Paying a visit to the country’s premier gay for pay university, run by Andy Lee, a straight-talking Dubliner.
‘It’s not sex,’ Andy Lee declares of what he does to earn a living. He’s showing me a pair of worker boots that he sometimes demands a submissive scene partner to sniff, assuring me they’re not just for show – they really smell. ‘I mean, physically it’s sex, but we’re not attracted to each other. We do stuff together, but we’re friends. Two seconds later, we’ll be talking about pizza.’
Andy, a well-built Irishman in his late 30s, ranks among the top 0.09% of OnlyFans creators. For the uninitiated (or those pretending to be), OnlyFans is a subscription platform that allows savvy exhibitionists to put their content behind a paywall and charge their fans a monthly subscription fee to access it. Not all content is X-rated, but top earners mostly are. It has revolutionised the adult content industry, freeing performers from the mendacious studio bosses who once dictated the sex acts and hoarded the profits. It has also become one of the most profitable companies in the UK – in 2023, the company reported a pre-tax profit of £488 million, a 25% increase on the previous year.
And it’s not just those at the top of the corporation who are reaping the rewards. Creators who know the game make serious money: Andy earns six figures a month. Aside from his brutish charm and north inner city Dublin twang, the foundations of his success are built upon a porn trope as old as the form itself: he’s gay for pay.
A typical video on Andy’s page will usually involve him and up to five or six of his typically working-class pals sitting around his place, perhaps playing a game of soggy biscuit (if you know, you know), or getting oiled up and wrestling naked in a paddling pool. Part of Andy’s appeal trades on the idea that he and his co-stars are just regular blokes trying to earn a quick buck, and seeing how far they are willing to go to make money.
However he set himself apart from the pack four years ago with the launch of what he calls his Porn Star University, a sort of one-stop shop he established to teach the masses about the nuances of his craft. Nestled between the border of Cambridgeshire and Hertfordshire is a once-dilapidated studio space that he acquired, now kitted out with various porn sets and facilities. It’s from here that Andy hosts ‘open days’, to which men from all over the world travel to be schooled on the art of filming themselves for the homosexual male gaze. That’s how I find myself one Monday morning, a little bleary-eyed, on a train hurtling towards an appointment with a bonafide impresario of gay-for-pay porn.
Located a short walk from the train station, at the end of a quiet cul-de-sac, I can hear the unmistakable sound of straight-lad banter bellowing from the studio’s open door as I approached – a reassuring sign thatI am in the right place.
I pop my head around the door to find the man himself enjoying a cuppa with three of his frequent collaborators. Sadly, it’s not a full-on open day today; instead, the space is being used by Andy and some of his most accomplished alumni to bank some content for their respective accounts. I’m swiftly introduced to Hard Tom, a fellow Irishman who’s travelled back from his home in Brazil to film. Beside him sits a devilishly handsome man who goes by the name of Big Steve, the group’s newest member. He was encouraged to make the jump into the world of adult content creation by his sister, who had watched an Olivia Attwood documentary about OnlyFans. And finally, I shake the hand of Jak White, the resident openly gay member of the gang (or ‘Team Andy’, as they refer to themselves online).
After exchanging niceties, Andy and I start to make our way around the studio. We move through a remarkable variety of sets – a builder’s office, a sex dungeon (complete with swings and harnesses), a mechanic’s garage, a Premier Inn-style bedroom, and a ‘chav’s living room’, based on Andy’s own childhood home. Comprising a leather settee, a coffee table littered with empty cans and McDonald’s takeaway packaging, the set is Andy’s personal favourite because ‘it feels so real’. Around the corner: half a black cab, bisected for filming. The latest addition to his repertoire is a green screen where he and his comrades have been shooting sketch comedy segments for their socials. He showed me one recent clip, filmed with a female co-star, in which they spoof around as the hosts of Good Moaning Britain; he as ‘Piers Clit’ and she as his co-anchor, ‘Susanna Rimmed’.
Finally, we arrive at his pièce de résistance: a back-less Portaloo, rigged so that performers can put their head beneath the toilet seat for filming piss-play scenes – although he draws the line at the number two. In fact, Andy draws many lines in his practice. ‘I won’t use derogatory terms on camera,’ he reveals. ‘Like, I won’t call people faggot or queer. A lot of people ask for that but I won’t do it. It’s just not me.’ As we chat, it can be hard to maintain concentration as a mere stone’s throw away, Hard Tom and Jak White are really going at it in a makeshift prison cell. Soon, we are competing with the latter’s effusive moans of ecstasy.
I find myself a touch overwhelmed by the surrealism of having stepped into a porno, although oddly excited to learn that the UK’s preeminent porn star-cum-queen of the PR stunt, Bonnie Blue, has also graced this hallowed set. ‘She’s an amazing person,’ Andy tells me. ‘When the cameras come on, she changes, it’s incredible.’ At the time of our conversation, the controversial star – who once filmed sex with 1,057 men in a day – had just been banned from OnlyFans for planning another stunt: being tied in a glass box in central London for public use (both stunts were later the subject of a Channel 4 documentary titled 1000 Men and Me: The Bonnie Blue Story, in which both Andy and Jak appear). ‘She was pushing it too far. She knows that,’ Andy admits. In the background, I can hear Hard Tom and Jak’s scene coming to a momentous climax.
Andy runs his open days about three times a month, and they largely function as an opportunity for guys who might be trepidatious about embarking on this journey to dip their toe in the world of porn. ‘I get messages all the time, from friends and strangers, saying “Andy, I can’t pay my bills, I’m on the verge of being homeless. I want to do porn,”’ he recounts. ‘And I always say, “It’s not the right time for you. You’re not in the right frame of mind, you’ll do anything for money.”’
Andy first began doing porn over ten years ago when he found himself living in a shared hostel room, working in demolition for £45 a day. He was offered £600 by the popular gay-for-pay porn site, EnglishLads.com, to masturbate on camera. His experience working with professional porn studios left him feeling jaded and exploited, he tells me. ‘The money would run out, and they knew I was on my arse, so when I would call them and ask to do another shoot and they’d say, “Andy, you’ve pushed it as far as it can go with solos, there’s no appetite for that anymore. We need you to do stuff with men.”’
‘This is why I’m so strict with the guys and tell them to only do stuff you’re comfortable with doing. Go slowly. Don’t chase the money. Make content you’re happy with, and happy with being out there.’
A typical open day, I’m told, starts slow. He usually gathers his pupils to talk them through the back-end of OnlyFans – consent forms for their collaborators, social media marketing, how to master the platform’s algorithm, etc. Some guys are more interested in being behind the camera, so they go through camera equipment and the importance of lighting. Then, for those who wish to take the next step, they usually engage in a mass circle-jerk to test his students’ comfort levels on camera, which can produce mixed results. ‘This is the reality of filming with straight guys doing stuff for gay audiences. They don’t get hard,’ he lamented. ‘And a lot of gays don’t get hard either, because it’s not really a sexual environment.’
As we chat, our panting neighbours emerge from their prison cell, fully nude. Jak takes pause to assure me the sounds he was making were entirely authentic on this occasion. An out and proud gay man, Jak is something of an anomaly here in Andy’s playground. The creator assures me, however, that he doesn’t enjoy the sex he participates in on camera any more than his gay-for-pay co-stars do – they all have to simply get on with it for the sake of their art. ‘You have to physically pretend that you enjoy it, or it’s going to be crap content,’ he tells me, both of us now perched in the sawed-in-half black cab.
A native Glaswegian, Jak has been working in porn since he was 18 years old. He moved to London over a decade ago to pursue a career as a flight attendant, and was approached in a bar and asked if he’d ever considered porn. Still a teenager, he began to moonlight as a porn star until his employer, British Airways, caught wind of his side hustle and forced him to resign – a moment he still reflects on with indignation. Today, Jak is a full-fledged member of Team Andy, and he considers the team’s namesake to be one of his best friends – the pair recently returned from a lads’ holiday to Dubai, having jetted off, just the two of them, to unwind by the pool.
Jak’s pool of collaborators has recently expanded after he broadened his horizons with a new venture into ‘straight-for-pay’ content, a still-largely unexplored niche in porn. The Scotsman’s foray into the lady garden began when Bonnie Blue sought a male co-star whom she could peg, a frequent request from her fans. Jak happily obliged, in what was a first for both he and Bonnie.
Curiously, his collaborations with women have provoked outrage from his vast gay following. ‘The amount of hate I got from gay people was ridiculous, people telling me I’m disgusting or that I should be disgusted by women. Like, that’s misogyny?’ Others seem to view his exploration with the opposite sex as some sort of betrayal, with some gay subscribers even accusing him of homophobia. However, as evidenced by the strong commercial performance of this content, it clearly ticked the boxes for many consumers.
Much as it did for Jak, diving headfirst into the porn industry has undoubtedly transformed Andy’s life. He spent parts of his childhood living in a women’s refuge centre in Dublin. Orphaned by the age of 12, he was frequently homeless as a teenager, before he made the move across the sea to work in construction in London, which naturally led him to the bright lights of a porn studio set. He detailed his troubled upbringing in an autobiography he released last year, titled Smelly Kid. Despite this drastic reversal of fortune, Andy is emphatic when he tells me that the community he has formed is his most precious asset, and it is one he is very protective over.
‘When people come here, they come because they need help,’ he posits. ‘They’re in debt, they’ve lost a job, or they need a break. All I ask is that people take it seriously, and that they help each other out. We have a WhatsApp group, someone might drop into it: “I’m having a fucking bad day, does anyone just feel like talking,” you know? It’s a really good group of guys.’
While Andy charges no tuition fees to attend his university, he benefits by having an ever-growing pool of lads to film with for his own channels. Back in the early days, he used to pay friends to film with him. He even filmed with two of his brothers, in scenes which catapulted him to stardom within the industry (as Andy tells it, they masturbated next to each other on camera – no touching – for which they were paid a huge sum of money). Sadly, this induced a relationship breakdown with his brothers, and other family members, after word reached their home communities back in Ireland.
I was curious to know what sort of relationship, if any, he might have with another community – the local community here in Cambridgeshire, which Andy tells me is wholly positive. As a group of five or six lotharios, often dressed as scantily clad firemen or police officers, Team Andy occasionally catches the eyes of locals walking through the area, he says, but relations are friendly. ‘Sometimes they take selfies with them,’ he says to me with a grin.
Of course, the question that plagues any man who is happy to sit next to another erect penis on camera is obvious – are they really straight? Andy maintains that he is entirely heterosexual. ‘I’m very comfortable with my sexuality. Listen, if I was attracted to men, I would know by now,’ he laughs.
As far as Andy is concerned, a creator’s own sexuality doesn’t matter. He applies this logic also when responding to those who accuse the likes of him and his cohort of ‘queerbaiting’, the act of a straight person appealing directly to queer audiences by alluding to their own potential queerness for their own financial gain. Andy rejects this notion on the grounds that he and his Team Andy peers do not merely dangle a carrot to lure in a gay audience – they deliver on everything promised.
The psychology around why this content is so popular among gay male audiences is not always clear. For some, it trades on the allure of a forbidden fruit, the depiction of fantasy scenarios of men they know they will never be able to sleep with in real life. For others, it might be the satisfaction of seeing their oppressor taken down a peg or two, seeing them resort to the sexual acts that gay men are lambasted for, out of sheer desperation for cash.
Josh Moore has been making adult content for over a decade, and today he stands as one of the UK’s most prominent gay porn stars. He has worked with many gay-for-pay actors in his time – including Andy, whom he once fellated in a clip that earned Andy over £100,000 in pay-per-view sales (some content on OnlyFans requires fans to pay an additional fee to view, even after subscribing). ‘When these gay-for-pay actors became more prominent on OnlyFans, I leaned into it [at first],’ Josh explains, speaking to me over Zoom from Zurich where he is visiting his boyfriend.
The issue is, in his opinion, multi-pronged. ‘This content reinforces the trope that being gay is a choice, because these men are choosing to do this for money even though they’re straight – though I don’t think that’s necessarily true, a lot of the time,’ he says. ‘It supports internalised homophobia, because a lot of people know that these guys are probably not 100% straight, but they’re acting that way to feel better about what they’re doing. I don’t think anyone who is 100% straight would think about touching work like this.’
As for queerbaiting, Josh, who no longer collaborates with gay-for-pay creators, agrees that he would reserve the label only for straight OnlyFans creators who tease or allude to homosexual content sitting behind their paywall, only for subscribers to find little more than shirtless softcore imagery. He also pauses to note that he differentiates Andy as one of the good guys: ‘I really do like and respect Andy, he’s an ally to the community.’
Asked how it feels knowing his collaboration earned Andy six figures, he admits: ‘Obviously, it doesn’t sit great with me, because I earned only a little more than usual from it. It feels like a lot of these straight creators get all the benefits with none of the prejudice or stigma. They don’t face any of the day-to-day things that we face as gay people, and then get to take all the profit we could have had if they weren’t in our industry,’ he bemoans. ‘So it does sting, to be honest.’
Andy, however, is fiercely defensive of his place in the industry. ‘I’m not taking money from gay content creators – I’m making gay content creators money.’ He regales me with tales of aspiring creators, many of whom are gay, who come to his studio for business advice, and are then allowed to use his sets and equipment for free. ‘I’ve never had one single person ever come through these doors and say they were treated badly or used. They’re all my friends.’ Andy continues, noting that, these days, he doesn’t have any friends who are not in the industry. ‘I love these boys more than anything.’
