This week, MTV is airing an episode of True Life exploring the lives of two such performers, and their struggles to balance the seemingly conflicting demands of their professional and personal lives.
Gay porn latino straight meet amateur professional# "Luke has a massive online following but he's managed to keep it a secret from his girlfriend," the show's narrator ominously reveals in a sneak peek for the episode. They're rising stars in the gay porn industry, but will the pressures of every day life force them to reconsider their lucrative careers?" "Ben is a married family man who recently started performing in gay sex films to support his kids.
Though the cable special is just coming out now, gay-for-pay porn is a fairly well-established phenomenon. In straight porn, the pay for men is notoriously lower than the pay for women, so "gay porn in general make a lot more than straight porn," Damian McKnight, the CEO and producer of the successful gay-for-pay site Broke Straight Boys, told the Daily Dot last year. The women get more exposure and respect in the industry, and for gay porn it's the male stars." "We're not sure why that is, but one of the ideas we have is that in straight porn, the women are the stars, and the guys are just props to pleasure them.
In a book that came out earlier this year, Not Gay: Sex Between Straight White Men, author Jane Ward argued that male sexuality is a lot more fluid than most of us are willing to acknowledge. In fact, she believes that popping a boner for another dude isn't at all a signifier that a man who says he's straight isn't, in fact, straight. "Who are we to say his entire life is a lie because he has the capacity to have sex with a man once?" she previously told Mic. That said, adult entertainment publicist Mike Stabile told Mic that he believes the sexuality of a gay-for-pay porn star is likely to be a bit more flexible than your average joe. "They seemed to have more of a fluid sexuality, or were just extremely sexual, even if they identified as straight in their private lives," he said of the gay-for-pay actors he's worked with in the past.
"Of course, there are some who are in it just because of the money, guys who insist on having loud cellphone conversations with their girlfriends while on-set, or being homophobic.