Burning the candle on both ends
A reflection on my content creation journey over the past 21 months: slowing down my output from August 1, 2024 onwards, switching to become a JustFor.Fans exclusive, and mapping out my future plans.
I began assisting my partner Tom/Thiktool with his rope bondage erotic photography in 2018. Over the next five years, I supported him with lighting and camera work and occasionally performed anonymously. Together, we met many amazing models, performers, and sex workers. These experiences introduced me to the intricate and fascinating world of the gay adult entertainment industry and the rope bondage kink community in the United States.
When my partner and I got married in December 2022, it came with the realization that rope bondage and erotic art is a fundamental aspect of what binds us. Embracing this aspect of our lives, we have committed to integrating kink into our shared journey. My partner has always been open about his passion for rope bondage, and I've seen how liberating it can be. To his credit, he has never pressured me into opening up, and allowed me to do so on my own terms and in my own time. As we plan our future together, we've discussed creating a production company for artistic erotic rope bondage photography and videography, and professionalizing our kinks through teaching and performance.
I started my fan site accounts (OnlyFans and JustFor.Fans) and made the first post on my fan sites in October 2022. There were two main intentions of starting my fan site:
First, I wanted to share my passion for rope bondage. While there is plenty of content from the perspective of a rope dominant, there is relatively little from the viewpoint of a rope bunny or submissive. I was curious to see if people would respond to this perspective, even if I was not sure there was a demand for it.
Second, I aimed to increase the diversity of Asian men's representation in the adult industry. Asian men are rarely featured in gay adult entertainment and often fall into racial stereotypes when they are.1 Typically desexualized in mainstream media,2 I hoped my work would challenge the trope of the passive, compliant Asian submissive. I wanted to explore the boundaries of racialized agency through submission and kink practices, and to think about more complex configurations of power beyond the polarizing extremes of submission and dominance.
What has transpired in 21 months?
Since embarking on this journey, I have performed professionally in eight partnered scenes and one solo scene for PeterFever and two scenes for Kink Men. I have traveled to Mexico City, Puerto Vallarta, Las Vegas, Palm Springs, Los Angeles and several other cities for filming. For my own content, I have worked with 60 models and filmed and edited close to a hundred scenes. I had the opportunity to work with many of the folks I look up to in the gay adult entertainment industry. These are folks that I will get off to in the past, who I will never imagine being able to meet, much less perform with, including Damian Dragon, Cody Seiya, Sammy Sinsss, Christian Wilde, Max Konnor, LeGrand Wolf, Brian Bonds etc.
For my work with PeterFever, I encouraged the studio to explore rope bondage, resulting in a series titled Tied-Up Tuesday, where we collaborated with rope rigger Dom Ellliot and created eight scenes featuring rope. As part of the series, we had a scene where I performed the role of a dominant bottom. My fellow performer Jay Tee was restrained as a submissive top and I took charge of the scene and used him. I also showcased a sensual soft rope bondage scene with colleague Nolan Knox, which was a departure from the aggression of most bondage scenes. Two of my scenes with PeterFever were nominated for the 2024 GayVN industry awards, where I was also nominated in the fan awards segment to be considered in the Best Newcomer category. You can read about my experience attending the GayVN awards here.
I was hired for two scenes with Kink Men, and wrote about my first experience filming with them here. As mentioned in that article, I was the first Asian-identifying new performer that was hired by the studio in recent times, with credit to director Micah Martinez for diversifying casting efforts during his stint with Kink Men.3
For my second scene, I was excited to not only be directed by veteran Kink Men dominant Christian Wilde, but also to be rigged by Van Darkholme, the rope bondage dominant that has directed and been featured in many scenes and done much for the representation of Asian men in the gay adult entertainment industry over the past two decades.
The most notable achievement since the start of my adult content creation journey will be our collaboration with Eli from Frock the World. The video featuring rope bondage with wax play is titled Human Chandelier and you can read more about the process of creation here.
Human Chandelier represented the epitome of what my partner and I set out to do, to feature erotic rope bondage in an artistic and sensual light, and we were heartened by its public reception. It was selected to be included in the first volume of the 2024 edition of Dan Savage’s Hump! Film Festival and played in 40 cities across the United States, Canada, the Netherlands, and Germany. At the end of its run, Human Chandelier was voted by the audience who attended the festival to receive both the Best Kink and Best In Show awards.
On the rope bondage education front, my partner and I have brought our 90-minute One Long Rope class to Cleveland and Atlanta and shared it with fellow kinksters at events in both cities. Both classes were well attended and received and featured us demonstrating our bondage philosophy, using rope as a tool for connection between the rope rigger and bunny.
In terms of academic theorization, I reflected on my own practice of archiving and performing sex on the threshold of obscenity as part of an artist panel at UC Berkeley titled Intimate Collections: Artists Archiving Sex in the Asian Diaspora. The presentation script is available here.
I also presented a first version of a paper at the Association of Asian American Studies conference in Seattle in April 2024 as part of a panel on queer Asian American diasporas. In it, I dissected a scene from the Kink Men catalog directed by Van Darkholme and examined the various layers of racialized spectatorship and performance while reflecting on my own experience of being a performer and sex worker.
Rethinking the embodiment of sex
In this brief 21-month period, I have had more consistent and passionate sex than I have ever had in my life. I extended the range of my sexual practice beyond what I felt immediately “comfortable” or “safe” and experimented with roles and fantasies that challenge my usual limits. With this extension of frequency and range, I gained a better sense of the difference between having sex for fun and performing sex for the camera, and rediscovered the small pleasures and delight of gay sex. I learnt that like any skill, the more you practice, the better you get at knowing how to do it and what brings you and your partner pleasure. Similarly, when you explore practices outside your range of comfort, it clarifies what you truly value in sex.
For example, one limit I pushed myself to experiment with was group scenes, the largest of which featured nine performers. I realized I find the raw sexual energy and exhibitionism of such scenes thrilling, but felt slightly disoriented during the performance because I am used to the intimacy, trust, and connection of a one-on-one scene. Even in large group scenes, I end up matching up with the same few partners repeatedly, seeking out that connection in a crowd, and this clarified what I valued in my sexual practice.
As a performer, I appreciate this visceral connection between the mind and the body, and the return to an embodied practice. I learnt how much my body can take, what is necessary for me to relax, and how to prepare as a bottom for a shoot. I used to be dependent on poppers or alcohol to relax as a bottom. Since the inclusion or use of poppers in videos are not permitted on fan sites, it has really given me the opportunity to rely on somatic practices to ease myself into performing. I applied techniques and knowledge I gained from other aspects of my life, from theater, from yoga, from mindfulness practice and applied it to my sexual performance.
Similarly, I have also experimented with thinking about sex in tandem with everyday activities, instead of couched in shame and compartmentalized as I was raised to think. This experience allowed me to consider the power of drawing erotic energy out from an isolated private space into public discussion and knowledge, and the potential impact it has on the self and others. I started being more aware about how sex affects my emotions and performance in non-sexual activities. After being open about pursuing mediated sex work, friends have also started sharing more about their sex lives with me and we are able to chat frankly about desire, fidelity, eroticism, and fetishes.
Rediscovering my vocational skills
In this overexposed arena of public opinion, you receive immediate feedback via social media and your fan sites about the work you are making and distributing. I have had an artistic and filmmaking practice for most of my life, but the feedback circuit is often delayed, taking up to months and years to get back to you. Having to hone my editing and production skills to take advantage of speed has been excellent training, and moving forward, I am not sure if I can return to more conventional modes of production and distribution.
There is something immensely gratifying about filming, editing and sharing something you have made within a short span of a couple of days, without being too precious about perfection. I have learnt how to take advantage of what Final Cut Pro editing software had to offer within these past two years more than when I had in all six years of film school. It was also a great opportunity to update my vocational skills to keep up with the recent developments in editing software development, including image stabilization, multicam editing, AI generated fills, automated captioning etc.
The thing that not enough fan sites or mediated sex workers talk about is the amount of copywriting this profession demands from you. From penning X or Instagram posts, to framing the synopsis of each video, to sending out mass messages to your followers or sustaining various ongoing conversation threads, you end up writing a lot. You attempt to come up with inventive and different ways to describe sex and all its details to remain aligned with your voice, while making it salacious enough to keep your followers and fans engaged, and toeing the content restrictions that vary from platform to platform. This is another vocational skill that I had to reacquaint myself with, especially since academic writing tends to permit more obtuse wording and complex communication.
In writing for social media, you adapt your writing to be concise, efficient, and impactful. You also become well-versed in the library of emojis 🙊 that have become part of contemporary parlance. It allowed me to consolidate my essay longer-form writing into this Substack, record my experience in further depth, and build my readership on this platform. I also discovered the use of AI large language model generative writing tools and how they can aid us in efficiency that I elaborated in further detail here.
Meeting perceived expectations
But beyond these positive aspects of content creation, there were also several challenging aspects of the industry that I had to negotiate with. The regard of race as a fetish category is still very much prevalent throughout the gay adult industry, and percolates into the content creation community. Asian performers are often underquoted, compensated at lower rates compared to our peers of other races, and tend to be sparingly hired.4
There are a number of studios and models who I have done fan content collaborations with, who have promised to work with me and hire me for paid studio scenes in the future, but those scenes never materialized. I have sent casting videos, photos and emails to various studios, networked with folks who work for studios at industry events with little success. To be fair, I did paint myself into a corner by claiming an identity that is not just racialized but on top of that, kinky. Time and time again, I have witnessed younger (and often whiter) creators who started at the same time or later get booked and blessed with studio shoots. It is difficult to remain optimistic and hopeful when this happens, but this is the reality of an industry which has yet to reckon with an in-depth conversation around race and representation.
I have had a fellow creator admit to me candidly that he enjoys filming scenes with other Asian performers, but the hard truth is that scenes featuring Asian co-performers do not perform as well on his sites. In his case, he claims that the choice of who to collaborate with is ultimately a business decision and not racism. This “business decision” is perhaps why I and other Asian content creators find it harder to find serious collaborators consistently, so much so that it becomes a constant source of stress for me to sustain a weekly update of a quality that I am proud of.
Even though it is up to us to determine the frequency of our updates and how to price our content, in order to remain competitive within a saturated market, the current expectation is for at least one or more updates a week, and charging no more than USD$10-15 per month for a fan site subscription.
This update frequency might be feasible for content creators focusing on non-kink or bondage-related scenes, or solo content, as it allows for faster video production without needing to find specialized creators who share your interests. In my case, due to my specific kinky proclivities, the considerable care I invest in post-production, and the time required for pre-production setup, it has been challenging to consistently meet these expectations.
Putting your body on the line
This speed and incessant cycle of production has also taken its physical and psychological toll. Even though I am on doxycycline and PrEP, the frequency and quantity of filming means that you do expose yourself to risk of STIs. Thankfully being a sexually active performer also means you get tested every couple of months and these are nipped in the bud relatively early. Beyond STIs, the frequency of travel and intimacy with people also means an increased risk of exposure to colds, COVID etc. Besides the strain of the physical performance itself on set, there is also the constant douching that is required as a bottom performer, the watching of one’s diet, and the networking and socializing at peripheral events that you are expected to attend to score the gigs you think you deserve.
When you are made to scrutinize every angle of your nude body consistently over time, especially because you edit most of your content, it is hard to not fall into the trap of body dysmorphia, and notice every single flaw that seems magnified by the camera lens. You invest a disproportionate amount of time into maintaining your weight and body to keep up with perceived desires, and you are harsher on yourself when you are reminded by the industry that you are already at a disadvantage because of your race. You are plagued with insecurity and anxiety when you are having a bad hair day, when your body does not cooperate with your filming requirements, or when you have an acne outbreak right before an important industry event. All these seemingly minute things eventually accumulate over time to wear you down physically and mentally.
OnlyFans and their prohibitive Terms of Service
Another challenge that I did not foresee, especially since it seems in their best interest to not to build an adversarial relationship with adult content creators who are their main source of income, is the prohibitive, opaque, and seemingly arbitrary terms of service of OnlyFans. To adhere to these terms of service and community guidelines, OnlyFans utilizes AI tools and algorithms to flag and remove any content that is suspicious, or consists of banned words like “meet” or “dog”. This is yet another layer of bureaucracy that adds to the difficulty of navigating this already challenging endeavor.
OnlyFans tends to be strictly heteronormative and kink-phobic because they come under close scrutiny from law enforcement agencies and financial institutions. Compared to other fan sites, their customer service takes relatively longer to respond to support tickets. When they do respond, their replies are often opaque, one-sided, and offer limited options for recourse or appeal.
As a concrete example, I had a video that was flagged by the AI algorithm because I titled the video Fun in the Sun, what I considered to be a relatively tame title featuring a non-kinky anal penetration scene filmed indoors in a sunny hotel room with huge bay windows. The content was flagged for “featuring public nudity.” I opened a support ticket asking why the video was flagged and taken down, and there was no response. After a couple of days, the video was restored with no explanation. I surmised that they assumed it was a video featuring content shot outdoors because of the title and description, but there was no way of learning what was the actual reason why the video was flagged. I compared notes with fellow creators, and my experience is similar to their interactions with the people hired to manage this platform.
Several of my close collaborators in the gay and kink content creation community have been removed and “blacklisted” by OnlyFans. This action not only hinders their ability to find new collaborators but also jeopardizes existing content. Despite having proper release forms, any content featuring blacklisted creators is at risk of removal. Furthermore, once a creator is banned, all past collaborations with them are flagged for deletion, effectively erasing their presence from the platform. Seeking out future collaborations with content creators on OnlyFans becomes more difficult for them.
This is not groundbreaking news. Creators talk and share information about it, knowing that the corporation does not provide enough support to its queer and kinky creators. Yet, despite all this talk, OnlyFans still remains the largest and most active fan site5, one that most adult content creators remain beholden to. Perhaps the platform basks in its complacency because it understands that creators are overly reliant on the site, so much so that OnlyFans can get away with restricting a minority group of creators without impunity. The questions we need to answer, and the questions I constantly ask after bringing in a five-figure income via the site is:
Why are we working so hard, investing so much time and creative energy into a corporation that does not have the interests of its independent contractors at heart?
Why do we continue to give 20% of our earnings to a corporation that does so little for its community, that at one point even sought to disavow the constituency that made the site the global success it is?
Most significantly, I have started to notice how my work and collaborations have increasingly become less about rope bondage and kink, and more normative and “vanilla” because of concerns around censorship and proscription by OnlyFans. A hetero-normative platform attracts a fan base with similar desires, and the terms of service and statistical success of certain types of videos on the platform have insidiously started to pull my work away from the initial two intentions why I chose to pursue adult content creation in the first place - which is to showcase kink and rope bondage and scenes with a diverse group of bodies, races, and age.
I ask myself: If my main intention in participating in this adult creator economy is to reconfigure expectations and desires, why am I conforming to the conservative limitations of one platform that caters to the largest common denominator?
Becoming a JustFor.Fans exclusive
The potential of a platform that does have the interest of its community at heart became clear when I attended the JustFor.Fans creators event in Palm Springs in March 2024. This was a weekend conference organized by the platform for its creators. Creators pay for our own travel and lodging, but the events were free to attend. This included a networking pool party, content creation events, and knowledge sharing panel discussions. Unlike the siloed environment of OnlyFans - where the infrastructure of the site actively prevents us from discovering other creators and where creators are placed in competition with each other, the JustFor.Fans event allowed creators to share best practices, and to build community and a support system.
In terms of site infrastructure, JustFor.Fans is a smaller company with fewer resources compared to OnlyFans, and the user interface is also correspondingly less sleek. Beyond the visual interface, the founder, who codes the site himself, runs a tight and efficient ship. Support tickets are often answered by a dedicated team within the day and you eventually get to know them on a first name basis. Creators are polled for our opinions on what features we would like to see on the site, and our opinions are taken into consideration. Most importantly, the platform gives money back to the community through its sponsorship and support of gay and kink events, where it registers its presence with a booth at events and hires their models to staff them.6
It is with all this in mind that I am switching to become a JustFor.Fans exclusive model from August 1, 2024 onwards. This is not an easy decision for me to make, as half of my current fan site income comes from OnlyFans, but I believe this is a right decision moving forward.
This means that my OnlyFans platform will be dormant, with no further updates after August 1, 2024. This way, I can focus my limited energy and time in updating a platform that I know supports the queer and kink community, and the work that I value. My archive of existing content will remain accessible on both platforms.
If you are currently subscribed to my OnlyFans, I encourage you to sign up for my JustFor.Fans site to continue to receive future updates of my adult content. To encourage your transition, here is a link to an introductory promotion to my Justfor.Fans site - $4.99 for 30 days.
These 21 months have been a great run, but also demanded my full-time attention. As some of you following my writing will know, I am still in the midst of finishing up my PhD. In the coming year, I will be required to channel my attention and time back to writing my dissertation and teaching responsibilities. I will be moving back to the Bay Area temporarily to fulfil these academic obligations in September 2024, which also means my ability to update my sites will have to take a backseat to my graduate studies.
I am still performing with various studios, and have a couple of exciting collaborations in the pipeline. I look forward to providing further updates here and on my platforms in time to come. Most importantly, I am taking this time to take stock of what I have done, and reflect on my original intentions for starting this adult content creation journey.
I question if I am still finding pleasure and joy in what I am doing, and if not, is there a better way for me to attain my original intentions in more effective ways beyond putting my body on the line?
Are my limited resources better spent pursuing other projects, especially since this adult content creation market appears to be increasingly throttled by restrictions imposed by social media infrastructure and platforms?
Most significantly, as we witness more and more creators entering the market, are we reaching a saturation point?
As my colleague Dane Jaxson frames it: “Each day, there is a better, younger version of you” entering the fray. Perhaps it is time to make space, and allow others who have more energy, who are more deserving, to take the lead.
What to expect in the future?
I had a friend ask me if going into pornography and adult content creation is an irrevocable decision. I answered honestly that it is, I believe that once you have committed to this path, there is no escaping it for the rest of your life. As I have experienced from my previous work,7 these images will continually come back to find you, often in the most surprising and unexpected ways. My commitment to the gay adult industry is permanent, and as I wrote in my first article, I still strongly believe in the worldmaking potential of our intervention in this system of erotic representation.
For the near future, beyond returning focus to my graduate studies, I will be supporting my partner in the rebuilding and relaunch of his website, and we will continue creating quality rope bondage content for it. In this updated site, we hope to offer our own subscription platform that showcases both our work. I have also been taking basic rope bondage classes and want to be a better rope switch and eventually be able to rig my own scenes in a couple of years, but this will take much more practice and dedication. As mentioned earlier, we are turning our focus to education and knowledge production, both receiving knowledge from other rope bondage folks, but also sharing what we know. We continue to pursue opportunities to co-teach and will be conducting a class on rope bondage and photography at the inaugural Men Roping Men rope bondage conference in San Francisco in October 2024.
I am also at the very early stages of pitching and preparing a treatment for a feature documentary that I am co-directing, that I hope will materialize further down the road. There are many rich and complex stories that I have encountered in conversation with other creators over these months, and I hope this documentary will be a way to shift representation and humanize some of our struggles, while highlighting unique personalities to transcend racial stereotypes. The concept for this documentary is to chronicle the lives of four to five gay adult content creators in the United States as they reshape the portrayal of Asian masculinity in the media. We are in the midst of doing pre-production and fundraising work for this project, which will take at least two to three years to complete, and I hope to share more information on our progress in time to come.
Thank you for reading and supporting my work so far, and special thanks to my partner, alongside all my various collaborators including models, videographers, editors, and fans who made this a exhilarating run for me thus far. While this might mark a pivot in my content creation journey, I hope that you stay tuned for greater things to come!
Fung, Richard. “Looking for my Penis: The Eroticized Asian in Gay Video Porn” Q&A: Queer and Asian in America. Edited by David L. Eng and Alice Hom. Anthology. 1998.
Nguyen, Tan Hoang. A View from the Bottom : Asian American Masculinity and Sexual Representation. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014.
Shimizu, Celine Parrenas. Straitjacket Sexualities: Unbinding Asian American Manhoods in the Movies. Stanford University Press, 2012.
After my first scene with Kink Men, I noticed that the studio has continued to hire and work with other amazing Asian performers like Hans Cross.
Hallie Lieberman’s “Asian Men Are Marginalized In Porn. Gay Male Performers Are Changing the Narrative” in Cashmere Magazine. June 14, 2023.
From a November 9, 2023 Washington Post article: “If OnlyFans’s creator earnings were taken as a whole, the company would rank around No. 90 on Forbes’s list of the biggest private companies in America by revenue, ahead of Twitter (now called X), Neiman Marcus Group, New Balance, Hard Rock International and Hallmark Cards.”
In full disclosure, I was one of the models who was hired to staff their booth and promote the platform in Atlanta, and go-go dance for a party they were sponsoring in Palm Springs.
I am thinking of my performance in the 2007 film Pleasure Factory, where I had a full-frontal nude scene, and in my 2012 performance reenactment documented and disseminated online. Read my The Intimacies of Obscenity article for a more thorough review of my past work.
Brilliant, and insightful. If only more academics were this honest.