RIP Tumblr Porn, We Hardly Knew Ye

Ladies and gentlemen, we are gathered here today to eulogize the glory days of Tumblr. From today forward, the company will ban all adult content. It is, in no uncertain terms, the death of Tumblr as we knew it.

The porn ban specifically affects the LGBTQ community, who reacted en masse to the announcement with equal amounts of shock and “aw, shit.” The community at large gleefully remade Tumblr in its image, filling its pages with an endless scroll of rich photography, deeply personal stories, and gorgeous art. Oh, and porn. Lots and lots of porn. An incredible amount of porn, actually. Pirated or amateur, submitted by exhibitionists or swiped from some dude’s Snapchat, it was all ripe for favoriting, reblogging, bookmarking, and gazing at ad nauseam.

I'm no stranger to the Tumblr porn rabbit hole, a treacherous time-suck that many a gay man you know can attest to. Logging on to simply glance at a single blog inevitably leads to checking out another video, and then another blog, and another. Before you know it, it’s 3 in the morning and your computer is overheating because you have 90 tabs open. My own bookmarks folder, filled with dirty Tumblr pages and posts, all coyly renamed to cover up that they were X-rated (I'm #classy like that), acted as a virtual fire extinguisher sitting behind glass waiting to be broken when I needed it the most.

I’m certain I’m not alone in my regular adventures with this side of Tumblr. Many of the posts I'm talking about collected hundreds of thousands of reblogs and favorites, some even cracking a cool million, shared by (horny) people all around the world. It was like a makeshift (horny) United Nations. You could even argue that the very birth of Tumblr porn ushered in an explosion of democratized porn. Far in the rearview were the days of glitzy studio productions and high-priced subscriptions. For many, gay men and beyond, Tumblr helped to revolutionize the way dirty photos and flicks were produced and shared: porn of the people, by the people, and for the people. Instead of showcasing and glorifying a host of scrubbed-down, buffed-up models, many of Gay Tumblr’s videos and gifs were of guys like you and me, devoid of any post-production, with grainy footage shot in dark bedrooms.

The porn on Tumblr suited every taste, style, age, gender, sexuality, and flavor. Of course your run-of-the-mill mainstream stars would pop up (shout out to that shaggy-haired dude from Sean Cody!) to collect a piece of the pie, but Tumblr porn was all about spreading the wealth, and we were all better for it, so help me God.

As a result of the medium's global popularity, the most unlikely people became hot commodities. Some even wielded a power of sorts. I remember a few years back hanging out with a (straight) buddy who has a respectable corporate job. That day, I couldn’t help but notice the cacophony of push notifications being sent to his phone, one after another. I had to ask what they were all for, and after some prodding, he sheepishly told me he ran a porn Tumblr, and a wildly popular one at that. As with the trading of baseball cards, or whatever kids are trading these days (drugs?), the collecting and sharing of Tumblr porn birthed a cottage industry, albeit one in which most users made a whopping zero dollars and zero cents.

Now where will the gay masses go to whet their appetite for the good smut? Can Instagram, with its inherent narcissism, possibly become even sluttier than it is now? Will the trending topics on Twitter now regularly include porn search terms? Will Facebook do an about-face and go dirty after it's (justifiably) abandoned by the moms who currently use it?

With the judgment day's arrival, we sadly bid farewell to Tumblr's heyday. Like Camelot, soon it will all be gone, lost to time and our collective memories and forever missed. But to paraphrase Elio’s dad in Call Me by Your Name: “Right now we may not want to feel anything. Perhaps we never wished to feel anything. But feel something we obviously did.”

Professor Perlman is right as ever. 'Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. Now get me a tissue.