The internet, when gay porn moved into the network and became free

In twenty years gay porn went from magazine scans crawling down a phone line to subscription sites, free tube sites and couples filming themselves for millions of strangers. Along the way a phone app changed how men met, and a pill changed what they did on screen.

Los Angeles, 25 March 2009. A new application appears in Apple's App Store for the iPhone. It is called Grindr, and when a man opens it he sees a grid of small square photographs of other men, each one labelled with how far away he is: a few hundred feet, half a mile, two miles. Tap a face and you can read a profile and start a chat. The technology blog TechCrunch covers the launch the same day¹.

Fifteen years earlier, a man who wanted to see a picture of another naked man on a computer had to wait while it arrived, line by line, through a telephone modem. Between those two moments gay porn left the shop, the cinema and the mailbox and moved into the network, where it became cheaper, faster, more amateur and, for the first time, free. This chapter follows that journey, from scanned magazine pages to subscription sites, from tube sites to self-shot clips, and ends with a pill that changed what men did on screen.

Pictures in pieces

Before the web there were bulletin board systems. A BBS was a computer in somebody's house or office, connected to one or more phone lines. Users dialled in with a modem, left messages, chatted and downloaded files, one caller at a time per line.

Many boards ran on a hobby budget, and a lot of what their users swapped was pictures scanned from printed magazines. In December 1993 a federal court in Florida ruled against George Frena, who ran a board called Techs Warehouse BBS, over 170 photographs from Playboy that his subscribers had uploaded and downloaded. It was one of the first judgments to say that putting a magazine's pictures online without permission broke copyright law².

The other channel was Usenet, a worldwide network of discussion groups that predated the web. Pictures had to be converted into text, chopped into numbered parts, posted as separate messages and stitched back together by the receiver's software. A single photograph could take minutes to arrive.

The groups for pictures sat under the alt.binaries branch, with names that described what they held, among them alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.male. Most of what circulated there was scanned from printed magazines. Nobody paid, nobody asked who had taken the photographs, and the users were as anonymous as their screen names.

The law tries to catch up

By the mid-1990s the web had arrived, with pages that mixed text and pictures and could be opened with a click. Commercial providers such as America Online brought millions of households online, and gay men found each other in its member-made chat rooms long before most of them had ever seen a gay website.

Washington noticed. In February 1996 Congress passed the Communications Decency Act, which made it a crime to send "indecent" material to anyone under eighteen over the internet. Because any website could be seen by a minor, the law threatened to turn almost all sexual speech online into a federal offence.

The American Civil Liberties Union and a long list of other plaintiffs sued. On 26 June 1997 the Supreme Court struck down the indecency provisions in Reno v. American Civil Liberties Union, holding that speech on the internet deserved the full protection of the First Amendment and that adults could not be reduced to reading only what was fit for children³.

The ruling did not make porn legal where it had been illegal before. Obscenity was still a crime. But it meant that an adult website, gay or straight, could exist in the open, as a business, and that is exactly what happened next.

One password, a thousand doors

The first business model of internet porn was the subscription. A visitor typed his credit card number into a form, paid a monthly fee, and received a username and password for the members' area: photo sets, then short video clips, added every week.

The credit card did two jobs at once. It paid for the content, and it was the era's rough proof of age, on the assumption that a card belonged to an adult. Specialist billing companies grew up to process these payments, which ordinary banks treated as high risk because of the number of customers who later disputed the charge.

The age-verification networks went a step further. The best known was Adult Check, run by a Californian company, Cybernet Ventures, founded in 1997. A user bought a single Adult Check password for a yearly fee and could enter every site in the network, and the owners of those sites were paid a commission on the passwords they sold. In 2002 a federal court in Los Angeles, hearing a copyright suit brought by the magazine Perfect 10, issued an injunction requiring Cybernet to act against sites in its network that used stolen pictures⁴.

Around the paysites grew an ecosystem of free pages that existed only to send them visitors. The journalist Benjamin Wallace described how it worked: lists of links, then "thumbnail gallery" pages full of sample pictures, then pages of short movie clips, each one paid a small fee for every surfer it sent and a larger one for every surfer who subscribed. The paysites handed out the free samples themselves⁵.

The gay side of the business followed the same rules. The established video studios opened websites to sell memberships next to their tapes and discs, and new companies appeared that had never sold anything except online. The historian Jeffrey Escoffier, writing at the end of the 2000s, could already say that gay porn, after forty years of films and videos, had moved almost entirely into cyberspace⁶.

Live from the bedroom

In April 1996 Jennifer Ringley, a student at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania, put a camera in her dorm room and connected it to a website that refreshed her picture every few minutes. JenniCam is usually counted as the first famous webcam, and it showed that ordinary life, watched live, could draw an enormous audience.

Cheap cameras made the idea spread. Small plug-in webcams sold for the price of a dinner out, and by the end of the decade sites had added live chat, so that viewers could talk to the person on screen and pay for private shows.

Men were on camera from the start, as performers and as viewers. For gay men in small towns, a webcam could be the first time they had seen, live and in real time, another man who wanted the same thing. It was also the first time many of them turned a camera on themselves, a habit that would shape everything that came after.

The boy next door, on a server in San Diego

The 2000s belonged to a new kind of studio, built for the web from the first day. It did not shoot feature films with plots and sets. It shot short scenes, often in a house or an apartment, posted them on a schedule, and sold a membership rather than a title.

The model was Sean Cody, launched in San Diego in September 2001 by a former software engineer turned photographer, known by the name of the brand. Its formula became the formula of the decade: young, athletic, clean-cut men, usually introduced first in a solo scene, presented by first name only and promoted as newcomers who had never done porn before.

Others followed. Corbin Fisher, started in 2004 by a former police officer who began filming on his weekends off, built a brand around college-age men. Randy Blue, the Next Door network and dozens of smaller sites competed for the same subscribers. The domain Men.com was bought in 2003 and later became one of the biggest gay brands of all.

The San Francisco company Kink, founded in 1997 for bondage and fetish material, bought the city's old Armory building at the end of 2006 as its studio. In 2008 it opened Bound Gods, a gay bondage site directed by Van Darkholme, the first of a group of gay sites under its roof.

Straight, he says

The most profitable fantasy of the period was the straight man. Many of the new websites sold their models as heterosexual guys trying sex with men for the first time, for money or curiosity, and built whole series around that first time.

The idea was not new. Escoffier, in a study of 2003, traced "gay-for-pay" performers back through the history of gay porn and argued that a straight identity was not only a fact about some performers but part of what was being sold: the scene let the viewer watch a man who supposedly did not want men give in to one⁷.

It was also a marketing claim that nobody could check. Some performers sold as straight were gay or bisexual, some were exactly what the site said, and the line between persona and person was, by design, blurred.

Free, all of it

YouTube launched in 2005, and the adult industry did not have to wait long for its imitators. On 12 March 2006 a company in Ontario, Webnovas Technologies, opened XTube, an adult community where users could upload and share their own videos and photographs. It carried both gay and straight material and quickly became a home for gay amateurs.

Over two months in the summer of 2006, according to Wallace, three more sites launched that would become major tubes: PornoTube, RedTube and YouPorn. Pornhub followed in 2007, run from Montreal. Their videos were free, often far longer than the eight-second samples of the old gallery pages, and much of what they carried had been uploaded without the owners' permission. The tubes made their money from advertising and from the traffic itself⁵.

Then came consolidation. In March 2010 the German programmer Fabian Thylmann, who had made his fortune writing software that tracked affiliate traffic for porn sites, and had already bought XTube, acquired the companies behind Pornhub and Brazzers for a sum he confirmed was close to 140 million dollars and renamed the group Manwin⁵. In 2013 he sold out to the managers, and the company took the name MindGeek.

By the middle of the 2010s one firm owned the largest free tubes and many of the paid studios whose scenes appeared on them, in gay porn as in straight. In 2014 a performer quoted by David Auerbach in Slate compared it to a giant retailer that had driven small shops out of business and then sold their goods without paying for them⁸.

The pirates and the lawyers

For the studios, the tubes were only the most visible problem. Scenes were copied to file-sharing networks, cyberlockers and forums within hours of release, and a subscriber in one country could share a password with hundreds of strangers.

Gay studios fought back harder than most, and in court. In January 2011 Corbin Fisher announced a two-week "amnesty": people who had shared its videos on BitTorrent could settle for a one-off payment of 1,000 dollars, plus a year's membership, before the company sued thousands of identified users⁹. A year later Sean Cody's parent company filed its first federal suits against 122 people accused of sharing a single scene.

The campaign was controversial. Gay commentators warned that subpoenas to internet providers could reveal the viewing habits of men who were not out, including young men living with their parents, and Corbin Fisher dismissed the warning.

Money was certainly draining away. The disc, which had made the fortune of the previous generation of studios, lost its buyers once the same scenes could be streamed for nothing. Slate reported industry figures in 2014 according to which film production had fallen by three quarters since 2008 and DVD sales by half⁸. According to the same article, many performers had to look for other sources of income.

Cole and Hunter

The same tools that ruined the old studios gave anyone with a camera a way in. On XTube, users could upload clips for free or sell longer videos by the minute, and the site kept a share of the money. Most of what was uploaded to its amateur section, Wallace found, was not for sale at all: people posted their own sex lives for the pleasure of being watched⁵.

The most famous of these amateurs were a Boston couple known as Cole Maverick and Hunter, together for about a decade by 2011. They had started by uploading a few snapshots to XTube, then clips of themselves, then films with other men, often fans. Their videos had been watched more than ninety million times, they filmed full-time, and Hunter described their income as a nice six figures.

Cole put their aim plainly: "to take gay sex out of the dark, leathery guilt-ridden realm, into fun sex, in the sun, in an honest, open relationship." Even they complained that their own films turned up pirated on the tubes, XTube and Pornhub included⁵.

A whole economy of small producers grew up around them. Men who had sold self-made videos by mail now sold them by the minute, and couples who had never thought of porn as work discovered an audience.

A grid of strangers

The smartphone finished the job. The iPhone went on sale in June 2007, the App Store opened in 2008, and in 2010 the iPhone 4 added a camera on the front, facing the user. The phone was now a camera, a screen, a messaging system and a map, always in the pocket.

Grindr used all four. Created by Joel Simkhai, it placed users by the phone's location but, as TechCrunch reported at the launch, showed only approximate distances unless they chose to share more¹. Within months it had hundreds of thousands of users, and within a few years millions, in nearly every country.

The effect on porn was indirect but deep. Men who met through apps traded pictures before they traded names, and the explicit self-portrait became an everyday part of gay courtship. Some of those men moved on to film themselves for an audience. The line between private picture, amateur clip and professional scene grew thinner every year.

A pill, and the end of the condom

For two decades the condom had been the rule in most American gay porn, the result of the mourning and arguments of the AIDS years. A minority of studios, Treasure Island Media in San Francisco the best known, had been making condomless films since the late 1990s and were treated as outlaws by much of the industry.

On 16 July 2012 the US Food and Drug Administration approved Truvada, a combination of two antiretroviral drugs already used to treat HIV, as the first medicine to reduce the risk of sexually acquired infection in people who did not have the virus, taken once a day together with other safer-sex practices¹⁰. The strategy was called pre-exposure prophylaxis, PrEP.

The vote at the ballot box went the other way. In November 2012 voters in Los Angeles County approved Measure B, which required condoms on porn sets in the county. In February 2013 its sponsor, the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, filed workplace-safety complaints with California's regulators against Treasure Island Media over condomless shoots¹¹.

The studios moved anyway. In April 2014 Michael Lucas, whose New York company had long insisted on condoms, said that it would now release condomless scenes too: with PrEP and new evidence that people with an undetectable viral load did not pass the virus on, he explained, the principle behind holding out was no longer as compelling, and condomless scenes sold far better¹².

By the middle of the decade many of the large web brands had followed, Men.com among them. Health organisations remained divided, and some campaigners accused the industry of selling risk. But the change was clear, and it reached far beyond the screen, into what a generation of gay men considered ordinary sex.

Everyone with a camera

In twenty years gay porn had gone from scanned pictures crawling down a phone line to millions of free videos, from a few studios with mailing lists to an industry dominated by one company that owned both the shops and the shelves, and from performers seen on a cinema screen to men filming themselves in their own bedrooms.

The money had not disappeared, it had moved. The next step would be to cut out the studio and the tube altogether and let each man sell himself directly to his fans, by subscription, from his phone. That is the story of the next chapter, the creator economy.