Sixteen years ago, Davey Wavey uploaded his first vlog to a relatively new website called YouTube, a short clip of him in his new apartment in Toronto. Back in those early days, when rough, slightly awkward videos felt like unscripted glimpses into the lives of actual people, then-twenty-something Davey talked about things other vloggers weren’t. He uploaded chats about when he knew when he was gay, and dished out advice on topics like coming out, dating, and surviving being gay and Catholic. With affability and charm (and, sure, shirtlessness), he soon became one of the original gay internet personalities, amassing millions of views. He now has over two million subscribers across his platforms.
In the queer community, there’s a long history of folks sharing sex and health information with each other in the face of disinterest or outright hostility from the broader world. So it’s no surprise that many of Davey’s past and present videos center on practical advice about doing it. Sex ed is either abysmal or non-existent in America for hetero folks, and it's worse for queer people. Like Davey, most queer guys learn to have sex from watching porn—which is great as a tool for getting off, not so much for teaching about dynamic consent, emotional well-being, and self-advocacy.
Davey read the room these past several years, watching as YouTube became increasingly resistant to content pertaining to sexuality. “It’s just unfortunate that it’s been at the expense of many of the communities that built the platform in the first place,” he says of YouTube’s growth. “And at the expense of a need for real sex education.” When he decided to start producing the kind of erotic-meets-informative material he wanted to see himself, he knew that YouTube wasn’t the ideal host platform. Instead, he created one himself.
In 2017, Davey launched Himeros.TV, which he describes as “erotic playground with juicy videos that have deeper message.” On its surface, the site might look like another porn purveyor. But the videos exude an almost documentary bent—with models asking permission before certain sex acts, or stopping to switch positions or grab a glass of water. In short, more like what actual sex looks like. Focusing on authenticity and intimacy, Himeros.TV works with sex coaches and educators to help queer guys get back in touch with their bodies, partners, and desires. The just-launched Himeros Academy, meanwhile, features more straighforwardly educational content, too.
Over the phone from his Rhode Island home, GQ caught up with Davey Wavey on “grass-fed porn” and rediscovering sexual curiosity ahead of a filming trip at a castle in France.
Davey Wavey: It’s a pleasure-focused porn site for queer men. But, often our content goes deeper than that. Some of the videos err on the side of educational. We have instructional videos with sex coaches, things like masturbation stroke techniques, sex games that you can play with a lover. And then other videos that we create are more about overturning stereotypes and tropes. But at the center of all that, really Himeros.TV is about celebrating an authentic expression of queer pleasure. And that’s really the theme through all the content that we create: authenticity.
Well, I think the only thing that links between the two is that having an audience on YouTube gave me a platform to market Himeros.TV. Because we’re taking risks, because this is really unique. It would have been really hard to launch the site and have it be successful if I already didn’t have an audience that was rooting for me. So I’m really grateful to have that platform to start with. And over the years, I think folks that are interested in the journey have moved from YouTube to Himeros.TV. That’s really where most of my time and energy is spent now. And I’m also 40 years old. Making a YouTube video vlog is just really not that interesting to me at this stage of my life.
Most people don’t realize how mainstream porn is created. I do think there’s a time and a place for it. It can be fun, it can be sexy. But I think in the world that we live in, which has a complete absence of meaningful sex education, porn tends to fill that void. And I think it’s worth reminding ourselves that porn was never designed to teach you about pleasure or connection or consent or how to communicate with a partner. It’s designed to get you off and it’s really good at that.
But if there’s an opportunity to create something that allows men to go deeper, it really means having a different approach. So, mainstream porn, it might be two guys fly in in the morning, they shoot a scene all day, they fly out at night, and that’s it. And it works for what it is, maybe. But with Himeros.TV, if the goal is authenticity, it really means having a different approach. So when we film, we pick locations that are really remote. We fly out a group of models. We have a sex coach who facilitates the project, who’s written the concept, and who’ll be conducting workshops throughout the days to connect the models to the concepts and to each other. And we film for four days, and the crew and the models all stay on-site in the same property. It almost feels like queer summer camp. Everyone’s really passionate about what we’re doing, and so it creates a feeling of deep support. Having the sex coach on set, having deep collaboration with the models and the crew, all of this allows for this underpinning of safety and authentic expression.
Yeah, the general consensus is that it really is night and day. And that there’s an intentionality in the work that we’re creating that feels really purposeful and fun. We treat the models differently. We do free mental health support for the models. Once they’re done filming with us they get five free sessions with the coach. We have a porn star bill of rights. I don’t know of any other studio, gay or straight, that has anything like that. We believe in fair pay for the models. We have a non-fetishization policy. Instead of just telling models to work with each other, we do extensive surveys to find who’s gonna have the best chemistry. I don’t think there’s a way to capture the authenticity without also having a process that really centers around the models’ sexual, spiritual, and mental well-being.
I think what’s interesting is that consumers demand, like, organic produce, right? They want coffee that’s fair trade, they want clothing that’s sweatshop-free. Why wouldn’t that same approach carry over to the porn that we consume? Sometimes we joke that what we do is like “grass-fed porn.” It’s interesting to me that [porn] feels like the last piece of conscious consumption to really change. But I do think with the rise of OnlyFans, that especially younger folks are recognizing the importance of paying for your porn, and watching porn that’s ethically created. I think that movement might be starting. We’re at the forefront of it, but I would love to see it not just be a top down but bottom up situation as well.
Probably. A missed opportunity, yes.
Each year we film five projects, and we do twelve scenes for each of the five projects. We work with twelve or so different sex coaches because they all have a different perspective and a different teaching style. And it’s nice to present, both to the model and the audience, this smorgasbord of approaches. Whatever it is that we film, the twelve concepts are all connected by some larger theme. What I tend to do is ask the sex coaches about what’s really alive for them right now. Our next project is in France, and I approached our sex coach Matthew Shur about filming something. What was really alive for Matthew was taking a deep dive into fairy tales, and in particular retelling fairytales through a queer lens. So, rather than a concept coming from me, I’d rather it come from the coach. Their passion becomes infectious to the models and the crew.
Yeah, that concept was part of an overall theme we called “The Erotic Playground.” It was simultaneously about healing our younger selves but also learning from what our younger selves have to offer. As we get older, we tend to become disconnected from things like curiosity and joy. So half the themes are about reconnecting to that curiosity and joy. The other half are about healing that younger self. And so this scene in particular, a lot of us have this shared experience of missing prom or not going with the person that we really wanna go with. That’s gonna resonate with an audience of mainly gay and bisexual men.
I can only imagine, right, someone gets home from work and they take their pants off, and they’re like, “I’m gonna watch the latest hot Himeros.TV scene.” And they sit down with a nice cup of tea and get themselves ready and press play and in the opening three minutes of the video someone’s crying hysterically and pouring their heart out. That’s quite confronting, and something that you don’t typically see in porn, but it’s also a really authentic experience and one that’s important to show. That was part of a retreat for everyday guys that we did in Hawaii, coming out of the pandemic. People had a lot of emotional weight on their hearts and that was the authentic expression at that time. And often I think we find ourselves more almost like documentary filmmakers. And he was brave enough to share his heart, and so it feels important to capture it and share it.
You know, some of the videos have these deeper concepts and are trying to convey these complex and nuanced truths. That was just watching a guy get his fantasy fulfilled with the support of his boyfriend. And yet another authentic expression of real pleasure, and it was super fun to film that. There were a couple minutes in the midst of it where we all just forgot we were even filming. Like, we were all just totally caught up in it. That’s definitely one of my favorite themes that’s come out this year.
That’s it.
You can create porn that demonstrates, in really sexy ways, concepts that we want people to learn and embody. So you can watch a scene, and even if your intention is just to jerk off, there still might be some morsel of truth that you can take away as well. Porn need not be destructive when it comes to our sexuality, and we can create content that is constructive. By showing dynamic consent, by showing real pleasure, by showing models communicating with each other, by showing dicks that aren’t always rock-hard. By showing someone ask for a glass of water. Like, when do you ever see that in porn? And yet in sex, to give ourselves permission to ask for what we need, even if it’s a glass of water, I love it when we are able to capture those moments. When the scenes are being edited, we leave them in. And you can see someone ask for a glass of water in the middle of this scene.
If you never see it in porn, you might not think to say, “You know what? Actually pounding me like that doesn’t feel great. Can we slow down, can we try something different?” You might just think you need to power through it. And for the top to see a porn scene where a bottom is getting pounded and then he says, “Hey, the harder you fuck me isn’t necessarily the more I enjoy it,” that’s important, too. You don’t see people expressing themselves in those ways in porn. And then what I fear is that we then don’t see that in sex. And so, creating porn that has a sex educational component doesn’t mean someone standing there at a chalkboard. It just means demonstrating good sex for the audience and knowing that they can then take that and apply it to the sex that they’re having.
I went to Catholic school. My sex education was, “Don’t have it.” And especially, “Don’t have it if it’s gay.” So I had to learn things for myself, and we didn’t have YouTube when I was growing up. It was dial-up and I don’t think we even had videos. So there was a lot of trial and error. More error than anything. And it certainly feels good that now we have the technology to pass that wisdom and knowledge on to the next generation of folks that are learning about themselves and their bodies and each other.