The intention of this article is to contextualize this creative practice and to provide some tentative conceptual orientations to situate popperbate videos and for the analysis of the textual qualities of the videos, and to discuss the sexual scripting that they produce. I argue that these popperbate videos, which function as examples of what Jean Burgess has described as ‘vernacular creativity’, construct masturbation as an activity that might be regarded as ‘productive leisure’.
The resulting videos are designed for the express purpose of aiding a form of masturbation often described as ‘edging’, fuelled by amyl nitrate use, into a pursuit that is elevated to the status of a competitive training activity, known by its practitioners as ‘popperbating’.
These examples of amateur gay porn, usually circulated via porn aggregators such as Xtube, constitute what might be described as video collages that repurpose a range of found sources including commercial moving-image gay porn, still images, text and music. In this article I explore the contemporary amateur practice of making ‘popper training’ videos.
