Producer Bottom III

Rank, arrogant amateurs

Probottom Book Club—

• “I’ve been down
  Can you help me out?”
  — HAIM, I’ve Been Down

• “I might even lose my virginity to him. I don't know when will it happen. You know, maybe in five minutes, or tonight, or sixth months from now, or maybe on the night of our wedding. But the really amazing this is, it is nobody's goddamn business.”
  —Olive Penderghast, Easy A

• “A performer at the circus has no theater curtain to come down and hide him and thus preserve the magic spell of his act unbroken. Poised high on the trapeze under the blazing arcs, he has flashed and pulsed like a star indeed. But now, grounded, un-sparkling, unfollowed by spotlights, yet plainly visible to anyone who cares to look at him— they are all watching the clowns— he hurries past the tiers of seats toward the exit. Nobody applauds him any more.”
  —Christopher Isherwood, A Single Man

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I’d chatted with him a few times on Grindr before I started seeing him at the gym, and then I really wanted him. He wanted it, too, and told me so over and over. But the cruising dragged on for days, New York men being only as hot as we are difficult to pin down. In the meantime we tried to tempt each other to travel across boroughs with lurid sexts. It was amid these horny hypotheticals that I scared him away with my good faith and crude need. Would you be down to film for my page, I asked, just a few minutes of footage without your face or anything. He gave me the answer I was most afraid of: What would I get out of it?

I backpedaled away from my request, but the mood took a sharp turn. He became suspicious that I was hustling him, sensitive to the idea that our primal attraction was tainted by work. Or maybe he was turned off by fucking a porn star, and was disappointed to be reminded about it. I considered offering him some money, but I was barely making rent off of my subscription revenue at the time. Nobody was paying each other to make content, and the standard compensation was just sharing footage and the informal right to monetize each other’s image. Fans pages were still pretty novel, and I can understand how he felt weary of being suckered into something compromising. A few weeks later he fucked my brains out off-camera, and I never heard from him again. I think he was going through something that had nothing to do with me.

In my first year or so with a page I had a hard time deciding whether to ask hookups to film me. My peers-slash-competition seemed to be putting out new hardcore material every week, and I wondered how I could possibly balance finding a filming partner that often while also getting laid off-camera for my own leisure or personal validation. I wanted to do things as ethically as possible, and I felt guilty about trying to make money off of guys who just wanted to hook up, even if they were comfortable with showing off anonymously. But I also felt immense pressure to keep up with the rat race of porn performers building home studios for big cash. I was scared to alienate the men I wanted to fuck, but I was even more scared of alienating paying fans and earning a bad reputation.

The whole appeal of fans pages is that they’re supposed to be more organic, more real than studio porn. They’re supposed to be glimpses at our off-the-clock sex lives, at how we like to fuck when we’re free to fuck the way we like to. We are amateurs attracting subscriptions on the basis of a very individual exhibitionism, appealing to consumers who are weary of the price and predictability of studio porn. Video quality is beside the point, and can even undermine one’s arousal if things appear too distractingly produced.

The problem is, real-life sex is awfully hard to see. You need lighting and angling and the good sense to pull out for a money shot. You need to remember to hold the phone sideways and to focus on the frame without losing your hard-on. You need to not get caught up in sex-time, which feels longer than actual time, and keep that shot going for more than a measly fifteen seconds. You need to be self-conscious about all these things and act convincingly like you’re not self-conscious at all, like all you care about it this ass, this cock, this nut. Some guys are naturally good at filming, know how to link up their libido with a directorial eye, but most aren’t. Even fewer guys are good at being filmed by someone else, especially not by the person they’re supposed to be dominating.

People think they want porn that’s free of all these considerations, just guys being dudes, but they don’t really. No matter how amateur we like it to feel, we need to be able to see what’s happening. That’s the whole point of filming it. The real art of pornography is how you either suspend the facts of production or make them erotic. Every now and then someone’s a natural at fucking on camera, but not often enough to keep up with the competition.

I made the decision awhile back to only shoot with people who have their own fans page, except in the rare circumstance somebody offers to film without being asked. Part of my reasoning is the liability— the model release paperwork we’re encouraged to use doesn’t seem all that legally robust to me, but if somebody posts the videos to their own page, I imagine it’s a bit harder to argue that they didn’t consent to being filmed. (That being said, I’ve always taken down videos when somebody asks me to remove them.) It feels more ethically sound to make content with somebody who also has something to gain from it, and it also makes for better sex when we’re looking for the same thing— that is, to make a hot video and have as much fun as we can in the process. 

But I also laid down this boundary because asserting my directorial point of view tends to make things weird. Perfectly fun hookups have been ruined by my simple request for a horizontal POV shot that exceeds a minute. I’ve tried to work it into what I’m “into,” like it’s just a kink, tried to frame it as something that would really turn me on, because it would. But alas, it always came down to the same tedium of production. The desire to make content was intruding upon my desire for connection and pleasure, even the liminal kind. If I had any hope of sustaining a kind of work that could permeate my whole life, I had to create limits on where it couldn’t.

I think I’m still learning what those limits are, but it’s vital to me that I discern any at all. For awhile, this meant accepting that I wouldn’t be churning out nearly as much hardcore content as other pages, and deciding that that opportunity cost was worthwhile. Now a lot more people have fans pages, though, than they did at the beginning of the year, which means my pool of potential collaborators has expanded quite a bit. But more on that another time.

XO

TY