I posted a couple of weeks back about my friend who fancies himself as an amateur gay porn star and the growing number of guys ready to smile and squirt it for the cameras. Turns out, I wasn’t wrong…

By pure chance I stumbled across pictures of an ex-colleague posing and loving himself on a porn website, then recognised a gay musician and minor, local celeb, on another. (At this stage I would like to point out that I don’t spend all my time surfing for porn).

Then there were those two wrestlers from Nebraska who got kicked of their university team for doing gay porn and getting found out. I see their motive as being different, though, and more about the money. As far as anyone knows, they’re both straight.

So, what’s going on with all these gay men doing porn on the side? The guy I used to work with, I believe, is still in a very well paid job, so he can’t be doing it just to pay the bills. He was always very into his body and, I suspect, it’s more about the need to compete and to induce a bit of peer envy. Plain old showing off, basically – there’s plenty of local guys who’ve had a private performance; now he wants to take his one-man show to a global audience. And fair enough.

I blame all this online social networking, people creating ever more in-depth and information-filled personal profiles, bombarding the web with images of them, them and more of them, and shouting to the world in under 140 characters what it’s like to take a shit. We’re turning into such exhibitionists – whatever happened to a bit of mystery and reserve?

Of course, lots of gay guys have been uploading naughty pics of themselves for years, on sites like Gaydar, for anyone who cares to look, so the leap into the big league isn’t so big, it’s just adding a bit of gloss and better lighting. But is it progress if more and more guys break out into the big-time? I thought coming out was enough to demonstrate to the world my gayness and I really don’t think I need to provide visual proof.

Then there’s the danger of a class system developing among gay men: those who have the body and measurements to pose for pictures or have gay sex for the camera, and those who don’t have a fist-full of dollars waved at them.

I’m starting to wonder who I’m going to come across next wearing nothing more than a grin and an erection. I really don’t need to see my old English teacher shaking his subtext at me.