When a friend first told me that he follows a couple of gay porn stars on Twitter, my first thought was, "Why? What could he possibly get out of it?" Plenty, it turns out. He gets to, um, reach out and touch performers in a way never before possible.
He loves to know what they're up to in their real lives and when they're coming (pun not intended) to a city near him, and he even communicates directly with them through direct messages" In short, he feels like he's friends with his sexual fantasies.
That got me thinking about how many other guys follow porn stars on Twitter, so my team put together a list of the 15 most popular gay porn stars on Twitter, ranked by number of followers. Three things surprised us:
1. The numbers of followers are high -- or low, depending on how you look at it.
The most popular gay porn star on Twitter, Brent Corrigan, has about 123,000 followers. Is that high or low? Given the popularity of gay porn, you might think that's really low. On the other hand, it's not far from the number of followers that the biggest straight male porn star, James Deen, has: about 167,000. Of course, how many women are going to follow porn stars on Twitter? A better comparison might be with how many straight men follow female porn stars. On that score Brent Corrigan's 123,000 followers aren't even half of Jesse Jane's 278,000.
2. Gay porn stars don't like to follow people on Twitter.
Even by celebrity standards, gay porn stars follow very few people. The average ratio of "Following" to "Followers" for the top 15 Twitter stars (Katie Perry, Justin Bieber, etc.) is about 0.003 percent. (That is, they follow 0.3 people for every 100 people who follow them). The ratio for gay porn stars is 0.001 percent.
3. They like to tweet -- a lot.
The top 15 Twitter stars combined tweeted a total of 94,000 times to date. The top 15 gay porn stars? About 135,000 tweets. Some of those numbers could be just plain manipulation on the part of the performers. One porn star in our list tweeted over 44,000 times. He's either got that much to say or he's gaming the system in some way.
4. They don't like nude shots on their profiles.
This was a bit of a surprise, but of the top 15 gay porn stars on our list, only one actually had a nude pic on his profile. Erect too. Yowsa! You would think they'd all have their flags waving at full mast, but either Twitter is clamping down on them or they're all battling a bout of modesty.
In the end, gay porn stars are using Twitter to move product. Many of their tweets come off as 140-character infomercials, but some performers actually type out funny, revelatory and sometimes poignant tweets. Stay tuned, because next week I'll highlight some of them.
How to Bottom Like a Porn Star is Mike Alvear's latest book in his gay sex advice series.