The gay for pay to bisexual pipeline.

Also, who's watching The White Lotus?

I don’t know how many of you have been watching the second season of The White Lotus (created by Bisexual King™️ Mike White!), but personally, I have been loving it. Strong endorsement to check it out, even if you haven’t watched the first season (I liked that one too, but thought it was a little more heavy-handed with its class analysis while this one is more just… bonkers soap opera). It’s got miserable rich straight people collapsing under the weight of their straight rich lives, and a pair of delightful sex workers, and some characters who are… maybe bi? Maybe gay for pay? It’s not totally clear!

Which is what I want to talk about right now. I’m not going to spoil The White Lotus for you, you should go watch it, but I will say that there are two characters who appear to only dabble in queer sex when they’re, ahem, repaying a favor. And if you’d asked me to classify their sexual identities, I’d probably tell you that the woman is bi (albeit mostly into men) and that the man is gay for pay. And realizing that this morning, that that’s how my brain would categorize these people, struck me as absolutely wild.

But I should back up for a second, because right now I’m making a lot of assumptions about everyone’s familiarity with the term “gay for pay.” The specific meaning of the phrase is pretty obvious: to be gay for pay is to, well, only engage in same-sex sexual encounters in a sex work context, and not in your personal life. But there’s a deeper cultural context worth exploring, particularly when it comes to how “gay for pay” works in the porn industry.

It is very very common for porn performers who are straight in their personal lives to queer it up on cam. With women, it’s just expected: it’s rare to find a performer who doesn’t do girl-girl scenes, the fantasy of two women together is so pervasive in porn that it practically feels mandatory for female porn performers to pair up on cam, regardless of their actual desires or orientation.

With men, it’s a little more complicated. In the “straight” porn industry, male-male sexual contact is heavily stigmatized. Few male performers are out as bi, and even as it’s almost expected that a female performer will kick off her career with some girl-girl action, there’s a lingering stigma against men who “crossover” from the gay industry to the straight industry (less stigma than there used to be, but it’s not totally gone yet). But at the same time, men who shoot gay porn make more money than their straight porn counterparts — so it’s not unusual to find straight men shooting gay porn in order to get more cash (and while I’m not an expert in the, uhhhh, ins and outs of gay porn I do know enough to feel confident in saying that “straight dude who goes gay for money” is indeed a whole trope and fetish within the industry).

So that’s our baseline here: for women, there’s an expectation of bisexuality that’s built in to the work; for men, there’s a financial incentive that potentially outweighs the stigma. In keeping with that, it’s actually somewhat rare to hear women referred to as “gay for pay” — in covering the adult industry, I feel like I’ve only heard it used by queer performers deriding an obviously straight co-star’s lackluster performance, a way of flagging that this performer is obviously phoning it in. In gay porn, on the other hand — well, I know there’s some people who dismiss straight boys fucking boys on camera as lackluster, not really into the scenes. But if the success of Broke Straight Boys is any indication, the “gay for pay” moniker can also be an enticement: sure, he’s straight, but for enough cash… is he really?

(A quick interjection here: In writing this it occurs to me that “gay for pay” is one of the exceptions to the “if he touches a man even once then absolutely gay for life” rule that dogs male sexuality; while I’m sure plenty of gay for pay guys are assumed to be actually gay for real, there’s a boundary created by the money, an explanation for why a man could do gay things, that allows him to, you know, do gay things while still pleading straight. See also, men who have same sex encounters in all male environments like boarding schools and prison.)

So. I feel like this context helps explain my reaction to these two White Lotus characters. I saw the female character having transactional lesbian sex as bi because I’ve been conditioned to see female sex workers as bi (it probably didn’t hurt that the character references having had sex with women before — albeit in a way that suggested it was a rare, surprising occurrence — and that she seemed genuinely into it). And I saw the male character as gay for pay because that, too, has been fed to me as the default for male sex workers, who are always packaged as straight or gay or gay for the money alone. And sure, that assessment was also bolstered by the fact that the male character doesn’t publicly profess any queer desires, and seems unhappy about the queer sex he has been having — but does that actually mean he isn’t bi?

Because the second thing that occurred to me this morning as I hastily categorized this character as gay for pay is that if you had told me about a young woman who was unenthusiastic about the older man she was having sex with for money, and didn’t seem super enthused about hanging out with him or his friends, I wouldn’t automatically assume that this woman was a lesbian. The mere fact that she wasn’t into this man, or this sexual encounter, and that money was all that was keeping her by his side — well, that wouldn’t automatically make me think that she lacked all capacity to be attracted to men. So the fact that that was my immediate assumption for a male character struck me as, well, odd.

And there’s another point that feels worth making here, too. It’s actually not uncommon for so-called “gay for pay” male porn performers to eventually, well… come out as bi. Collin Simpson did it, Cody Cummings did it, and while Wolf Hudson’s arc is a little more complicated, it’s not not that. [NB that Cody Cummings link is full of pix of shirtless dudes and dildos and Fleshlights.] Notably, being openly bi isn’t always great for a male porn performer’s career — in that linked piece (which again, has sexy though not explicit imagery, consider yourself warned), Cummings himself describes his bisexuality (or at least societal biphobia) as leading to the downfall of his career. Even in an industry comfortable paying straight men to have gay sex, genuine bisexuality somehow winds up being a threat.

Which brings me back to The White Lotus. Yes, that male character could just be a straight dude transactionally agreeing to put his dick in a man’s ass. But he could also be a bi man — one who doesn’t like his client very much, and hides his attraction to men from women, but who is bi all the same. Truly, it has happened before. It’s hardly unimaginable — particularly in a world where being transactionally gay is more acceptable, more socially approved, than actually being bi.

I don’t expect the show to answer this question in its final episode (though maybe Mike White will surprise us all!). But I do think it’s worth sitting with the possibility that this character is bisexual, that he’s a different kind of bi character than we’re used to seeing on screen, yet one who could be bi all the same. Not just because it makes the character more interesting to me, personally. But also because it’s worth remembering that bisexuality is far more places than we think — and that sometimes (maybe even often) “gay for pay” is just a culturally acceptable scrim obscuring the reality of male bisexuality.

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