In the waning days of 2025, Quinn, one of a few newish wellness-coded apps offering subscription access to audio erotica to an audience of mostly zoomer women, scored a huge get. It managed to hire Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie, the young stars of the HBO breakout hit Heated Rivalry, to voice a three-part audio original, Ember & Ice, which hit the $7.99/month app right as Heated Rivalry psychosis was at its zenith. Quinn’s founder, Caroline Spiegel, told Vanity Fair that she thought of this story as “Brokeback-otar”—a mashup of Brokeback Mountain and the Sarah J. Maas romantasy series A Court of Thorns and Roses, a book fans often abbreviate to ACOTAR. Ember & Ice, much like Heated Rivalry, is about two young men—one serious, careworn, and closeted, the other a charismatic bon vivant—on opposing “teams,” who have sex secretly over the years, before eventually coming out as a couple. You get to hear Williams and Storrie breathing heavily, egging each other on while their characters hook up. “I’ve seen you in battle. I know you can take command,” one prince says to the other. “I’ve seen you in battle. I know you can be brave,” his heated rival later replies.
Storrie and Williams are not the only stars with thirsty parasocial followings to say yes when Quinn came knocking. The company has been around for a while—it was founded in 2019, when Spiegel, the sister of Snapchat’s CEO, was 24 years old, and the mobile app launched in 2021—but this past year, it has honed its strategy of bringing in new earholes particularly well. (Spiegel told the Hollywood Reporter late last year that the app has “hundreds of thousands” of subscribers.) Quinn finds the guys (mostly guys) in television shows whose characters people fantasize about. It pays those guys to read original scripts that have explicit sex in them—often, as with Ember & Ice, stories that vaguely echo the original source material that the actor became famous for, whether in vibe, plot, or theme. Then, it’s simple to piggyback on the stars’ substantial fan bases, reaching them through TikTok videos promoting the stories, with the goal of ultimately bringing more people to the app.
So far, Quinn counts among its celebrity voice actors Costa D’Angelo, from Hulu’s dark romance thriller Tell Me Lies; Andrew Scott, the Hot Priest from Fleabag; Jamie Campbell Bower, the sharp-cheekboned villain Vecna from Stranger Things; Jesse Williams, Dr. Jackson Avery from Grey’s Anatomy; and more. This past week, the app’s TikTok account teased a forthcoming project that got everyone guessing (correctly, it turned out) that the next Quinn original celeb would be Tyriq Withers, who starred in last year’s football horror movie Him and recently co-starred in the latest Colleen Hoover film adaptation Reminders of Him. It’s a canny idea. “If you’re a popular ‘thirst’ celebrity, you’re going to have your voice be haphazardly AI-replicated and have thousands of fan-fiction stories written about you in the depths of the internet, so might as well do it right and do it your way,” Spiegel told the Wall Street Journal, describing her pitch to Hollywood.
In hiring these stars, Quinn is also introducing a whole new audience to a different way of consuming romance. Listening to Ember & Ice (a male/male romance, performed as an audio drama by a duet of actors) is almost like listening to Rachel Reid’s Heated Rivalry audiobook. But there’s a major difference, and it’s not just the addition of more, and more explicit, sound effects (some of which would truly mortify me if they were to accidentally broadcast from my phone in a public place due to a sudden Bluetooth connectivity screwup). As a frequent listener of romance audiobooks, I thought I was used to listening to audio descriptions of intercourse, outercourse, kissing, blow jobs, the works. But with audio erotica, I’m discovering, there’s an element of immersion that is less present in their audiobook counterparts. The key to this medium, as the people using sites like r/gonewildaudio and Literotica knew long before Silicon Valley app-ified and celeb-rified this genre, is transporting the listener to the scene, making them as much a participant as an onlooker. It’s the inevitable end point of spicy romance content that, in the current mainstream romance boom, has been increasingly designed and packaged for consumers’ personal pleasure, tagging everything with tropes, content warnings, and plot points to suit individual desires. Infinite postmortems on the success of Heated Rivalry have tried to put a finger on what it was about this unlikely show that drew such a rabid audience. What Quinn’s celeb initiative suggests is that the market for content that serves women’s sexual fantasies has barely been tapped.
Take the fact that most Quinn scripts—including the celebrity-voiced stories that don’t star Heated Rivalry’s HudCon—are written so that the narrator reads one half of an encounter, leaving space for you, the listener, to insert yourself into the scene. There are no female voices in the stories. The actors say things like “Would you like to come in for a glass of water?” or “Don’t move, there’s a rattlesnake by that log!,” then pause for you to imagine a reply. During sex scenes, these actors—who work with the benefit of an on-set intimacy coordinator, Spiegel has said—gasp and grunt and groan, heroic one-sided participants in each encounter. Some of the celebrity stories have transcripts on the app, so you can see what it was that new Quinn star Rob Rausch, a snake wrangler and reality-TV contestant who recently won the latest American season of The Traitors, said, word for word, while he was pretending to be a worker at a reptile rescue, having sex with a girl whose car broke down nearby: “Holy shit. That’s it, baby. You’re doing so good. Easy. Yeah. Oh, shit. God, you’re incredible. Oh, holy shit. Good girl. Fuck. Keep rolling your hips like that.”
Yes, I typed that all out from the transcript. Yes, I’m beyond mortified to admit that I listened to a person born in 1998, whose claim to fame I didn’t even watch, say these things in his Southern drawl—and, even worse, that I kind of liked it. That’s core to the whole experience of consuming this kind of audio erotica: It feels embarrassing, secret, private. Although people online say they use Quinn stories like other audio—they report listening at work, while doing dishes, or while working out—I find I have just enough Puritan in me to think, I could only listen to this when I’m alone. I mean, come on: “How does it feel when I rub right there at the top of your thigh? Is that good? Tucking my fingers inside, just like that. Oh. You feeling needy? I can tell. It’s been building for a while, huh? I know exactly how you feel,” said Chris Briney, who plays the sensitive, pining Conrad from Prime Video’s smash hit The Summer I Turned Pretty, into my right ear. (I said, “Oh, Lord, save us,” to my empty office.) Briney fans seemed to like it: “He’s such a champion for this,” one wrote on Reddit, calling the actor “either incredibly generous, or a freak, or both.” But I couldn’t help but feel as if I’d crossed the Rubicon—as if I were prompting an A.I. chatbot to talk dirty to me like Conrad from TSITP might, and the A.I. was doing its best.
As explicit as the celeb originals are, they’re nothing compared to the rest of Quinn. After listening to far too many actors talk dirty to me, I asked around in real life, looked around on Reddit, made a little list of people’s favorite non-celeb voice artists, and gave some of those a try. Like this TikTokker, who posted a shocked video about moving on to the regular Quinn voice artists after listening to Ember & Ice, I feel like begging everyone to be patient with me. The experienced VAs, many of whom post anonymously, and not all of whom are male (shoutout “Sweets”), sound utterly fearless. Only while listening to some die-hard favorites (shoutout “Naudio,” “Anonyfun,” and “Milo”) did I realize how stilted the celebrities sound when they perform the sex scenes. Part of it is that the non-celeb content has less plot; most stories I sampled got right to the sex. Part of it is that the VAs are not trying to continue careers in film or television. Through their utter commitment, they can make squishes, whacks, sighs, and thrusts creep in underneath your suspension of disbelief, eventually neatly lifting it away, like the skin off a pudding.
This level of visceral immersion isn’t what every female consumer of romance content wants, even if some romance readers’ strong emergent preference for first-person narration in their love stories may suggest otherwise. On Reddit, fans of Heated Rivalry debating whether to pay for Ember & Ice access, and discussing most Quinn stories’ self-insert mode, agreed that they probably wouldn’t enjoy it. “I want to get caught up in someone else’s love story. I don’t want to be part of it or involved at all,” one wrote. That’s far from the experience you have when you listen to Andrew Scott saying: “Give in to me. I can feel how close you are. Have you been dreaming about this too? Are you going to give me what’s mine? That’s it, good girl. That’s it. Give in. Give in. Let go. Let me hear you. You still take my directions so well” up close and personal, an experience that feels even stranger when you recall that Scott is a gay man who probably isn’t going around looking for “good girls.” A third-person book like Heated Rivalry, about two men falling in love, is the right level of uninvolvement for some audiences.
People vaguely aware of romance’s resurgence may have broad, often dismissive, ideas about why women seek out love stories and sex scenes. (I’ve seen Maas’ ACOTAR described, not kindly, as “fairy porn,” for example.) What my time with Quinn taught me is that picking a trope is just the beginning of the personalization a female consumer of romance content can now set out to do. Maybe you like to read prose, first person or third person, M/F, M/M, F/F, or M/M/F. Or maybe you like prose of any of those types, read aloud by an audiobook narrator who’s female—or one who’s male. Maybe you like to watch celebs on-screen, going at it on a movie or TV show like Babygirl or Bridgerton. Maybe you like the slightly illicit thrill of hearing celebs pretend to have sex in your ear. Or perhaps you try a Quinn VA, like the growl in their voice, and become a devotee of an anonymous person making sex sounds into a microphone, somewhere out there in the world. Hollywood and book publishers know that romance sells. But what kind of romance turns women on? We’re really just getting started.
