ABSTRACT
This article investigates the emerging popularity of same-sex pornographic content in India featuring fitness trainers and bodybuilders. The article argues that its production and consumption is governed by socio-economic difference that is revealing for the resilience of (middle-)class boundaries. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research, the analysis is complemented by engaging with informants’ social media updates and the un/intentionality of their homoerotic layering. By focusing on the trajectory of one trainer who now provides escort services and features in pornographic movies, the article shows that such productions need to be understood as amalgamated with and indivisible from non-pornographic content depicting near-naked muscular men. It treats homoerotically suggestive social media updates, YouTube productions that warn men against the pitfalls of male modelling and the risk of sexual abuse and exploitation, and actual same-sex ‘porn’ as existing within a shared continuum through which we can understand different productions of desire and desirability.
