This article originally ran in the August issue of AVN magazine.
Once upon a time, LeGrand Wolf and his husband were both good Mormon boys, born and raised in Utah—an upbringing complicated by their sexual orientation.
“We were true believers and we even went on missions. But we both sensed that we were gay from a young age, and that’s a big problem, so neither of us told anyone,” says Wolf, owner and creative director of MormonBoyz.com. “My husband and I have always loved porn, and after we got married we took the little money we had and started paying guys off Craigslist to dress up in Mormon outfits and jack off on camera. It immediately got enough traction to start paying its own costs, but life got in the way.”
So the site went dormant for two years—but was re-launched in 2012 when the whole country was considering a Mormon for president. “Very quickly, it was pulling in enough money for us to invest in professional equipment and pay for full-on fucking in our videos. That’s when the site really started to take off, and we could now afford more elaborate sets, costumes, equipment and a shoot team.”
Wolf notes that the essence of the site is innocent: young Mormons getting their first education in gay sex, with each other and with the men of the priesthood. “We try really hard to get the emotional reality of being an obedient missionary into our films—the sets, costumes, camera work and scenarios are all about these submissive boys giving themselves up to these older men who have total power over them.”
When creating MormonBoyz, they decided it would need to incorporate several themes: the gay daddy/son dynamic, the gay incest taboo, gay bareback (“it’s how the priesthood is conferred: ordination by insemination”), men in suits (lots of clothed male/naked male porn) and gay Mormon. Wolf explains that each Mormon boy goes through a series of secret erotic rituals as part of his initiation into The Order, and along the way he ends up having casual sex with other missionaries he is paired with (called his missionary “companions” in Mormon speak).
“Yes, the iconic image of Mormon boys are the missionaries that spend 24/7 in a boy/boy pairing. Yes, missionaries on bicycles and going door to door, two by two is the iconic image of Mormon missionary boys, but ‘gay Mormon’ wasn’t at the top of our list because, unlike Catholic schoolgirl porn, ‘gay Mormon boy porn’ wasn’t a thing yet,” says LeGrand, who worked as the senior coordinator on several National Institutes of Health-funded studies prior to delving into the adult industry as full-time employment.
“I was a researcher that focused on the sexual health of men during my time in the university setting. My team conducted huge national and international surveys of men who have sex with men. I learned a lot while looking at the de-identified responses of hundreds of thousands of men—not gay in most cases—in their responses about the sex they were having (or fantasizing about) with other men. Among the things I learned while culling through the data, men are no more or less likely to engage in homosexual behavior than women. People who feel uncomfortable when they see two men kiss or hold hands are three times as likely to have experimented with guys, and twice as likely to still secretly hook up using apps like Grindr and GayRomeo,” he says.
“I learned a lot of things that informed the creation of MormonBoyz…research was fascinating, and I enjoyed my work on how technology has changed the behavior of men who have sex with men, but I was restless. I didn’t want to just study what other guys were doing, so I decided to make porn on the side.”
And considering the path Wolf endured to get there, that’s a minor miracle. “Coming to terms with being sexual was incredibly difficult for me as a young man. There were simply no positive images of gay Mormons when I was a kid. I didn’t even have the language to say to myself: ‘I’m attracted to men because I’m gay.’ I was really confused about what I wanted, and it wasn’t until I was 20 that I admitted to myself that I was gay and acted on my attraction to men.”
Wolf says that he hopes MormonBoyz communicates to Mormon teens that “it’s really fun and really hot” to be gay.
“My first sexual experiences happened when I was a Mormon missionary. When I was in the missionary training center, I was suddenly surrounded by other adolescent boys and I wanted to fuck a lot of them. We shared a communal shower nicknamed the ‘Tree of Life,’ so every morning we’d stand in a circle naked and soap up. By some miracle, I managed to never get a boner even though that shower was the hottest thing that had ever happened to me,” he recalls. “When I left the training center and went out into the world to preach the gospel, one of my companions happened to be bisexual and a total slut. Since a missionary spends all day, every day with his companion, it wasn’t long before he and I started having sex.”
The MormonBoyz Movement
Wolf notes that taking the site from solo jerkoff videos to full-on fucking seemed like the obvious progression. While it worked to a degree, the growth didn’t spike the way he had hoped.
“When we moved toward a focus on the daddy/son content, the growth went up like crazy,” he says. “So many guys wrote in to share with us their stories of sex they had on their missions with their companions. We were hearing from Bishops and Stake Presidents (Mormon leaders) about the sex they were having with Mormon boys after their missions. And so many women were writing in to tell us that this was their favorite porn site, which was really a surprise to us…we’ve had hundreds of emails from women referencing the story pages of our Elders. Women love the fact that we are story-based porn.”
Wolf says he is most proud of the number of guys they have helped bottom for the very first time, noting that about 50 percent of the men they shoot with have never been with another guy: “Of the guys who had been with another guy, many of them had never bottomed in anal sex before. Not only were we their first, but many of them love the experience of discovering their prostate.” He adds that most of the men have never shot elsewhere.
“It’s also a sign of just how unique we are that various bloggers will write to us and ask, ‘Can you please tell me the ‘porn name’ for Bishop Angus and Patriarch Smith?’ As if their MormonBoyz porn name isn’t their real porn name. Or rather, as if their porn name on MormonBoyz is their real name. While guys who go on to do work with other studios after our studio take on less-Mormon names, frequently they just drop their title (Elder, Brother, President, Bishop) with a first name. This is exactly what happens when Mormon missionaries return home.”
Wolf says they are always looking for handsome, young, clean-cut, innocent-looking guys who can take orders and a pounding, and they generally like to work with first timers. “Mormon boys are called as missionaries when they are 18. While you can technically still be called on a mission until you are 25, most boys start their missions at 18 or 19.”
Wolf notes that the MormonBoyz world centers on a set of secret sexual practices peculiar to Mormonism: the rites of passage to gain the “Patriarchal Priesthood” or “Priesthood of the Father” involve a series of steps in the Mormon temple. He says that the “average” Mormon might not know about all of these rituals, but that most are real—and reserved for the elite.
“Regular Mormons going through the temple actually do see and use its ‘glory holes,’ they just call them by a different name. They are called ‘The Veil,’ and Mormon’s blindly touch each other through openings during one step in the secret Mormon temple ceremonies,” Wolf says. “On our site, there is the step involving the priesthood stretcher, and believe it or not, this is literally the only step that doesn’t happen in a Mormon temple. That said, it is common for priesthood leaders to ask for details and even a demonstration in private when boys come to them and confess their sexual sins, especially homosexual sins—or as Mormons like to say, transgressions involving ‘same-sex attraction.’”
Mormon Misconceptions
Wolf notes that while they did not set out to piss off Mormons, it happened anyway. “We get hate mail, our sites have suffered DOS attacks…people are constantly flagging our social media posts. The most disturbing for us was our exclusion from the Utah Pride parade this year. The whole fiasco was shady and offensive. It’s one thing for Mormons to object to our work, it’s another to be attacked by sex-negative elements of the gay community itself.”
Because the site is so unique, Wolf says it has received a lot of attention without really trying—some good, some bad. “We even had death threats during the first year. But all told, our brand has attracted a lot of positive attention, and that has really helped us stand out. The Los Angeles Times put our Magic Mormon underwear as the featured story on the front page of their Style section. VICE did a feature article on our website, and we’ve been in several dozen other publications quite a few times since we launched. But there is a reason for the interest. Our commitment to our niche, and the nature of our niche, has helped us stand out. We’ve tried very hard to have a clear vision of what fantasy we’re serving.”
Wolf says they try not to take the hate mail and controversy too seriously. “If anything, this inspires us to work harder to make great erotic fantasies for everyone—mostly non-Mormons, but Mormons, too! ‘Mormon’ is one of Utah’s top-five search terms on xHamster. We’re having fun, and so are our fans.”
The company also operates MormonsSecret.com, a place to buy authentic replicas of the secret Mormon underwear that plays a big role on the site; and MormonGirlz.com, which focuses on the secret sex rituals performed in Mormon temples and the taboo practices of polygamy. Meanwhile, MormonBoyz was recently revamped with a fresh design. Wolf adds that a pin-up calendar and the first book from the team—a “sexy Missionary Journal”—are on the way, along with their first-ever crossover projects with other studios.
“I am very proud of how we run our studio,” says Wolf, who directs all the videos and is joined on staff by his husband, their friend Brooke Hunter (a lesbian ex-Mormon) and a shooter/editor they’ve had since the re-launch. “We think we’re fairly unique. We’re the only place for gay Mormon porn. Mormon missionary-themed content at the other studios will pop up here and there, but without fail it’s way off. The costuming is wrong, the grooming is off, and the other studios don’t understand what really makes Mormon missionaries different or unique. And it’s not just the lingo—the other studios don’t have the real Magic Mormon underwear! When other studios try and execute the Mormon missionary genre, we think it’s great—even when it is cringe-worthy.”
