Austin Wolf on Porn, Racism, and His Own Questionable Twitter Exchange

This week, as demonstrators protested against white supremacy and police brutality following the death of George Floyd, a slew of racist remarks and attacks appeared on social media -- including posts from LGBTQ+ people.

On Monday, JustForFans.com dumped the account of gay porn star Billy Santoro after he wrote a post encouraging police to shoot black looters: "Lol. America! Lol you let your blacks loot as a way of protest. Wake the fuck up. Shoot first," Santoro wrote in a since-deleted Facebook post.

Wolf -- a prominent fixture in the adult industry and one of the first models to transition their brand to sites like Only Fans, a regulated website where models set their own rates and create their own content for subscribers -- responded swiftly to Santoro's post in a heated and emotional call to action for viewers and studios to pull Santoro's content altogether.

Within an hour of Wolf posting the video, JustForFans took down Santoro's account.

"What he said could have actually triggered someone's death," Wolf tells The Advocate through tears (see video below). "And I popped."

"I don't know if I am the right person [to speak about racism]" Wolf says. "White privilege is real. I'm fully aware of what it is and what it means. This isn't to say that I understand what it's like to be a person of color... I know life is easy for me in comparison. I know I have a head start in life. I'm 6'4, 265 lbs, and I'm white. It doesn't get much easier than that."

"Watching my friends of color having to work harder, struggle harder, [with] much less followers, much less fans -- that's just in my industry -- it's things that I see," he continues. "I don't like when people are picked on. I don't like when people are thought of as less than, whether it's for color, femininity, homosexuality. Life has been easier for me so it's my duty to stick up. How do we sit comfortable... doing as well as we do seeing what we see and saying nothing? It's hard for me not to say something."

"I think that video needed to come from somebody that looked like me," he adds.

Shortly after Wolf posted his video, he shifted the narrative on his Twitter account to voting and encouraged his followers to register, during which he engaged in a heated debate with commenters and it quickly spun out of control.

Wolf says he responded impulsively to a specific comment made by a Black person who wrote, "America is not about freedom. It's about POWER and EXPLOITATION!!"

Wolf wrote back, "Then move. That's a small-minded answer from [an] ignorant person. Plenty of places in the world for u to try out. Have at it. Trust me. No one's stopping u."

Wolf claims he didn't know the user was Black when he made the remarks.

"I woke up the next morning and it turns out that young man is a person of color," Wolf says. "People are assuming that that conversation was race-based and it was not. I was talking to Americans in general: We have to vote. We have to register."

"Needless to say, it was a brash and insensitive comment, especially given where we are," he added. "And I wasn't paying attention at all to who I was speaking to. It was rude and it was a mistake. Of course, [now] people are lumping me into the same category as [Santoro], which is really disheartening."

The next day, Santoro's husband posted a photo of Santoro lying in what appears to be a hospital bed, claiming that he'd tried to end his life as a result of the backlash he received from his statement.

Santoro's husband's Twitter account was deleted soon after, following allegations from users that he and Santoro staged the photo.

"I take suicide and mental health very seriously," Wolf says. "My comments never went anywhere violent. I don't want anything bad to ever happen to anybody and if you're ever feeling like you have these thoughts, please seek help. No harm should ever come to anyone. You should have justice and you should have consequences, but suicide is never the answer."

Wolf also spoke on the porn industry and its evolution since the #MeToo movement, which he says is bleak.

"I don't think it's changed anything," he says of harassment and assault in the gay porn industry after #MeToo. "I've heard just as many complaints about specific studios and problems within the industry before and after... These young men don't have any money to hire lawyers. They're paid peanuts. What can they really do?"

As far as what it will take for the porn industry to be more regulated, he says, "Rates. Leadership. What it means to be a model needs to be more important. Models shouldn't be paid $600 or $700 for a scene you put out. Also, education [and] teaching people how to market themselves, teaching people to respect their brand a little more because right now being a porn star is kind of a joke."

"Know when something is inappropriate," he continues. "Educate [young models] on what's OK and what's not OK. I think sometimes when you're only 18 years old, 19 years old, you're not really sure. You don't really know better, and sometimes you go along with something just because you want the job."

As far as the future of porn, Wolf, who owns the website 4My.fans, hopes it will become more streamlined and create independence for models, especially for those who work on Only Fans or Just For Fans, which he says "changed the world permanently, and I don't think we will go back."

Still, Wolf says his own dreams go beyond porn.

"I'm hoping to get out of being a model, that's the goal," he admits. "I think that it's time. If I really want to help the community -- whether it's people of color or just my industry alone -- [my future] is going to look like something different. It's going to look political, it's going to look managerial and hopefully everything I have in my head, everything I have building, will be a positive change not just for me, but for everyone."