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Gay for Pay: The Internet and the Economics of Homosexual Desire

This paper discusses the proliferation of websites that present apparently heterosexual men engaging in gay sexual practices for an assumed homosexual audience and the allied phenomenon (known by the vernacular expression) of the ‘gay for pay’ performer. Drawing on literature in the fields of gender and sexuality the paper explores the alibis deployed to justify and legitimise the transgression of hetero-normative conduct that these sites eroticise and discusses the extent to which this phenomenon offers ‘new’ models of sexuality or merely reinforces the status of hegemonic masculinity.

Whilst the longstanding practice in gay pornography of employing models who self-identify as heterosexual and the eroticisation of the signifiers of heterosexual masculinity are not new phenomena in and of themselves, I argue that the explicit and emphatic presentation of performers who are willing, as heterosexual men, to transgress the boundaries of hetero-masculinity in a public arena is a distinctive feature of these websites.

Inevitably the question of exploitation (a key and longstanding issue in studies of pornography more generally) arises. The essay assesses who is being exploited through the emergence of these websites: the heterosexual males who through economic necessity resort to sex work? The gay male audiences who are presented with reactionary desires for the unattainable ideal of the ‘straight’ man? Furthermore, is it the case that exploitation itself is intrinsic to the patterns of sexual desire that the internet both constructs and benefits from?

This essay is an addition to the body of research that I have undertaken into the ways in which masculinity is presented as an object of erotic investment. The essay has been translated into German for the peer reviewed film studies journal Montage AV and has been translated into Italian for an edited collection.