Like Comic-Con, fans can pay to get an autograph or photo from their favorite performers. Unlike Comic-Con, some will also allow you to motorboat them for an additional charge.
My dad really, really, really loves steam trains. If you took the amount of passion I have for every single person and thing I feel passionately about and combined it, it would amount to maybe 1/100th of the amount of passion my dad has for locomotives. I’m fairly certain he’s physically and mentally incapable of focusing his attention on anything else for more than a few minutes at a time.
As such, most of my childhood was spent either inside a steam train, looking at a steam train, or being talked at about a steam train. I don’t think we ever took a family vacation that didn’t revolve around trains in some way.
If my dad were forced to choose between me and a steam train in some sort of Sophie’s Choice scenario, I’d like to think he would pick me, but I don’t doubt there would be at least a few seconds of hesitation. (I don’t feel bad making fun of my dad for this on the internet, because there’s no way he’s reading this. It isn’t about trains.)
This is, of course, not something that is unique to my dad and trains. This is the personality of most dads. I’ve met hundreds of other middle-aged male fangirls who have similar levels of all-consuming passion, but funnel it into muscle cars or guns or stamps or Cabbage Patch Kids.
As porn is a thing that adult men like, this type of man exists in the porn world, too.
I first noticed them a few years ago outside a porn event in London. They were gathered at the end of the red carpet with well-organized folders filled with photos they’d brought for the talent to sign as they entered. Kind of like the people you see at movie premieres, except these guys were presenting the women with photos of themselves with cum on their face or a dick in their mouth, rather than one of their old headshots.
The biggest event in the porn megafan calendar is the AVN Adult Entertaniment Expo, a giant adult industry trade show that takes place every year in Las Vegas. According to the event’s organizers, it attracts over 30,000 people, around half of whom are fans.
Much like Comic-Con, fans can pay to get an autograph or photo from their favorite performers at booths on the show floor. Unlike Comic-Con, some will also allow you to motorboat them for an additional charge.
I attended this year’s event, which took place last week at the Hard Rock Hotel, to take photos of the fans. By my unscientific count, around 80 percent of the people in attendance were middle-aged men who looked like a computer model based on the average of every single one of my friends’ dads. Ten percent were younger guys, all of whom had an extreme Jean-Ralphio energy. The remaining 10 percent fell on the spectrum somewhere between those two points. (I also saw three women that I think might have been there as fans.)
Much like how my dad peppers his speech with references to 2-8-0 wheel formations or Thomas Brassey in spite of my blank stares of incomprehension, all of the people I spoke to at AVN made references to specific cam girls and porn production companies as if these were the most natural and widely known topics of conversation in the world.
“It’s fairly cheap, a lot of the models are nice, you get to know them,” said Nick Koontz, who told me he was mostly known as KingNut345, his username on MyFreeCams.com. “It’s more of a community than it is a random website.”
Here are some photos of superfans, performers, and various other passersby that I saw during my time there:
