Beyond fame: online microcelebrity porn stars in the Twitter Alter Community in the Philippines

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article explores the case of famous Filipino gay amateur pornographers on Twitter (now X) within the so-called ‘alter community’, a collective of anonymous Filipino Twitter/X users who produce and consume amateur pornography. Facing homophobia in their everyday lives, queer men seek intimacy, friendship, and self-expression in social media, even through extreme means such as producing pornography with which they are catapulted to fame. Using ethnographic and interview data gathered since 2019, this paper explores the motivations Filipino gay pornographers have for producing pornography and their experiences of dealing with fame and celebrity. It considers the experiences of celebrity among minorities whose issues never received adequate public attention. What does celebrity mean to sexual minorities where patriarchal and heteronormative structures are deeply entrenched? How do they manage their celebrity status within ‘networked sexual publics’ which competes against the gendered roles they assume outside the internet? While gay pornographers’ celebrity capital is contingent on the search for genuine acceptance and authentic self-expression, this article frames authenticity as faithfulness to hetero-patriarchal sexual scripts and pornoscripts. Authenticity emerges from the convergence of platform affordances, individual desires, and fan demands, and it gets complicated in the context of queer porn microcelebrities.