Authenticity and affirmation lie at the heart of desi gay porn’s continuing popularity. But will the hunks make the cut?
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At the end of February this year, Body Artist’s profile on X (formerly Twitter) gained 30k followers. On February 29, he posted a video, now liked over a thousand times, celebrating the count. The thumbnail shows him lying face-up on a magenta velvet bedsheet, his hand covering his face, as he mostly does in his videos. Visible on the chiaroscuro of creases is his chest, with three letters scribbled in fading black: 3, 0, and K.
At the bottom of the thumbnail stands an ejaculating penis. Blobs of semen lie spluttered on his chest. When one watches the video, the first thing they hear is the sound of a climax; in the background is a voice saying “congratulations on your 30K”. When the 90 second video comes to a close, the same voice echoes, “You deserve this b***h; you’re the best.”
30-year-old Body Artist, currently based in Mangalore, Karnataka, has a day job, but is better known as one of India’s rising ‘desi’ gay porn content creators.
‘Desi Porn’ contains erotic material – stories, videos, photos, comics, etc. – that feature people from India in everyday settings. Produced mostly in Indian languages, Desi Porn’s distinguishing feature is the lack of professional production. It rarely features pre-planned content, and relies largely on people either spontaneously recording themselves during sex or recounting—and sometimes, exaggerating—their sexual experiences in the form of erotic stories and comics.
In contrast, typical pornography (for example, that produced in the U.S.) is heavily industrialized, complete with producers, directors, actors, sets, and scripts. According to one estimate, the market size of the US porn industry was about $1100 million in 2023. Much of desi porn features bad lighting, shaky camera and no foreplay, and the infamous “SMS language.” Largely categorized as ‘amateur’, it is only recently that Desi Porn has seen a rise in semi-professional productions. Irrespective of the production quality, desi porn remains particularly popular in India.
On his X profile, Body Artist describes himself as “horny bottom on PrEP [Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis]” (PrEP is a medicine used to prevent transmission of HIV during sex or injection drug use). He asked me to use his social media profile names instead of his real name to protect his identity.
One can argue that different types of desi porn cater to people from different genders and sexualities. Among the categories of desi porn that feature and cater to queer people, desi gay porn seems to be the most popular. Here, I look at why its popularity persists on the face of a highly globalized gay subculture.
In the public, gay men in India might parade in Prides, work in global corporations, and watch Heartstopper on Netflix, but their bedrooms tell a different story. Undergirding the popularity of desi gay porn is not only a voyeur’s quest for ‘authenticity’, multiple consumers told me, but also of having their own erotic selves seen, recognized, and affirmed.
For this story, I spoke with seven queer people who were assigned male at birth. While most of them identified as gay or bisexual men, one person identified as a “queer” man. Another did not reveal their gender identity mentioning that they are currently exploring it. Admittedly, this story leaves out voices of people from other genders and sexual orientations – a task I take up in the next edition of this column.
Body Artist first began recording himself and his partners in 2022 for “curiosity and artistic purpose,” he said. At that time, he didn’t intend to upload the videos. One day, he bumped into desi gay porn videos on X (then Twitter) and was surprised to see the variety.
“I thought, ‘I also have a few, so let me upload’.”
(X’s policies state that explicit content is allowed as long as it is marked “sensitive”.)
In June 2023, he created a new account on X, solely for putting out porn content, and amassed over 5000 followers in the first fifteen days. Come November, he came across Official.me, a platform like OnlyFans, the popular London-based content subscription service. OnlyFans required him to sign up with his passport—a document that he does not have. Official.me did not. This is when Body Artist decided to monetize his content.
The appeal of his videos, Body Artist believes, lies in how “real” they are. “We have to understand the psychology of watching porn,” he said.
Having sex with someone in his bedroom would seem more ‘real’ than a studio arrangement, according to him. “My videos are appealing because people are able to relate to it; they feel they can also be a part of it.”
At the end of February this year, Body Artist’s profile on X (formerly Twitter) gained 30k followers. On February 29, he posted a video, now liked over a thousand times, celebrating the count. The thumbnail shows him lying face-up on a magenta velvet bedsheet, his hand covering his face, as he mostly does in his videos. Visible on the chiaroscuro of creases is his chest, with three letters scribbled in fading black: 3, 0, and K.
At the bottom of the thumbnail stands an ejaculating penis. Blobs of semen lie spluttered on his chest. When one watches the video, the first thing they hear is the sound of a climax; in the background is a voice saying “congratulations on your 30K”. When the 90 second video comes to a close, the same voice echoes, “You deserve this b***h; you’re the best.”
30-year-old Body Artist, currently based in Mangalore, Karnataka, has a day job, but is better known as one of India’s rising ‘desi’ gay porn content creators.
‘Desi Porn’ contains erotic material – stories, videos, photos, comics, etc. – that feature people from India in everyday settings. Produced mostly in Indian languages, Desi Porn’s distinguishing feature is the lack of professional production. It rarely features pre-planned content, and relies largely on people either spontaneously recording themselves during sex or recounting—and sometimes, exaggerating—their sexual experiences in the form of erotic stories and comics.
In contrast, typical pornography (for example, that produced in the U.S.) is heavily industrialized, complete with producers, directors, actors, sets, and scripts. According to one estimate, the market size of the US porn industry was about $1100 million in 2023. Much of desi porn features bad lighting, shaky camera and no foreplay, and the infamous “SMS language.” Largely categorized as ‘amateur’, it is only recently that Desi Porn has seen a rise in semi-professional productions. Irrespective of the production quality, desi porn remains particularly popular in India.
On his X profile, Body Artist describes himself as “horny bottom on PrEP [Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis]” (PrEP is a medicine used to prevent transmission of HIV during sex or injection drug use). He asked me to use his social media profile names instead of his real name to protect his identity.
One can argue that different types of desi porn cater to people from different genders and sexualities. Among the categories of desi porn that feature and cater to queer people, desi gay porn seems to be the most popular. Here, I look at why its popularity persists on the face of a highly globalized gay subculture.
In the public, gay men in India might parade in Prides, work in global corporations, and watch Heartstopper on Netflix, but their bedrooms tell a different story. Undergirding the popularity of desi gay porn is not only a voyeur’s quest for ‘authenticity’, multiple consumers told me, but also of having their own erotic selves seen, recognized, and affirmed.
For this story, I spoke with seven queer people who were assigned male at birth. While most of them identified as gay or bisexual men, one person identified as a “queer” man. Another did not reveal their gender identity mentioning that they are currently exploring it. Admittedly, this story leaves out voices of people from other genders and sexual orientations – a task I take up in the next edition of this column.
Body Artist first began recording himself and his partners in 2022 for “curiosity and artistic purpose,” he said. At that time, he didn’t intend to upload the videos. One day, he bumped into desi gay porn videos on X (then Twitter) and was surprised to see the variety.
“I thought, ‘I also have a few, so let me upload’.”
(X’s policies state that explicit content is allowed as long as it is marked “sensitive”.)
In June 2023, he created a new account on X, solely for putting out porn content, and amassed over 5000 followers in the first fifteen days. Come November, he came across Official.me, a platform like OnlyFans, the popular London-based content subscription service. OnlyFans required him to sign up with his passport—a document that he does not have. Official.me did not. This is when Body Artist decided to monetize his content.
The appeal of his videos, Body Artist believes, lies in how “real” they are. “We have to understand the psychology of watching porn,” he said.
Having sex with someone in his bedroom would seem more ‘real’ than a studio arrangement, according to him. “My videos are appealing because people are able to relate to it; they feel they can also be a part of it.”
Anthropologist Sanjay Srivastava, a professor at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, writes in his book Passionate Modernity that sexual content – albeit heterosexual – has existed since at least the late nineteenth century. Cheap, locally produced ‘erotic sex-manuals, popular romances, entertaining songs [and] texts offering advice on sexual relationships’ flourished in book markets, local kiosks, railway stations, and the footpaths of India’s modernizing cities.
In the 1970s, small “blue film” theaters began screening softcore porn films, with scenes that were sexually suggestive, but did not show sex explicitly. Then, internet services became increasingly popular and cheap in the 2000s, offering Indians access to pornography around the world. Around the same time, desi porn found itself exploring newer – and more provocative – genres. In 2008, Savita Bhabhi, perhaps India’s most iconic porn character, was born. Vellamma and Veena, “sister comics” of Savita Bhabhi, followed, targeting South Indian consumers.
In 2018, India emerged as the third-largest consumer base for porn across the world, with about 30% of consumers being women; despite the Indian government’s attempt at banning porn twice: in 2015 and, then, in 2018.
Heterosexual porn produced in India thrived in the face of a nation that was increasingly casting itself in a global image. Gay porn soon caught up with the trend. Staring in the eyes of section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, a law that criminalized consensual adult homosexuality and pushed gay men underground, desi gay porn surfaced on porn websites. It offered reassurance that queer Indians’ desires were valid, all the while offering pleasure that was otherwise hard to come by.
People like Amish*, a 52-year-old gay man from Bangalore, turned to websites such as Antarvasna, Desi Kahani, and Indian Sex Stories, to read desi gay porn stories. Amish first encountered gay porn stories in 2004 on Nifty Erotic Stories Archives, a web platform functional to date. Despite how compelling he found the stories, there was “always this mental block,” which didn’t let him connect with the stories, he said. Desi gay porn bridged that gap for him.
Like Amish, six other queer people I interviewed for this story recounted getting hooked to desi gay porn owing to its portrayal of familiar bodies, familiar languages, and familiar settings. They called desi gay porn more “authentic” and “real” as compared to ‘western’ porn. For Barkat*, a 23-year-old queer man from Ayodhya, a small-town in Uttar Pradesh, watching desi gay porn provides an opportunity to accept his body as desirable and pleasurable without having to aspire for western standards.
Bodies in western porn disenchanted him. He sarcastically referred to them as “9 inches from Scotland.” (A made-up slang that refers to large penises and white bodies that dominate western porn).
“Forget Scotland, what about Saharanpur,” he said.
Barkat now finds validation in amateur desi gay porn videos—those that are often spontaneously recorded by people during sex. “Seeing people like me tells me that I am sexually valid,” he said.
For others, it is the familiar vernacular that adds to desi porn’s erotic quality. Except the occasional devanagari, most “Hindi” stories on Indian Gay Site (IGS) are written in English script. In April when I was writing this column, five out of the first ten stories on IGS’ 'gay sex stories' page were in English, three were in Hindi transcribed in English, and two were English stories with Odia dialogues, which were transcribed in English. The vernacular in desi gay porn appears in banter, seduction, and slang. Hindi stories, for example, use prolifically the word 'l**d' (dick) and 'g***d' (ass). A generous peppering of vernacular abuse serves as the cherry on the cake.
“I have an abuse kink,” Tony Ribeiro*, a 23-year-old New Delhi-based gay man told me. That people in the porn he watches talk in Hindi, and that they use Hindi abuses, lend authenticity to the porn, he said. Abuse kink refers to a fetish where people are sexually aroused by the use of abusive language and actions during sex.
Despite men in desi porn not having “muscular” bodies, they are “rugged,” said Tony. “When I will be hooking up, I will be meeting people like them only.” Desi porn virtualizes a reality, and a potential hookup realizes the virtual. In contributing to this exchange between the virtual and the real, desi porn becomes more “arousing,” according to Tony.
One of the most popular categories on IGS is 'outdoors', having over 900 contents. For Ayanabha, a New Delhi-based journalist, the element of risk in an outdoor setting contributes to making the porn video both more “real” and “adventurous”. The reason this matters in the Indian context is because consensual adult homosexuality remained a criminal offense until 2018, and where sex in public would fall in the purview of punishable 'public nuisance'. “Film it, and then upload it online, and the recipe for an ‘adventure’ is complete,” said Ayanabha.
“These things might happen to me,” Ayanabha added, the anticipation in his voice palpable.
The About Us page of Indian Gay Site , claims that it has been, “for the past 20 years”, the “topmost free porn website catering to the desires of homosexual and bisexual men in India and abroad.” The site hosts over 2500 porn videos, the same number of 'sex stories', and about 2000 pornographic photographs. Contributions to the website continue to pour in from viewers, making the collection “ever growing,” the ‘About Us’ page adds.
The late 2010s brought in a new form of porn consumption. In 2016, when OnlyFans opened its doors to the world, Indian porn content creators jumped on the bandwagon to monetize their content. Under the COVID-19-induced lockdown, OnlyFans’ use swelled. Some Indian gay porn creators minted upto ten times more money during the pandemic, according to one estimate.
Now, competing with OnlyFans are platforms like Official.me, where Body Artist monetizes his content. He carefully snips provocative parts of a recording to a minute-long promo, which he then uploads on X. The post carries a link to the full video on Official.me, the price for watching which can range from ₹269 to ₹469. While I could not identify when Official.me was launched and where its operations are based, the current website appears to be active since 2021. The ‘About Us’ page of the site mentions that the platform is operated by “Fanzone Technologies, a company dedicated to developing innovative platforms that empower creators to succeed.”
In his 2020 book Muscular India, anthropologist Michiel Baas, a lecturer at the University of Amsterdam, talks about how films like Om Shanti Om (2007) and Ghajini (2008), coupled with the birth of the fitness magazine Men’s Health in 2007, constructed the lean and muscular man as a middle-class ideal. As this ideal solidified, gyms mushroomed, and with that mushroomed fitness trainers.
Muscular these fitness trainers might have been, but, as Baas writes: Bodily capital…is rarely enough to compensate for a lack of social and cultural capital, and can even complicate matters.
The trainers quickly found that training clients in a gym was inadequate to make ends meet. Some moved to fitness modeling, and, then, to gay porn. With the COVID-19 pandemic pulling the shutter down on gyms, this number increased. Charak (name changed in the report) is one such example, as reported by Vice.
In came a turn in desi gay porn. Unlike amateur content that dominated the desi porn scene, no longer were the bodies “average”; these “hunks” began shooting in proper lighting and setting, collaborating with international porn content creators, and speaking English in their videos. No more shaky cameras, hazy images, or unscripted risky adventures.
In the words of Barkat, “The brown industry is following the same norms [as western porn] now.”
When Ayanabha watches such porn that “markets itself as, and draws inspiration from, western porn, and has sentences in English”, he mutes them. “As a consumer, I am not able to fantasize at all,” he said. Tony agreed, as did Bijon*, a 31-year-old queer man from Hyderabad. Professional lighting, spoken English, and a planned setup are not alluring, and compromise on the authenticity offered by amateur desi gay porn.
Bijon filmed himself for the first time in 2013. “I was very attracted to bodies in desi porn, and wanted to see how I would look on camera,” he said. Following year, he cropped his face out of a ‘j**k-off’ video and uploaded it on a gay porn streaming website. The video, he claimed, has been watched close to eighty thousand times.
“As someone with body image issues, it felt great to see so many men appreciating my body type,” he told me. According to him, he was then neither skinny nor muscular – the two hypervisible body types in western porn.
Liberated by the public’s appreciation of his body, Bijon frequently films himself – and his partners, with their consent. While explaining his motivation to film himself, he quotes Moira Rose from Schitts’ Creek: “Take a thousand, naked pictures of yourself now….one day you will look at those photos…and say, ‘Dear God, I was a beautiful thing!’”
Bijon may not post most of his filmed content, but desi gay porn in India certainly takes the rest of Moira’s words to heart: “Oh, and make sure you submit those photos to the Internet.”
Ironically, my conversation with Bijon on desi gay porn took us to a Canadian sit-com for its vocabulary. And yet, it is also ironic that on the face of a highly globalized queer culture in India, queer people I spoke to for this story kept going back to amateur desi gay porn to meet their erotic needs. Maybe the answer lies in the 1950s Bollywood song by the acclaimed singer Mukesh, “phir bhi dil hai hindustani” (yet, the heart is Indian).
*Names changed upon request to protect identities.
Sayantan Datta (they/them) is a journalist and assistant professor at the Centre for Writing & Pedagogy, Krea University. They have been awarded the 13th Laadli Media & Advertising Award and the inaugural Ashoka-SAGE Prize in Critical Writing Pedagogies for their work.
Shruti Sunderraman (she/her) is a journalist, writer, editor and strategist who splits her time between Bombay and Bangalore. She’s worked in culture, health, gender and science across publications over the last 10 years.
Jose (she/they) is a non-binary illustrator from Kerala whose work highlights personal stories marked by gender, body experiences and their south-Indian heritage. While not lost in their sketchbook, they can be found devouring all things camp and horror.
