Of his 250 regular OnlyFans subscribers, Ryan thinks that most were as a result of his Instagram account. These OnlyFans lads depend on using their very public Twitter and Instagram accounts to entice gay men to subscribe to their soft porn account. However, these adult content creators – the OnlyFans lads if you will – are redefining a brand of heterosexuality so fragile that it’s proven, in part, by its deliberate distance from anything faintly gay. Their watches are large, swollen biceps tattooed with crying Geishas, and for some reason, they photograph themselves sitting on the bonnets of cars. Many of the straight men doing so sit between ‘top-lad’ and ‘apex-lad’ – meaning, they perform heterosexuality to its most aesthetic extremes. Ryan is one of an increasing number of heterosexual men uploading explicit content for their mostly gay subscribers – Ryan tells me that he estimates his subscribers to be “97 per cent” men. He makes a strong business case for doing so: “I used to have a wank and wouldn’t get paid for it, and now, I get paid for it.” He had left the military in February and was “tired of being skint”, so began to upload – among other things – videos of himself masturbating. In April 2018, 26-year-old Ryan Yule had a “fuck it sort of moment” and joined OnlyFans, the platform that allows him to charge people $15 a month for access to pornographic photos and videos of himself.
