It may seem like every possible iteration and permutation of sex has been explored, sifted through and turned inside out, but emerging gay web brand Himeros.tv has carved out a unique niche for itself with gorgeously filmed content that deliberately adds emotional and spiritual flavors.
Many of the site’s concepts and scenarios are developed by tantric instructors who lead carefully matched performers through a series of workshops to nourish and develop a bond between the men before they ever set foot in front of a camera. The result of this careful prep — which includes a highly cinematic aesthetic — are unique, deeply erotic mini-films that take gay adult far beyond familiar wham-bam pizza boy/horny mechanic tropes.
If you’d asked me at 25 if I was having good sex, I would have said, ‘Yeah, of course!’
The site’s founder and creator, the notable online personality and social media influencer known as Davey Wavey, has deftly folded his sizable platform — more than 1.4 million YouTube followers — into the effort and describes Himeros as “an erotic playground for men who have sex with men to enhance their experience of sex and sexuality. It is like porn, but better.”
A mere four years into its mission, Himeros landed a 2021 XBIZ Awards nomination for “Gay Site of the Year.”
“There is an in-person piece to Himeros that we haven’t really tapped into yet,” the entrepreneur said. “I love that we’re on the radar. I love to say that the ‘secret sauce’ of Himeros is not so secret. I’m more than happy to share, and hope that other studios replicate some of the kinds of things that we do.”
“I think — for anyone, but especially for LGBT people — there’s this complete vacuum of sex education,” he observed. “We do learn about sex in school and about STIs. There’s never any discussion about pleasure, intimacy, connection, exploration. Into that vacuum of meaningful sex education steps porn. And you and I both know porn isn’t designed to teach you about good sex, it’s designed to arouse you and get you off. And it’s awesome at that, and we all love it and celebrate it, but when we’re using it as a tool for better sex, we’re really going to come up short. The question then became, with Himeros.tv, ‘Could we create really hot, erotic video content that also enhanced the experience of sex and sexuality for the people that are watching it?’”
Wavey spoke to XBIZ as he was prepping for the Himeros Experience in October, which was rescheduled from 2020. The five-day in-person retreat is open to website members and others to take what they see and learn onscreen and apply it to their own lives. Here is what he had to share, in this exclusive interview.
ADAMS: You’ve been creating content online for about 15 years. That makes you an OG YouTuber.
WAVEY: Totally, yes. When I started, a lot of my videos were about coming out or talking to your friends and family about being gay. But I was also 23 and that’s where I was at in my own life. As I’ve gotten older, the things I’m interested in have shifted and evolved. Once I hit my 30s – I’m 38 now – I was much more interested in sex and sexuality and in realizing there was so much more to sex than what I’d been taught and what I’d experienced. There are so many other flavors, there’s so many other tools to have in your toolbox. And in talking about that on YouTube, there’s just a lot of limitations around what can be said and how you show it, so it became really necessary to launch a separate platform.
We were really able to not sugarcoat it and show the dicks and the asses and the cum and not have one hand tied behind our backs. It’s been a big experiment. And because my background’s not in porn, the approach has been different. The models that we work with – some of them have been really inspired by our approach and its focus on authenticity and vulnerability and really showing up. And then other models are like, “You know, I just want to show up and play the plumber.”
ADAMS: I wanted to ask you about that. I imagine some guys are like, “Can I just whip my dick out?”
WAVEY: “And get my check?” Yeah. That’s awesome! There’s plenty of porn sites where you can find a great home. That’s not what we do. People who are tired of seeing the same thing over and over again, who are searching through Pornhub like, “Okay, I’ve watched this over and over again,” I think Himeros speaks to that market.
ADAMS: Your approach really shows some of these models in a new light. I’ve been a fan of Adam Ramzi for a long time, for example. He’s done great work for Titan Media and Raging Stallion, CockyBoys — really good stuff. But you’re showing these guys, like Adam, in a really new way that I enjoy. Or Wesley Woods — he’s another one who is certainly acclaimed as a performer. But watching them here, you can see a tenderness and a sensuality that didn’t always come out in their other porn. They always make good stuff, but I appreciate a different angle on these guys.
WAVEY: It’s about creating a space to make that happen. We did a great shoot with Wesley where we rented a place out in the desert and we had a tantric instructor who facilitated the project. He wrote the concepts and then worked with the models every day through a series of workshops to really help them embody what we were demonstrating on camera. And there weren’t people coming in and out of the set; it was catered. It was just us; it’s almost like a retreat experience when we film. It’s called “Worship Me.”
ADAMS: That’s an amazing clip.
WAVEY: The first minute is [costar] Chris Harder affirming Wesley as this kind, loving human being – just completely affirming him in every way possible. And Wesley is crying as he receives this. Chris gives him a handjob and he proceeds to have one of the most ecstatic, toe-curling orgasms that we’ve ever filmed. No one fucked. No rimming. It was a completely different experience of porn but it moved people to tears watching it. “Okay, do I jerk off? Do I cry? Do I do both?” It was definitely something different, you know?
ADAMS: You’ve used the image in past interviews of “dipping broccoli in chocolate,” but is that something you still use? Sometimes people get the idea that this kind of porn is instructional. I mean, it’s still gorgeous guys having sex.
WAVEY: I feel like I need better language when talking about Himeros. “It’s educational? I don’t want to be educated when I’m watching porn!” But it can be done in really subtle ways. That video with Wesley where he has this mind-blowing, full-body orgasm is educational in that it shows the viewer that there’s this other way to connect and it sparks conversation. So it’s not to say the videos are dry or in-your-face about the message. We can sneak it in so that the viewer who isn’t here for that can just watch it and say, “Oh, that was really hot. That was really different, I enjoyed that.” And it ends there. Other people want to have a conversation about it.
Each week we do an hour-long podcast where we take a deep dive into the video that came out that week. We read comments from our audience and it becomes a community discussion. There’s a certain percentage of our audience that enjoys all of that and – [chuckles] there’s probably a significant percentage that hasn’t watched a single episode of that podcast. We can meet people where they’re at.
ADAMS: It’s interesting to hear you talk about struggling to find the right language to describe Himeros because culturally, I think, it’s just not part of the discussion.
WAVEY: And also, if you’d asked me at 25 if I was having good sex, I would have said, “Yeah, of course!” What’s that saying? “Sex is like pizza: even when it’s bad, it’s still good.” But then you get a little bit older and you learn about what you didn’t know, and you think, “Oh, this is good sex. I don’t know what I was doing before.”
Here’s what I know: For me, good sex is dynamic. It’s creative, it’s challenging, it’s interesting, and yet the porn we’ve settled for – mostly – is anything but those things. Why have we made this bargain? Why are we settling for the same old thing, over and over again, when our sexuality is this incredible, tremendous gift? Why aren’t we exploring that through erotic video content? I’m not willing to settle for that. I’m willing to take the really big swings.
ADAMS: With a lot of these guys — Wesley, for example, is a trained actor — but a lot of these guys probably aren’t accustomed to being asked to be vulnerable onscreen. I think, for many men, being literally naked is not being vulnerable. It’s sort of like reverse armor; being emotionally vulnerable is not something that’s asked of them.
WAVEY: Yeah. Usually, when we do a shoot, we have about seven models and we film for four days. We have a tantric instructor. We go to a remote location. We hedge our bets by having half of the models be repeat [performers] that we know can anchor a project, and half are new models. So we always know there are a couple people who have the presence that’s needed.
I think, also, when the newer models look at what we’re doing and see that we’re filming with an $80,000 camera they used for “Game of Thrones” – we literally used lenses from “The Handmaid’s Tale” on one of our shoots – it raises the bar. It elevates everyone and they really want to give the best version of themselves for the project. Also, any video a model [films], they can release on their OnlyFans. So, they have a more personal investment in the content they’re creating because they’re serving it to their audience, too.
ADAMS: The same video or separate footage?
WAVEY: The same edit. It’s win-win. When we work with models, there are always four pieces of compensation. Obviously, they get paid, and whatever scenes they film, they get to use for their OnlyFans. I always offer to do a YouTube video on my channel that they can use to promote their OnlyFans and reach my audience. And the fourth piece, which I would love to see more studios do, is we offer five post-filming sessions with a sex and intimacy coach after they’ve worked with us.
The content that we create is very intimate and vulnerable and things come up. It’s optional; they don’t have to do it. But we cover the cost of five counseling sessions to help them integrate their experience into their lives. It’s kind of like a mental health check-in for the model. Probably half of the models take advantage of it. They don’t have to talk about what they filmed with us; they can talk about how they’re navigating sex work or how porn is impacting their relationships, all these things that are real issues, in a confidential environment.
It’s just another way to support the models because I think they carry the collective shadow of gay men. We’re always taking, taking, taking and objectifying, objectifying, objectifying, and it’s nice to be able to just give them a little bit of support.
ADAMS: I want to return to something you touched on when you mentioned the equipment you use. The kind of content you’re making is not the usual two guys in a hotel room who have to be quiet because there are tourists on the other side of the wall. That can be really hot, of course. But there’s a burnished gold quality, at least with the stuff you shoot in the desert, that is striking and a very specific aesthetic. A lot of porn is very standard framing with either natural lighting or that very bright, operating room feel. How do you go about designing the look of a shoot?
WAVEY: I wanted to create content that was worthy of the title “gay sex.” For me, gay sex is incredible and beautiful, it’s creative and dynamic and interesting. And so I wanted whatever we filmed to be worthy of that. That means working with a lot of mainstream filmmakers, really cool, creative queer people, and convincing them to take a chance with me in creating erotic content. But in order to make that feasible – it’s a huge financial investment – our approach to filming is also really different. When we do a project for four days, we come out with 12 videos.
We’ll film a video before lunch, and then two before dinner. But the sex that we’re filming is like capturing a documentary. The models, through the workshops that they do in the morning, have all the tools that they need. No one actually has sex for more than 90 minutes in real life. So we’re not saying, “Okay, hit position ‘A’ and now hit position ‘B’ and now let’s pose for pictures.” We kind of do everything all at once. Occasionally, because we missed something, we’ll have to say, “Can you spit in his mouth again?” But we try to capture it as organically as possible. And that formula makes it sustainable to have an investment in film equipment. If we were just filming one video a day, it would be triple the cost. That’s how we’ve been able to make it work.
ADAMS: You are a big part of Himeros. Your face, your body, are a big part of it.
WAVEY: The YouTube videos, 15 years ago, were a personal diary. I was talking about the books I was reading and what was happening in my life. It never occurred to me that people would watch. Being on YouTube was not a career at that time. I just wanted to document things and look back on it in 20 or 30 years.
And then people started watching. I made a video about my masturbating neighbor in Toronto and suddenly it had a million views. For me, being in front of the camera is not particularly interesting [anymore]. I’ve made over 1,000 videos; I’ve said what I wanted to say, for the most part. What’s nice with Himeros is I can really use my platform to open to other voices and other stories that are not my own.
ADAMS: There has been something of a reckoning in adult about this topic recently.
WAVEY: Quite frankly, just as a 38-year-old cisgender white guy — I’m not saying this in a self-deprecating way — I’m not that interesting. My story has been told, if not through me then by other people who have had similar experiences. What’s fun for me is to use that platform to open the door for other folks. We did an antiracism audit of our content, a little over a year ago, with an educator who said to us, “Yeah, you have a lot of representation on-camera. But I can really tell a lot of the stories here are being told through a white lens.”
Consider that, if you’re a model of color who has participated in an industry which has a tremendous amount of fetishization and racism and of really problematic narratives, that model is coming to us with all of that experience. If they step onto a set and we say, “Be authentic! Let your guard down!” And then they look around, and no one on the crew who is going to be telling their story looks like them, they might not want to be as authentic as we want. And so a big part of our work has been finding directors of color who are inspired to get into porn. Think about it: if you’re a director of color and you’re thinking about the projects you want to work on, and you’re considering an industry with as much baggage as this one has, it’s completely feasible that you would not want to be involved in porn.
ADAMS: I also noticed that Himeros was ahead of the curve on a movement that seems to be underway to show more diverse body types and ages in adult.
WAVEY: I would say 80% of our models are the traditional porn stars that people know and love and follow on Twitter. But 20% of our models are not the typical mainstream performer. When you watch erotic content, and all you see is the same body type – the 20-year-old with the nine-inch dick and an eight pack – over and over again, it’s completely reasonable that person will think, “I don’t look like that, so I’m not worthy of touch. I’m not worthy of being desired.”
And we’re trying to show people that pleasure is your birthright. And in order to do that, they have to see people they identify with. We’ve all made assumptions about what we think people want – is it just these 20-year-olds with tight bodies? And, sure, that’s hot to a lot of people. But it’s kind of difficult to be attracted to what you don’t see. It’s fun to show a broader spectrum. Our most popular model is also our oldest model, who was 83 years old when we worked with him. He’s 86 now; his name is Norm and he lives in North Carolina. We only made a handful of videos, but he’s the one that everyone talks about and writes about.
