Sophia Michaels
This former Disney star is less “Moana” and more moaner.
Dan Benson has no problem baring it all on OnlyFans, but there’s one thing he won’t do.
“I’m not going to have sex with men on camera because everyone wants to see it,” he tells Page Six exclusively.
“I don’t want to look back in 10 years and go, ‘OK, I made all this money, I got all this fame because of this, but goddamn it, I was doing all these things that made me feel uncomfortable just for that,’” he explains.
Benson, 35, estimates that “99 percent” of his subscribers on the NSFW site are gay men.
While the “Wizards of Waverly Place” alum admits to “pushing my boundaries of things I’m comfortable with” while creating content for his page, he tell us, “I am straight. I’m very comfortable making content for gay men. I specifically make content for gay men.”
Benson shares that learning about gay culture has been an interesting journey for him.
“It’s specifically not my thing,” he concedes, “but I totally get it, and I’ve also learned what they’re looking for in terms of what really attracts gay men.
“There’s a lot of aspects of sex. Like, not to be vulgar, but, like, ass play that straight men also enjoy, but there’s a stigma around that for straight men to be comfortable about being open of their enjoyment of ass play. There’s a huge stigma that if you have anything to do with experiencing orgasm through your butt, you’re gay, but that’s absolutely not true.”
Benson gained fame playing nerd Zeke Beakerman on “Wizards of Waverly Place” alongside Selena Gomez and David Henrie between 2007 and 2012.
He fell into OnlyFans by accident when years ago he began chatting with a person online for more than a year.
“It just became such a long-term thing that I felt like I knew them and then ended up sending nude photos to them,” he tells Page Six. “And it was months and months later that I kind of found out that those nude photos had been leaked online and that there’s now websites that are selling those pictures and videos.”
When OnlyFans gained popularity, he began thinking back to those leaked nudes.
“I had grown into understanding it and being comfortable with my own sexuality, and the thought of doing it publicly, it just didn’t scare me at all,” he adds, noting that he waited “at least a year or more” to take the plunge.
Benson declines to go into hard numbers but teases that he is earning “a lot,” adding, “I’m doing better than I’ve ever done in my entire life by a long shot.”
He sagely notes that there is a plethora of free porn available but understands why people pay for OnlyFans, pinpointing it to a connection that fans feel with his “Wizards” role.
“I didn’t realize that my character was in the household of millions and millions of people, and people developed a relationship with this character in their minds,” he theorizes. “And so it’s fun for them to be able to now — as they’re, as we’re all adults — go and kind of reconnect into that world.
“And I get messages all the time from people that say, ‘Hey, you were actually my gay awakening. ‘And first of all, that’s super flattering for me. That’s incredibly endearing and awesome. And [it] is funny to me because Zeke was, like, the dorky, goofy character on ‘Wizards of Waverly Place.’ So I’m like, it’s shocking to me, but I think that’s cool.”
Benson, who jokily describes himself as a cross between a “twink” and a “hunk,” admits he now has to keep up with his gym routine.
“It’s a completely different level of fitness,” he says. “The gay community takes fitness seriously, and they put it to levels that are extreme. … I absolutely work out knowing that this is part of the job, and I take my job seriously.”
And the former TV star is grateful for his job, which he says is more involved than people realize.
“Everyone makes fun, like, ‘You do OnlyFans for a living,’” he shares. “It’s easy, and I’m not going to complain because, yes, this job is easy and freaking awesome and the best, and trust me, I’m fully aware that I’m one of the luckiest humans on Earth when it comes to jobs.
“But that doesn’t mean I just, like, sit around all day. Like, I wake up, I work out for an hour to two hours a day [and], you know, work. I treat it like a full-time job because I had so many full-time jobs leading up to this.”
