​Why Do Teen Girls Like Gay Porn?

Enter Tumblr, where teens are known to flourish and reblog artful, softcore GIFs. If you're on the look out for sexy stuff, you can easily find your standard kink enthusiasts, cam girls, and sex positive queer bloggers. But further within the social network's blue walls, straight–identifying teen girls commune over their unabashed obsession with gay male porn, perverting the definition of "boy crazy."

While we generally accept straight men and women's love for lesbian porn—we, as a society, have centuries of experience sexualizing women's bodies and portraying female sexuality as fluid and performative—gay male porn hasn't been subject to the same treatment. Girls only recently started rebloging yaoi manga (graphic Japanese comics that depict plotlines of "boys love" written mostly by and for women), androgynous male models' underwear shoots, and cutesy photos of regular, yet genetically blessed gay couples. The blog Boys Love World, for instance, garners most of its notes from its active following of young girls. The blog advises the uninitiated to "prepare to get blown away by [the] most sexiest, cutest, and hottest guys" and, ostensibly, it delivers—if you're a teen girl who is into J- or K-pop stars who look like they're about to kiss. Another blog with a mostly female following, Pretty Gay Boys, features a more American aesthetic. Clearly, these blog's readers are far from a monolithic entity. Some girls obsess over the manga, some teens want to see the real thing, and others just identify as fangirl "shippers" who delight in pairing their favorite male characters from TV shows in fictional relationships.

Toward a more unified theory, I called up adolescent psychotherapist Anupama Kalyanam to figure out why teen girls suddenly like gay male porn. Kalyanam works as a licensed clinical social worker in New York, specializing in working with LGBTQ youth. She chalked the obsession up to the Internet and teens being teens. "It's part of the spectrum of desire and attraction, especially since adolescence is a time for exploration," Kalyanam says. "The internet makes it easier to find different types of sexual behavior. I don't know if teenage girls would have had much success finding gay porn before the Internet."

The Internet, of course, has also allowed the Japanese "boys' love" frenzy to gain young fans in every corner of the world. Yaoi-con, a three-day manga and anime festival that celebrates "male beauty and passion," is holding its 14th annual conference this September in San Francisco. And as I ventured deeper into weird teen Internet, following links from gay porn blogs down a rabbit hole, I eventually found an entire subset of young Russian girls who find man-on-man action fixating.

Anastasia, 20, "has loved gay porn since about [age] 16." Growing up in Moscow, Russia, where same–sex sexual activity has only been legal since 1993 and anti-gay attitudes are the norm, Anastasia always considered gay porn salacious and sinful to watch. But when she started to realize she was developing small crushes on her gay, male friends, she decided to explore her attraction. As it turns out, when you ask a teen girl, or former teen girl, why she likes gay porn, she'll actually answer quite bluntly: "The attraction was undeniable, but hard to explain," Anastasia tells me over email after responding to my call I put out on Tumblr in a bid to to help me understand #teens. "I feel more comfortable being attracted to gay masculinity than straight masculinity," she continues. "I imagine gay men smell better [than heterosexual men], or at least the gay men I like. [I'm into guys who are] more androgynous and boyish, yet still somewhat muscular."

For a teen girl, in Russia at least, part of the allure of two nice-smelling men getting intimate with each other is tied to the imagery's illicitness. Gay porn is coded with the coolness of youthful contrarianism. On the Russian social network VK, which operates like a a Tumblr–Facebook hybrid, the blog No Hope Kids pastiches signifiers of hip (dip–dyed hair and vague rejections of capitalism) with pictures of lip–locked men who have what Anastasia refers to as a "post-Soviet look." The blog is careful to display an "18+" disclaimer. Thanks to the 2013 Russian law forbidding "propaganda of nontraditional sexual relations to minors," anyone accused of even creating "an interest in nontraditional sexual relations" could have to pay a fine.

"Trendy Russian girls aren't really interested in straight men," Anastasia says, noting Russia's dominant cult of masculinity. Anastasia even refuses to watch straights have sex. "What do we have in common with them?" she asks. "They like beer, soccer, and boobs. We like new trends and music styles."

Historically, gay men have been cultural trendsetters from the margins, but Anastasia, who moved from Moscow to Los Angeles, California, in 2012, classifies her interest in gay men as more than a trendy affectation. "Funneling teen hormones in the direction of gay men seems like the only way to get any kind of sexual release," Anastasia says. She views gay porn as a way to enjoy pornography from the vantage point of the female gaze: "I can watch gay porn, engaging in my sexuality, but escape the male gaze of sexualization, objectification," she says.

The idea of concluding that teen girls like gay porn for the sake of empowerment and flipping the male gaze is seductive. But all this could also be interpreted as the trope of the "gay best friend"—viewing gay men as ancillaries to straight women—being taken to its extreme fetishization. (No homosexual males replied to request for comment.) On the fringe of the fringe, some girls who are sexually attracted to gay men refer to themselves as "girlfags," defined by Urban Dictionary as "a woman who is very attracted to gay/bi/trans men." A quick search through the Tumblr tag proves the term to be divisive at best. Girls who claim the "girlfag" are often accused of co-opting LGBTQ struggles, objectifying gay men, and essentially just being overzealous allies. The controversial moniker dates back to 2003, when an article appeared in BUST magazine that attempted to validate the "girlfag" as a legitimate sexual orientation, or at least an element of one. In 2012, "girlfag" made more official inroads into the queer lexicon when Janet W. Hardy, the writer of the cult, kink bestseller The Ethical Slut, wrote a memoir about her life as a self-proclaimed "girlfag." Although Kalyanam has never come across any "girlfags" in her practice, she "could see how it feels appropriate for some, and problematic for others, but as long as there is consent and nobody's getting hurt, I don't think there's much place to judge."

For the final word, I asked my teen spirit guide Anastasia what she thought of the term. As I had come to expect, she was wise. "I don't really like the idea of objectifying gay men when I watch gay porn," she admitted. "[It's not my intention], but it's inevitable, I guess. If I wanted to express some vengeance over men who have wronged me, I would just watch femdom videos. But those bore me. I like seeing people receive pleasure. I don't want to think about pain, unless it's the immediately gratifying kind."