Hot House’s ‘gay muscle porn’ is all masc and moan

If you’ve spent more than a few minutes wandering through pics of naked men on the internet, there’s a 100 percent chance you’ve scrolled past something from Hot House. It boasts impressive longevity among porn producers, having been founded in 1993 by Falcon Studios veteran Steven Scarborough. Over the last quarter century, Hot House helped to cement the image of what mainstream audiences expect from gay porn: tall, muscular models; bright lights; moans and grunts; and acting that exists only to be fast-forwarded through or laughed at.

With a catalog encompassing 700 hours of sex over multiple decades, it would take years to watch every clip on the site if you only watched one per day. So is the price of a subscription worth it? We broke it down.

Hot House cost

You have some options when signing up for Hot House. You can start with the limited three-day trial membership, which costs about $3. But what the site doesn’t tell you until after you’ve paid is that you’ll only have access to the latest 10 releases. A popup will also inform you that you’ll need to subscribe for an additional $29.95 per month to “get access to all site features & functions.” But what are those features and functions? Nobody knows.

If that sounds like a bait-and-switch, you might bite the bullet and go straight for the $29.95 one-month subscription. Thirty dollars seems steep for a month’s worth of streaming video, though, so you could opt instead for a package deal: The three-month membership works out to about $20 per per month. A year’s worth of access, paid up front, amortizes to about $10 per month but you’ll have to pay for it all up front.

Choose your investment wisely. If there’s a way to switch from one subscription level to another once you’ve picked, we weren’t able to find it.

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Hot House membership perks

Hot House advertises “access to 45 years of Falcon Studios content” and “access to 25 years of Hot House content,” with “over 3,500 exclusive scenes available to watch.” That may be true, but we were only able to find videos dating back to 2007. Access to vintage porn would be a huge perk, but those 45-year-old videos are either hidden so well they’re nigh nonexistent or require some unidentified membership level to access.

Members also get access to photo sets, which are actually quite nice. Those fleeing the Tumblr NSFW purge will likely enjoy the well-composed, generous stills in the galleries, which can be freely downloaded… if you upgrade your subscription.

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In addition, the site has a truly bizarre section for “DVDs.” The DVDs aren’t for sale, or even available to watch. You can only view the trailer, along with the front and back cover of the box. It’s hard to imagine what the point of this feature is. Is it in case someone is feeling nostalgic for a DVD they saw at a garage sale in 2011? For people who lost their DVD cases and want to re-print the cover art at home? Is it for queer studies scholars seeking primary sources for their dissertation on semipermeable social boundaries in erotic discourse? It’s weird.

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The Hot House vibe

Hot House has a very specific tone, what its website banner labels “gay muscle porn.” The studio lights are bright, the models are mostly white, lean, and have just a little body hair. They take sex very seriously and seldom smile or laugh. Every scene spurts with masc swagger.

It’s what straight people imagine gay porn to be, in the same way that the Abbey is all they think a gay bar could possibly be. In other words, these are not imaginative videos.

But then again, maybe you don’t need to find the Wes Anderson of gay porn to get off. There’s something to be said for predictability, and you always know what you’re going to get when you click on a title like “Slam That Hole” or “Deep Examination” or “Pack Attack 6.” And despite the unfulfilled promise of 45 years’ worth of content, there’s still enough here that you’ll probably never run out of videos to watch.

Is a Hot House membership worth it?

If the Hot House look is your jam, then congratulations, you lucky thing: You hit the jackpot. Go nuts with that $119.40 yearly subscription, and dehydrate yourself to the echoey sound of one muscleman after another slamming each other on a locker room set. Let us know if you figure out what that DVD section is for.

But if you need more variety in your porn—different body types, different skin colors, long-tail interests like looning and gooning—you’re probably better off moving along.

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