their work. Johnson books all of his work through an agent. He does mostly studio stuff with larger budgets. And he’s established enough now to turn down work that he doesn’t want.

Something else is on his mind, though.

“There’s an interesting dynamic of interracial porn where the majority of consumers like to see darker melanin: dark-skin black guys with pale white girls,” he says. “I’m in the weird dynamic of being light-skinned. Sometimes I get flak from the fans because I’m not black enough. There’s some companies I haven’t worked for purely because of my skin tone.”

How does that make you feel?

“It makes me feel like shit,” he says, candidly. “But it also makes me want to work harder, because it’s nothing against my performance. It’s something I can’t do anything about. Each year I get more popular. My skin tone is no longer something that can hinder me in the industry. Back in the day, porn was definitely racist. Back in the day, you don’t work with a black guy until the end of your career.”

Like the culture at large, parts of the porn world are becoming more inclusive. In the very last row of the Expo Hall I meet Eddie Wood. Wood moved to L.A. to pursue a Ph.D. in political science at UCLA around the same time he started taking hormones and transitioning from female to male. Grad school didn’t pan out, but Wood found a new community: friends who were trans and also sex workers. It was the first place he ever really felt he belonged.

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“I had my top surgery about six weeks before I did my first scene,” Wood says. “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.”

The FTM trans male porno market is still relatively niche. (MTF trans female porn, on the other hand, is one of the biggest search categories on Pornhub.) There aren’t many performers, and the guys who have made a name for themselves are still figuring out their audience. For instance, MyFreeCams.com, a major sponsor at the AVNs and which, we’re told, is paying for Cardi B to play, doesn’t host for trans performers (or male performers).

But broadly speaking, Wood is optimistic. He’s got a day job in the back office at a porn studio. Performing doesn’t yet generate enough revenue for him to make it his primary income, but he’s working toward that goal. Each year Wood finds his market growing, and with it the level of acceptance toward trans performers. It turns out that viewers are willing to pony up extra for trans content. And while equality on a spreadsheet isn’t the only form of acceptance he’s looking for from the industry, it’s a step forward.

But there’s something else that porn provides for him, and it’s the answer to the question I keep coming back to in Las Vegas: Why is he so determined to break into the industry and make a living from it? Wood’s response gets at the paradox of porn: What others might perceive as inherently exploitative or degrading can actually provide affirmation and, in some cases, a space for catharsis.

“With porn I’m able to put in boundaries around sex that I never really got to experience growing up,” he says. “Through childhood violence, childhood trauma in the home. What we get to do is re-create it with boundaries in place. The idea of trauma is that we’re always re-creating it. There’s a perpetrator, there’s a victim, and there’s a person who stands by and does nothing. But on a porn set, you can rewrite the script. Everyone’s consenting along the way. There’s a lot of checking in. And it sounds weird, but I like how there’s no emotional component to it. We’re here to have sex. We’re showing our IDs, signing our forms, getting paid.”

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If that utopian vision of a sex-positive future, the one shared by Michael Vegas and Johnny Stone and Ricky Johnson and Eddie Wood, were to be made flesh, it might look something like Jay Taylor’s suite at the Alexis Park Resort, the night before the AVN Awards. Taylor is hosting an orgy.

There is a mattress in the middle of the floor, and it is already strewn with half-clothed people. I am introduced to the assembled performers. Here is Fabiana, a dancer at a vegan strip club in Portland who shoots porn in her free time. Here is Will Pounder, the only man I meet this weekend with a pun for a stage name. Here are ten other people whose names I am too flustered to remember.

The director and cameraman, whom I will call Tim because he works in mainstream entertainment, too, and wants to protect his identity, reminds everyone that this is a trade shoot. Whatever content is created cannot be released until the decided upon date several weeks from now, at which point everyone will have the opportunity to post the videos and pictures to their personal paid websites and let the money start flowing in.ADVERTISEMENT

The orgy begins with a conversation that will never make it onto the Internet. Tim goes around the room filming the faces of the performers as they discuss their own personal-consent boundaries.

“How does everyone feel about kissing?” Taylor asks. Positive responses. “What about creampie?” Negative responses. “Okay,” Taylor says. “Let’s decide together now to not come inside anyone.” Everyone has a chance to say what they do or do not like. Several women cheerfully articulate no-nos. Another says matter-of-factly that she would enjoy some light hair pulling. It reminds me of a group of chipper camp counselors enthusiastically discussing the rules for their favorite game of flashlight tag after the campers have all gone to bed.

“What about GQ?” Will Pounder asks. Someone wonders aloud, half-jokingly, if I brought a clean test. There is some discussion, and it is suggested that I stay on the staircase up to the loft, which overlooks the mattress to avoid it getting in Tim’s way while he’s filming. It is further decided that I am allowed to masturbate if I want to.

An orgy is by definition an exercise in teamwork and cooperation; hogging the action is anathema. That said, there is one man who lasts longer than all the rest. Billy King is a British military contractor who spends half the year in Afghanistan. The other half he spends having as much sex as possible. Sometimes on camera. But typically King doesn’t get paid, even if it’s a professional shoot.

Anyway, he’s not in it for the money. He’s a self-described people pleaser. This character trait is demonstrated as, one by one, he brings each of the female participants to orgasm while pressing on their pelvis to “make them squirt harder.” The orgy ends with four or five women pressed against King in an arrangement that, with all the sculpted muscles and pendulous curves and bare flesh, reminds me of an ad I once saw for a modern dance company.

One guy is having trouble finishing. Tim, blessedly, does not film this struggle. It’s difficult but not impossible to imagine the mind games involved in tying your masculinity and your self-worth and your career to your sexual performance—and having that sexual performance recorded for posterity online, to have it picked apart by hyper-attentive Pornhub commenters. I watch him in horror, identifying with his plight and actually kind of vicariously experiencing his sweat-inducing crisis. When the man finally does reach orgasm, the relief I feel is deep and soul-affirming.ADVERTISEMENT

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This is something male porn stars kept bringing up: how the most difficult part of their job isn’t physical, it’s mental. If a woman doesn’t have an orgasm, she can fake it and the scene will still work. Guys can’t, and that’s a lot of pressure. Some of these guys are shooting three or four cum-shot scenes a day. There are times when a performer, of any gender, isn’t attracted to the person they’re shooting with. There is friction. The lights get hot after a while. There are usually at least a few other people on set, in addition to the director. And failure—the inability to reach orgasm—can affect your ability to find work in the future. Directors talk. If you’re new, even just a couple bad days could mean the end of your career.

It’s a good reminder that in spite of the inclusivity and friendliness of this setting, the stakes are still high. Porn is still fraught. Livelihoods are on the line. That is, broadly speaking. I heard multiple times over the course of the weekend that performers don’t expect to make a ton of money from a trade orgy—it’s really more of an excuse for everyone to get together and have sex with their friends.

After the orgy, there is lots of post-coital checking in. At least four people come over to make sure that I’m okay.

Some concern is expressed about the amount of female ejaculatory fluid that may have soaked through the now quite bunched-up sheets and into the mattress. Will Pounder elects to carry it back up the stairs to the bed in the loft.

Someone suggests that he return it upside down. Everyone agrees.