In that study, Monaghan drew a chart to illustrate the many types and subtypes of gay and straight bears and BHMs:īut even a chart like this doesn't define bodies completely, and that's by design. It had a name at least as early as 2005, when Lee Monaghan, a professor at the University of Limerick in Ireland, studied virtual constructions of male embodiment-including Big Handsome Men, Bears, and all of the subsets in between. “When God has given you a gift, you have to do what you do, you know." It's not a category on any of the major tube sites like Pornhub, xHamster, or XVideos, and doesn't have an award category in any of the major porn award ceremonies like AVN or XBIZ. In the past, BHM and large men in porn in general have often the butt of a joke: The Minion's gimmick is letting beautiful women smear food all over him, and a search of tube sites for "fat man" and variants of the phrase returns a lot of degradation content.īig guys have been doing porn for a while, but it's difficult to trace exactly when Big Handsome Man became a genre of its own. There are a few notable examples of big guys breaking the mold before that: in 1995, The Secret Life of Herbert Dingle starred Mark Kernes alongside Sharon Mitchell, and the box cover played up his looks-a slightly disheveled guy in a rumpled gray suit-as contrast against his lithe female counterparts, crawling all over him in nothing but neon thongs. "It’s still such an overlooked and marginalized niche in porn, so I’m very happy to help give it more exposure."
But I always wanted to showcase my bi side too, especially as a heftier man." He collaborated with some local female talent, and started incorporating more straight scenes in his repertoire. "That made me quite popular among the gay bear and chub subcultures within the LGBTQ community and fan base. Which I still regularly do now," he said. "As an out and proud bisexual man, I’d done plenty of all-male scenes with other guys.
BHM isn't limited to straight porn or heterosexual fans, either.īHM performer and content creator Rex Behr, who also considers himself a bear, said that the move toward the BHM label was a natural progression. Bears have been around for a long time, as has queer porn that's welcomed and championed a wide spectrum of body types.
Bears include barrel-chested, hairy, or muscular men, and chubs are usually just plain corpulent guys. The rise in camming and independent modeling platforms has opened up a new world of body types, sexual expressions, and fetishes that studios rarely allowed or accounted for.īig Handsome Men are sometimes seen as the straight side of "bears" and "chubs," two categories of talent that exists within the gay porn world. But in the last five years or so, that standard has shifted. Male talent like Lexington Steel, Rocco Siffredi, and Johnny Sins have risen to fame at least partially because of their fantasy-level physiques. For decades, much of mainstream porn has been dominated by big dicks and abs that could grate cheese.