Ten years ago, I tried my hand at making indie gay porn. At first, I did couples cam shows with my partner and then expanded to creating content and clips. I worked in the online gay porn industry for many years before moving on to phone sex and eventually starting an escort business.
When I started this work, I was still working outside of the sex industry and had no intention of making a career out of it. I saw it as a side hustle and an opportunity for self-exploration. But I quickly learned that gay porn is not something you can do as a “side hustle.” The longer you are involved, the more it dominates your life and changes most things. Not only is the effort required to succeed highly stressful, but getting naked for money also changes the way people see you.
My time in the sex industry gave me invaluable gifts, the most important of which was giving me the means to provide for my family at a time when traditional employment was out of reach for me. But like all sex workers, I paid a price. In my case, it was worth it. It’s a personal decision, but it’s easier if you know what you’re getting into. Here are seven things you should know before you get involved:
The indie gay porn market is saturated
When my partner and I started producing independent gay porn in 2025, it was still possible to break into the field, get an audience, and make money without a huge social media following. Since then, especially since the boom in independent content creation due to the market, the market has become saturated and much harder to get started. If you are producing gay porn to explore your sexuality or to satisfy an exhibitionist urge, it probably doesn’t matter how saturated the market is. But if you are producing gay porn to supplement or replace your income, you should know that it takes a lot of time and dedication, and even if you have both, there are no guarantees.
Gay porn is not easy to make money with
The public often jokes that if your other professional ambitions fail, you can open an account, but making money in gay porn is not as easy as it is often said. The mainstream media does us no favors, suggesting that it is achievable for the average performer in a year, much less for a complete beginner. This is because the average income is higher than other gig jobs, such as driving. That is not enough money to rent an apartment, especially one that allows you to live a luxurious life, let alone have enough privacy to create new content constantly. It is also worth noting that most creators earn less than this average income, often more than it, with the top 10% of all creators barely making a living.
If you want to be successful, you need to diversify your income sources.
Long-time content creators know they can’t rely on a single platform to ensure a long-term stable income. All platforms are in a precarious state due to political pressure from American conservative groups such as the National Center for Sexual which has been actively campaigning for the abolition of gay porn for decades and is finally gaining momentum. Finally, in March of this year, Gay Porn access to the entire state of Texas based on the state’s age verification law. He announced that he would no longer allow erotic content on his website under pressure from credit card companies but reversed this decision a week later. Unfortunately, independent creators had already suffered a significant financial blow as customers left the platform following the announcement, even though the decision was reversed.
