Producer and performer LeGrand Wolf recently marked a decade in adult with a bold move: he and his husband/business partner Jay Wolf walked away from several established properties — including the reliably controversial MormonBoyz — and launched a new company, Carnal Media, with a particular focus on all-male fetish. Carnal Media took the further step of purchasing venerable affiliate network GunzBlazing and gained an immediate foothold in the marketplace.
“In light of the many questions we have received about our business,” announced the partners last year, “we need to clarify that we are no longer associated with MormonBoyz, the site that we created nine years ago while on our honeymoon, a site that we loved and cherished as it grew and won awards.”
We call it ‘smut.’ You can call it ‘art,’ you can call it ‘movies,’ you can call it whatever you want. We like the subversiveness of calling it ‘smut’ and we don’t shy away from those terms.
The men also stepped away from their original company, MetaVentures, and its affiliated sites, such as FamilyDick. With a year-and-change into the life of Carnal Media under his belt, LeGrand Wolf spoke to XBIZ about his continually evolving career and his passionate desire to produce distinctive, original gay content.
“My career as a performer and filmmaker started out with my husband and I getting very excited about the possibility of effecting social change through pornography,” he said.
“I was in medical school almost 15 years ago and realized [it] wasn’t the path I wanted to take in life and that I’d chosen that career for reasons other than passion. It wasn’t something I was particularly excited about.”
Nevertheless, Wolf came out of the closet while in med school and met his future husband. They promptly started a series of online businesses that became victims of the Great Recession, he recalled.
“It was no longer possible for us to continue to pursue the mainstream ventures, and we were looking at going back to school — medical school, in my case and my husband going back to graduate school.”
The Wolfs also wanted to legally marry. “Five years into our relationship, the Mormon Church had launched a campaign to strike down the newly won right in California for gay couples to become married with a proposition that was to go on the ballot, called Prop 8,” he notes. “The Mormon Church had donated millions of dollars privately; they lied about what they were doing with the campaign donations. They lied about the efforts they were engaged in to persuade voters. Meanwhile, my husband and I were actually planning on getting married in California. In November of that year, Prop 8 passed and we weren’t able to get married. That was in 2008; in 2009, we decided to get married in the state where it was legal, in Massachusetts.”
On their honeymoon, the men took another leap of faith. We decided to give “one more entrepreneurial thing a shot,” Wolf said. “We were joking, really. We said, ‘Let’s do porn. We should do Mormon porn because we grew up Mormon.’ And we created MormonBoyz.”
The men had experience in the online space but knew nothing about the adult industry.
“That was in 2009; it’s now 10 years later. The world of porn had already changed; Napster changed it, torrents changed it, tube sites had changed it. VHS was no longer a thing. This was still when you could post an ad on Craigslist and say, ‘Hey, if you’re interested in coming into a hotel room and jacking off on camera, you can make a little money.’ That still existed,” said Wolf.
They produced an initial series of videos featuring young hunks — “innocent types with big dicks and handsome faces” — chatting about their mission experience and pretending to sneak away to jack off on-camera, magic Mormon underwear and all.
“We got a lot of exposure. A lot of people were upset; a lot of people thought it was great,” notes Wolf.
It was during this time that the seeds for what would become Carnal Media were planted. An opportunity arose for the men to decamp to the University of Minnesota to run a newly funded program that explored the intersection of technology and sexual behavior among a particular group of people described as “men who have sex with men,” not necessarily “gay men.”
“It was very interesting because Grindr, the location-aware web, was a new thing. We were big consumers of lots of these products, like Grindr and other apps like Hornet. Scruff wasn’t quite a thing yet; DaddyHunt was barely becoming a thing,” said Wolf. “We really were excited about what we were seeing.”
Several years passed; in 2012, Mormonism was unexpectedly in the zeitgeist. Mitt Romney was running for president; the “Book of Mormon” was entertaining packed houses on Broadway; and the ever-entrepreneurial couple had launched a burgeoning clothing label, Magic Mormon Underwear.
“We decided we really needed to double-down and relaunch our site, especially with all this new information we had, this market research of talking to ‘men who have sex with men’ and why they buy the porn they buy, why they click, why they still subscribe to subscription sites despite the fact that so much content is free. We did a relaunch and focused a lot of ‘daddy-son’ interactions. It was also something we really love.”
Wolf cites the now-defunct print magazine Handjobs as an influence, with its primary focus on the power dynamic on ‘daddy-son’ fauxcest stories. “It’s all deliciously perverted and erotic and should and does exist in the world of pornographic fantasy,” he said. “It’s great!”
The relaunch was a success and the men subsequently conceived GrowlBoys in late 2012 and early 2013, which LeGrand describes as a “furry” site, but with a twist that explores “transformational” erotica — meaning an actual change from one form to another.
“In our mind, people were walking right up to the line of doing porn but not actually doing porn, telling stories in comic books but not really actually allowing there to be an intersection of art, writing and pornographic video,” said. GrowlBoys is among the suite of Carnal Media’s fetish sites that have launched this year.
GrowlBoys and such nascent sites as BoyForSale and Gaycest fit Carnal Media’s business plan. “We feel like the future of the porn industry, and where we plan ongoing, is in creating content that you can’t get for free. We could see – and we knew this when Tumblr was the number-one place for gay men to get porn — that you can see suck-and-fuck porn all day long. That doesn’t mean I don’t consume it; I love it. I love jerking off to things I might find on Twitter or Reddit,” he explained.
“But there’s not anything particularly special about it anymore. Seeing a beautiful male figure, seeing beautiful sex between two men, is fantastic and it’s beautiful and it’s great to see. If the goal is to go and have a private sexual experience, where I’ve got lube and I’ve got my dick in my hand and I’m going to masturbate and ultimately orgasm, you can use some of these things. But we wanted to create content that was really special and unique, along the lines of MormonBoyz, which was a world you could immerse yourself into. That was our vision for how we move forward.”
However, when BoyForSale went live, the launch of Carnal Media hit a speed bump over concerns about the site’s overarching theme.
“People have fantasies about giving up their autonomy. [BoyForSale] is about young men who are excited to be ‘owned’ and used by sexy men who are hung and powerful,” said Wolf. “They get to be passed around and fucked and that’s great — it’s great fantasy and, of course freaked-out people that thought this was glorifying a particular fantasy, which is bananas.”
He concedes the theme is decidedly provocative.
“People are allowed to say what they want. You certainly would never curtail free speech, but you certainly don’t want to curtail fantasy at all. The place for [fantasy] is in porn. Porn is not just a reality-television show. Porn should be, and is, the place where reality ends and fantasy can pick up. Hence the reason you might have a doctor [sexually] interacting with patients: absolutely, wildly inappropriate for the real world, for a doctor to fuck his patient, but in fantasy it’s great. Or a teacher to fuck a student. Entirely unethical, but in porn that’s fantastic,” Wolf notes.
“So for a young man to find an underground society of men who buy and sell them to be used as property is fantastic fantasy.”
Wolf decried the “cynicism” of those who may sign up as affiliates and then stoke controversy to drive traffic back to that very same content. He believes the controversy “speaks to what is really needed in porn right now. We need thoughtful, good creators of content who know how to make money in the current environment, frankly, and who are able to challenge people. If a porn fantasy is to be tied-up and beaten, in some type of bondage scenario, we don’t actually believe it’s okay to tie up people and beat them against their will. But in a bondage scenario, that’s fantastic fantasy if all parties are willing and interested and there’s consent.”
After more than 10 years in adult, Wolf remains energized by the possibilities inherent in the genre. “What’s the product that we sell? Immersive fantasies where people can actually lose themselves. We are selling the opportunity to lose yourself in that fantasy in the privacy of your bedroom, safely away from homophobic people or people who want to criminalize what you find fantastically sexy. And you can have an STD-free orgasm in the safety and privacy of your own home. That’s our product. And we believe in our product; we love our product. We jerk off to our own product!” he said, with a laugh.
“We think that the product is something that is almost better than anything else. Who else offers people an orgasm? Who is making that? We are in the business of making a product that gives people sexual release, an outlet for urges that are best kept as urges in your mind and in your fantasies.”
“For us to survive in the world of porn, we really need to be thinking about creating those fantasies that aren’t just the standard suck-and-fuck that you can see on JustFor.Fans and OnlyFans. Those are great places for it, but that’s reality. We need to be thinking about — at least, for our company, what Carnal Media stands for — creating really believable and exciting fantasies.”
Wolf has embraced new artistic challenges by stepping in front of the camera as a performer, a move that has been enthusiastically endorsed by his husband, but stoked negative blowback from some of Wolf’s business colleagues.
“One of the things that I noticed is that people who produce content look down on performers. I hear it all the time. ‘Why would you debase yourself and be a performer? You shouldn’t be the CEO of a company and also be a performer.’ I find that repulsive and shocking,” he said.
“We are all the same. No one is any better than anyone else. Becoming a performer, for me, was an important thing. I really enjoy working with others to use our bodies to create art, to create smut. And I think it’s really important to not just be a director, but to be talent, be an editor, be an artist and a PhotoShopper — it’s really important to understand all elements of the business for me. And forcing myself to be more in shape than I probably would be otherwise and forcing myself to really connect with [costars] and make sure they feel safe and feel like we, as the owners of the company, are really there with them — that’s really important. It’s been great. It’s fun.”
Even as they continue to expand and nurture their new company, and navigate the occasional period of controversy, Wolf and his partner are living out their grand idea, first hatched during their honeymoon, of “effecting social change” through pornography.
“My husband and I have long since decided that this [industry] is something that erodes the traditional, patriarchal notions of what you should do with your body, sexually, and that’s fantastic. We should be more sexually liberated; at least, that’s our thinking.”
“We call it ‘smut.’ You can call it ‘art,’ you can call it ‘movies,’ you can call it whatever you want,” he said. “We like the subversiveness of calling it ‘smut,’ we like the subversiveness of calling it ‘pornography’ and we don’t shy away from those terms. We think there is a ton of money, a ton of excitement and interest in gay content and there’s lots and lots of business to be had in the gay space. [We are] educating buyers and building a powerful team and we’re excited to share that success.”
