Davey Wavey Talks the Good, the Bad, and the Future of Porn

This interview was conducted as part of the interview series, LGBTQ&A, a weekly podcast that documents modern queer and trans history.

LGBTQ people -- all people, really -- often turn to porn to make up for the failures in sex education. "We copy what we see," says Davey Wavey, the YouTube personality and creator of Himeros.tv.

And that creates problems.

With Himeros.tv, Wavey is creating a more intentional and carefully crafted type of porn. Videos are created by a team of sex coaches, tantric instructors, and sexologists to make sure that you get turned on while also learning something constructive about the ways in which queer men have sex.

Davey Wavey describes it as "dipping the broccoli in chocolate" on this week's episode of the LGBTQ&A podcast.

[Click here to listen to the full podcast with Davey Wavey.]

Jeffrey Masters: There is so much written about the negative things we learn from porn, but you're flipping that its head to change porn itself, to make sure what you're learning from it is good for you.
Davey Wavey: Because the answer is always "Oh, we need to stop watching porn." Girl, it's not going to happen, right?

We copy what we see. When I was 19 years old, I was in my college dorm room covered in cum. I had just had sex with my boyfriend, and he said to me, "Having sex with you is like being in a porn." And I thought, Fuck, you're welcome. Mission accomplished.

Because if I was successfully emulating in the bedroom what I saw on the computer screen, then I was doing a good job. And what he knew then, and what I would eventually learn, was that that's not real.

When did you start to clue into that?
Probably my late 20s, maybe 30. The thing is, bad sex is still pretty good.

I mean, the sex we've been filming is at another level. It's toe-curling, incredible connections and ecstasy, and full-body orgasms, and orgasming without ejaculating.

What is the best way to describe Himeros.tv? Tell me the public description versus the private mission.
The idea is that Himeros.tv enhances gay and bisexual men's experience of sex and sexuality through connection, exploration, and pleasure

We don't market it as educational porn or porn that's good for you, but it kind of is. It's porn, that when you watch it, you see either a technique that's being demonstrated or a concept that you feel like you can apply to your life.

As gay men in a vacuum of sex education, we learned about sex by doing what? Watching porn.

Almost exclusively.
In reality, there are sex coaches, experts, sexologists, a whole field of individuals that have this wisdom and knowledge. And so for me the question became, is there a way to package that in really sexy, fun, erotic content that's authentic and real and fun to watch?

In much the same way that my YouTube videos have a good message at their core, but you package it in something that's funny or sexy. We call it dipping the broccoli in chocolate.

So we see you shirtless in your YouTube videos intentionally, because it draws a greater number of people in.
It can be shirtlessness. It can be humor. It can be emotion. There's a lot of ways to not preach at someone but still get a message across. And it turns out that porn's a really good vehicle. People enjoy watching porn.

And if you can hijack that formula to help people have better sex, it becomes really fun. So you watch this video, you're like, "Oh, wow, this is hot. Oh, I never thought about that. Oh, this is a fun sex game that I can play with my next hookup or my next date," or "Oh, gee, I never looked at sex that way."

What types of content have you been surprised by that people gravitate towards?
What has been surprising for me is how excited people get by seeing what I would consider a nontraditional model in our videos. So whether that's someone with a small dick, whether that is someone that's older, whether that's someone with a belly, someone that's furry. People get really excited when they see someone that they can relate to in an erotic video. It's a reflection on themselves.

And I think if you watch video after video after video, and you just see these 20-year-old guys with nine-inch dicks and six-pack abs, at a certain point you're like, "OK, great, but what about me? That's available to them, but what's available to me?"

Are there ever issues with performance anxiety on set?
Totally. It happens all the time. And here's the thing. That is real fucking life, and people don't always get hard.

But on a porn set, there's added pressure. You're there to shoot something that often requires an erection.
Well, the goal for us is to film a hot connection between two guys. If you don't get hard, they can blow someone. All dicks are welcome. And you can fuck people with your fingers. You can eat their ass. I mean, there's so many ways for us to express that.

That blows my mind because all of the porn I've seen has been erection-focused.
So then think of the effect that has, because that's a common experience on us individually when we go into the bedroom and the expectations that that creates around your dick.

Apparently, the only thing that's taboo to show in porn as a soft dick because it really freaks people out. And they're like, "Well, these guys weren't into each other. Like, he's not even into this. He's not hard."

Girl, how many times have you been in a situation, perhaps because you're so into someone, where you don't get hard?

And so watching this porn is teaching people that if you have erection issues, that's fine. If you don't have a penis, that's fine.
Right, yes. And that boners come and go in waves. Some people don't get hard very often, some people do. It's just part of life and we need to be a little bit kinder to ourselves about our fucking boners.

I think what people don't realize is that the boners that they see in traditional porn are artificial. A traditional porn takes hours to film. No one's going to be hard for four to six hours. And not only do they often take Viagra, but they often inject their dicks with a drug called Trimix.

I have never heard that.
So what you're seeing in porn -- I hate to be the bearer of bad news again -- that's not real. Those guys do that, I think, in part because of this. It just feeds itself.

If this is what you would like the future of gay porn to look like, where do you actually see it heading?
I think there's going to be all of it. I think there will continue to be the SeanCody.coms of the world. We'll keep making content through Himeros.tv that is for an audience that wants something that's a little bit more or a little bit deeper, something to challenge themselves, something to learn to experience more pleasure.

A lot of the future of porn is going to be in OnlyFans and JustForFans because traditional porn lacks authenticity. When you're watching someone that's holding their iPhone themselves, and you're in their bedroom, watching them have sex in real life the way that they would, that brings some of the authenticity back into the equation.

[Click here to listen to the full podcast with Davey Wavey.]

New episodes of the LGBTQ&Apodcast come out every Tuesday on the Luminary app.