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In this essay, I borrow philosopher Henri Bergson’s concept élan vital, which is translated as vital force or vital impetus, to describe the generative potential evident in new Do-It-Yourself (DIY) pornographic artifacts and to resist the trend to view porn as dead or deadening. Bergson employed this idea to challenge the mechanistic view of matter held by the biological sciences of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, a view that considered the stuff of life to be reducible to brute or inert matter. Bergson argued, rather, that matter, insofar as it undergoes continuous change, is itself alive and not because of an immaterial, animating principle, but because this liveliness is intrinsic to matter itself. I use Bergson’s élan vital to think through the liveliness of gay DIY porn and for its contribution to a visual history of desire, for the ways it changes the relationships between consumers and producers of pornography, and the ways it realizes new ways of stretching the pornographic imagination aesthetically and politically.