Mormon-Themed Porn Is Apparently a Booming Business

Becoming a Mormon is incredibly erotic—at least that's how one porn entrepreneur remembers it. Legrand Wolf (obviously not his real name) never knew any openly gay men as a kid, but he'd also never enrolled in sports. So when he had his first locker-room experience at the Missionary Training Center in Provo, Utah, it was revelatory.

"Getting ready for my mission, I was finally exposed to [naked dudes] and I figured it out pretty quickly," he told me. "But then I was around all these straight hot men, and I had to hide the fact that I was gay despite all this intimacy."

Wolf eventually had sex with his mission trip partner, which the Mormons suggestively enough call a "companion." After months of dropped hints and excruciating build-up, Wolf's sexy French partner finally put the moves on him and they developed a loving relationship. Although his former companion is now married with kids, Wolf says their affair—and the sexual tension leading up to it—changed his life. At the very least, it's the inspiration for MormonBoyz.com, the only gay porn site that caters to some very specific religious fantasies.

While the idea of Mormon-themed porn might seem hyper-specific, it makes sense. "If you're looking for something general, there are a million ways to get it," Stephen Yagielowicz, who works at the adult industry business site XBIZ, told me. "Tube sites are monopolizing traffic, so now it's not even about the niche, it's about the microniche." The industry expert says that the ways to compete with free content are three-fold, and all problematic. Porn makers can make high-quality content (but then have to "play whack-a-mole" to keep it from being stolen and uploaded to the tubes), make their stuff more extreme (but then reckon with something "legally problematic and bad for the industry"), or do something really, really specific ("if people are into one-legged tap-dancing Bulgarian midgets and find a stock-pile of that, they're willing to pay").

That's why it's perfectly logical to have a porn site where users can pay $30 a month to watch characters like "Elder Buckley" and "Stake President Cannon" stuff magic underwear in each other's mouths.

It makes sense on another level, too, according to Wolf: Much of America thinks Mormons are kind of freaky. "Mormonism has always been seen as a place for secret sexuality," he says. "Ever since Joe Smith was secretly marrying [multiple] wives, people have thought of the Church as a sexually libertine one that was a danger to the mainstream way of life."

The church has banned polygamy since the late 19th century, and it's not as if Mormons' sex lives are weirder than anyone else's. Still, their rituals definitely have an erotic flavor. When a young Mormon gets inducted into the temple, he or she gets "anointed" while wearing a sheet with a hole in the top. The elder then washes the newbie's body, including his or her thighs and groin area. Then they put on the Temple Garment—or dowdy white underwear that devotees are required to wear at all times after the ceremony.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, this ceremony is a common set on the site. And according to Wolf, people aren't exactly disappointed by the repetitiveness. He says that while business was slow for the first two years of the site's existence, it's taken off in the last two.

So much so that in July, Wolf's friend from Brigham Young University started up MormonGirlz.com, a sister site with the same idea. Brooke Hunter (another pseudonym) grew up in Provo in a devout family, so she knows all the handshakes, rituals and symbols—and she incorporates them into her videos. She says that kind of arcane info is part of the appeal for her fans. "If they're not Mormon they probably like entering this little self-contained universe with thorough storytelling," she says. "If they are Mormon, well, it's pretty authentic."

Hunter, who is a lesbian, also had an encounter with one of her mission companions, she says. A favorite trope of hers to play with is that of the "companionship inventory." That's a scheduled part of the week when partners air their gripes —like a "oh, you sing too loud in the shower when I'm trying to read my scriptures" sort of thing. But as the site grows, Hunter wants to move beyond recreating the same sex scene over and over.

"Right now it's all sister missionaries, all girls in their early 20s," she says. "I'm thinking of adding in a few classic characters, though, like Mormon MILF. I think that would be a popular one."

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