Men in Sex Work: Male Porn Performers

This is a guest piece by Ernest Greene, who yep, sure enough has been invovled in various aspects of the porn biz longer than some of my readers have been alive. As I am interested in the lack of interest taken in or notice of male sex workers, I asked him if he would be so kind as to do a post on the matter. He was nice enough to do so. That being said, Ernest is a guest here, so I ask that you treat him with the same respect...oh, wait, where am I? Ahem...more respect than often shown your cynical hostess. I ask that comments be civil and on topic, and I will not hesitate to used draconian powers of moderation- even though I don't like doing it.

So, settle in, grab a drink, smoke if you got 'em, and learn...and now Ernest takes it away~

Okay, here's the deal. I already told Ren by email that I didn't feel too welcome here, based on responses to some things I'd posted previously, and hadn't planned to come back. But I did air some ideas I have about male sex workers, having been one myself on and off since I was 24, and she took it upon herself, fearlessly as usual, to post on the topic. Seeing some of the stuff that followed, I can't say my apprehensions are exactly allayed, but it's clear that a nerve was touched and that some information needs to be shared before any of the judgments that have already popped up can be supported or opposed.


Yes, I have some opinions of my own, but those aren't any more useful than anyone else's unless backed up by some straight 4-1-1. I want to try that first and then let's see if this is a conversation we can carry on in a civil and constructive way. If it can't be, that tells me something too, which makes it all the more worth a try.


I know a little bit about most kinds of sex work done by men, including stripping, escorting, live sex performance, etc. But I've worked in porn continuously for the past twenty-five years and that's the branch of sex work I know most about, and male porn performers are the male sex workers with whom I've had the most extensive contact, having been one myself both before and after I started working as a video director. I won't make any generalizations about the guys who do the job – a varied bunch not easily typed – but I can describe what's required of them, how they're compensated for it and what challenges it inevitably presents in their lives.
This is not meant to initiate a contest over who has it worse or who deserves more of what. I think both male and female porn players have their burdens to bear, that those burdens are somewhat different and that how easily they're carried depends more on the individuals in question than whatever gender they happen to be. I understand that this is a controversial view in itself and those who don't agree will certainly have their say, here or somewhere else. Fine by me.


Let's start by talking about the money. The sex business in all branches is really more about business than it is about sex, which is part of what makes it inherently a contentious issue. You can't discuss it meaningfully without recognizing it as first and foremost a commercial enterprise. Any commercial enterprise involving such intimate labor exacts a certain cost from those who practice it in return for its material rewards.


In het porn, male performers overall are paid much less than women. There are a few exceptions, and in recent years, the more reliable and appealing male performers have closed the gap a bit, but the gap remains and it's pretty wide. For a straight boy-girl scene, a male player makes anywhere from three to eight hundred bucks, with the vast majority pulling down about five hundred. A BJ only might go as low as three hundred, but there's no up-charge for anal or DP unless you're one of those few, sought after dudes who can be choosy and demand a slight premium for something you don't really like doing. I'm talking slight as in an extra hundred bucks to have a second male performer rubbing dicks with you through about an eighth of an inch of female membrane.


In gay porn, the bar to admission is higher. If you're not good-looking, hung and able to perform reliably with other men, you need not bother to apply. However, if you're sought after on that side of the fence, fifteen hundred bucks is a good starting price and the rates can go way up from there. Just like the men on the straight side, that one-time check is all you'll ever see for any particular scene, no matter how much it makes the producer, and every time you do it you create a permanent record of something that will effectively bar you from almost any other kind of employment. Hard enough to be out about being gay. Harder still if any potential employer, landlord, family member or whoever can actually watch you take it up the ass on a wide-screen TV. Not surprising, when you consider these factors, that gay players get paid more. Gay players do work with condoms almost universally, but they also work without testing, which the gay side of the industry doesn't require.


In het porn, female players can and do charge by the specific act. A few make big bucks, but most have pretty standard rates. Lesbian porn, as distinct from girl-girl material made for male audiences, is mostly pro-am for small production companies and it commands the dead-lowest rate, somewhere south of five hundred dollars per scene.


I can't resist wondering aloud if the poster here who suggested that straight guys who don't like their rates should just bend over and spread for other men would make a similar suggestion to lesbians. Somehow I very much doubt it.


Pro GG with no extras (vanilla licky-licky with fingers and a small toy or two) brings in anywhere from six hundred bucks to a grand, depending on the performer's current popularity. Use of an anal toy kicks that up another couple of hundred.


A BJ-only boy-girl is rarely more than five hundred for the girl.


A vage-only boy-girl for a female performer is typically around seven hundred, with a few players being able to command a thousand. Twelve hundred is the going rate for anal with one male partner, though fifteen hundred isn't outrageous for someone with an established name. A first anal or a first BG might run up to five thousand dollars, but that trick only works once and only for a fortunate few who come in as former Penthouse Pets or whatever and can command a premium for existing name value.


Stunt sex – DPs, ATMs, ATOGMs, double anals, double vages, cream pies, gang bangs and so on obviously escalate the price, sometimes into the thousands, but there are plenty of female players who do stunt sex for a lot less. However, you can bet that whatever they're making, they're making more than the guys they're doing it with.


This is not because, as someone on this thread has suggested in a display of breath-taking ignorance, there is such a glut of male talent just clamoring to get in here they're practically a dime a dozen. That would be good for a laugh if it weren't such a blatant insult to the few men who actually do try to make the cut. In fact, the reason you see the same dudes over and over and over and over in video after video is because they are the ones who not only will have sex for the camera, but can do so with predictable results. That is a very small group of men. Sure, lots of horny dudes think they'd make great porn studs. About one male civilian under thirty in every ten I meet asks me if I thought he could be then next John Holmes. It takes me two questions to sort them out. Does he have a dick that's at least ten inches long fully erect? Can he get it fully erect, keep it that way for an hour and then have a visible ejaculation in front of a room full bored men with no other source of stimulation, visual or otherwise? If the answer to either is negative, he has no chance.


This industry gets away with paying guys less due to a perverse twist on the law of supply and demand. Precisely because there are so few who can meet these criteria, those who can are able to work a lot. I mean a whole lot, as in five scenes a week, sometimes a couple more if they double-book themselves. So the most they can earn is about three grand a week, but they can keep pulling that down for as long as they can get it up. Tom Byron, for example, has been doing scenes for almost as long as porn has been legal in this country. If you put some money aside, you can actually go someplace and do something else after a few years. Trouble is, what can you do with your anatomy gracing literally thousands of videos? That question is no easier for a man to answer than it is for a woman.


Oh, you think it doesn't follow you the way it does female performers? Right. I know a guy who was made ONE hardcore video when he first got out here and was flat broke. Ten years later he was vice president of a mainstream studio where there was a typical executive power struggle in progress. He came into work one day and discovered a copy of his only X-rated title on every single desk. He was outta there that afternoon.


So on the bottom line, unless you intend to keep doing scenes until you're my age, which is pretty fucking old, you need to bank those bucks and make an exit plan, because a lot of the other revenue streams that might give your female counterparts a boost just aren't there for you. Web site? I know a couple of guys who are trying it. So far, no male ClubJenna. Big company contract? It's happened once or twice, but at about half the rate the same company would pay a female player for the same number of scenes. And that's once or twice, period. Feature dancing? Nope. Personal appearances in video stores? Negative. Artificial anatomical parts named in your honor? Maybe, if your name is Peter North. Escort work on the side? Not on the straight side. Women don't have to pay for it and they don't do so. Selling your used underwear on ebay? Don't think so. You get my drift, I'm sure.


The total annual earnings for a male performer in any given year will certainly be lower than those for a female performer at the same career point. The fact known to every producer is that most porn consumers are men and that no man's picture on a box cover ever sold a single unit on the het side. This is reflected in who gets paid what.


However, a female player's career, with very few exceptions, is going to be shorter. There are busloads of pretty young things arriving in Van Nuys every day, and after every production company has shot any one of them five times, she's done working for that company. There are about two hundred active companies making video out here at any time. Do the math. After a few hundred scenes, it's back on the bus, unless you're really exceptional in some way. Nina is still doing half a dozen scenes a month after 25 years, but the average career for a female performer is about twenty-five months. We always tell the new ones to take it slow and make it last, but to suddenly discover at age eighteen that you can pull down ten grand a month makes you deaf to good advice.


Therefore, over the longer term, the numbers do even out a bit. A female performer might make more on a specific day, but across the span of her career, she's likely to make about the same thing a hard-working guy will in his ten years as opposed to her two.


And there is much more opportunity for advancement for male performers who can learn new skills. It's much easier to switch over to the crew side for a man. If you can carry a camera, hang lights, operate an editing system or manage a production, you can cross the frame lines into a new trade. If you have some vision of your own, you could be the next hot director, another John Leslie or Jules Jordan. You can end up with your own company, a McMansion and a leased BMW.


The only women who have ever made it into the real ownership class in porn video are Candida Royale and Jenna Jameson. Both are very shrewd and hard working and put many years into building their businesses. Candida left performing early and built a couples' niche market for her products that essentially didn't exist until she invented it. Jenna made her success as a result of perfect timing, fierce ambition and the kind of street smarts acquired at the cost of the experiences she describes unblinkingly in her book. There are some powerful women execs in porn - the chief of the publications division I work for at LFP is one. The head of production at Vivid Video is certainly another. But the equity in most of the bigger production shops stays with the boys.


This is no small difference that works to the disadvantage of women. The companies are indeed owned mostly by men and they are much more likely to take another man into the company than they would be a woman. The glass ceiling here is practically bullet-proof, so let's just not have any bullshit about that. Porn may be empowering to some women in terms of what they can do with the cash and how they can use their names to leverage some other heem, but solid service as a male performer positions you for management, and that's a much more dependable route to power. Everybody still with me?


Okay, let's talk about the work itself then. As a guy, you don't have to even consider the anatomical intrusions among which you must choose as a female performer. You get paid about the same for whatever hole you stick it in and unless you volunteer, nothing is going to get stuck in you back.


Now if you like getting stuck in all kinds of places, and those female performers who enjoy any real success here genuinely do like it or the camera will inevitably unmask their lack of enthusiasm, this isn't that big a problem. Contrary to what the antis always claim, female performers aren't "intimidated" into doing things they don't want to do. There are too many others eager to do the same thing who will thus do it much better for the same money. They find a comfort level in terms of what kind of sex they like on camera, decide which performers they want to work with, and work for the companies that respect those limits. No doubt, having those limits will compromise your income to some degree, but it's up to you how hard a scene you care to shoot and nobody can tell you otherwise.


Guys don't have to make as many choices, but they don't get to make as many choices either. A male performer who's picky about what women he will work with isn't going to get enough scenes at his lower rate to pay the rent, so he'll end up working with whoever he meets on the set when he gets there. If the scene calls for anal, he'll be doing her up the butt whether that's his thing or not, that is, if he wants to make the car payment. If she says or does something to piss him off, he better keep it to himself. Remember, it's her picture that sells the video, not his, so if there's a problem between players, it's the guy who gets replaced.


And when it comes to the physical labor involved, even on a bad day, as Nina likes to say, a girl can get by on lube and acting. A guy has to get it up, keep it up through four positions, covered hard and soft and with stills, stay at the ready regardless of time of day, temperature of surroundings, comfort of furniture he's fucking on, distractions that come with picture making (such as having a hot light stuck under your scrotum so the hardcore is properly illuminated) and distractions in his own head. Some female players are generous about being helpful in this process (smarter for it too, since it gets them paid and home sooner if they don't have to file their nails waiting for him to get wood), but many simply regard their partner's hard-on as his part of the job and go out for a smoke when there's a cut to change camera position. The one kind of sex you almost never get to have is the kind you want with the partner you would choose for it.


Consider this: Masters and Johnson tell us that a typical sexual encounter between ordinary civilians takes a rather unimpressive eleven minutes, start to finish. As a director I allow a minimum of two hours to shoot a basic sex scene. Let that one sink in for a bit.


And at the end of all that, the man has to ejaculate when and where he's told. If it happens too soon or in the wrong place, the camera will miss the famed "money shot" and the whole scene will be essentially lost.


All it takes are two failures to perform as required in a row and a man is finished in this business. The production managers talk among themselves and then they talk to the directors who talk to the agents and it's all over.


Viagra you say? Not the magic bullet some people think. It's just a vaso-dilator that helps you get and keep an erection if you're already so inclined. It's not an aphrodisiac and if you can't focus because you're mom's sick or your car's been towed or your partner won't spit out her gum, the blue pill might not help at all. And even when it does work, it only works well for about about two hours. It also takes an hour to come on. Porn shoots rarely run on schedule, so a Viagra-dependent performer has to guess the perfect moment to drop the tabs. If the camera suddenly quits or the fire marshal shows up or the thousand other things that can delay a shoot happen, he can miss his window and have the drug go out on him half way through the scene.
There is no insurance against performance failure. That is the anxiety under which every male performer must operate every day of his working life.


There's also no insurance against STDs or STIs. While HIV is certainly a greater danger for women, as the receptive partners in most of the porn shot, other bugs are much less discriminating, and they can fuck up your work and your life pretty good. This just comes with the territory for both sexes, but it's also a consideration for both. Condoms can provide some protection (although with the kind of sex we do for camera, they're much less reliable than they are at home, what with all the starts and stops and ups and downs), but there are plenty of things you can get even with a condom on, and the condom is a much bigger obstacle to keeping an edge for the male performer. Again, there is an analogous drawback to them for women, which is the additional friction from drag that may actually make them more susceptible to whatever infections do make it outside the protective barrier.


No joy on this subject for either men or women in porn and not much more that can realistically be done in the way of harm reduction than the required testing we do now. I know this is Un-PC and downright heretical to some people here, but the resistance to condom use in porn isn't all because of male piggery in the audience or on the set. Female performers hate them too because they don't work all that well for this application, make everything take longer and result in added wear and tear on internal parts.


Relationships? Definitely advantage female players on that one. There are all kinds of men who will date or even marry porn performers. Some are slimy suitcase pimps. Some are just living out their fantasies. Some are surprisingly supportive and terrific. Some are fellow performers who work with their spouses as teams.


But very few civilian women will even consider getting involved with a man who fucks other women for a living, and who can blame them? In addition to the jealousy factor, there's also the disease risk and the harsh reality that a man who has to get himself up and off under trying circumstances several times a week may not have much left for his sex life at home.


There comes a terrible moment in a male performer's life when he realizes that if he stays up all night rocking and rolling with his new girlfriend, he may not be able to work at nine in the morning, which means a lost scene at best and possibly irreparable reputation damage at worst. He's got to ask himself if he can afford to blow off five hundred dollars to have some fun or if the phone bill matters more. I've yet to see a non-sex-worker woman make it six months with a male performer as a primary partner. About the only long-term prospects are people in the same business who can understand what you have to do and not take it personally. That limits your prospects rather severely. Most male performers simply do not have sex lives of their own. That is what they sell to make their livings.


Even friendships with other men are difficult. They give you that nudge-nudge-wink-wink-aren't-you-a-lucky-dog shit and you just want to run. They want to be fixed up with this or that porn star you've worked with or they want to get invited to the wild parties you obviously go to every night or whatever. They just don't get it and you just can't explain it to them.
Don't even try explaining it to your family. They may not toss you out for being a whore and a slut, but they will disown you for being a lazy bum who uses his dick instead of his brain or his hands to earn his keep. Being a male porn performer may not be a family disgrace, but it's a pretty low status job and nobody is going to be proud of you for doing it.


But you can't think about things like that because if you do it may fuck with your process and if your process gets fucked up you won't be able to fuck and you'll be fucked for sure then, so you just learn to keep it all inside. No rescue organization is looking to find you. Diane Sawyer isn't wringing her hands over your terrible fate. Radfems just consider you one more henchman of The Patriarchy. If you commit suicide, as Cal Jammer did a dozen years back, it won't even make the papers, much less inspire gooey elegies from anti-porn bloggers after you've been in the ground for a decade. Never heard of Cal Jammer? Didn't think so.


No, once you sign on for this deal, you're here to stay and you're pretty much on your own. You won't marry your way out of it. You won't be able to go on Oprah and make a career crusading against it. You won't be able to sell your memoirs to Judith Reagan. You'll either get inside the system or the system will get inside you, and if it's the latter, your prognosis is not great.
Does this breed resentment in some of the guys? Sure. Do some of them have bad attitudes toward women? Yep. Are some of them nice, friendly, regular blokes? You bet, possibly even a majority. Are some of them closeted bi-guys who take their frustrations out on their fellow players? No doubt about it. Are some of them lover-boys who require too much emotional maintenance? A most frequent complaint of female performers to be certain. Are a fair number of them just plain dumb, clumsy and insensitive with no interest at all in pleasing those with whom they work? That one cuts both ways.


Don't take my word for it. Read what Susan Faludi had to say about it in her New Yorker piece "The Money Shot" after she got a few male performers to go on the record. Then tell me how easy it is for this class of male sex worker and how much better they have it than their female counterparts.


No, as Tommy Byron once told me, it's not all hearts and flowers out there under the lights, not for women and not for men either.


I hope all this gets some people thinking and if not, well, it should. A male sex worker is a human being just like you, not a life-support system for a penis. He's not just a load. He's a man, and what he does is not "getting paid to have fun."


I'm not a parent to any of these people, male or female. They're consenting adults and it's not my place to question their choices, especially since I made the same ones back in 1984. I was lucky to have abilities that eventually put me behind the camera instead of in front of it, but I know that happens less often than not.


In conclusion, I would say that being a sex performer, male or female, is not as bad as those who hate porn say it is, or as good as those who make porn want you to think it is. It's neither as dangerous as it looks nor as safe as we all wish it were. At least our trade is legal, for the moment, and that is one huge advantage not to be underestimated. But it is far from socially acceptable, regardless of which set of chromosomes you got, and the decision to enter into it will absolutely change the course of your life, no matter who you are. You may be fine with those changes. Not everyone in porn is a miserable victim by any means. You may have to struggle with those changes and eventually reach some internal compromise with the things you don't like. Almost any job requires that much. You may end up dead in your ex-girlfriend's driveway with a smoking gun in your hand. You may end up with a big house in Malibu.


Sex work can be profitable. It can be fun. It can be creative. It can be ugly and mean. It can be humiliating and debilitating. It can be pretty much what you make it within the limitations of the commercial enterprise that it is.


But what sex work can never be, for either men or women, is routine. As we know so little about male sex workers, any assumptions made about them are necessarily prejudicial and most probably inaccurate. I'd ask anyone to think that over before offering an opinion, much less a dismissive put-down, in the general direction of the men who do this work day in and day out, unnoticed, uncelebrated and largely uncared for.


Any questions? Happy to answer them as long as they're polite and sincere. Snark, smack and off-topic bullshit? I'll ignore it. Fair enough?