Boycrazy is a gay boy’s answer to Heaven

The sexiest thing a man can do, according to certain people on Twitter, is to wear loose-fitting plaid boxers with an elasticated waistband. It’s probably got something to do with the lore that collects around unavailable straight men: that somehow – even despite the hygiene standards and Jordan Peterson monologuing – they are irresistible, neanderthal sex gods. It’s the same reason why people upload images of soiled mattresses captioned with something like ‘This is where you get the railing of your life.’ And it’s the same reason why ‘straight’ is the fourth most-searched term across Pornhub’s queer categories. According to photographer and designer Jaden Walker, the eroticism harboured in a sagging pair of ancient and hole-ridden shorts comes from the wearer “not giving a fuck”.

Those boxers appear throughout the photoshoots that Walker has produced for Boycrazy – a label he created in the depths of lockdown to sell bootleg Stüssy, GAP, and Sprite merch (redesigned as Büssy, FAG, and Spit) to queer people who like to spend time online. “It’s supposed to be lighthearted and cute,” he says. “It’s a silly brand.” It’s also an excuse to spill coming-of-age fantasies onto the newsfeed: ones where high-school athletes eyeball each other in locker rooms, and where skater bros compare sizes. To scroll through the brand’s Instagram is to roll back the clock on an era of gay porn where men in backwards caps spent their days getting lured onto casting couches with increasing sums of cash. It was a dangerous time to be a straight-passing BiLatinMan, lost on the streets of LA’s porn district. But regardless of its cum-splattered t-shirts and fake sets and this, there’s a wholesomeness to all the teenage dreams that Boycrazy trades in – those which most of its fanbase wouldn’t have been able to realise whilst they were going through adolescence. 

“I wanted to make something for young queer people,” Walker says. “I had been collecting vintage gay tees for a while and it struck me that we just don’t have those kinds of brands these days.” The same could be said for magazines like XY, which used to publish radical, candid journalism for and about gay teens until its editor converted to Christianity and renounced homosexuality. “I have a big stack of them that I flip through to find inspiration before shoots. Its editorials showcased cute, hot, and gay experiences, but they never crossed the line into pornography.” And like all internet brands – OGBFF, Praying, Haunted Starbucks – there is a sense of belonging to the right side of the internet. Fans of Boycrazy will have likely seen archival XY shoots become fodder on Tumblr and Twitter long before they bought into that nostalgia with one of Walker’s t-shirts. But a retroactive appreciation of early 00s culture hasn’t been without its complaints, with some Instagram critics concerned about the brand’s interest in hyper-masculine men. “When r we getting some models with meat on their bones,” etc. 

“Boycrazy is for all types of queer people and there’s a lot more coming soon,” Walker says. And while there are examples of femme-presenting models fronting the brand, he’s honest about the masc4masc stuff. “The whole gay-boy-wants-straight-boy thing is just cute and relatable. The last shoot was inspired by porn and those studios fetishise a specific kind of guy: the macho guy that looks homophobic but you still wish you could fuck, the kind of guy you’d never think would do gay shit. It’s all a fantasy, and Boycrazy is rooted in fantasy,” he says. But it’s also rooted in the recycling of these pop cultural tropes, like a gay boy’s answer to Heaven – reproducing niche elements of internet culture and brandishing them on a hoodie for a new generation of online queers. If Ava Nirui is all about Sofia Coppola films and Hysteric Glamour, then Boycrazy is about Don’t Panic t-shirts – “I can’t even think straight!” – and old RedTube videos.