About us / Without us / For us
My "virgin" experience of the GayVN Awards 2024 in Las Vegas.
What happens after the revolution? What does it mean to celebrate when the “workers” have stormed the proverbial “factory” and taken control of the means of production? Will we do a better job at operating the machinery?
Or have the habits of late capitalism embedded themselves in our beings so deep that we are ultimately beholden to those who hold on to the invisible reins of power?
Amidst the exhilarating glitz and glamor of the GayVN award ceremony in Las Vegas on 25 Jan 2024, these were some questions that kept resurfacing in my mind. I will return to these scattered thoughts at the end of my writing, but first, the amuse-bouche - morsels of information since my last update.
I had several posts planned out, but decided to combine them into this update. I got hit by a nasty bout of viral fever after I got back from Las Vegas1, and before Vegas, I was gripped with the intensity of preparations for the event. I am sure not every nominee stresses over their presentation to such a degree, but I knew the chances of winning were slim, and this was probably my best, and perhaps only, opportunity to leave an impression. With the fickle attention span of this industry, who knows if I will even be considered next year? So outfits were chosen, shopping trips were made, friends who were in the fashion industry were invited out for cappuccinos to lend their expert sartorial advice.
Part 1/6 - Walking the Red Tightrope
The feeling is similar to being presented as a debutante at the start of a social season. Mating rituals refracted through prisms of high school proms, social media preening, and collaged into the format of the award show red carpet. On one side of the stanchions stands the subject, scrutinized, and dissected by cameras, while on the other side, podcast interviewers, producers, and implicitly studio directors and casting managers assessing one’s talent. The main difference in this specific situation of an gay adult industry award show is that instead of being buried within the deepest recess of the enfilade, one’s sexual performance is taken very seriously, and examined under bright lights and scrutiny online, or in hotel suites almost adjacent to the red carpet. There is a fervor to be seen, and especially if you are used to walking in a room in this country and being invisible, there is an even greater urgency to announce one’s presence.
As a result of this scrutiny, this padded plush carpet proves to be a fine tightrope to walk. To be slutty and sex-positive, but in a fashion-forward way. To be unrestrained by the shackles of cis male-presenting evening and formal wear, and yet not taking it too far and turning up in high camp drag. High camp may be appropriate for some performers, but not if you are interested in being considered by studios or fellow creators who still prioritize the conservative gay desire for a white cis-male Abercrombie and Fitch mold. Then there is the issue of your personal brand, a buzzword within the fan-site dominated adult sexual economy, a term borrowed from marketing spin-doctors, your “USP” or Unique Selling Point. Does the look that you are assembling adhere to how you have set out to brand yourself, but leave just enough room for the industry to see you as more than your social media biography description?
Part 2/6 - Double Rainbow: Afternoon at the Tom of Finland Foundation
I was fortunate enough to have generous support for my look, which was custom made by designer and entrepreneur Louis Dorantes of the brand Leak. We were introduced in December 2023 when we were both in Los Angeles. My partner Tom and I were there for the annual Leather Getaway and Louis was there for a photo shoot. We happened to all be interested in touring the Tom of Finland Foundation house and Oat Montien, who was a Thai artist-in-residence doing a second residency at the foundation, offered to give us a tour.
Oat and I met in 2022 when I was also in Los Angeles, and we remained in close contact after. Oat gave me a very similar tour to me when he started his first residency with the foundation, and I appreciated the value of being guided through the perspective of a fellow Southeast Asian. All gay men must admit to having been seduced, at one point or another, by the hypermasculine renderings of Tom of Finland’s men, these perfect pervasive callipygian specimens and an early mold for gay male desire.2 Oat’s tour highlights the house, its legacy, and importance with utmost reverence and respect, but also politely points to what can be done differently and alternative narratives that lie latent in these sculpturally detailed renderings, a slight revisioning of who can be considered part of Tom’s cohort of men.
It was closing the loop to bring my partner Tom to the Tom3 of Finland Foundation house to experience the tour in 2023, and to witness how Oat’s commentary and his personal artistic intervention into the archive of the foundation has also sharpened within the span of the year. Oat has this casual and uncanny method of creating social environments for like-minded personalities to meet. Getting to know Louis was an unexpected bonus, and turned out to be providence.
Oat met me, Tom and Louis at the front door, after an unusual Los Angeles brisk rain, petrichor lingering in the air. Our quartet started with the outdoor Pleasure Park, the stepped gardens behind the house. We greeted Durk, Tom’s partner and co-founder of the Foundation who was tending to the grounds with tools from the underground dungeon space. We moved in to the kitchen, having tea and cookies along the way, visited some of the other artists-in-residence before wandering up to the attic room where Tom’s workspace was, and found our way into the Solarium with these intense rays of yellow light that produce these endless elongated shadows and distort your perception of time.
Oat’s recent project, which culminated in a final performance and visual art presentation on the Foundation’s premises on 5 Jan 2024, was an investigation into the figure of the Western cowboy and its entanglements with his personal family history. Oat pointed to the transmutation of the cowboy with the lasso on the horse into the leather biker on the motorcycle in Tom of Finland’s drawings, as a pre and post modern imagination of Americana. Rope bondage was another aspect that Oat wanted to experiment with in his performance at the Foundation, so my partner Tom, guided him through a series of simple rope maneuvers with me as the model and Louis watched and observed. Sometime during our visit, a double rainbow appeared on the horizon.
Part 3/6 - Leather and Lace: Assembling the Look
The recounting of the visit was necessary because I believe that you can see fragments of the experience that afternoon distilled in the eventual design that Louis made for my red carpet look. Leak was established a mere four years ago, and is making waves in queer nightlife for the way it not only challenges but also transforms expectations around gender and knitwear.
When I wear a Leak bodysuit for a go-go gig, it feels like I am wearing a sexy patterned second skin. They have referred to their clothes as “slutgear”. Your body gets shrouded in a cloud of mystery, yet the suit exposes your curves shamelessly. Folks do a double take because they are intrigued by how the cutouts transforms your body (and conveniently provides more places to hold tips). I wanted to support a brand with a similar ethos to what I hope to see more of in the gay adult industry, championing an increased representation of bodies of different races, types, shapes, and sizes, beyond the Abercrombie mold of desire.
Over two fittings at their studio in Bushwick, the second one late on a weekend when everyone had gone and it felt like Louis and I were two friends just trying on clothes before a night out at the club, the look emerged like a developing photograph in a darkroom.
The talent, the vision, the silhouette was all Louis’ credit. It is pretty astounding to give myself to another artist and be privy to their process of creation, to witness them building an outfit piece by piece. Like what Louis speaks about in a recent interview, it is a process of extreme trust, especially since the look can be so “provocative” or “intimate”. A practice of chalking, cutting and pinning. Blades against skin. Safety pins unclasp by teeth as fingers hold tension. Followed by trimming, and stitching shifting spandex to finish off a look that felt entirely made for my body, and an extension of my persona.
When people ask about how I felt wearing the look that night, I reply by saying that it made me possessed a sense of invincibility that comes with wearing a suit of armor, even though I was also incredibly vulnerable as so much of my skin was exposed to the elements. Let us just say that walking through the foyer of the hotel I was staying at, which also happened to be hosting a gun convention, definitely took some nerves of steel (and brisk walking). I am thankful for my partner Tom, along with roommates Ricky Lee and Johnny Ford for the strength in numbers. The Syro high-heeled leather boots were styled perfectly with the rest of the outfit, changed my gait, presence, height, and allowed me to look straight into Tom’s eyes (for once).
Personally, the devil is really in the details of Louis’ creative genius. It is in these details where you discover their intrinsic sensitivity towards the texture and materiality of fetishwear, one that was perhaps heightened by our collective experience of the Tom of Finland Foundation house. A big part of my performer persona is kink-inspired, centering on rope bondage, but also adjacent to leather, restraints, spandex etc.
The centerpiece of the design that Louis conjured up had a cape of leather, a pair of vintage leather chaps worn in a different way. The weighted significance of the material of leather was retained but also transformed beyond immediate recognition. The sides of the leather chaps zips up to enclose my arms completely, but when unzipped reveals the laced-up layers of red canvas and grommets that serve as sturdy arm gauntlets. My mind was truly blown when Louis explained their vision of the leather cape piece. It takes an absolute genius to look at something common within a leatherman’s wardrobe and attempt to imagine it otherwise. This was creativity as alchemy.
In my opinion, the look was a success that evening, it was unique, it left an impression, and it said something about the work that Tom and myself do and the leather and kink community we are part of in an understated and elegant manner. There were other red carpet looks that left a deep impression, and here I will try to mention the highlights with my painfully limited sartorial references, because they deserve all the credit and attention.
Part 4/6 - Toots: Memorable Looks of the Night
Jonzu / Jordan Jameson always turns a look. For this GayVNs, he showed up in an all-black number, right down to his blackface makeup, along with a leather corset, jacket, thigh high boots with chunky acrylic heels and mesh lined skin tight wear accessorized with a detailed beaded neck and shoulder accessory. The thing about Jonzu that really inspires me is his complete and utter dedication to carrying the look through. The last time we attended the Grabbies together he showed up in fully ruby rhinestoned makeup that must have taken hours to apply. This man has a vision and he is not afraid to realize it. At the same time, he pushes the look just to the brink of ironic farce and camp, to remind us to play and have fun with what we wear, and to not take ourselves (and the event) too seriously.
Other inspiring looks for the evening includes Elijah Zayne’s billowing white satin cape and pants accessorized with white sneakers and pearls, and Jake Waters’ wide brim hat and beaded top with a luscious silky red pants and skirt ensemble at the bottom made by TJ4M. Both looks were sexy and magisterial, showed the right amount of skin and challenged gender conventions in their own unique ways. The fashion aspect of the entire proceedings was a fascinating aspect of the entire week for me, as you get to meet folks in-person, and also see how they translate their personalities into what they wear and choose to represent. There were plenty of moments to mingle with other performers, before the red carpet a few of us went up to superfan Grandma Patty’s room on the 51st floor to admire the view of the Las Vegas Strip and some champagne.
Unlike our AVN award counterparts, we had no stipulated entrance time for the GayVN red carpet interviews, so there was plenty of time while waiting in line to socialize. The foyer to the theater was another great venue to meet folks before and after the award show, and if all that is not enough, there were two nights out at the club, one opening party before the GayVNs and another post award show. I highlight all these interstitial opportunities to socialize because these turned out to be the most rewarding aspect of the event, more so than the main event or the Expo floor itself.
Creating content can be a highly isolating experience, even if it seems counterintuitive to the nature of making content (the meeting of people and sharing intimate moments on screen). These casual gatherings are essential to get a sense of the fuzzy outline of the shape of a community, and to have a face-to-face connection with folks who you might not be algorithmically matched with. Tom and I had one session arise from connections we made at these meetings, and initiated conversations about rope bondage with many more.
Part 5/6 - Observations from GayVN Awards 2024
This was my inaugural GayVNs, but my second gay adult industry award show. So, even though it might not be my first rodeo, I am still a little green. These are a few thoughts about the ecology from my limited perspective (and I will be happy to be corrected).
There are a couple of award shows within the North American gay porn ecology. XBIZ Awards, run by another industry publication, has a couple of gay categories within their larger heterosexual adult industry award show. The 2024 XBIZ awards took place a couple of days before the AVNs in Los Angeles. Grabbies (with an accompanying European franchise) is the other exclusively gay adult industry award show in Chicago that takes place in late May. There are also online awards given out by gay porn aggregators and news sites. To be honest, I am not privy to how the voting and selection process for any of these award shows work, but I cannot imagine them functioning differently from any other industry awards, especially when they are tied to a public-facing trade and fan convention like the Adult Entertainment Expo at the AVNs.
Industry award shows are designed to highlight the most prominent studios and companies who have invested heavily in maintaining a presence at these events, and in the trade publications that are associated with these award shows. These award shows cost money to produce. The fact that a separate show was carved out from the AVNs to celebrate the gay adult industry means that there might be a shared infrastructural cost, but pragmatically, there were still the costs of running the show, which includes venue rental, that needed to be addressed.
As a specific example of estimated costs, from the perspective of a kid with a technical theater background, even accounting for the operating costs of those LED video panels that filled the full proscenium of the theater, the technical crew that runs it, the design team that had to produce content for it, has got to be a tidy sum. A close examination of past winners of the GayVNs also indicates that there were few surprises or upsets to be found, and they have consistently been distributed to the few tent-pole studios and stars within their firmament. Coincidentally, these were also studios that have invested in renting a booth, paid for advertisement space, or sponsored the event.
Like any other industry award - you cannot buy an award, but you definitely need to invest if you want to be considered in the running.4
We do not have to go far back in history to be reminded that the entire GayVN awards was put on hiatus from 2011 to 2017, even though the event started back in 1998. This is merely a reminder of how tenuous and precarious this event is when positioned in relation to the larger adult entertainment industry. In fact, this might have been the most sobering realization of my entire GayVN / AVN awards and Adult Entertainment Expo experience. When you enter the expo floor and look at the size of scale of the queer “The Village”,5 it dawns on you how tiny the gay adult industry is compared to the rest of the industry. This observation is scaffolded by overheard conversations with straight counterparts at the expo which appears to be light years ahead in conversations around performer rights and activism, testing innovations, licensing of one’s likeness for A.I. and other issues that the gay adult industry are just beginning to catch on to.
But even in consistency and predictability, there are still a few observations that can be made about industry trends, it just depends on how closely one reads the tea leaves. Here are three brief observations to wrap up this piece of writing.
Observation 1: Carnal+ raises the roof and sells the fantasy.
There are two parts to the GayVN awards proceedings - the first segment is the industry awards, with the prefix “best”, and the second are fan nominated categories, with the prefix “favorite.” Out of the 33 awards distributed in the 2024 ceremony, 1 was a legacy award, 15 were industry awards, and 17 were fan-voted awards.6
The economics of generating visibility was covered earlier in this essay, and out of the various studios, Carnal+ appears to have made the largest investment at the GayVNs this year. They had a prominent booth on the Expo floor, using the opportunity to re-launch their own news and gay pornography aggregator site The Gay Goods. They generously sponsored the open bar before the award show, making sure we all have our necessary libations before the proceedings. They also won the “Best Three-Way Sex Scene” category at the GayVN awards. Performers Cole Blue and Noah White bounced onstage in their distinctive boy scouts uniform, joined by the production team shortly after, to accept their award.
How is this win significant? Granted, it supports the observation I made earlier, that the GayVN awards are held up by a few tent-pole companies and the support they provide to the event, but beyond a simple correlation, this was also the first time that Carnal Media has won an industry, non fan-voted award since its inception in 2018. Owner Legrand Wolf also took home the fan-voted ‘Favorite Daddy’ award that same night.
So all in all, a bountiful harvest for a studio established right before the pandemic, who had to contend with surviving amidst the juggernaut studios but also within a shifting ecology shaped by fan-sites and the creator economy. Carnal Media has been clear about how it positions itself in this ecology, one that is in the business of selling fantasy at a time when other sites and creators are selling authenticity and reality,7 and this strategy has been clearly working for the company. This is perhaps a good segue into the second observation, to look at other ways of thriving within the fan-site / independent creators dominated ecology.
Observation 2: For the fans - and the rise of Rhyheim.
I asked the more experienced performers what is the main difference when comparing the GayVNs to the other awards ceremony, and most replied that the GayVNs is more fan-focused. The fan awards segment appears to be a democratic concession to the fan support and presence that the convention and award show was intended to attract, and was introduced in 2018 after the GayVNs was brought back after a seven year hiatus.8 In recent years, nominations for these 17 fan categories opened up a couple of months prior, and voting for each category was carried out online. After registering an account and logging in, each voter was permitted up to five votes in each category, each day.
From a pragmatic viewpoint, this strategic move on the part of the organizers makes perfect sense. Post-pandemic, there was lingering anxiety about returning to in-person events. As the award returned to in-person ceremonies in 2023 after 2 years of being held online, it made sense to strengthen this fan component of the award show. After all, what is an award show without the constellation of stars that make it thrilling? As a fan of the gay adult industry I was pinching myself in the foyer of the theater in disbelief that evening. Imagine all of your favorite performers dressed to the nines and materialized in the flesh, all neatly contained within a single space. By effectively doubling the number of categories with the fan awards, and with each category in the fan award category containing up to 15 nominees, the number of award show nominees have exponentially increased, and so will the likely attendance by stars and their ardent fans.
On the flipside, this opening of the floodgates to democratic selection also meant that being a nominee at the GayVNs no longer carries the same weight as it used to be, when nominations were fewer and perhaps more exclusive. The nature of award shows in the age of content creation is also shifting - it is no longer what happens in the theater, or on the red carpet, but what happens outside of it in private hotel rooms that hold the most weight. I know of a couple of performers who did not attend the award ceremony or enter the expo but traveled to the city in order to “collab”, responding to the sheer number of creators who were going to be in the city. Everyone was trying to land that great collaboration with the person a couple of rungs above you on that ladder of popularity.
These occasions for the gay adult industry to gather have shifted beyond simple networking to include full scale independent content production. The commodification of every aspect of recreational and personal life as a result of the gig economy. Under neoliberalism, responsibility is individualized and we have to be our own managers, production assistants, buy our own lighting and production equipment, edit and produce our own content. There is no one you can count on to show up reliably except yourself, and as a result, if you fail to live up to the exacting standards that the public (i.e. social media) demands of you, you feel personally responsible for your own failures. If we follow this prediction to its logical (and tongue-in-cheek) conclusion, perhaps in time, everyone will be a nominee and doing collaborations and ‘live’ cam shows from their hotel rooms in lieu of attending the ceremony.
Speaking of trial-by-social-media, the other significant thing that happened at the 2024 GayVNs is Rhyheim Shabazz taking home not just the main award of ‘Performer of the Year’, but also two fan-voted awards, including the ‘Favorite Creator Site Star’ award. This crowns him as both an industry darling and a fan favorite. This is unsurprising, as Rhyheim (and his team) has truly demonstrated a way for the fan-site / creator economy to shift how the industry operates, transforming how black and brown melanin skin can be lit and lensed for pornography. Rhyheim has assembled such an incredible production team and pool of talent that studios are approaching him for partnerships (e.g. NakedSword x Rhyheim). He has also launched his own site under the Aylo media conglomerate9 last year, and is truly a formidable (and sexy) force to reckon with.
Observation 3: Increased “diversity” in representation
Which brings us to the third and final observation from the GayVNs - the increase in AAPI representation among the nomination pool. It is clear that compared to previous years, there were more AAPI folks nominated across both industry and fan categories.10
Cody Seiya leads the pack in the industry categories with 5 nominations, including ‘Performer of the Year’. In the fan awards section there are AAPI performers in at least 11 of the 17 categories, which includes Dane Jaxson for ‘Favorite Butt’ and Favorite Bottom’, Damian Dragon for ‘Favorite Daddy’, and Magic Mike Hung for ‘Favorite Porn Star Creator’, ‘Favorite Daddy’, ‘Favorite Dom’ and ‘Favorite Bear’. Significantly, Jkab Ethan Dale took home an industry award for ‘Best Featurette’. This marks the first win for an AAPI-identifying performer in the main industry categories.11
When I first declared my intention to attend the awards this year, a colleague who attended the ceremony a year ago mentioned that Alec Mapa, Filipino-American comedian and longtime host of the awards (since 2009), asked onstage as part of his banter where the Asian folks were and why were we not nominated. This time around, when Nolan Knox and I ran into Alec on the red carpet, I made it a point to grab a photo with him as proof that we do exist and we were present.
In fact, I have been ruminating on the nature of Alec Mapa’s involvement as host for the awards and how this can play into stereotypes of Asian men in the gay adult industry.
Alec was co-hosting this year with Cade Maddox, a gay adult performer. In between categories, Alec will come onstage to banter, by himself with the audience or with Cade. Alec also appears in the interstitials video sequences with other gay performers enlisted for the GayVNs’ publicity campaign. The subtext of his appearances will often be a “fish out of water” scenario, where he was caught unaware in a sexy situation, with Alec clothed amidst a sea of men who are all in various states of undress. It is difficult not to read it as yet again a reinforcement of Asian men as a funny but un-sexy (or funny because they are un-sexy) trope (think William Hung), doomed to perform as the perpetual sidekick or court jester. Under such circumstances, it was hard to differentiate if folks were laughing at Alec, or with him, and what were the specific motivations that fuels their laughter.
So yes, having him as a host might help position the organization against accusations of a lack of casting “diversity”, but has it been helpful in shifting the representation of Asian men and sexuality in the public imagination? Or merely a haunting reminder of the persistent desexualization of Asian men within the media industry?12
To tie it back to my initial observation and apply the logic of my argument above to the increase of AAPI nominees, we can ask if the quantitative increase in nominations, especially as the exclusivity of being nominated is gradually being diluted (see point 2 above on fan democratization), is a qualitative indication of the recognition of AAPI talent? What other forms of acknowledgement and recognition can there be within an award show model that rewards the “best” or the “favorite”?13 Perhaps what we need is a reexamination of the format of the award show model itself as a way of recognising talent and performance, and if so what will that format look like?
What happens after the revolution? What does it mean to celebrate when the “workers” have stormed the proverbial “factory” and taken control of the means of production? Will we do a better job at operating the machinery?
Or have the habits of late capitalism embedded themselves in our beings so deep that we are ultimately beholden to those who hold on to the invisible reins of power?
Part 6/6 - Conclusion: Who holds the reins?
I return to the opening questions that linger in my mind weeks after I have returned home to New York. During my brief trip to Las Vegas, one of the most interesting talks I attended was a panel for the launch of the “Sexual Entertainment and Economies Collection” at the University of Las Vegas on the same afternoon as the GayVN Awards. It provided a brief respite from the Strip and the event, and took place on campus a short car ride away.
Of all the invited speakers, the panel on sex worker rights featuring two speakers, Lotus Lain and Jessie Sage, who identify as performers and sex workers, proved to be the most enlightening and relevant. Lotus and Jessie shared their experience working in tandem with the Free Speech Coalition to fight SESTA/FOSTA bills. Part of the most indelible impressions they made, which triggered this cascade of questions that I opened this essay with, was the salient observation that so much of the infrastructure in the adult industry (especially the gay adult industry) have been established to protect the studios’ interests, since they are the ones with the deep pockets to fund and maintain these infrastructures. Even trade magazines are mostly reporting from the perspective of the studios and representing their interests since studios are paying for advertising space.
If we really want to consider the modus operandi Lotus and Sage insist on, that there should be “nothing about us without us”, nothing that is written about sex work or pornography without including the voice of the performer / sex worker, then how do we go about representing sex worker and performer rights and protecting our interests? How do we begin to design “awards”, produce writing, podcasts, news sites written by gay adult performers FOR other gay adult performers? For “nothing about us without us” to happen, the “us” must step in to fill this void.14 How does one expect a community that is often underpaid to afford the time and energy to do so on top of keeping up with the content creation cycle?
Isn’t this supposed to be the moment after the revolution? A period in time where adult performers have more autonomy than ever before? Or has the gig economy, as mentioned earlier in this essay, created even more individualized responsibility to make us all homosexual homo economicus15?
Have we just moved from one quagmire into another, as focus has shifted by the powers-that-be to mechanisms of circulation, networks of distribution “social media” - surrendering these empty factories and production infrastructures for the workers to manage ourselves? By adopting this strategy the current adult entertainment companies conveniently absolve themselves of responsibilities to their workers and tighten their stranglehold of what consumers can experience of the world through the control of meta infrastructure (Aylo/MindGeek’s PornHub, Fenix International’s OnlyFans, Chaturbate etc.).
This will be a dystopian and inhumane future indeed, not unlike the rows of cam-performers ‘live’ streaming from their fluorescent ring light lit booths that line one section of the expo, a future where sex work becomes a completely mechanized performance, and the humans a mere surrogate for the machine.
I did my STI/HIV panels before and after the event and my results were fine. It was also not the COVID virus, I tested multiple times over the past week.
This mold of gay male desire that Tom of Finland encouraged evolved into the Abercrombie and Fitch type that was mentioned earlier in the essay prioritized by gay porn studios and fellow performers.
I know the proliferation of “Toms” can get a little confusing, but stay with me.
When watching the nomination roll in aniticipation of our production being listed, I was surprised to realize that there were nominations that were not even mentioned during the show.
I was fortunate enough to work for a smaller studio PeterFever.com and two of our films were shortlisted for 2 out of the 15 main categories.
At the award ceremony, only a selected number of nominated clips from each category were screened during each category, and we were left out of the nominee roll both times. Who and what is the criteria for screening a clip of your performance on the big screen as part of the nominee roll? We will never know.
This is the name of the area the event organizers allocated for the “LGBTQ+ fan experience”.
Just to give you an idea of the discrepancy between the scale of the GayVN awards and the straight sister counterpart, the AVN Awards, the AVN awards have over 100 award categories compared to the GayVNs 33 awards. In XBIZ awards there are a mere 7 specifically gay categories out of over 150 award categories.
You can read about how owner Legrand Wolf frames it in this recent XBIZ interview: “Contrary to the prevailing trends, we reintroduced fantasy at a time when most of the industry was heavily invested in raw reality.” You can also trace it back to other interviews on XBIZ over the past few years. “Immersive fantasies” (16 Dec, 2019) and “Where Fantasy Belongs” (21 July, 2021)
Incidentally, it appears that in this instance, GayVNs took the lead in introducing a fan award segment, the main AVNs award show appeared to only introduce fan award segments later, with the first recorded on Wikipedia in 2022.
Aylo was previously known as MindGeek. Men.com, SeanCody.com are some sites under its umbrella. The biggest porn company by far, head to Wikipedia to read more about it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aylo
I did the calculations and can list the numbers, but hesitate to do so as some folks might not self-identify as AAPI, especially in an industry where race can be such a fraught conversation and where performers might strategically choose to remain racially ambiguous.
To be absolutely honest, I only realized this when Jkab posted about receiving his award belatedly on X, he did not managed to attend the awards to collect it in person. I updated this article on 16 Feb 2024 to reflect this change.
Jkab has been an inspiration, especially with championing and speaking up for minority representation. Watch him articulate his experience as an AAPI performer in Go-go for the Gold reality TV show season 2’s reunion episode 7. Jkab was also the only AAPI performer who was featured prominently in the GayVNs publicity leading up to the event and during the show (on those giant LED screens onstage).
To be clear, I am not faulting Alec Mapa personally for his creative comedic choices, some which were probably out of his control and in the writers’ hands. Neither am I saying that the figure of Alec needs to represent all gay Asian men, be hyper masculine, or virile. I am also perfectly comfortable with representations of a non hyper-masculine, more feminine form of sexual agency (see my previous writings responding to bottomhood as an agential position).
With Alec being one of the only few visibly AAPI representations onstage that evening (Jkab Ethan Dale was the other, who performed in video sequences as part of the publicity campaign shoot), he unfortunately ends up bearing most of the undistributed burden shaping how AAPI folks are perceived by the industry. One solution will be to include more folks to distribute this burden of representation.
There is more to be said about this, but perhaps another article in the future. Another colleague who has been in the industry for a longer time lamented about the fact that there used to be a specific “ethnic” nomination category in the GayVNs prior to 2011 before it went on a hiatus, where at a time when race as a fetish category was widely accepted as the standard in the industry.
Similar to current political conversations around affirmative action, there were arguments for and against this practice of having an “ethnic” category. There were some who missed having a category where they felt acknowledged and recognised by the industry, and others who felt the category itself made the issue of race self-contained while pitting black and brown performers against each other, creating unfair competition.
Some examples of excellent work that have been done to create content by us, for us are the podcast and video interviews available done by individuals involved in the industry. I Que Grande’s Demystifying Gay Porn is one such resource that comes to mind. There are more out there, but this will probably require a separate article in the future to unpack.
I’m specifically referring to Michel Foucault’s use of this term in The Birth of Biopolitics - which refers to his 1978-1979 lectures at the Collège de France.
No one else I know is writing about the gay adult industry like this guy. An insightful read, as always