Twitter, I’ve come to learn, is a fantastic place to find, store, and share homemade gay porn.

The platform may have banned a former president who helped stoke a deadly insurrection, but nonviolent, non-extremist, consensual nudes and sex videos are fair game, according to the site’s media policy. (Twitter, reached for comment, directed Vox to said media policy.) It’s a sex-positive policy on an increasingly sex-wary internet. Anyone, if their heart desires, can post nudes, selfies, and homemade videos of up to two minutes and 20 seconds. And a faction of gay Twitter users have taken full advantage through their alts.

“Alt” can be read as alternative or alter ego, but the word has its own life as the term for secondary account. They’re not that different from the urge to create “finstas” (fake Instagrams) or private Snapchat accounts, pseudonymous accounts where users can, paradoxically, really be themselves. And some of Twitter’s sexiest alts have huge followings.

The alt known as A Considerate Top (not safe for work) explained this to me while recounting his origin story. He started using his handle — which, translated into heterosexual English, refers to a penetrating partner in gay sex who, against popular stereotype, has a caring nature — to post his nudes and sex dates because he ran out of space on his iPhone. (The app, unlike other social media platforms, doesn’t compress images, and quality matters: Penises are variable, but if given two identical pictures with the only difference being image quality, you’d be hard-pressed to find ardent admirers of manhood who prefer the grainy one.)

He says that when he went to bed on July 17, his account was a fun side project with a couple dozen followers.

A Considerate Top (ACT) woke the next day and found his 20 or so followers had ballooned to the thousands. His DMs were full. A popular account had retweeted one of his videos.

The video in question is one minute and two seconds long. It’s shot from bed height. You can see the fire alarm on the ceiling. ACT’s headless body, thighs that stretch into eight defined and divided abs and then into a well-muscled chest, presses up against an unnamed partner’s jock-strapped butt. Skin thwacks against skin. At 30 seconds in, ACT asks, “Can I cum?”

To date, ACT’s video has been viewed over 110,000 times. ACT now has more than 50,000 followers and, since mid-August, a burgeoning OnlyFans account, where 110 posts have garnered more than 16,100 “likes.” The 24-year-old says the porn he makes is enough to pay the bills.

Not all alts are created to hit 50,000 followers, nor are porn alts exclusively gay. But they do seamlessly tie into certain aspects of gay men’s culture that are played out in hookup apps and other social media platforms.

Compared to straight culture, gay male culture and queer culture at large are often more straightforward and open when it comes to discussing and expressing sexual desire. Hence, a common refrain from a certain faction of straight people is that gay men and queer people “shove it down our [their] throats,” with “it” being a euphemism for sexuality. Alts, for some, represent freedom from that response and maybe even certain norms within gay male culture. One man I spoke to explained that nudes are already swapped on Grindr chats and that his alt is nothing you couldn’t find there.

“There’s still moments where I think maybe gay men are not always 100 percent with our peers on all the stuff that we’re into,” a man I interviewed said. “There’s still the radical faerie in me that feels like there’s still some aspects of a heteronormative life and that we still allow our sexuality to be shamed even with ourselves. And the alt peels that layer back even more.”