(Men’s sexual bodies and man-on-man sex discussed in street language, so not appropriate for kids or the sexually modest)
Gay Pornlandia celebrates the American commercial holiday Fathers / Father’s / Fathers’ Day with annual sales on wares explicitly featuring Boys and their Daddies, or gay male roles and relationships in that sociosexual neighborhood (running the scale from temperamentally contrasted boyfriends to subs / slaves / boys vs. doms / masters / sirs in BDSM practices).
From my 6/21/15 posting “My hard-on belongs to daddy, for Fathers Day (which always comes in the middle of Gay Pride Month), on daddy – boy films (taking off from the 2011 Catalina flick Daddy It Hurts!):
(#1) Spencer Reed as a muscle-hunk daddy — and calliphallic top — and Cole Harvey as a twinkish boy — and callipygian bottom (naughty bits cropped for WordPress modesty)
In this world boy and daddy name “types”, personas, or social roles — and also relationships; these can be more or less conventionalized or ritualized and so framed as identities (in which case the talk will be about a Boy and his Daddy)
Casting matters as sharply counterposed characteristics for boy vs. daddy (yes, yes, you will see here the ghostly echoes of the normative gender opposition feminine vs. masculine):
— youthful, playful, inexperienced, younger vs. mature, serious, experienced, older
— accommodating, cooperative, supportive, submissive vs. assertive, competitive, in control, dominating
— twinkish or athletically lithe body type vs. bearish or muscle-hunk type
— sexual bottom vs. sexual top
— hence, callipygian presentation (boy offers you his beautiful fuckable ass) vs. calliphallic presentation (daddy offers you his handsome big hard dick to jack off, suck, or take up your ass)
With this as background, the e-mail ad (again, cropped) for this year’s TitanMen Fathers Day sale:
(#2) The ad identifies this as Lucas Leon in a porn flick Highway; that is some version of Lucas Leon (and his big hard tits), but I can find no evidence of a TitanMen flick named Highway; however, what I care about here is Leon and his function in the ad, so I’ll just let the film drift past
I’ll pick out four things in the ad:
— boys and their daddies, briskly reviewed above; and see the Page on this blog about my postings on Daddy – Boy relationships (and DILFs)
— the one-word NP text in the ad: Daddies! Who’s saying this, to what audience, for what purpose? And what does it have to do with the figure of Lucas Leon in the ad?
— Leon’s dick in the ad; what you don’t see in the cropped ad is fine pornstar standard dick (an uncut 7ʺ), shown rock-hard and jutting straight out like a thick flagpole attached to his crotch — an effect I find remarkable but risible rather than arousing (I remind you that I’m someone who can get little cock-tingles just from fleeting thoughts of penises). Leon’s dick just reminds me of metal or wooden artefacts — a flagpole, or maybe better, a wall hook, for hanging up a hat or coat. Below I’ll look at some wall hooks that people might be inclined to view as metaphorical dicks; I’m inclined instead to view Leon’s dick as presented in the TitanMe ad as a metaphorical wall hook (presented as a human bodypart).
This might seems merely perverse to you, but understand that my photos of wall hooks are posed (but reasonably faithful) representations of the actual objects, while the Lucas Leon you see in the ad is, yes, a posed representation of the actual actor (in character as “Lucas Leon”), but one that’s stupendously far from a reasonably faithful representation of the actor; it’s a hugely doctored image, barely recognizable as a photograph at all, and if you know anything about how the “Lucas Leon” character is presented in publicity photos (I’ll show you some below), you’ll have trouble recognizing the guy in #2 as this character. The guy in #2 is some kind of fictitious hard, tough Daddy built from some of Leon’s physical features for the purpose of selling jack-off material for fags like me (remember, I’m an enthusiastic consumer of this stuff), some of whom long deeply for a fantasy encounter as a Boy serving such a Daddy. (There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. It’s far from any of my customary fantasies, but on exploring more of Boyland for this posting, I tried out several varieties of Boy Submits to Demanding Daddy and found that they can be made to work quite satisfyingly for me. Ah, there are always new things to experience.)
— the character “Lucas Leon”. The porn persona of the actor who uses the professional name Lucas Leon is remarkably consistent. And it has nothing to do with the Hard-Daddy “Lucas Leon” in #2. Over several years, the actor has altered his physical appearance, bulking up considerably (if he’s still a twink, he’s a muscle-twink) and letting his naturally hairy body do its thing unimpeded (ok, a hairy muscle-twink, why not?) — but his character’s personality and sexual attitudes and inclinations seem to have changed very little. And in the center of all that he’s an amiable bottom who finds Boy parts especially congenial. Surprise!
(Meanwhile, we know only a little about how the actor conducts himself in the business when he’s not in character in front of a camera, and almost nothing about the man’s life outside of his sexwork, except that he’s a serious gamer.)
Details, Professor, we need details. Yes, yes.
Daddies! It would appear that the male figure with the jutting dick is either the speaker of Daddies! (either attracting the attention of viewers who are Daddy types by calling to them with the news that here’s something on offer that would appeal to them, or merely announcing to the viewers that Daddy types are on offer in the Fathers Day sale) or is serving as an exemplar of the Daddy type on offer, the source of Daddies! being the generic voice of the TitanMen company. Or of course both.
What we have in Daddies! is a stand-alone, or isolated, NP (a plural isolated NP that happens to be a single word, but Hot Daddies! or Big hard Daddies! or Daddies with big dicks! or Daddies who fuck their Boys hard and deep! would illustrate the same points as the minimal NP Daddies!). So I now turn to the handout for my Stanford SemFest 5 paper (delivered 3/12/04), “Isolated NPs”, which surveys the uses of isolated NPs. Two would seem to fit with #2:
— call vocative (designed to catch the addressee’s attention — cf. Hey, you Daddies!); or
— telegraphic offer (cf. Get yer Daddies here!)
There are at least two other uses that are not entirely out of the question as the speech act being performed in #2:
— exclamative (as in Daddies! Oh, honey, who can tell what they’ll do?)
— telegraphic request (as in Daddies! Need two Daddies over here, pronto! Desperate Boy needs double-teaming in aisle 2!)
The jutting dick, flagpoles, and wall hooks. My first thought on seeing the jutting dick in #2 was: flagpole. Flagpoles are made of metal, or sometimes wood, rather than human flesh, but then it’s an analogy. Flagpoles are also much longer than human penises, even the hyperbolic ones in Tom of Finland drawings, and they’re most often installed to angle upwards rather than jut horizontally. But horizontal is possible:
(#3) From the (Qatari) Ubuy listing on Amazon, a house flagpole kit: a 6ʹ stainless steel flagpole; a 3ʹ x 5ʹ nylon American flag; plus flagpole rings and brackets
Well, erect penises are very often angled up too, so the flagpole analogy isn’t so shabby. (Yes, there is a Page on this blog about postings on the angle and curvature of erect penises. No, I have no idea of the relative frequency of horizontal vs. up-angled.)
But there’s a better analogy. Looking at the dick in #2, I thought, hey, you could certainly hang a hat or coat on that. It might not be the greatest flagpole (just to note that my disabled right hand keeps typing fagpole, which is certainly appropriate to the context), but it would make a pretty good wall hook. Like this one:
(#4) NAUMOO black walnut wood wall hooks (sold on Amazon); short and thick, analogous to fireplug or kielbasa dicks
And of course there are up-angled wall hooks:
(#5) HomeDo beechwood wall-mounted hat racks / coat hooks (sold on Amazon)
The character Lucas Leon. We get to discuss Lucas Leon here only because the TitanMen Fathers Day ad identifies the actor — in barely legible small print below the image. Most sale ads don’t identify the actors or films; it seems to be assumed that few viewers care about these details, and anyway the function of the images in the ads is just to parade fag-enticing male bodies, not to provide information.
But Titan gave us the information, and eagle-eyed AMZ noticed it, with some surprise (by his hair, his face shape, and his prominent tits you shall know him). So, some notes on Leon the porn actor (and, more generally, the sexworker) and specifically on his porn persona.
Very few basic facts are available. The Lucas Entertainment site lists him as a bottom, with an uncut 7ʺ dick (the pornstar standard), height 5ʹ9ʺ. In a GLUE Magazine (“LGBTQ+ news and entertainment from around the world”) interview (not dated, but I’m guessing from 2022), he says he’s 29, lives in West Hollywood but was born in Brazil. He started in the business in 2018; since then he’s done roughly 50 films with a huge range of studios.
His porn persona — LL in what follows — has held constant throughout these years: this LL character is ass-proud the way some people are house-proud, displaying his gorgeous ass, flaunting it for any audience, but especially for any man who might want to fuck him; and keeping it in shape as part of a rigorous schedule of working out in the gym. LL’s not just a bottom, but a celebratory uberbottom. (Meanwhile, he offers his own hard dick for men to jack off, or perhaps suck off.)
LL is also comfortable in all sorts of submissive roles, welcoming cum facials and drinking piss — gifts of a dominant man’s body. Through all of this he manages to be amiable, even charming, not at all like a guy in the vise hold of an unmanageable obsession. LL enjoys it all, and he enjoys giving his sexual partners what they want, getting them off. He smiles lovely smiles, of several different varieties.
So: ass-proud, and also tit-proud. Apparently nature gave him significant nipples. He’s been working on them to make them even better, and encourages men to work them over roughly. These men give him the pleasure of low-grade pain, he gives them the pleasure of abusing him.
When he started in the business, LL presented himself as an Appolonian beauty, lithe, slim, smooth, and sleek. As here:
(#6) Falcon Studios callipygian p.r. shot from 2018: almost smooth-shaven body, lovely smile
But then LL gradually roughened his image, letting out more of the natural hairiness of his body that you can see in his forearms in #6; cultivating facial scruff; and beginning to bulk up in the gym. Here he is in what I think of as his Middle Period, with the emergence of the hairy butch uberbottom (LL’s junk merkined out for WordPress modesty):
(#7) Body hair trimmed; fine pecs; nice half-smile with the mouth, plus smizing: a presentation as a nice guy, and even better, he’s totally available, you call the shots (in the words of the wonderful t-shirt: FUCK ME LIKE THE WHORE I AM); meanwhile, significant amping up in butchness
(Oh, yeah: big hands.)
Leon was working with the Lucas company shooting his first bareback film, Servicing Daddy’s Dick (2018) — yes! we are back to Fathers Day! — paired with Michael Lucas (a famously tough ubertop) himself. In the second scene, as described in the Lucas p.r.:
Lucas Leon wants to prove to Michael Lucas how much of a good boy he is. Michael likes his boys to obey, so Lucas makes good use of his submissive talents to suck Michael off, get his ass licked, and take raw dick deep. Lucas Leon gets his prostrate hit plenty until he can’t take it anymore and shoots his load.
There are two threads in this account. One is a telling of sexual acts: LL sucks ML’s cock, gets rimmed by ML, gets fucked hard and deep by ML, shoots his load. That’s just stuff, as I’m fond of saying: just perceptible things, situations, or events. The other thread has to do with the interpretations that the participants place on this stuff — in effect, the emotional meanings that the stuff has for them. In the fiction of the second scene of Servicing Daddy’s Dick, the raw actions are understood, at a very high level of abstraction, to be part of a Daddy – Boy interaction, in which the Boy submits to the desires of his Daddy, to earn the satisfactions of his emotional and sexual attentions (remember that LL finds anal stimulation — in particular, through being rimmed and fucked — intensely pleasurable, so he seeks out ways to gain this satisfaction) and to satisfy his Daddy emotionally (by affording him a sense of power, through the control of another man) and sexually (by getting him off).
[Digression. Notes on emotional meanings. Servicing Daddy’s Dick is Gebrauchsfilm, utilitarian fiction on film, a form that doesn’t demand much nuance or complexity — though it’s not antipathetic to it; it all depends on what a crew does with the script. In addition, filmed porn is a highly extemporaneous, improvisatory form (analogous to jazz, rap, or Indian ragas); the script provides a rough sketch, and the cast riffs on that, introducing all manner of emotional content from their own experience or imagination. Finally, this is film, a strongly visual art form that values showing over telling, and there’s only so much emotional meaning that can be conveyed visually. So there’s a lot we don’t get.
Bottom men frequently find the sensation of being filled up by their partner’s dick very satisfying physically (“Fill me up with that big cock!” is the sexcry), and on occasion, also experience having another man’s body inside their own as an emotionally intense union with the other man, figuratively sharing each other’s masculine power and multiplying it (“Gimme that big cock!” is a sexcry that covers some of this territory: make your cock mine!). Still other bottoms on occasion experience the raw intensity of getting fucked as a test of strength and endurance, a chance to show that they can, figuratively, take it like a man, and they’ll cry out to get fucked harder and deeper. Still other bottoms on occasion configure getting fucked as a service to another man, giving him a warm wet hole to come in, and they might then beg him to shoot his hot load in their assholes. There’s more, quite a lot more, but the point of these examples is that these emotional meanings for bottoms — there’s another big collection for tops — can’t be conveyed visually; if they’re to be expressed at all — in the heat of the act, in anticipation of it, or in recollection of it — that has to be in words.
So most of the emotional content of the act is simply inscrutable in gay porn. For porn, that’s largely a good thing, since it allows the viewer to import his own emotional meanings into the acts on screen, up to the constraints in the rough sketch of the film (gangbang, romance, watersports, Daddy – Boy, first time, t-room, S&M, whatever). Even in real life, even if you’re the sort of guy who reflects on and analyzes his inner emotional life (a great many men are not at all given to this kind of thought), you might not want to reveal these feelings to others.]
Meanwhile, while LL is butching himself up, he’s also fully embracing Boy status — not just with Michael Lucas, but also (for instance) with top Cade Maddox, in scene 3 of Icon Male’s 2019 Blended Family, where LL, getting doggy-pounded hard by Maddox, cries out wildly, “Fuck me, Daddy!” He’s honing a porn persona in which he’s inviting, even demanding, to be used and abused by powerful men, taking pleasure from the physical sensations of their acts and from the satisfactions of giving them the physical and emotional pleasures they seek.
Late Period LL and the emotional meanings of one man servicing another. The photo, following on #6 and #7, from LL recently on Twitter (@lucasleonxxx), where he describes himself as a “big beefy hairy gaymer bottom” (and shows off his big tits):
(#8) Fully hairy body, bearded rather than scruffy, his characteristic mane of hair now wild rather than styled, huge muscular pecs (lots of gym hours there), plus those tits; still an uberbottom, but now in a seriously butch body — and presenting himself with a rougher manner, challenging men to work his tit hards and fuck the cum out of him
Compare this to the much more composed — but note the jutting moose-knuckle — somewhat earlier hairy-muscletwink photo from the GLUE interview, presumably taken in the actor’s West Hollywood apartment:
(#9) Well, this is a photo of the actor, not of LL in performance as one of his characters in a porn film fiction, but things are more complex than that, since this too is a performance, of the public LL, or LLP.
Think of LLP as the guy who does the public appearances, interacts with fans on Twitter and elsewhere, reports on the filming, release, and reception of LL’s porn work, and takes on the side jobs — escorting, hustling, dancing, stripping, giving live sex shows, doing phone or net sex, selling his photos and videos, writing advice columns, whatever — that make LL’s porn career viable (hardly anyone can live on the income from acting in the films, and even if you could, you can’t swing that for very many years.)
Meanwhile, the actor — real-life LL, or LLR — might have, in his private life, an ordinary job that provides him with some income. Other men who act in porn are (at least part-time) accountants, bartenders, florists, wedding photographers, pizza boys, secretaries, truckers, waiters, dog groomers, any number of things. As far as I can tell, LLR has no private occupation, so he depends on LL’s and LLP’s work to make a living.
LL’s and LLP’s money-making activities are real work, requiring skills of many kinds, considerable time, and application to these crafts. Yes, they involve having sex with other men, commanding an admiring audience, and getting guys off, activities that can be pleasurable and rewarding in themselves — but that here are elements of structured and demanding occupations.
Here I point out that not only is LL’s porn work performance (of various story forms, notably Daddy / Boy and other dominant / submissive forms), so are LLP’s side appearances, in particular his postings on Twitter and other social media, which are in fact teaser sales pitches for subscriptions to his fan pages (originally on Onlyfans, now on JFF (Just for fans)); some discussion below. Those performances have evolved over four or five years, through a series of shifts in personas, maintaining his submissive stance but toughening up the presentations of his characters, meanwhile moving further into BDSM practices (on screen).
Note that I distinguish LLR, LL, and LLP and various personas for LL and LLP (presumably also for LLR, just because that’s the way people are, but we know very little about the actor’s private life), but surely these identities and personas are not unrelated to one another (I would be utterly dumbfounded if it turned out that the actor in his private life was a total aggressive top, who had just found that he could get good gigs in the gay porn business by playing submissive bottoms); in fact everything leaks into everything else, in very complicated ways. Still, the distinctons are important.
Two things.
First thing. The question of the emotional meanings of fucking for top men. The physical pleasures are of having your hard cock encased in, embraced by, a warm sleeve — which is, moreover, inside another man’s body. A body that is, in the default case, underneath you; leaving you free to thrust into it energetically. From which a range of emotional values can spring, among them: activity, freedom, energy, control, dominance, invasion, conquest, superiority, contempt.
If you’re a top, what sort of bottoms do you seek out? I know, you’ll say you want a hot guy with a hot ass, but there’s a huge taste range as to what counts as hot in a man, and also a large range of different types of desirable male buttocks. Beyond that, there are two taste oppositions that play a big role in male partner choice for (at least) many American men (these oppositions are tied to normative masculinity in complex ways):
— some tops seek out easy marks, bottoms who openly offer themselves; other tops are inclined to disregard such partners, preferring instead to overcome resistance or reluctance in a potential partner (a “worthy opponent” to be defeated)
— some tops seek out conventionally less masculine bottoms (opposites attract); other tops have a strong preference for bottoms who are (in their estimation) at least as masculine as they are (like attracts like)
Now, LL and LLP will probably always be easy marks, pantingly enthusiastic to get fucked and sexually used in general (though of course LL might accept a porn role that runs counter to his porn persona). But you can see the butching up and roughing up of LL’s and LLP’s porn personas over time as a move to appeal to Masc Seeks Same.
Second thing. Porn fandom and its monetization. Porn fans have always been inclined to conflate the actors, their porn personas, their public identities, and the characters they’ve portrayed; to treat these men as like acquaintances; and to want to get close to them in one way or another. Studios and individual actors sometimes facilitated such connections, offering photo sets, chatting for a fee, and the like. Various ways of monetizing porn fandom.
More recently, the business has been systematized, via subscription platforms that coordinate and manage these connections. LLP now uses JustFor.Fans / Just for fans / JFF (“free, uncensored photos / videos plus premium content”), which he advertises on Twitter and elsewhere. This is one of the part-time jobs for LLP, and the more effort he puts into it the more he earns. A JFF subscription is $11.99 a month; JFF content providers receive 80% commission on their earnings, including subscriptions, paid messages and tips.
Before JFF (which is specifically designed for gay porn performers), LLP used OnlyFans. From Wikipedia:
OnlyFans is an internet content subscription service based in London, United Kingdom. Content creators can earn money from users who subscribe to their content — the “fans”. It allows content creators to receive funding directly from their fans on a monthly basis as well as one-time tips and the pay-per-view (PPV) feature.The website has two million content creators and 130 million users.
The service is popular with sex workers in pornography, but it also hosts the work of other content creators, such as physical fitness experts and musicians.
But then things got complicated. From the New York Times Magazine on-line on 5/16/22, “The ‘E-Pimps’ of OnlyFans: Clever marketers have figured out how easy it is to simulate online intimacy at scale, ventriloquizing alluring models with cheap, offshore labor” by Ezra Marcus (in print on 5/22):
OnlyFans started in 2016, and has since emerged as the top platform worldwide for creators to sell monthly subscriptions for self-produced erotic content. The platform has become synonymous with this sort of business, though some use it for other purposes. It served as a financial lifeline for many in the pandemic, allowing people to monetize time spent indoors. In 2019, there were reportedly 120,000 content creators using the platform; by December 2020, that number had risen to more than a million. Many creators on the site aren’t just posting nudes. The real product is relationships. Money from subscriptions can be trivial compared with the profits earned by selling custom videos, sexting sessions and other forms of fan interaction that require more concerted engagement than simply posting to a feed.
The platform then began using hired chatters, fictive content providers: real people providing the fan interaction (primarily e-sex) in place of the actual content providers, and at low rates of pay. JFF seems to be much more tightly managed.
I am an enthusiastic user of gay porn, and a student of its forms, of the business, and of the (actual) lives of the pornstars, but I’m not a porn fan in the usual sense, so I won’t be subscribing to any of the fan sites. Meanwhile, I wonder where LL and LLP are going next.
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