How a pandemic hobby led Will Chiong to chronicle Asian representation in gay porn
Will Chiong didn’t set out to become a historian of Asian gay pornstars. He didn’t even set out to become an artist. He instead fell into both, almost by accident. “I actually got really into artwork during the COVID lockdown. That was when I first started doing figure drawing,” said Chiong, a gay Asian artist … Read More
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Will Chiong didn’t set out to become a historian of Asian gay pornstars. He didn’t even set out to become an artist. He instead fell into both, almost by accident.
“I actually got really into artwork during the COVID lockdown. That was when I first started doing figure drawing,” said Chiong, a gay Asian artist based in Brooklyn, whose work explores the intersection of queerness, pop culture, and Asian identity.
Prior to the pandemic, he described himself as a hobbyist sketcher without any formal training. Bored at home, Chiong started drawing anything and everything in reach, when a friend suggested that he check out one of the many Zoom figure drawing sessions that were extremely popular from 2020 to 2023.
What began as a pandemic hobby quickly turned into an informal but very real artistic education. Chiong watched a lot of YouTube videos to practice before joining the virtual drawing classes, which were hosted all over the world: in London, New York, Los Angeles, and more.
“I got to meet all these great artists around the world, and I just was doing it almost every night of the week, and then just spending a lot of time practicing, and I just got really hooked on it," Chiong explained.
[caption id="attachment_64821" align="aligncenter" width="441"]
A self-portrait of Will Chiong.Will Chiong[/caption]
One of the early virtual sessions of note was with Doable Guys, a homoerotic art collective based in New York City. The group was one of the earlier collectives to pivot to online sessions in 2020 and now hosts weekly sessions in SoHo, where Chiong is a regular attendee.
Category: Asian Man
In 2023, Chiong began a project titled “Category: Asian Man,” a trading card set that featured 17 Asian gay pornstars who had appeared on the gay pornography website SeanCody.com. Why that specific website? “[Sean Cody] was really important to me in my 20s. You know, it was just like, kind of a website that I was extremely aware of. I remember me and my gay friends would talk about it almost like a reality show. We were tracking the models, who was new, and what's going on. It became this central talking point that you could have, and it was one of the first online studios. It broke a lot of conventions of traditional studios.”
[caption id="attachment_64820" align="aligncenter" width="700"]
Will Chiong's "Category: Asian Men."Will Chiong[/caption]
There is some merit to Chiong’s point: At the time of its launch, Sean Cody didn't have the cheesy porn music or scripts, there were no porn name pseudonyms, models were instead identified by a single name, and they were categorized by ethnicity and other physical stats, such as age, piercings, and tattoos.
It was that categorization, specifically the labeling of “Asian,” that made Chiong revisit the site and take pause. Of the 4,000 performers who’d appeared on Sean Cody since the site’s inception in 2001, only 17 carried the categorization of “Asian man.” (That’s 0.425% for anyone wondering.) By comparison, the website labels white performers as “American man.”
As appalling as this number may sound, Sean Cody outranks many of its peers, including Corbin Fisher, which according to Chiong, “in all of their history, I can find two Asian models” in the site’s talent roster.
That Sean Cody statistic became the premise for Chiong’s “Category: Asian Man.” He created 17 original pieces of art for the project — one per performer, each with its own distinct style. He then had those pieces printed on 2.5” x 3.5” trading cards reminiscent of the Marvel Masterpieces cards of the 1990s. Each card came complete with the performer’s name, aliases, first appearance, stats, and a brief bio. Chiong debuted the set at Flame Con, New York’s LGBTQ+ comic convention, in 2024.
“That was the perfect place to do it because people immediately got it,” Chiong said. He did note, however, that “younger audiences kind of associated them more with Pokemon cards, and I just didn't say anything because that would make me feel old,” he concluded with a laugh.
Famous Asian Gay Porn Legends
If “Category: Asian Man” was a snapshot of gay Asian representation in pornography, then Chiong's follow-up would be considered a wide shot. “Famous Asian Gay Porn Legends” is a magazine featuring nearly 30 original pieces of physical and digital artwork that traces Asian representation in gay porn from the 1990s to today. The magazine was released earlier this summer, coinciding with Flame Con 2026.
[caption id="attachment_64819" align="aligncenter" width="700"]
Will Chiong's "Famous Asian Gay Porn Legends."Michael Shirey[/caption]
Chiong opens the magazine with a foreword in which he credits performer Brandon Lee as being one of the first meaningful moments of Asian gay representation for him.
“I just remember, like, the idea of seeing a sexualized Asian male was so foreign at the time," Chiong said. "Asian men weren't even like romantic or leading roles in Hollywood at the time or on TV shows. It was so rare to see an Asian man on TV, let alone in any kind of romantic possibilities. And I think that it was pretty groundbreaking to see an Asian man in like a dominant sexual role.”
The magazine goes on to offer a retrospective of popular performers throughout the decades. Each decade is teed up with a blurb about the state of the porn industry, including the rise of online studios, the pivot to online amateur work on blogs, and the advent of OnlyFans. It is an incredibly thorough and digestible thesis, built from over 200 sources. Some of that research came easy; the rest, especially the mid-2000s, was a bit harder to track down.
“A lot of those studios of the early 2000s are either acquired or have gone under,” Chiong elaborated, describing the “mushy” gap in gay porn history where print media gave way to early, incomplete web coverage, where an entire decade of performers all but vanished for official record. Chiong filled those gaps by relying on unofficial record: leaning on fan-run databases and wikis like the Internet Adult Film Database, Gay Erotic Video Index, and StashDB. Chiong describes these sites with a sense of affection, calling them “the most obsessed porn nerds in the world, of which I’m one.”
By broadening his scope in “Famous Asian Gay Porn Legends,” Chiong was fortunate enough to work and speak with some of the models featured in the magazine — including Damian Dragon, Sammy Sinsss, Jason Luna, Cody Seiya, and Zed Sheng. Damian Dragon, who used to live in New York and now resides in Thailand, even provided a blurb for the piece, calling Chiong’s work “a powerful reminder that [Asian men] have always been worthy of being seen, desired, and celebrated.”
As he distilled his research, a trend became increasingly clear to Chiong: Asian representation in gay porn and in mainstream media have moved together in lockstep, both being next to nonexistent in the 1990s and climbing up ever since. Chiong points to 2009 specifically, the launch of the Asian-focused studio Peter Fever and the rise of Tumblr-era amateur porn as a major inflection point. Chiong points to evidence that once performers could represent themselves outside of the studio models, there was a more-than-eager audience that had been there all along. For example, Pornhub's own year-end data named Tyler Wu the platform's most-searched gay performer of 2025 (up from fourth place in 2024).
Chiong doesn’t consider either of these collections to be the final say on gay Asian representation. That reckoning is far from over. Stereotypes about Asian men in queer spaces, passivity chief among them, still persist. But, in Chiong’s opinion, the current rise of performers on independent sites like OnlyFans signal a brighter future.
To celebrate the release of “Famous Asian Gay Porn Legends,” artwork from both projects will be exhibited at the SoHo Project Space Vault Gallery in SoHo. There will be an opening reception on Thursday, September 10 from 6-8 p.m. The show will run through Sunday, September 27. Pieces will be available for sale, along with copies of “Category: Asian Man” and “Famous Asian Gay Porn Legends.” To find out more about Will Chiong, visit WillDrawForFun.com.
A self-portrait of Will Chiong.Will Chiong[/caption]
One of the early virtual sessions of note was with Doable Guys, a homoerotic art collective based in New York City. The group was one of the earlier collectives to pivot to online sessions in 2020 and now hosts weekly sessions in SoHo, where Chiong is a regular attendee.
Category: Asian Man
In 2023, Chiong began a project titled “Category: Asian Man,” a trading card set that featured 17 Asian gay pornstars who had appeared on the gay pornography website SeanCody.com. Why that specific website? “[Sean Cody] was really important to me in my 20s. You know, it was just like, kind of a website that I was extremely aware of. I remember me and my gay friends would talk about it almost like a reality show. We were tracking the models, who was new, and what's going on. It became this central talking point that you could have, and it was one of the first online studios. It broke a lot of conventions of traditional studios.”
[caption id="attachment_64820" align="aligncenter" width="700"] Will Chiong's "Category: Asian Men."Will Chiong[/caption]
There is some merit to Chiong’s point: At the time of its launch, Sean Cody didn't have the cheesy porn music or scripts, there were no porn name pseudonyms, models were instead identified by a single name, and they were categorized by ethnicity and other physical stats, such as age, piercings, and tattoos.
It was that categorization, specifically the labeling of “Asian,” that made Chiong revisit the site and take pause. Of the 4,000 performers who’d appeared on Sean Cody since the site’s inception in 2001, only 17 carried the categorization of “Asian man.” (That’s 0.425% for anyone wondering.) By comparison, the website labels white performers as “American man.”
As appalling as this number may sound, Sean Cody outranks many of its peers, including Corbin Fisher, which according to Chiong, “in all of their history, I can find two Asian models” in the site’s talent roster.
That Sean Cody statistic became the premise for Chiong’s “Category: Asian Man.” He created 17 original pieces of art for the project — one per performer, each with its own distinct style. He then had those pieces printed on 2.5” x 3.5” trading cards reminiscent of the Marvel Masterpieces cards of the 1990s. Each card came complete with the performer’s name, aliases, first appearance, stats, and a brief bio. Chiong debuted the set at Flame Con, New York’s LGBTQ+ comic convention, in 2024.
“That was the perfect place to do it because people immediately got it,” Chiong said. He did note, however, that “younger audiences kind of associated them more with Pokemon cards, and I just didn't say anything because that would make me feel old,” he concluded with a laugh.
Famous Asian Gay Porn Legends
If “Category: Asian Man” was a snapshot of gay Asian representation in pornography, then Chiong's follow-up would be considered a wide shot. “Famous Asian Gay Porn Legends” is a magazine featuring nearly 30 original pieces of physical and digital artwork that traces Asian representation in gay porn from the 1990s to today. The magazine was released earlier this summer, coinciding with Flame Con 2026.
[caption id="attachment_64819" align="aligncenter" width="700"] Will Chiong's "Famous Asian Gay Porn Legends."Michael Shirey[/caption]
Chiong opens the magazine with a foreword in which he credits performer Brandon Lee as being one of the first meaningful moments of Asian gay representation for him.
“I just remember, like, the idea of seeing a sexualized Asian male was so foreign at the time," Chiong said. "Asian men weren't even like romantic or leading roles in Hollywood at the time or on TV shows. It was so rare to see an Asian man on TV, let alone in any kind of romantic possibilities. And I think that it was pretty groundbreaking to see an Asian man in like a dominant sexual role.”
The magazine goes on to offer a retrospective of popular performers throughout the decades. Each decade is teed up with a blurb about the state of the porn industry, including the rise of online studios, the pivot to online amateur work on blogs, and the advent of OnlyFans. It is an incredibly thorough and digestible thesis, built from over 200 sources. Some of that research came easy; the rest, especially the mid-2000s, was a bit harder to track down.
“A lot of those studios of the early 2000s are either acquired or have gone under,” Chiong elaborated, describing the “mushy” gap in gay porn history where print media gave way to early, incomplete web coverage, where an entire decade of performers all but vanished for official record. Chiong filled those gaps by relying on unofficial record: leaning on fan-run databases and wikis like the Internet Adult Film Database, Gay Erotic Video Index, and StashDB. Chiong describes these sites with a sense of affection, calling them “the most obsessed porn nerds in the world, of which I’m one.”
By broadening his scope in “Famous Asian Gay Porn Legends,” Chiong was fortunate enough to work and speak with some of the models featured in the magazine — including Damian Dragon, Sammy Sinsss, Jason Luna, Cody Seiya, and Zed Sheng. Damian Dragon, who used to live in New York and now resides in Thailand, even provided a blurb for the piece, calling Chiong’s work “a powerful reminder that [Asian men] have always been worthy of being seen, desired, and celebrated.”
As he distilled his research, a trend became increasingly clear to Chiong: Asian representation in gay porn and in mainstream media have moved together in lockstep, both being next to nonexistent in the 1990s and climbing up ever since. Chiong points to 2009 specifically, the launch of the Asian-focused studio Peter Fever and the rise of Tumblr-era amateur porn as a major inflection point. Chiong points to evidence that once performers could represent themselves outside of the studio models, there was a more-than-eager audience that had been there all along. For example, Pornhub's own year-end data named Tyler Wu the platform's most-searched gay performer of 2025 (up from fourth place in 2024).
Chiong doesn’t consider either of these collections to be the final say on gay Asian representation. That reckoning is far from over. Stereotypes about Asian men in queer spaces, passivity chief among them, still persist. But, in Chiong’s opinion, the current rise of performers on independent sites like OnlyFans signal a brighter future.
To celebrate the release of “Famous Asian Gay Porn Legends,” artwork from both projects will be exhibited at the SoHo Project Space Vault Gallery in SoHo. There will be an opening reception on Thursday, September 10 from 6-8 p.m. The show will run through Sunday, September 27. Pieces will be available for sale, along with copies of “Category: Asian Man” and “Famous Asian Gay Porn Legends.” To find out more about Will Chiong, visit WillDrawForFun.com. 
