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Horny! Guys! Sleeping?
YouTube’s “sleep streams” are hours long and show nothing more than sleeping men. But viewers will watch every second just to catch a glimpse of something naughty.
BY JAKE HALLFEB 27, 20236:00 PM
Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by kaipong/iStock/Getty Images Plus and insta_photos/iStock/Getty Images Plus.
In late 2004, Finnish filmmaker Juha Lilja went to a Helsinki film festival and watched Andy Warhol’s Sleep for the first time. Described as a “cinematic joke,” the “anti-movie” clocks in at a whopping five hours and 20 minutes, and consists entirely of a hot, naked guy—poet John Giorno, who dated the artist at the time—just sleeping. Lilja found the screening “interesting,” but he didn’t think much more of it. “I was kind of watching it, falling asleep myself, and then watching it a little more,” he told me, a smile visible beneath his thick beard.
Nine years later, Lilja created his own homage to Sleep in commemoration of the original’s 50th anniversary. Warhol’s Sleep is 30 minutes of original footage, slowed and looped to stretch the runtime; Lilja wanted a full eight hours, achieved by filming one hour of sleep (his camera’s limit) for eight nights. The grainy black-and-white footage is mainly of his bare butt, but he spliced in landscape shots and clips of motorcycle rides, too.
When no museums wanted to screen the film, Lilja uploaded it to YouTube—first on his main channel, and then, in 2020, on his then-dormant backup channel. To his shock, views on his backup account quickly skyrocketed: At the time of writing, it has 161,000 views. “I got hundreds of comments, like ‘I love you,’ and ‘You look so sexy,’ ” he said. Most of these came from gay “bears,” who identify with and are turned on by chubby, hairy guys just like Lilja.
That’s how he learned of a growing YouTube trend: the horny guy sleep stream.
Increasingly, half-naked guys from around the globe have been streaming their slumber for die-hard fans, who sift through footage to post timestamps of nighttime erections. Some stream in boxer shorts with their penises visibly at attention; others use YouTube’s membership feature, allowing fans to pay for streaming videos, in skimpier undies and ass-baring thongs. A small handful of these sleep streamers have OnlyFans accounts, but the majority don’t, instead adding payment links in their captions so fans can tip them. Weirdly, it’s almost exclusively men making this content, hundreds of whom have uploaded their sleep streams to YouTube this month alone. Mostly, they can be found by searching for “male sleep stream,” or just the plain old “sleep stream.”
It’s become a natural evolution of the livestreaming phenomenon to share the most mundane details of your day. In 2019, 22-year-old Michael Gerry decided to stream an entire year of his life, including the XXX stuff: showering, having sex, masturbating. But by March 2020, sleep-streaming in particular was on the rise. Initially, it was framed as a kind of get-rich-quick scheme, and articles highlighted the novelty of creators literally getting paid in their sleep by fans eager to interact with them. Then, the pandemic hit, forcing the world to stay indoors, where they clamored for companionship. Streamers of all genders were there to fill this void, sharing their lives to create a sense of intimacy with viewers across the globe.
As the market grew, creators started experimenting with new ways to spice up the genre. StanleyMOV initially made “joke content” about his “thick Danish accent” on TikTok back in 2020, but soon started livestreaming—mainly gaming and meme content—for his fans. He later moved to Twitch, making “increasingly chaotic” sleep streams. “I started with a loudspeaker, but later I integrated LED lights alongside the loud noises,” he told me. Fans could spend points—which they could either buy or earn through watching Twitch streams—to set off Stanley’s speakers and lights, waking him up in hilarious fashion. Some sleep streamers still use wild props to draw in fans: Stanley has seen everything from “leaf blowers and confetti cannons” to “this blow-up latex thing that wiggles around when people tip.”
Stanley wasn’t aware of horny sleep streamers, but he’s not surprised they’re on the rise. “If we take the lewd and sexual side, that’s always been a thing—just look at the Twitch controversy around hot tub streams, for example,” he said. (In May 2021, a wave of hot tub and bikini streamers were banned by Twitch, leading the platform to publish an official clarification and introduce a new category: Pools, Hot Tubs, and Beaches.)
Lilja’s take is similarly straightforward: “It’s the internet,” he said. “You know Rule 34? If it exists, there’s online porn of it somewhere.”
The thing is, these streams aren’t strictly pornographic. Some people do watch them to catch a glimpse of an erection, and others are turned on by sleeping itself (this is called “somno kink”), but there are also plenty of viewers who watch them just to feel a sense of companionship, much like they would feel while watching a makeup tutorial or a mukbang video (safe for work!). In fact, many viewers start with wholesome intentions before accidentally veering into sexier territory. “I actually went on [YouTube] to listen to a monotonous space documentary to help me sleep,” wrote one viewer forum that has too many leaks on it to link. “Now I’m horny as ****, because [this streamer] looks like Michael Gerry.” Mainly, viewers just post erection screenshots and dick-slips but stop short of eroticizing sleep—it’s more just that sleep streams seem to be the most failsafe way to glimpse a guy’s junk on YouTube.
Really, streamers never know how people are going to engage with their “work.” Lilja just wanted to share his Warhol tribute project, but ended up getting legions of bears hot under the collar. He’s straight, but doesn’t mind the attention. In fact, when he saw the views racking up, he decided to give the gays what they wanted. “I made four or five different streams in one week,” he said. “I streamed myself sleeping on a sofa, on a chair, on a carpet, in the snow—well, I didn’t really sleep in that one. It was too cold.” He even decided to “take more suggestive shots” of his crotch for his fans. “It’s just fun to me that people are finding it and enjoying it,” he said.
YouTube, it’s worth noting, is not a fan. It is currently playing whack-a-mole with horny sleep streams; plenty of them get deleted, and Lilja is worried that if he takes up the site’s offer to monetize his channel, moderators will scrutinize his videos and flag them for explicit content. He’s already had a few videos flagged, so he quickly made them age-restricted, but he’s not about to stop streaming for fear of a few YouTube strikes. If YouTube’s gonna come for him, fine—they’ll have to wake him up first.
