Icon Male

Icon Male Review

Icon Male was formed when producer Mile High Media teamed up with director Nica Noelle to create a series of gay porn feature films focusing on hot stories with lots of dialogue, high-production values, passion, intimacy, and great sex. This site made its name pushing boundaries and taboos and was one of the first, if not the first, to explore fauxcest (sex between family members who aren't related by blood). "The New Stepfather" debuted in 2014 here and sent Pornland into the fauxcest craze with porn sites trying to out do each other with the most shocking and titillating set-ups. This theme is still popular over a decade later.  Aylo, previously Mindgeek and the owner of MEN.com, took over Icon Male's day-to-day operation in 2019 and continues to manage the site. It's been just over a year since our last review, so let's head back to see what's been happening.

Almost every major performer in gay porn has appeared on Icon Male. And while today's video output is drastically less than it was in the site's heyday, it still brings us popular performers like Angel Santana, Enzo Muller, Ethan Chase, Manuel Skye, and Crush Daddy, but also brings in relative newcomers like Felix Trainor, Occitan Prince, Dick Dawson, and Seb Leblanc. If you've followed the site over the past 12 years, you'll remember men like Joel Someone, Jesse Zeppelin, Colby Jansen, Dominic Pacifico, and silver daddy Lance Charger in scenes with slender, younger boyish or jock types in their twenties. There are plenty of hunky, well-built stars including Nick Fitt, Dante Colle, Michael Boston, and Jack Hunter. Many of the men here have moved on from porn filming, but heaps of them are still quite active.

Some of the men are hairy, others are smooth; some of the guys are clean-cut, while others have tattoos or a scruffy look, and you'll find some really big cocks. While most of the men are Caucasian, there are some men of color like Shawn Rhimes, Trent King, Armond Rizzo, Zario Travezz, Devin Trez, Dillon Diaz, and others; altogether there are 65 interracial gay sex scenes. The producer casts the performers who best suit each particular storyline, so there's no particular type here.

Director Nica Noelle explored taboo relationships between men. The very first scene that launched the site was a series called "Forgive Me" and it featured priests having sex with their confessors and parishioners. Early videos explore closeted and curious men seeking sex with other men, football players getting off together in secret, and there's even a series called "Prisoner of War" with American POWs being interrogated and fucked by their German uniformed oppressors. Then Noelle began presenting stories like "My New Stepfather" with young men being seduced by their handsome and hung stepdads. That led to others like "My Daughter's Boyfriend" and "His Sister's Lover" that showed what happened when men who weren't truly related crossed boundaries. "Guys Kissing Guys" has passionate kissing figuring heavily in the action. "Sugar Daddies" featured older men and younger guys. The "Forbidden Sex" and "Men Seeking Men" series were hugely popular with fans of the site.

The sets, lighting, and camera work are top notch and Noelle touched on other provocative scenarios like married and closeted men looking for love on the down-low, coaches and athletes, firemen fucking on duty, and doctor and patients going at it in the exam room. In a Pornland full of the same old scenarios, Noelle not only pushed boundaries, but she pushed creativeness to new heights. Viewers were no longer willing to accept a one-minute set-up with a customer looking for his lost wallet to pay the pizza delivery boy.

The sex is hot and passionate with lots of kissing, cock sucking and fucking, and the early scenes feature condom sex while the newest releases are now bareback. The filming is top notch and gets us into the action with shots of hard cocks sliding in and out of hungry mouths and holes, and men kissing and making out. Sometimes the sex is rough and sometimes it's romantic, and the performers have good chemistry with expressive eye contact and tenderness, but there's hard ass drilling, too. The site delivered its first bareback scene in March of 2020 and it continues to film without condoms.

Icon Male now offers 551 videos in MP4 format with running times of 20 to 35 minutes and each is a scene from an IconMale DVD. The site continues to release new DVDs, the latest is called "Hard Cocks & Tight Holes 2" with three of the site's latest releases. Downloads are available with a monthly option that costs $10 more than the streaming-only option. The newest videos are good quality and available in five sizes from 2160p (4K Ultra HD) down to 320p (SD), but there's a Full HD and HD version available. Older downloads come in four sizes minus the 4K version, so from 1080p (Full HD) to 320p (SD) and these aren't as crisp but they're still good quality. You can also stream the videos on your desktop and mobiles, but they are only available in one resolution. If you're on a large desktop and want to enlarge the videos to full screen, the newest look best and while the older ones still look good, they aren't as crisp. Still, I enjoyed watching them, no real complaints. I had no problem playing the videos on my Android phone.

If you think you're going to want to download videos to keep, then you'll need to sign up with either the "30 Day Membership + Downloads" or the 12-month option. There's a streaming-only memberships that's $10 cheaper and I'd be happy with that since I don't collect videos anymore. It's also worth mentioning that the trial membership is limited and doesn't include any downloads, but there's no more information about what other limitations there might be.

In June 2021, the site stopped adding picture galleries, and this continues to the present day. Before that episodes offered good quality digital stills displaying at 533x800 or 1200x800. It's hard to tell how many galleries there actually are without checking each one, so I've put the estimation at 465 galleries. You can save pics individually or download whole sets in zip files. I found many of the larger sets with more than 200 pics had lots of similar poses, so these could be pared down. There's a hands-free slideshow feature as well as manual forward and back controls.

Let's talk about updates. The IconMale episodes are dated and they consistently add a new one every month. Two visits ago, the site was updating twice a month, but for the nearly two years they have been adding a single update each month. 

There are some downsides. There's a pre-selected offer on a dropdown near the top of the billing page; if you're not interested, click where it says "Yes, add..." and change it to "No thanks". The new membership with downloads costs $10 more than the streaming-only membership. Trial memberships only give limited access, but they aren't specific about what those limitations are. Also, when joining IconMale, you are automatically added to an email list and will receive commercial emails. Sales tax will now be added if it's required in your jurisdiction. And the model pages mostly lack information about the men, some of the stats details are completed, but only for some models and really only here and there.

When logging in, you'll land on a long page full of advertising; the link that leads to the members area isn't hard to spot. Be careful because sometimes this company has a checked or unchecked offer on the full-page ad. Once you're in the member's area, one of the rotating banners on the top of the page is an upsell for the entire network and there's another at the bottom of the page. Each video starts with a short ad, as well, and there's another banner beneath the video player.

Icon Male has hot men and the action is sizzling, there are plenty of hunks and porn stars, and the quality of their productions are top notch. There's plenty of taboo themes like fauxcest, priest sex and doctor/patient sex, and the content is well-filmed. Nica Noelle is gone from the site and I miss her story-driven films. She had a way of pushing performers to give their very best. Today's scenes are still fun to watch, they're simply not as creative and attentive to detail as Noelle's. While downloads are available with a higher priced membership, you might ask yourself whether you really need them and are they worth the extra $10. This site used to update weekly, so I'm disappointed that it's down to once a month, but that's nothing new and there's enough to keep you entertained for a few months, maybe even longer if you're not a big consumer. I think the site is still worth checking out.

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