Watch: Straight Guys Documentary Trailer - Film Debuts at Toronto's DOC NOW Festival on June 4th!

“Straight-Guy Porn” is a wildly popular subgenre of online amateur pornography that features supposedly heterosexual men having sex with other men for a gay male audience. Why do some gay men prefer to watch sex between two heterosexual men? Where does this desire come from? Is it innate or is it learned? And why would men who identify as straight choose to perform in gay porn? Straight Guys follows filmmaker Daniel Laurin on his journey to answer these questions and reconcile his own relationship to this type of pornography. Daniel speaks to porn historians, porn theorists, porn producers and the performers themselves.

Straight Guys is a lighthearted look at a very real and pressing set of questions. As children and teenagers get
more and more of their information from the Internet, pornography has become an increasingly prevalent source of sexual education. It is an even more influential resource for gay/bisexual/questioning teens, who have very few examples of gay sexuality in mainstream media. This film uses Straight-Guy Porn as an entry point into deeper questions about gay desire in a very straight world.

Director Daniel Laurin further explains his drive to make the doc:

For some reason, the content I gravitated to was Straight-Guy Porn. Was simply because it was popular at the time? Did it speak to a desire that was already present in me or did it create it? What effects, if any, did viewing this very specific subgenre of pornography in my formative years have on my sexual and social development? 

These are the questions I hope to answer, and are my motivation behind undertaking this project. Though it isn’t talked about openly, it is a genre most gay men around my age are aware of, and it’s either a turn-on for them or it’s not. I’d like to know why that is.

Straight Guys is playing on June 4 as a part of the DOC NOW Festival in Toronto. Full details about the festival and screening times can be found at docnow.ca. If you live anywhere near there, you should probably go.