“The internet is for porn.”
That immortal line from the hit musical “Avenue Q” fairly sums up a truth you won’t necessarily read about in Forbes.
The queer adult entertainment business model has evolved dramatically over the years, with leaders like Legrand Wolf and Carnal Media paving the way. In this article, we explore how the internet has shaped the queer porn industry.
According to the cybersecurity firm Webroot:
Every second:
- 28,258 users are watching porn on the internet
- $3,076 is being spent consuming porn
Every day:
- 370,000 pornographic videos are uploaded to the internet
In total:
- 25% of all search engine queries are related to porn
- 35% of all internet downloads are for porn
- 40 million Americans regularly visit porn sites
The German-based data analytics company Statista estimates the entirety of the porn industry rakes in more money than any one of the Tiffany networks like ABC, NBC, or CBS. In fact, the porn industry rakes in more revenue than the NFL, MLB, and the NBA, combined.
While there isn’t clear data for how much of available porn content on the web is of the same-sex variety, according to a 2024 year-end report by Pornhub Insights, among the content of each of the top six most-searched performers on the site is a significant library of same-sex content.
Evolution of the Queer Adult Entertainment Business Model
But it wasn’t always this way.
Up until the early 2000s if you wanted access to gay porn, you’d have to hit up a bookstore and either rent or buy a video. You might look for a flick by your favorite “Porn Star” like Jeff Stryker or the latest title from All Worlds, Falcon, or Titan.
Now, Jeff Stryker is eligible for social security, and those days of sauntering into a bookstore to pick up the latest skin flick by Treasure Island are gone, and so too is the ecosystem they supported.
The internet changed the porn distribution model. As Netflix and streaming services killed off Blockbuster and Hollywood Video, the availability of porn being just a click away dealt a death blow to many adult book shops that once thrived on the foot traffic of renting, buying or previewing videos.
In this new internet landscape, studios that relied heavily on brick-and-mortar distribution models and were slow to digitize were lost to time and innovation. However, some porn companies seized the opening and thrived.
Arguably, the biggest online studio in the early 2010s was SeanCody.com. Because legacy companies like Falcon were slow to respond to the changing distribution environment, newcomers like SeanCody were able to capture huge market share by going straight-to-consumer with their membership-based business model. While hardly diverse in their casting, SeanCody’s format paved the way for the direct-to-consumer business model.
Once a unique and powerful voice in the space, now SeanCody is just a brand owned by the Canadian porn conglomerate Aylo, which also owns PornHub, Men.com, and several other dot com porn destinations. Aylo itself (formerly MindGeek) was purchased in 2023 by a private equity firm called Ethical Capital Partners (and no, that’s not a joke). The cost of the acquisition has not been disclosed, but the price tag had to be pretty low, all things considered. Aylo was facing multiple class action lawsuits, settlements, and fines in the millions of dollars.
A New King of Queer Internet Porn?
While once the bragging rights of SeanCody, the title of “king of queer internet porn” may now very well belong to performer, producer, director, and co-owner of the Carnal family of brands, Legrand Wolf.
It may be a surprising title for a guy who was born in Utah with the very Mormon name of Levi, and who, before he launched what is now a genuine porn empire, was a university researcher.
Wolf married his husband Jay in 2009, and while on their honeymoon, the pair decided to moonlight by getting into the porn industry — as one does.
For the Wolfs, the decision wasn’t entirely profit-based. To understand that, one needs to understand Legrand Wolf.
In addition to being a legit smoke-show at a muscular 6 foot 6 and fully embracing his Daddy era, Wolf is well educated, intelligent, and thoughtful. He is deliberate, and his business success also reveals him to be intentional, especially around decisions regarding diversifying portfolios and branding.
“I believe the fundamental difference between straight people and gay people is the sex we have,” Wolf, a former sociologist, said. “That’s it. That’s the only real difference.”
For him, then, creating curated adult content with queer themes is, in part at least, Wolf’s way of normalizing queer culture. “You have to get to the point where no one cares,” he said.
Film What You Know
Perhaps it was his drive to normalize queer sex and queer fantasy that led Wolf to start his porn career by creating fantasy-based porn that recalled his upbringing as a Mormon, especially a ritual called the Temple Endowment Ceremony.
“When I was in the temple as an 18-year-old,” Wolf said, “I was there with a bunch of older men who watched me strip naked and put on this magic underwear.”
He explained that the ceremony was quite intimate, with various men participating. “One of them gave me what an outsider might consider a kind of inspection, touching my body all over.”
As the ceremony progressed, Wolf described how another older man rubbed his genitals and gave him a ceremonial washing and anointing. “This is normal,” Wolf said. It’s what happens during this stage after a young Mormon man turns 18. “During all this, it’s not at all uncommon for young men to get aroused,” Wolf explained. And, “It felt quite sexual.”
If that sounds like the opening scene to the kind of fantasy porn you’d find under the “Masonic Boys,” brand, you’d be right. It is one of the Carnal properties, and the similarities are intentional.
“We wanted to own the Mormon narrative in a way,” Wolf said. “What we created was a love letter to our Mormon upbringing.”
One of These Things Is Not Like the Other
Unlike many of Carnal’s predecessors, within the various brands inside the company, viewers will find a diversity of performers, in age, ethnicity and body type, often working opposite each other in what Wolf calls “Contrast Porn.”
This is how Wolf describes fantasy genres like a daddy with a younger twink, a coach with a player, or a doctor with his patient. The decided king of this contrast style for the Carnal brands is “Fun Size Boys,” which features performers like Milo Miles, a diminutive 5-foot-4-inch toned Colombian with the much taller Wolf. In one of their fantasy fun-size pairings, Miles presents himself as a tasty birthday present for “Dr. Wolf,” surprising the doctor when he arrives home, presumably from a long day of doctoring.
As far as Wolf is concerned, there will always be a market for fantasy-based porn, and it plays an important part in his original reason for getting into the business.
“We are normalizing fantasy,” Wolf said.
However, some of Carnal’s fantasy brands rim the edge of the taboo, like inappropriate family relationships, or how priests and/or mentors who young men look up to exact penance during surprisingly sinful confessions, sometimes in surprisingly spacious confessionals.
When asked about whether those taboo fantasies exceeded a moral or social line, Wolf didn’t hesitate. “Fiction is good,” he said, “but it’s fiction”.
“A doctor should never f*** a patient. That’s not good. A step-dad should never f*** his kid. That’s not OK in the real world, either.
“And look, at one point even homosexuality was criminalized,” he continued. “But today the issue isn’t about the legality of what we are doing. You don’t break the law if you want to run a business. But, we absolutely want to challenge prudish, uptight ideas about a part of sexuality — fantasies.”
While he acknowledges these fundamental truths, Wolf also points out what he believes to be a significant social inconsistency.
“There’s a hypocrisy that says normalizing heterosexual fantasies is fine, but not gay fantasies.”
Fighting Piracy
At the foundation of the admirable goal of normalizing gay sex is a business, and that business needs to make money.
But making money in the age of internet porn isn’t easy, especially since so much of it is “free.”
Pirated material that costs thousands to create often gets uploaded to various open-source “tubes” or torrenting sites that can be downloaded and watched for free, with just the click of a mouse.
For Wolf, his movies are no exception. “Within two weeks of launching Masonic Boys, I went to a Russian-based [pirating] site and saw that our movie had been [illegally] downloaded one-and-a-half million times.” That, just within two weeks.
“If I had a dollar for each download, I’d have $1.5 million,” he said.
But piracy for porn is nothing new.
In fact, in his February 2020 podcast, anti-piracy expert Jason Tucker said that when it comes to internet piracy, “it all started with porn.”
For Tucker, understanding the depths of the piracy problem was a steep learning curve. “For us, initially, at that time, piracy was an afterthought. We didn’t know the size and scope or how to tackle it,” he said. But when it came to porn, it also provided a roadmap for those willing to read it.
“The unlawful proliferation of adult content is a good lesson in consumer habits and how to address them,” Tucker said.
Perhaps surprisingly, in the early days of internet porn piracy, the hands-down biggest offender was Napster. Yes, that Napster, the one you used in high school and college to get the latest Madonna tune because your Top Ramen budget didn’t provide enough disposable income to include the entire Vogue album.
Turns out, in addition to music, users of Napster also shared a lot of porn — a whole lot of porn. But the world didn’t much care about a bunch of porn companies losing money, Tucker said.
It wasn’t until Hollywood and the music industry, and copyright protectors like Tucker, got involved that the legal system took it seriously. Not long after, entertainment lawyers took Napster to court to protect its movies and music catalogs, and Napster shut down.
But for every illegal piracy site that gets shuttered, Tucker said, more take its place.
Adapting to a Business Reality
Keeping Carnal’s productions away from pirates is a top priority.
It’s for good reason. There’s a lot to protect. According to Wolf, the average cost of making a Carnal production is around $20,000, with a lead time of several months.
It’s a lot of work.
He and his team have to write the story, then they have to identify the performers who fit the narrative. Then there are location and shooting schedules to create, not to mention all the production work of the actual filming and editing. Once the project is complete, there’s the marketing and release plans to coordinate.
These days, a growing number of Carnal shoots take place overseas — not because it’s cheaper, but because Wolf is adamant about paying talent equally, whether they’re filming in Europe or the U.S. For some companies, they can operate with much higher margins by making productions overseas featuring attractive, young eastern European men because these companies pay those performers a fraction of what their American counterparts would make.
“As far as I know,” Wolf said, “we’re the only company that pays the European performers the same as we do the U.S. performers.”
The Anti-Piracy Strategy
So, how does Carnal protect its investment of time and treasure against the very real hit to the bottom line of piracy of its content?
It starts with a realistic outlook and knowing your strengths.
“We entered into a business where piracy already existed,” he said. For Carnal’s team, that meant knowing the consumer and what they come for.
“Once you see the c** shot, you c** and you’re done,” Wolf said. “You may never come back again.”
Wolf wanted to change the game, so he changed how Carnal releases its content, and in so doing, has become a disruptor of his own.
First, this meant Wolf and his team would focus on the fantasy elements of their content, filming contrast films that focused on size, generational, and religious differences.
Next, they needed to build suspense. To do that, they chose a chapter release model. Rather than release the entire video all at once, Carnal would release their stories in pieces they call chapters.
Alan Breslaw is the Chief Marketing Officer for Carnal, and he says the company will release a chapter that lasts about 20 minutes, and then release the next chapter anywhere from one to two weeks later.
“We leaned pretty heavily into the idea of showing the ‘Before on…’ and ‘Coming next…’ kinds of storytelling,” Wolf said. This would help set the stage for the current chapter and build anticipation for the next chapter.
To say the industry’s reception to Wolf’s strategy to fight piracy was “tepid” would be kind.
“We were summarily dismissed,” he laughed. “But it worked and we grew.”
Carnal now has 14 brands under its umbrella, each unique and each thriving with its chapter release format, with Fun Size Boys leading the way.
Coming Up Next…
It seems fitting, then, to tell you this series will continue in Part 2.
In the next installment, we will dive into what Obi-Wan would call “a great disturbance in The Force” — the arrival of sites like OnlyFans and JustFor.Fans. We’ll examine how they have created another shift in the porn distribution model.
As the internet created direct-to-consumer pathways for porn studios to bypass brick and mortar distribution modalities, now performers can bypass porn studios by becoming their own direct-to-consumer content creators.
Just like their non-digital predecessors, studios that are slow to adapt to this new reality and develop an adaptive queer adult entertainment business model are quickly going out of business.
So, until our next installment is released, “Grab your d*** and double-click.” Just make sure to pay for that subscription.
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