By Peter Berton
LOS ANGELES – “No filter. No agenda. No censors.”
That’s the banner under which Zachary Sire and Davyd Dixon launched gay-porn news-and-gossip site Str8UpGayPorn.com. Sire, formerly editor of the gay blog The Sword and Unzipped magazine, and public relations consultant Dixon intend the website to be a sort of gay-porn TMZ with a hefty dose of Perez Hilton worked in.
Thanks to Sire, Str8UpGayPorn is long on snark and in-your-face attitude, evidenced by recent headlines including “NextDoorStudios Forcing Models To Perform In Deep-Throat Contests,” “Sean Cody’s Brooks: Is His Cock Actually Too Big?” and “UNHINGED: Billy Santoro Makes Violent Threats Against Blogger.”
YNOT.com asked Sire why, after a career with more sedate publications, he decided to stop pulling punches.
YNOT: What’s the overarching concept here?
Zachary Sire: It’s pretty much exactly as the title suggests: Straight up gay porn.
We update the site daily throughout the day with everything from new releases and industry news to gay porn gossip and whatever trouble our favorite performers are getting into. We also break our own news with exclusive scoops, interviews, on-set reports and lists.
We love curating content and are proud to be an authority on all things gay porn. From lists of the best Sean Cody models to the worst furniture in gay porn, we have an encyclopedic knowledge of this crazy industry.
There’s no shortage of websites and blogs covering all aspects of the adult industry. Why launch another one?
We know there’s an audience for unfiltered and uncensored news, but some gay porn blogs tend to cater to advertisers first and their readers second. So, a lot of what you see on other sites is just photos and press releases, perhaps, without any editorial voice — which is totally cool, as we are fans of a lot of those sites, too.
On Str8UpGayPorn, we want to reach the people who love gay porn but who also love hearing the inside stories about how it’s all made and what it all means from a business standpoint, from industry insider’s perspective.
Other than “gay porn,” the site doesn’t seem to have any particular theme. Content seems to have one goal: create buzz. Or are we missing something?
[The site] has everything from hardcore trailers and image galleries to behind-the-scenes gossip and hard news. There are plenty of readers who just want to get off to the latest scene with their favorite gay porn stars, but there are also readers who want to find out who’s dating whom or who got arrested last night. We aim to please everyone with diverse content.
We also cover the latest in gay mainstream news in a section called “Hot Links,” where we link to mainstream news that we find entertaining and/or relevant to gay life.
Your slogan is “No Filter. No Agenda. No Censors.” Why did you put that front and center?
We want our audience to know they’re getting an honest and uncensored take on the latest in gay porn. Like I said before, a lot of sites are affiliate blogs whose only aim is to convert traffic, and that’s fine too.
To be fair, a lot of these [bloggers] aren’t writers, nor do they proclaim to be. And let’s face it: Not everyone has strong opinions like I do.
How will you succeed if you refuse to pander to third-party business interests?
The beauty of this industry, and the internet specifically, is that you don’t have to pander in order to succeed. During my tenure as editor of The Sword, one of the biggest and most consistent targets was popular gay-for-pay performer Cody Cummings. And guess which site was a top affiliate for The Sword month after month? CodyCummings.com.
We think there’s plenty of room for criticism and nuanced opinion that can both inform and entertain. If you can attract enough traffic to your site with compelling content, the revenue will always follow, regardless of who you’re not pandering to.
How is that philosophy working so far?
We’ve seen our page views and unique visitors go up week after week, and in [the fewer] than three months since launch we’ve already surpassed many other blogs’ Alexa rankings. As of today, we are ranked 48,000 in the U.S. on Alexa, with no advertising to date. It’s pretty incredible that we are already one of the most trafficked gay porn blogs on the internet in such a short time.
We’ve also received multiple complaints from studio heads and industry personalities who didn’t like our coverage of them, so we’re happy to know that everyone is reading and making Str8UpGayPorn part of their daily routine. We couldn’t ask for anything more right now.
We have a lot of great and unique coverage planned for 2014 and look forward to entertaining and informing gay porn fans throughout the year.
