Each day, thousands of suburban sybarites videotape themselves doing the nasty, then post their efforts on the Web. As mainstream porn feels the pinch, Radar zooms in for a close-up

PICTURES AT AN EXHIBITION The Internet is fueling an explosion in DIY pornography.
But how long can it last?

On the evening of March 13, 2005, Augustus Lewellen, a mild-mannered 30-year-old technology entrepreneur, came home seven hours early from a business trip to find his 24-year-old fiancée getting ready for a date with a man she had met on a personals website. They had a fight, Lewellen stormed out, and like that, their five-year engagement was over. After moving back in with his mom on Chicago's north side, he spent several months nursing his wounds, distracting himself by toiling 15 hours a day at his consulting business. But lovelorn workaholics need to take the edge off somehow, so when Lewellen wasn't picking up women—like Zoe, the blonde, 19-year-old veterinary student who became one of his first post-engagement flings—he turned to porn.

POINT AND SHOOT Otherwise upstanding citizens are getting in on the act

Sex flicks offered a temporary salve, but he soon grew tired of the silicon Barbie dolls typically featured in commercial offerings. "I like my ladies thick," he explains with a laugh. After googling "homemade porn," he stumbled onto xtube.com, a fledgling user-generated erotica site featuring videos created by real people—exhibitionists, would-be starlets, free spirits, and maybe a few kooks—some of whom, it turned out, were also ladies of reasonable "thickness."

After a couple weeks of avid viewing, though, Lewellen's competitive nature got the better of him. "I realized that some of my own homemade movies were better than most of what I was seeing," he says. And so, on a humid July afternoon, 16 months after he left his fiancée, he fired up his late-model Dell desktop and posted a 5-minute, 29-second clip from a tape he and Zoe had filmed together. Recording the tryst had been her idea, and when he contacted her to ask if he could post a portion online, she was surprisingly enthusiastic.

SAY CHEESE "Corporate porn" has lost 20 percent of its audience to the amateur variety

It took Lewellen less than two minutes on the site to select the channel (he chose "straight") and the three sub-categories that would tag the video (XTube has 33 such niches; he picked "amateur," "teens," and "hardcore"). He dashed off a provocative, if fanciful, title—"Revenge Sex: Fucking The Boss's Daughter in a Cheap Motel"—along with a brief description, and agreed to the legal terms of use.

Then he clicked UPLOAD.

(This is an excerpt from the June/July issue of Radar magazine. To get a risk-free issue, click here.)