(Part 1 of 2) Ask adult webmasters what their primary goals are, and they will inevitably tell you that making their surfers happy is right up there with retention and conversion. In fact, they will probably say that keeping the customer happy is the key to achieving the benefits of those two magic words. And if anybody knows something about keeping surfers sated and sexed up, it’s Jake Cruise.
A middle-aged man with a weight problem in 2000, Jake (not his real name, by the way) was feeling particularly low when his psychologist recommended that he try his hand at pornography. (Seriously, we’re not making this up. But more on that in a bit.) Having been involved in the dot-com boom, Cruise decided to take his shrink up on his suggestion, and launched his first adult site, HardontheWeb.com, to lukewarm results. Realizing that he needed to try his hand at something unique, Cruise adopted an online persona, placed an ad in the local arts and entertainment paper asking for sexual exhibitionists, and started filming more specialized content—placing himself right into the action at his fans’ request.
Today, JakeCruise.com is one of the most, er, “cruised” gay sites on the Net, converting at top speed and keeping surfers coming back for more of Cruise’s footage of himself having sex with some of the hottest amateur guys he can find.
Recently, Cruise launched his latest endeavor, the ambitious StraightGuysForGayEyes.com (or, simply, Sg4ge.com), which contains exclusive footage of hot straight guys getting it on with (gasp!) women. But, unlike most straight porn, Cruise has targeted his hetero footage to gay men, focusing his cameras on the boys instead of the ladies. In the process, he’s created a unique new genre of “straight porn,” and once again found that surfers will flock to content that is daring and unconventional.
I recently caught up with Cruise as he was preparing to launch the new site, and over the course of an hour, talked with him about everything from gay-for-pay models and cunninglingus to building a website and why gay guys seem to be so drawn to straight porn. The following is the first installment of that rather lengthy chat.
| <?PHP print Create_Archive_Image_Tag('<% Content_ID %>', "KenKnox20050809.jpg", "", " border=\"0\" alt=\"\""); ?> |
Jake Cruise: I myself have always enjoyed watching straight men having sex with women. If the guy is hot then it really turns me on. But straight porn is frustrating because the focus is on the women. Then there are the pussy-eating scenes and the lesbian scenes, also known as the fast-forward button scenes. And the women are usually hideous. So I thought, “Well let’s take it a step further,” so I decided to create content that was focused totally on the guy with no cunninglingus, no lesbian scenes, and the girl is basically a prop, basically servicing the guy more than anything else. Minimal exposure to pussy. She keeps the clothes on for the most part. Sometimes the panties go because it’s too uncomfortable, but she always has her top on, so there aren't a lot of breasts, you know, flying around all over the place.
Ha-ha. Nice.
Yeah, a lot of the actors on my site are straight, and they've begged me to do straight scenes. But I didn't want to add that to the Jake Cruise site. So I thought it would be great to produce a new line that would be strictly straight porn made for gay men. There is absolutely no gay sex in it at all.
You bring up an interesting point in your predilection for straight porn. A lot of gay guys seem to be getting into this these days. Why do you think that is? What do you think is behind the continued fascination with men who are unavailable to us?
Well actually, for me, it’s not a fascination with men who aren’t available. I don’t give a shit about if a guy’s straight or not. On my site, the only time I’ve really stressed this whole turning a straight guy gay type of thing in the “Straight for a Day” scenes. I had two friends, two longtime straight models who had done solo scenes for me, who I finally convinced to do a scene together. They were both friends. And it took me two years with one and over a year with the other one to get them to that point. Not to mention a little bit of money. So it’s actually my best seller because it’s very playful. These are friends, and they’ve never had full-blown gay sex before, and one’s fucking the other, and I even make them kiss, and it’s kinda like they’re both really nervous because they think they’re gonna throw up. It’s so silly. But you go through my site, and say, like, “Oh, I know someone is straight” or whatever, or “He’s gay for pay.” It is what it is.
There are a lot of sites out there, like Sean Cody’s [SeanCody.com] and AmateurStraightGuys.com, [where] it’s all about straight guys. But my site has both gay men and straight men. It’s just about whoever’s hot. And the reasons I like watching straight sex are: Number one, if the guy is hot, and number two, the lack of condoms. Because to me condoms are, quite frankly, a huge turn-off. It puts a barrier in [that takes me out of the moment]. To me, there has to be contact between skin and skin, as silly as that may sound. It’s just something that I just see that’s an immediate turn-on for me.
So you don’t think it has to do with gay guys chasing after the unattainable?
Well, yeah. That too. I think gay men are fascinated with what they can’t have. … I think it is something that naturally occurs in humans. We want what we can’t have. I really can't tell you what other gay men like or don't like about straight porn. For me it's not about manliness or anything like that. I like porn, gay or straight, that is real. And what I mean is that the people performing are really enjoying themselves. If there are two gay men making mad passionate love – and you can see Brad and John or Carlo and Jake on my site for an example of that – it's as hot to me as watching a straight man having straight sex.
Where I think gay porn turned south was in getting a lot of gay-for-pay models. These guys are “acting” and not that into it. It shows on camera. Mind you, I use gay-for-pay on my site too because after all, there are 10 times more straight men than gay men so you have to use whoever is hot and willing.
Wait, you mean you think straight guys are hotter than gay men, or there are just more straight men in the world?
(Laughs.) There are more straight men in the world. Nobody is hotter than gay men! We take better care of ourselves.
Amen to that, brother!
(Laughs.) But for me, with porn, it's not just that the guys are hot, it's that the hot guys are hot for their partners. That's what really turns me on. And you can really see it in my straight movies.
Do you have to eventually get some of the guys to maybe do a gay scene for you?
Some of the guys on [the JakeCruise.com site] have done gay scenes for me. There are guys who are straight on my site that either have been strictly straight—like Nick who would only do a solo, wouldn’t even let me touch him; he did a scene. And some of the other guys, they have been gay-for-pay but are straight. So they’re in there as well. And then there are other guys that are strictly straight, that aren’t even on my site at all, not even as a solo. So it’s, how do I put this … I guess I don’t have so much a fascination with straight men. I just like watching straight sex. And I think there’s a market for this. I’m always trying to find a niche.
I have two basic sets of members: One is people around my age who sort of relate to me and get on seeing an Average Joe getting to play with all these hot guys, and on the other side, I have actually quite a few fairly young members who are into daddies. So it’s kind of interesting.
You seem to have become a very popular webmaster in a very short time, and the story of how you got into porn is quite interesting. Do you want to tell it?
It was on the advice of my shrink. Not JakeCruise.com specifically. I was quite a bit overweight. Significantly much more overweight than I am now, and I had sleep apnea, which, at that time, had been diagnosed as depression instead of sleep apnea. And so I was seeing a shrink. I was having money problems; I was a Web designer, but during the dot-com bust period, things got a lot worse for Web designers. … And [my shrink] asked me, “Well, do you have anything against porn?” And I said no. And he was, like, “Well, why don’t you make porn websites? There’s lots of money in that.” And I went, “Hmm … “
I mean, I had subscribed to a couple of sites a couple of times and that was it. And most of the porn that I would watch would be on tape. The whole thing about clicking online and jacking off didn’t really appeal to me. And back then the frame rates, etc., were still pretty bad. The quality of the videos were still pretty bad, [and it was] mostly photos. I first started a site called HardontheWeb. That’s where I had my first four or five guys and their solo scenes. And it didn’t do well, because it was just like every other site out there. So I stopped that, did a little bit more research, and I realized I had to come up with a persona.
And that’s how you came up with Jake Cruise?
I started talking on camera, like introducing the guys. And little by little, I started getting emails saying, “Why don’t we get to see you?” and “We want to see real sex instead of just solos.” I couldn’t afford at the time to hire a second model, so I ended up becoming the second model. So, it just sort of evolved that way. And I sort of fell into this niche. I didn’t say, like, “Oh, there’s a market out there for 47-year-old average guys having sex with really hot punks” or whatever. There was no way I was gonna figure that one out. (Laughs.) So that’s basically how I fell into that.
That was a fairly renegade operation in the beginning right?
Oh, that was strictly me.
What kind of equipment did you start off with?
Like I said, I was a Web designer before, so I already had the knowledge of how to create a website. And I did some programming, et cetera. So building a website wasn’t a problem. I also had some experience with video editing, so that also helped. But I had no training as far as a photographer, as far as videography. And I bought a Canon G01, and then a Sony three megapixel still camera, which to this day, when I take a look at the photos, I think they’re incredible. And I put an ad in the paper, the free LA Weekly, and just went from there. I didn’t even have any idea of how much to pay these guys.
So you weren’t using buddies or stuff like that?
No. I didn’t know anyone that would have done this. As a matter of fact, a lot of my old friends are kind of shocked.
Do you have a technique when it comes to photographing your models? How does a typical shoot go?
Well, first of all, there’s no scripting. We’ve done a couple of silly scripts, like silly pretend things, but only a couple of things. I basically want to capture sex as real as possible. And I’m always joking around. So I keep it lighthearted. One of the things I really find deadening about gay porn is I found that most of it’s really cold, and there’s absolutely no sense of humor in it at. To me, sex is fun and funny and crazy and silly, and so we do a lot of that. In my movies, you’ll see a lot of laughing and smiling. During this one scene I shot in Toronto with this guy Samuel, the bed broke while he was fucking my face. And we start laughing, “Keep the camera rolling!” You’ve got to leave those things in. I don’t consider them bloopers. They’re just a part of the world. So that’s kind of one of my attitudes that I bring to it, like it’s not so much amateur, it’s reality-based. It’s not super polished. Since I started, I put a bit of money into new cameras, new lighting. So everything’s really well lit, but I still want to keep it as natural as possible and just capture those moments that you really can’t write, because they are priceless.
Nice.
Part 2 of AVNOnline’s interview with Jake Cruise will appear tomorrow.
