Following the success of his 2021 EP Love Yah, New York City-based queer creative Jack Tracy is ready to launch a brand-new era of music, complete with a slate of “Too Hot for YouTube” music videos beginning with an urban pop, pseudo-diss track, “Daddy Made It.” The song is now available to stream on all major platforms.
Additionally, Tracy released an accompanying racy music video, which can be found on his new OnlyFans page. A censored version of the video will be available on YouTube.
Explaining his decision to bite the OnlyFans bullet, Tracy hopes to make tastefully explicit presentations of LGBTQ love and sex without having to cater to YouTube’s increased content moderation.
“The sad truth is, unless you’re backed by a major label or production company like Lil Nas X, similar visual content from independent artists will be buried by YouTube,” Tracy says. “Despite owing its popularity to the demand to see Janet Jackon’s wardrobe malfunction all the way back in 2004, YouTube is steadily heading towards Disney-i-fication. So, if your content’s not for children, and you’re independently produced, honestly, don’t even bother with YouTube at this point.”
Besides being an independent music artist, Tracy is the founder and owner of Necessary Outlet, a production company that has produced several LGBTQ works including the weekly dating and sex podcast Dying Alone, Together, and the critically acclaimed web series History.
He took some time to talk more about “Daddy Made It” with Instinct, as well as why he started an OnlyFans and what subscribers can expect and receive.
Hi, Jack! Thank you for taking some time to chat with us about your latest single “Daddy Made It.” Can you begin by telling us more about the track’s concept and inspiration?
“Daddy Made It” came out of one of the last things my ex-boyfriend said to me when we broke up that really pissed me off. I broke up with him, and in that conversation, he said, ‘so, you’ve decided to be single in your late 30s.’ In the moment, I was like, you can go fuck yourself, but that stuck with me. It was a manipulative dig, but I always try to take anything that emotionally impacted me, good, bad, whatever it is, and try to make it into something. I was like, this is a song. I need to write a diss track response song being like, you said I was too old? Well then, how about all these dudes who eat this up? So, that was the inspiration for the track.
What kind of message do you hope listeners take away from the song?
That you can have fun at any age, and as long as you feel sexy, other people will feel it too. I feel like much of my life has been spent being very self-conscious, and now that we are in a post-pandemic world, I want to try new things, and one is just faking it until I make it on the confidence side. Stepping out there and being like, no, fuck it. I’m great, and that comes with feeling sexy and embracing it. I think I had all these ides about what it meant o be an older gay man. I am knocking on 40 now, so what does that mean? I was just hit on by a 30-year-old DJ the other not, and it’s not a fucking problem. I wanted this to be a confident, sexy song, but it wasn’t me trying to chase youth. It is really just about embracing exactly who and what I am.
I would have never guessed you were a self-conscious person.
Oh, I am extremely self-conscious. I come from a family where, the greatest example is, my mother has not allowed a public picture of herself since, I think, 1989 because she hasn’t lost the weight yet. I grew up in a family that was extremely focused on weight. Most of my family is overweight, but the message was always like, you cannot be seen if you look like this, and everyone constantly comments on each other’s weight. It is the thing to talk about. As a young child, that was ingrained in me, and that has given me a lot of things to work through. Also, just bad eating habits from my family. I’ve had to learn how to actually eat like a human and realize that fish sticks and French fries are not a balanced meal. I have had to do a lot of work to feel sexy and confident. It has only taken 38 years, and I think we are now there!
Although “Daddy Made It” just dropped, how has it been received so far?
Really great! I performed it before the official release at Club Cumming, and the crowd really liked it. I had a lot of people stop me after, and I always pass out QR codes so people can download it. I am finding that for the kind of artist that I am and where I am in my career, it doesn’t make sense to release music without a visual. That’s what brings people in, so that is what I am doing now. No more EPs until I reach a level where I feel that’s appropriate. It’s music video, single, music video, single, and I am getting a lot of great responses from the music video, which the uncensored version is only available on my new OnlyFans.
Yes, that was my next question. Can you talk more about why you began an OnlyFans account and why you decided to go this route?
In March, I released a music video called “The Feels,” which I knew was very much on the line of whether or not YouTube was going to allow this. No nudity, but certainly, very sexual. Two things became very clear out of that video. One, it is my most watched music video to date. It got the best responses, but I would say after two months of receiving 500 new views a day, they were just racking up, suddenly, it wasn’t removed, but if you searched Jack Tracy “The Feels” on YouTube, you didn’t get it. It suddenly could not be found. I also noticed that all the views were coming from the outside. It wasn’t YouTube recommendations, it wasn’t browsing. All the views were coming in if you had a link from elsewhere.
You pretty much put two and two together, and you realize you have been shadow banned for the content. You’re not blocked because it’s not technically against their rules. I was like, fuck it. I am not dealing with this. Lil Nas X can do it because he’s backed by a major record label company and they’re not going to fuck with him, but who am I? They don’t care about me, so how do I do it? I’m not for kids, I am not trying to Disneyfy. That’s not my brand, that’s not the music I want to write, I want to write about adult things. So, I was like, why not put it on a private site for the people who really want to see it and I can start making some actual money?
And you will grow your fanbase as well.
I hope so! It’s going well so far, and I want to be 100 percent clear about this. There is no judgement to anyone who does this, but my account has no pornography. I know my videos might make you think that there are going to be pornographic elements to them, but that is not the case, unless my OnlyFans blows up to a certain level. If that happens, maybe we can have a new discussion, but right now, I need to pay my bills, and I can’t do pornography to do that.
So, that’s not going to happen, but what you are going to get from my OnlyFans, I am prolific in content. There is an eight-part behind the scenes featurette of how we made “Daddy Made It.” From dance rehearsals to exclusive content with Ginger Ladd, a phenomenal New York City drag queen, and Richard JMV, a nightlife staple here in New York, who are both in the video. I’ve got merch packets for people who subscribe to three-month chunks. There is a lot of stuff, so I promise you will get your money’s worth.
Why do you think this kind of content receives the most views?
It’s the tale as old as time – sex sells. Do I wish it were this way and does that actually work for me, Jack Tracy, as a consumer? No. I am not the person who sees a thirst trap and is like, I wonder if they have an OnlyFans. My brain doesn’t work that way, so it’s kind of weird for me to enter this space because that’s not how I consume things. However, I do think most of the LGBTQ audience does. They follow thirst accounts, they subscribe to OnlyFans, it’s that level of intimacy and authenticity that people want from artists nowadays. I think people really want intimacy, so much that we equate that with sex. Even though gay media representation is so much better, we are still quite neutered. At most, you might get some lovey dovey kissy stuff and some teeny sweet romancey stuff, but we are still not really allowed to be sexual animals in the mainstream the way straight people can be.
You mentioned Ginger Ladd and Richard JMV, and you always like to cast colorful characters in your videos. Why is showcasing racial and queer diversity so important to you?
I was actually talking about this to a friend the other day. It took me until I went to college to understand that my personal experience growing up was not the normal, which was that I grew up in a very diverse neighborhood and school district where there were all kinds of different people. It felt like I was on The Muppet Show. Like, there’s all these different Muppets, and we are all different, but we are all like a family. That is how I always sort of patterned my life of my experiences, and when I went to college, it was like, why are there only white people here? It felt weird. My classes were full of white people, my dorm was full of white people, and I didn’t know that there were places in the world that were like this.
It took a long time to realize that I had the unique experience and that most of the world tends to self-segregate. We see that a lot in the gay community. You don’t see it as much in New York, I can’t say about other areas, but the apps used to be terrible with racial preferences and things of that nature. I think with what minimal platform I have; it is at least my responsibility to make sure that the worlds that I create, and I do that for every video, I want it to feel like I am playing a character in a new little world, and I want to make sure that world is a world I would like to live in. One that has a whole bunch of different people from different perspectives, all getting along and having fun.
What can you tell us about the next single in your “Too Hot for YouTube” series?
We are filming the next video in November, and it is another collaboration with incredible gay rapper Mel Lennon. It is a proper duet that we wrote together in my living room in my last apartment called “Overdrive,” and the video, you are basically watching a smuggled 80s VHS porn. That is the theme of the video, and we might get Ginger Ladd involved as the person who’s watching the video. We are still planning it, but it is very 80s/90s aesthetic, but definitely too hot for YouTube. The song is very heavy on R&B, and it almost feels like a Rick James/Teena Marie sexy duet.
One of your other main projects right now is co-hosting the Dying Alone, Together podcast with fellow actor JJ Bozeman. For those who have not listened, why is it worth checking out?
Dying Alone, Together is a podcast that you appeared as a guest on once, and it is a LGBTQ centric dating, sex, and relationship podcast. Each episode is about an hour long, comes out every Wednesday, and we have three segments. My co-host, JJ Bozeman, who is a 26-year-old love and light, hippy dippy fairy boy, and me, a 38-year-old thrice divorced jaded misanthrope, play a perfect odd couple where we, for segment one, talk about something going on in our dating lives. A theme or topic like ghosting, how to break up with someone appropriately, friends with benefits, polyamory, that kind of stuff, and we just have an open comedic discussion.
Section two, we flip through an app, and we flag anything crazy that we see. There is always something strange. Then segment three, we invite someone like you, a luminary from the LGBTQ community to come in and either play a game with us, or have a roundtable discussion, and then we end each episode leaving love and light to something that week that we want to give a shout out to or pick a fight with something we are upset about.
The reason you should listen to it is because it’s very funny, but also, I think it continues to do what I think is right on my brand, which is very frank vulnerability and authenticity. We don’t pull any punches, and we talk very openly about our sex lives. I have no desire to put on a presentation of myself, so you just get fully authentic me, and I found that when I am out there discussing things that make me very vulnerable, those are the things that hit. So, that is what we do.
What does the rest of 2021 look like for you?
Busy [laughs]. I feel like I’m going to wake up tomorrow, and it’s going to be January. We’ve got to film “Overdrive” and release that, we are filming the third single “It’s Time,” and we are going to release that. We’ve got the OnlyFans where you are getting new videos, photos, all sorts of exclusive content you won’t find on my Instagram. The merch bundles are going out in December as a holiday gift to people who have subscribed to three months or more. Dying Alone, Together comes out every week on Wednesday, and the next one will be the live episode we did in August. I am pitching two movies that I wrote to a production company and trying to book as many nightlife gigs as possible. I would love to get out there and tour and meet people. As fun as the videos are, you are going to like a Jack Tracy live show. We bring it. So, hustling, hustling, hustling.
Connect and stay up-to-date with Tracy – Instagram, OnlyFans, YouTube, all other links.
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