Eroticizing Desperation: Poverty Gay-for-Pay Porn

Abstract

The gay-for-pay genre of gay pornography often utilizes inauthentic narratives, situations, or settings to indicate its male performers are heterosexual and partaking in on-camera gay sex strictly for remuneration. Poverty gay-for pay, a lesser-known gay pornographic subgenre, is devoid of the contrivances and modelesque men who populate mainstream gay-for-pay porn. Instead, it fetishizes elements of the tangible destitution experienced by the ordinary Joe male performers, such as homelessness and past incarceration, used to leverage gay sex acts from typically heterosexual men. The following paper is a reading of the visual and textual content of the poverty gay-for-pay pornographic websites Gemini Men and Workin’ Men XXX. Informed by previous literature, the current article discusses the unique multimodal messages employed by each studio to suggest the male performers are authentically heterosexual. Studio history, online media content (text, photos, video, audio), and featured performers are reviewed. Based on this examination, three distinctive methods used by the poverty gay-for-pay subgenre to code the male performers as genuinely heterosexual are discussed: (1) survival sex; (2) the father figure; and (3) reversal of power dynamics. The implications for the existence of this subgenre of gay pornography are examined.