INTRO: FILLING THE VOID
I was fifteen, maybe sixteen, when I met him. A dentist, twenty-six years old. I had to do some maneuvering to convince my parents into letting me visit him for the weekend — not easy, but they agreed.
The first thing I noticed was that he was extremely full of himself. He spoke about his life, his background and achievements at length and with great seriousness. He told me about his abusive father and brother. He also told me, without any hesitation, that he had chosen his profession for one reason: money. He wanted a lot of it. He wanted a different life.
He was a great cook. He made nice, slightly exotic things I had not really known before. I loved that, and I still do. I still order those dishes sometimes.
Yet he was not particularly interested in me. At least not in the way I expected. Not that I had much to say anyway. I preferred him doing the talking. He let me know, quite openly, that my body disappointed him. For a teenager struggling with self-esteem issues, that was a blow. He did not like my physique, and he made no effort to hide it. What he wanted was an audience. The sex consisted of me watching him admire his own body and touch himself.
He made me feel unwelcome. Even though he had invited me, he gave the impression that I was some kind of intruder. Despite that, I went back a few times over the next six or seven years.
He was not openly homosexual, and he did not see himself as a gay man. As far as I know, he still does not. I cannot imagine him ever having a girlfriend either. To the people around him, he seems to occupy an older category: the lifelong bachelor, perhaps even the asexual kind, a man whose lack of women is treated as a harmless peculiarity one does not speak of.
Years later, another detail attached itself to the story. He had met a younger guy — someone he was apparently seeing, or trying to see — who was about the age I had been when I first met him. He told me about him a great deal, actively, as if it were something to show off. As if I were somehow part of that relationship — or had become that. He included me in their twisted relationship.
At some point, I do not remember exactly how, the younger guy came to visit me. We went out and spent the night together. He was not the type I would usually have been interested in. He was not especially striking, though there was a certain innocence about him I liked. As far as I could tell, whatever was supposed to happen between the two of them had probably never happened. With me, it did.
I remember finding that funny. For a moment, it felt as if I had beaten the dentist.
For years I asked myself the obvious question: what kind of man invites a fifteen-year-old boy to spend the weekend? Now I think that question is beside the point.
He did not strike me as a bad person, or as a weirdo. That was not how I experienced him. There were even things I liked and admired about him: the way he spoke, the food he made, the life he seemed to have assembled around himself. He sold me on his lifestyle.
What impressed me, I think, was that he had become something. At twenty-six he seemed to have turned himself into an entirely different person, and he was putting that on display. The profession, the apartment, the body, the food, the way he talked about himself — all of it seemed to say: look what I have made of myself.
That was what I saw then. Not evil. Not danger. A performance of arrival. A man showing a boy the person he had managed to become.
It would be too easy to dismiss him. The question I ask myself now is how much of a gay person there is in him — and how much of him is in me. I have encountered many versions of him over the years. Which raises the question: Is he an embodiment, a slight caricature even, of what a gay man essentially is — a man running from his past, looking into a void, and trying to fill it?
Almost thirty years later, when I watch certain content on social media, I am reminded of him. The difference between him and the people I watch now is that they are open about their sexuality, engage in actual sexual acts, and have fully adopted the gay identity. Only the dentist never indulged in his victimhood.
On social media I am not necessarily looking for content related to my sexuality. Yet it finds me. The platform has decided what I am, and what I therefore want to see. What disturbs me is not only that. It is what I am shown. I find it hard to take seriously. Yet, I believe I will have to.
On there I'm constantly being lured into watching pornographic content. Many OnlyFans models have a parallel presence on the mainstream platforms. Not all of it is bad. Some genuinely try for something more, try to make it artful or try to make some deeper points about sexuality. Still, most of what I've seen is tacky and vulgar.
Most of the content that shows up uninvited in my feed would have been labelled softcore pornography when I was younger. There is not a single gay man presented to me who is not at least half undressed. Even "family" photos often show two "gay dads" with muscular bodies, half naked, with two or three children. I always wonder: what is the message of that picture? And no, they are not at the beach. It upsets me. It feels intrusive.
The rest of what finds me online is "activism". A gay pride parade in Budapest. A ranking of the most gay-friendly countries in the world. The first gay prime minister somewhere. The first this, the first that. It is hard not to notice the connection. The half-naked body and the political milestone arrive in the same feed, in the same register, asking for the same thing.
For those who believe in a certain idea of social progress, all of this must make perfect sense. I simply do not seem to get it. That, at least, is the reaction I receive when I ask basic questions about it — trying to make sense of what I see. Apparently I have yet to reach the higher level of consciousness that others seem to possess.
Even the supposedly more serious content is, on closer inspection, the same thing. The explicit sexuality and pornographic imagery may be absent. The obsession with sex, even when absent, is not. It remains the organizing principle — the thing everything else orbits around. The impression I am left with is consistent. For those for whom the gay identity is vital and important, sex is not merely part of life. It is the center of it.
VULGARITY PRIVILEGE
The modern gay identity presents homosexuality as a collective experience. Part of the culture has been a certain permissiveness, not only in sex, but also in style. A stylized vulgarity has traditionally been a part of it. The identity though does not merely permit vulgarity; under certain conditions it protects and elevates it. The same kind of sexual bluntness that might seem crude, pornographic or predatory elsewhere is reinterpreted, when gay-coded, as a liberating form of authenticity, a way to work through one's trauma and an expression of community joy.
The vulgarity borrows innocence from the identity. And increasingly, it borrows income from it too. What was once a skill — something you either had or you didn't — seems almost to become a right. Every homosexual who adopts the identity is entitled to it. The vulgarity no longer needs to be earned. It can simply be claimed.
One can see this in a small circle of young men who have built platforms around the topic of being gay. All of them have an OnlyFans running underneath. Art is one of them. Ukrainian born, now living in New York City. He lives the life and wants to put it out there. He calls himself an influencer. His content consists largely of interviews with other creators — his circle of friends. Friends interviewing friends.
A certain bluntness is an essential part of his style. His early content consisted mostly of staged street interviews in which he would open by asking supposed strangers what seems to be provocative questions. "What's your name?" "Kevin Jose." "Are you gay?" "Yeah, sometimes." "Since you're gay, do you enjoy sucking dick?" It is the ordinary language of a certain gay world, broadcast to a wider audience.
After establishing that his subject is a homosexual, the next question is always the same. “Are you top or bottom?” “I say I’m a verse top but it’s really just top.” Art knows the code well enough to press him on his sexual identity. “You’re a dying breed.” How often, then? “Twice a year.” From there the conversation goes where it goes. Another exchange moves directly to color and anatomy. “Like those dicks look like a lollipop.” Art asks how one would know. “You can see it over here — if your man has like this part of the body really pink, he has one.”
Another guest has had eight cosmetic surgeries: hair transplants, bicep implants, pec implants. The arm work was later reversed; he still carries the removed pieces with him. “You always keep your biceps in your Birkin bag?” Art asks. “It’s like a coffin for them.” “Wasn’t it easier just to sign up for a gym?” “Honey, I was in the gym. I was in the steam room every day.”
Art interviews James Lucky — introduced as “straight-passing” — an OnlyFans creator he helped launch. James made $14,000 in his first month and quit his job two weeks later. The story is told with almost no astonishment. Art saw “potential,” looked at what James was doing, and told him to start over. James followed the instruction: “I was doing three reels a day.” The method is presented as labor, discipline, and self-expression all at once: new ideas, constant posting, keeping people engaged, staying true to oneself without producing “complete BS that means nothing.”
At first James could not imagine doing the work at all. “There’s no way I would ever be able to do something like that,” he says. “It’s so cringe.” Then he did it. A new Instagram, a new TikTok, three reels a day. The first 50,000 followers “meant the most.” “I was just kind of proud of myself,” he says, “that I was able to do it.” What matters here is not only the money.
When Art asks what the work requires, James does not describe sex. He describes a mental exercise: “new content ideas,” “how you’re going to put yourself out there,” “how you’re going to stay creative,” “how you’re going to keep people engaged,” and how to “stay true to yourself” without making “complete BS that means nothing.” Producing pornography becomes part of his development. He has overcome something: embarrassment, hesitation, the fear of being seen.
In Art’s interview, James talks about growing up gay. He knew from age four or five. “I was a total fruitcake.” He loved Britney Spears. His father once let him buy a doll, then threw it away in front of him: “No son of mine’s going to have a Barbie.” In high school he became invisible by necessity. “I had no friends in high school. I kind of lived every day of my life in school trying to make sure that people didn’t even know I existed.” That is an experience I share with him.
What I cannot follow is the explanation he gives: a supposed sassiness that had to be suppressed. “I talked with like a little bit of a gay accent,” he says. “I was just very sensitive… flamboyant.” In high school, that child disappeared into an almost deliberate invisibility. Art understands the script well enough to add his own version. He remembers being mocked for the way he walked and Googling how to change it. Then comes the joke that is not entirely a joke: “There’s so much trauma — I see you, you’re not alone. We can do a support group on my VIP page.”
James recalls his earliest attraction in the same confessional tone. “I just had like an emotional and even — it sounds really messed up but — even like a physical kind of it. I just remember feeling a specific type of way towards men. Yeah, I just like big guys, big dudes.” He was four or five. The memory is offered as something almost shocking to admit. It is, of course, entirely ordinary. Children notice attraction before they have the language for it. What is revealing is the framing: the self-conscious disclaimer, the little performance of daring around a perfectly unremarkable event. Sentiment and display. Confession has become content.
In the same conversation, he says: "The person I am today is a product of the bullying that that young gay version of me went through." He remembers being flamboyant, sensitive, feminine. The bullying buried that person. What emerged was a guy who sounds very much like me: introverted and more masculine. "I tried my best to get rid of it just for survival purposes." "I was never really praised for being flamboyant — my brothers, my dad — it was always something wrong with me." The person he is today is not his true self. It is the person who must now exhibit himself pornographically.
The business side of the story is not hidden. James says Art “immediately saw potential” in him. Art turns the word into a joke: “Do you mean he saw size potential in you?” James answers without correcting the premise: “He saw all kinds of potential.” Art looked at what James was doing and told him it was “garbage and trash,” something to be started over from scratch. The method was not merely technical. It was a way of rebuilding the person as a platform.
After the first week, James remembers, the message was simple: “It’s all on you. You have to keep doing it.” The old job disappeared. The new life began. By the end of the interview, Art can fold the entire figure into a sales pitch: “Beautiful person, beautiful guest, beautiful parts of his body out there, beautiful soul… check out our VIP pages.” Porn is the backend. Personality is the frontend. Beauty is the condition.
Art is candid about the content strategy of a successful creator: "We need to be more controversial. Something needs to happen — negative — and then you'll get clout and then the podcast will go through the roof." Within his little circle, and perhaps even the community at large, the kind of sexual talk he, James, and their friends engage in must already be endlessly boring.
One of Art’s other interviewees is twenty-three years old. His best month on OnlyFans was $71,000. He has a financial adviser and plans to retire at thirty-five. The arithmetic is precise: to reach that point, he would have to save $35,000 a month after taxes and bills for the next twelve years. He has done the math. Elsewhere, the anxiety behind such calculation is stated more plainly: “Every single day there’s someone who turns 18 and starts on OnlyFans.” Porn has become pension planning. Youth is the asset. Replacement is built into the model.
Straight men performing gay bother Art and James: "They just trying to get money from OnlyFans and it works so well for them." Unlike them these people are not angels: "It almost feels like bullying or laughing at gay culture." And yet: "Sometimes I have to benefit from their clout and I'm here for it." The straight man with the gay persona and the gay man with the victimhood narrative are in the same business. The lack of authenticity feels like a betrayal of the people watching. The gay audience deserves better than that. One could argue market has spoken. What do they care?
In another video Art visits a holy site: “Welcome to the gayest town in America. We are ready.” The format is familiar. Arrival, hotel room, kiss for the thumbnail. Every hundred metres, another rainbow flag: “It’s like uber gay here.” They pass a shop too explicit even for his channel: “We cannot go in because it’s a little bit too graphic for YouTube.” The tour eventually reaches the Gifford House: “That’s where a lot of like underwear parties are and all kind of other stuff like dark stuff, you know what I mean?”
What one never learns from the content is what is actually good about it — beyond the fact that it is very gay. One basically only sees symbolic imagery. A holy site representing a secluded world with an alternate morality — one that runs in the opposite direction from the one these men believe they grew up in. It is the same direction where progress is heading. "Every time I come here, I just like — it's the hardest place to leave. I love this place. I could live here. I'm not even kidding. I'd brave the winter."
For now, they choose to live in the heteronormative hell they've become accustomed to. The pornography is their way of protesting it — and their means of surviving it comfortably. They endure the society they despise by selling their bodies to its sexually stranded.
Frosty is another successful figure in this world — self-described as "one of the biggest German OnlyFans creators worldwide." In him one can see even more clearly the path gay culture has taken in the past decades. The first thing one notices, watching him, is how heavily his German is riddled with English words. It is not only a cheap form of coolness, but a borrowed one.
The video that gripped me most is titled Secretly Fucked in the Forest at 16. He says: "At 16 I regularly sneaked out of my parents' house, met a complete stranger I knew from Grindr, got into his car, drove into the forest with him — and I was terrified every time that I was going to be murdered. Which wasn't that unlikely. But because it was the only way I could have sex, I kept doing it." It is exactly what I did at that age, and probably what many others did too. Much of what he shares on his platform sounds familiar to me; the explanation, however, does not.
His family, he says, was not homophobic. “They were just very, very uneducated, very uninformed about these things. I love my family — but my family never gave me the space in my youth to feel like myself.” From this he draws the larger conclusion: “Bavaria created such a sick environment that I felt more like myself with a complete stranger in a dark forest, having sex with someone I was afraid might murder me, than I did at school or with my family.” The video ends with an address to Bavarian politicians: “You have destroyed so many lives. The numbers of attacks against queer people are rising brutally. That is your fault.”
I remember a time when it became cool to be gay. The places had that atmosphere: hipsterish, with a dark edge. Many people still think of gay culture that way. Over the past decades I have watched not only a coarsening, also a new kind of provincialism creep into that world. What looks like sexual openness is often only a new small-mindedness. It gets away with it because it still lives off the glamour of the past.
In a video titled This Sex Party Almost Killed Me, Frosty recounts how he sustained a serious internal injury at an orgy because he was too afraid to say stop. "First of all, you should know that I'm super tight. Especially for an OnlyFans creator." He didn't stop when it hurt. "Because I didn't want to come across as someone who couldn't take it. Because I didn't want to seem weak." The injury kept him bedridden for days. "On the third day I really thought I was dying. And I hadn't told anyone. I don't even know why." When he finally went to the emergency room, his first message to a friend was to check whether they could still film their YouTube video the next day. Imagine him losing his most vital sexual organ.
What distinguishes Frosty from his American counterparts is the absence of money or strategy talk. In Germany, that kind of vulgarity is considered embarrassing. What he lacks in financial exhibitionism he makes up for in politics. He created several videos on the German far-right party AfD, explaining why one should not vote for them, delivering German-style civic lessons to his audience. He says "I like Germany very much and I don't want our beautiful country driven into a wall." He is aware of one of the reasons the AfD might exist: "I understand the fear of violent homophobic foreigners. I've experienced homophobia myself from such people — but also from German potatoes."
His political priorities are clear. In his world, a gay person can only align himself with liberal thinking: “Rights are like dominoes. If you manage to topple one, the rest fall one by one. You don’t have to understand trans people, but you have to defend their right to be themselves — because otherwise you’ll eventually lose your right to be yourself.” Here sexuality and American-style progressive correctness become the two poles of an entire worldview.
I have always found much of the political side of the gay world laughable. Yet I have engaged in these extreme sexual behaviors myself — not merely similar ones, but exactly the same ones. I also recognize the background and many of the same conflicts they describe. So why does their talk bother me so much? Is it simply the public display? Or is it that they have turned what I lived as experience into language, identity, and a performance?
Even though I engaged in the same thrill-seeking behaviors, and even spoke in similar ways, I did not give them that much thought. At the time, I also did not feel the need to rationalize them so heavily — to myself, let alone to others. One of the things that strikes me most about these content creators is their complete lack of irony. I grew up in an age when people had developed a certain distance from the things they were doing, selling, or propagating. These people take it all dead seriously. Nobody steps outside the performance, even for a moment. Times have changed.
Frosty opens every video by saying things like: "Hey, I'm Frosty, one of the biggest German OnlyFans creators worldwide — and if you want more insane gay stories and someone who doesn't mince words when it comes to the world's problems — and holy fucking shit, we have a lot of problems in the world — then subscribe, because a subscription is free." Sex and the world’s problems arrive in the same breath. The pornographic persona and the civic instructor are not separate roles. Both are parts of the same civic duty. He means all of it. That is what makes it so uncomfortable for me to watch.
Twenty-five years ago this would have been laughed at — and by gay people themselves. The non-judgmental norm had not yet hardened into a commandment. One must not judge. Every possible objection has to be disarmed before it can appear. Listening to Frosty, one can see how this is done: through political morality on one side and aesthetic permission on the other. “We must not give this far-right, homophobic and racist bunch a chance. That’s not even a left-wing thing to say. Everyone hates Nazis.” In another context he gives away the other mechanism: “As long as you’re hot enough, you can get away with anything in the gay community.” The politics sanctifies the world, and beauty excuses the person.
Through their bodies, Frosty and his co-creators transmit an entire story of gay identity as a product. Their content passes through algorithms and lands in the feeds of gay men in Warsaw, Jakarta, Cape Town. They become carriers of a particular cultural idea: what a gay man is, how he should speak, what he should desire, what politics he should hold, what his culture ought to look like. The young man receiving it has no context for what produced it — the German city, the American podcast circuit, the platform economy, the grievances, the markets, the incentives. It arrives detached from its origins. It arrives as universal. It arrives as the map.
Frosty is not entirely unaware of this. At one point he says: “Sometimes I forget that not every gay boy grows up in a place as homophobic as Bavaria.” He forgets. The content goes out anyway. Somewhere, a young man opens his phone and receives it without the local context: not Bavaria, not Berlin, not Frosty’s own history, but gay culture itself. It arrives as normal. As what he is supposed to become.
People like me, like these influencers and many other gay people who started engaging in risky and boundary-pushing sexual behaviors developed a certain playfulness, feel carefree when engaging in it, and can truly feel uninhibited — which gives the life a certain ease. As one grows older, one tends to lose that. The lifestyle often results in major problems later in life. It cannot often not be sustained.
THE TYRANNY OF TALK
I always had the sense that the life I was leading was a way for me to survive. It was the only thing that gave me real pleasure, and something I took great pride in. Nothing else came close. It gave me a cool edge. Yet at some point it stopped being fun. It began to take back what it had given. I got into a lot of trouble.
In recent years a vast amount of on- and offline content, aimed squarely at a gay audience, has emerged dealing with exactly that problem. It tries to do two things: help people lead healthier lives, and resolve the problems lying underneath the behavior. The resolution is to be found in an expedition inward. The gay identity is not left outside this process; it becomes both the explanation and the promised way out.
One of the things I always liked about sexuality is that it is a form of communication that does not involve much talking. Experience has taught me something else: people who constantly talk about sex in this extroverted, performative way are usually bad at it. In this therapeutic content, however, the talk about sex seems endless. The way it is spoken about — the detail, the exposure, the total absence of reticence — aspires to depth. It wants to understand, to excavate, to heal. And yet it feels like watching pornography.
There is a lot of talk about things like “your inner child,” “sex addiction,” and how all this relates to “gay loneliness.” Some of the seemingly more serious content comes from Gay Men Going Deeper, an initiative by the self-described Gay Men’s Brotherhood. We learn a great deal about healing shame, building better relationships, emotional intimacy, and attachment styles. It feels as if this kind of content is made for people like Art, James, and Frosty — only fifteen to twenty years on.
The hosts are earnest. They truly believe in what they are doing. You can tell they successfully helped some people pull back drugs, engaging in risky sex and other self destructive behaviors. In many ways, they are the men I relate to most. They feel like the kind of men I could be friends with. We would have a lot in common. That is what makes the content difficult to dismiss.
Like the OnlyFans boys, they are selling their content. Healing Your Shame. Building Better Relationships. A coaching collection. An attachment-style quiz. A private Facebook group. Monthly Zoom calls. Healing has become a subscription service. Self-exploration has become a business model.
Matt Landsiedel is one of the hosts. His story, the things he had to endure and the problems he had to face — much of it sounds uncomfortably close to my own life. “A very core wound — or even like a karmic thing — that I’ve been dealing with my whole life is this feeling of feeling misunderstood and feeling different. Being gay, being sensitive, being empathic — these are all things that significantly impacted who I am.” And then this: “I think I was frozen as a kid, I think I was frozen as a teen... my way of coping with being dissociated and numbed out all the time was addiction.”
His background also sounds remarkably like mine. The family silence is familiar. “The traumas, the incidents, all the things that happened. We never talked about it. It was just like move on to the next day.” What followed was a disorganized attachment style — his words, not mine, although I recognize it. “I have a blend of anxious and avoidant... this is a direct reaction to my childhood which was hot and cold.”
The result: “I was very popular in school, I had tons of friends... but I was hiding everything. I was hiding all the parts of me that were authentic. I was literally at parties and in groups of people and I still felt lonely.” And underneath all of it: “The underpinnings of it all was not feeling good enough. I didn’t feel worthy of love or belonging.”
He describes loneliness with cold precision: "Loneliness results from a discrepancy between one's actual level of social connection and one's desired level of social connection." The root is not being alone, but being unable to connect. It is accompanied by a pervasive feeling of doom: "Sometimes my loneliness gets so overwhelming — especially the existential loneliness — it's a pit of despair and then it leads to people taking their life."
Whenever he turns to the cause of his problems, however, he starts losing me: "Growing up, we have to hide our authentic self. So we develop this kind of faux sense of self — this leads to a lot of loneliness, a lot of disconnection." He goes on: "Being an empath in a family system where no one else is empathic is a very challenging thing to navigate — you're picking up on everything in the family system, the spoken and the unspoken." The reason he ended up in this world of coaching, healing, and self-exploration is clearer: “I was addicted to crack at that time... he was basically observing my decline.” The expedition inward, in his case, began there.
His twenties and thirties were lost — he could not enjoy anything. He assures us that his forties are going to be his best decade: “I think the best relationships of my life are going to come in the second half of my life because my relationship with me is more solid and more secure.” Sex seems to have been the one thing that gave him a charge and a reason to keep goingex a.
One would think that sexuality should take a step back here. Instead, it remains the organizing principle. Everything refers back to it. The men from Gay Men Going Deeper believe in the wholesomeness of promiscuous sex, well into adulthood: “I define myself as sex positive.” Leaving a certain lifestyle behind seems unthinkable: “I am not knocking casual sex. I love casual sex. I think it’s great.” On sex without intimacy, sexual intimacy, and intimacy without sex, the answer is carefully neutral: “We are not saying one is better than the other — it’s really a question of what do you want and then aligning your actions to that.”
The reservation surfaces, then retreats. “I’ve misused casual sex... doing drugs was really huge... conformity was a big one in order to get connection.” “It can be rooted in that” — meaning unresolved shame — “but not for everybody and I’m not going to pathologize people.” Casual sex may be described as empty, compulsive, disappointing, and tied to drugs, loneliness, and social pressures. It still has to be protected from judgment.
What is being protected, then, is not always pleasure, but its substitute. “Sometimes that loneliness is just that existential human existence of like am I really here, do I exist, am I valid — and by going on Grindr people messaging you and talking to you is validating that existence.” The message stands in for the person. Being wanted stands in for being known. A moment later, he gives away the problem himself: “I was craving connection but it being easier for me to find sex. Sex was easier than intimacy... I’d leave feeling maybe regret or not fully satisfied and then I’d end up stuck in that pattern.”
Now they are determined to do a better job of living the gay life. “Do you want a seven-course meal or do you want a bag of chips? The chips are probably easier... it’ll fill the void. But will it feel satisfying in the long run?” The answer, for most of these men, appears to be no. And yet. I myself remember enjoying it; I remember knowing I was good at it. Was it all bad for them, I wonder?
They can go from saying questionable things to the absurd. They have an episode titled The Body Count Dilemma: Why Gay Men Can’t Win. I had never heard a gay man use that expression. It does not fit. It does not even make sense. Consider the body count of the average gay man. It is not a very gay thing to say.
Their take on attraction to masculine men reveals a similar pattern. "Masculinity is not just attractive. It is status. It is admired. It is respected. And it is still even to this day positioned as the quote unquote ideal version of gayness." They are aware of the contradiction. "When a gay man says he prefers masculine men, is that simply attraction or is there something deeper going on?" The answer they provide: "What we call preference is really just distance from stigma. I get it. We don't want to be stigmatized. We stigmatize ourselves." As soon as femininity is seen as embarrassing or less than, they argue, "that reveals your hierarchy." And then Matt goes on saying: "Masculinity for me is the number one thing I'm attracted to." The analysis and the preference sit side by side. Neither cancels the other out.
To escape the charge of internalized homophobia, a recurring topic on the channel, he reaches for a concept I’ve never heard used quite this way. In the context of explaining attraction to a certain type of masculine men, he says: "It's a safety thing — when I feel safe with somebody, that's what makes me demisexual." What turns him on is emotional vulnerability, the sharing of feelings. "All the demisexuals out there get turned on by this."
"The more I got to know someone and the more I saw their character, the more attractive they became to me." From there, the masculine ideal is softened into virtue. He is drawn to men who are determined, active, brave, devoted — "one who does not deny his power, but channels it towards life, in service to others." A man who can cry at movies but also trains in boxing. A lumberjack who is also an intellectual. What appears is not a partner he has found, but a figure he has assembled: masculine enough to desire, sensitive enough to excuse the desire. “I kind of envisioned myself like meeting a partner, growing old together.” The romantic and spiritual guide in him are, in the end, the same person.
Next to masculinity there is another the men want to do groundbreaking work in and act as if they were talking about a forbidden subject. An entire episodes is devoted to the relationships with their fathers. They claim that “our relationship with our dad is one of the most defining — and least talked about.” The question becomes “what is that like for us to have a relationship with a straight man that is our father?” These fathers may have “felt disappointment or disapproval,” or “shamed us for being gay or for being feminine.” One father’s imagined permission is reduced to a sentence: “Love whoever you want. Just, you know, be a man. Act like a man.”
All of this may be worth discussing. Yet after a while the missing subject becomes impossible not to notice. Where are the women? Not women as allies, mothers who knew, sisters who were told, or listeners to the podcast. Women as a real psychological problem. The mother, the sister, the grandmother, the woman before whom the gay man learned distance, ease, contempt, tenderness, rivalry, indifference. The taboo subject is not the father. The big taboo subject in the gay world is called: women. They cannot go there.
What the Brotherhood offers is what a lot of gay men are yearning for. To make sense of their life and their sexuality. What does it mean when one is exclusively attracted to people of the same sex? There is a desire to elevate it to a higher, metaphysical meaning. Yet, the line between that and sanitizing problematic behavior through misunderstood ideas can become very thin.
Their co-creator is a licensed psychologist. He seems not only to be the leader of the pack, also the one who knows how to turn the whole thing into a business. They borrow heavily from ideas linked to C.G. Jung. You can see it in the highly popularized terms especially Matt often reaches for — "empath," "shadow work," "authentic self." I can see why they are useful to make sense of things, for making sense of one's own life, the people in it, and the course it has taken. Yet in this form, the language quickly becomes flattering and self-congratulatory, a way of giving self-absorption the appearance of depth.
Besides, ‘inner work’ can only be practiced on an individual level. The moment it is done in group form — on a podcast, for a mass audience — it will acquire cult-like elements almost automatically. Ideas have to be calibrated and standardized. What is good for everyone has to be decided on. The individual encounter with meaning has to some extent become a shared template, whatever room there still is for the individual. A guide like Matt becomes inevitably something closer to a prophet.
They claim that their ‘work’ has helped them overcome their own homophobia. For them that is a real thing — not a problematic concept, not something to debate, but a condition to be diagnosed and treated. They clearly identify as being gay. What they reject is only a certain over-identifier — what one commenter on their own channel called a "Professional Homosexual", I suppose someone for whom everything is gay, gay, gay.
Oh no, they reject that: "I look at my gayness as like ten percent of who I am. The other ninety percent of me is like all the other things. I'm a therapist. I'm a son. I'm a dog dad." Yet: "I have a special connection with the gay part of me. It has now become one of my greatest strengths."
The centrality of sex, the preoccupation with homophobia, the insistence on Pride — these are not incidental. They are their ideology. "Our existence is rebellious" and "shamelessly, unapologetically gay." "If you grew up in a world where being gay was stigmatized — and I assume most of us did, it's called Earth." Hostility is everywhere, inside and out, and the gay identity is their form to resist that.
Matt reads from Eckhart Tolle: "If you develop a sense of identity based on your gayness, you have escaped one trap only to fall into another. You will play roles and games dictated by a mental image you have of yourself as gay." He reads it approvingly. He does not appear to notice that this is an exact description of what he is doing. "I think gay men do a bad job at marketing themselves — it's just very very sensationalized and sexualized." On the top of the iceberg, he says, you see "white fit guys partying under a disco ball with rainbows — and then under the ocean, the bottom part of the iceberg is everybody else." He would like Pride to be "a giant party for everybody — and the rainbow represents just everybody."
He never seems to wonder whether something might be wrong with Pride itself. The loneliness, the shame, the addiction, the disordered attachment — these are things to be healed within the framework of gay culture. The possibility that the ideas surrounding it might be partly producing them, or at least keep them alive, is never entertained. It cannot be. The whole enterprise depends on that question not being asked. And the resolution is available for purchase. Their slightly altered, spiritualized version of the identity is presented as a way to salvation — only this time done properly.
Matt and his friends appear, at first, as the correction to the culture I have been describing. No OnlyFans, no explicit content, no sex-party footage. The tone is calmer. Yet the mechanism remains recognizable. Sexuality still provides the central problem; gayness still supplies the key; biography is still arranged around recovery from it. Crack, the frozen teenager, the silent family— these do not merely appear as episodes in a life. They become the material from which authority is built. The exhibition is cleaner now. It has learned to speak softly.
Spiritual ideas can help one make sense of one’s life. That is their value — and their limit. They work precisely because they are inexact, because they gesture toward things that resist clear statement. The moment the Brotherhood turns them into an equation — intimacy equals authenticity plus vulnerability — something has died. What was alive because it was vague has been made into a system. Into a product.
Spirituality requires silence. It requires highly personal introspection and reflection. The willingness to sit with what you do not know and not resolve it. The podcast is the opposite of that. Every feeling must be named, categorized, and broadcast. The inner life becomes content. And once it becomes content, it is no longer inner.
What has Matt replaced the addiction with? Endless talk, and above all the “helping” of others. They present themselves as healers of the community. Convincing gay men that their identity is something wonderful, something to be explored, celebrated, and healed into. The drugs are gone. What remains is a different compulsion in a more respectable form. He has not left the void behind. He has built a podcast inside it. His inner life is now on display. He sells it as a subscription. The gay identity is still the answer to everything and must be hung on to. His mission is to spread it.
THE IDEOLOGY OF THE INFLUENCER
The internet and social media have given people endless instruction videos on every possible subject: how to work out, how to dress, how to lose weight, how to fix a car, how to cook, how to make money, how to pray. One can educate oneself through lectures, tutorials, sermons, demonstrations, and free material that previous generations could hardly have imagined. That is the wonderful part.
Alongside this usefulness, however, another drift has appeared: everything begins to move closer together. The person who teaches fitness cannot stop at exercises. Soon he has to teach food, discipline, confidence, masculinity, sleep, relationships, psychology, and the proper way to live. The person who was good at making money on the markets does not stop at the stock exchange. He begins to teach success, freedom, politics, libertarian values, and the hidden rules by which society supposedly works.
A practical skill becomes an entire way of living. A body becomes proof of discipline. A bank account becomes proof of wisdom. A morning routine becomes a moral order. One clicks on a workout and receives a philosophy of manhood. One searches for investment advice and receives a theory of politics. The person who can explain one thing begins to explain everything.
There is something endlessly fascinating about this, and much to learn from it. The art is to keep what is interesting and useful, and separate it from what is misleading, self-serving, or simply garbage. One may take the exercise and leave the philosophy of manhood; take the cooking lesson and leave the doctrine of clean living; take the investment lesson and leave the politics of resentment. One may learn from a monk without becoming a disciple.
There is a contradiction at the heart of what influencers are doing. Their success depends on exception, yet they present it as method and promise. Copy what I do and you will become like me. There is also the strange generosity of it. The accomplished man does not simply enjoy his accomplishment. He turns back toward the crowd. He explains, demonstrates, instructs. One is supposed to admire this as help. Perhaps it is. Still, the gesture is not innocent. Why does success need an audience of pupils?
Moreover, his success depended on seeing what others did not see. That is how this kind of success usually works. One notices an opening, moves before others move, and turns that asymmetry into an advantage. If everyone could do the same thing, or even a substantial number of people could, the advantage would disappear. Very few people are good at what he does. He belonged to that smaller group. So why teach everybody else?
The clearest example is the man who made money on the stock exchange, or by trading some other asset. One would think: here is an accomplished man. He saw something, understood something, acted on it, and became wealthy. Apparently that is not enough. He still has to display his success and “help” others achieve the same thing. Yet the success depended precisely on an advantage others did not have.
If everybody started trading the way he does, nobody would make money in the same way. The opportunity would disappear. The volume of these trades is not large enough to become a pension scheme for everybody, contrary to popular belief. So why teach others? Some may not see the problem. The ones who do have moved into gold and now explain, with great seriousness, how crooked the financial system was all along.
The gold the gay influencer provides is his OnlyFans subscription. He is selling much more than his body or a sexualized performance. At first, it looks like a glimpse into another life. Oh no — the glimpse widens. Art introduces us to his boyfriend. We see them shopping. We get the apartment tour. Soon enough, we may learn something about the sexual arrangements inside the relationship. We meet the friends, the other creators, the small circle around him. The body may be the entrance. The life is what keeps one watching.
The model already exists in ‘ordinary’ influencer culture. A woman does not simply sell skin cream; she shows the bathroom mirror, the morning light, the clean sheets, the glass of water, the face that has supposedly been rescued by the routine. A fitness man does not simply sell protein powder; he shows the breakfast, the gym bag, the sleep schedule, the discipline, the jawline, the whole order of the day. The product is almost secondary.
It is surrounded by an entire mythology of use. One buys the cream, the powder, the mattress, the suitcase because it seems to belong to a life already improved by it. With older forms of marketing or advertising one had the inclination to look away, laugh at it, or ignore it. Here the opposite happens. The advertising is meant to be enjoyable. It entertains while it instructs. That is precisely why one keeps watching. Art, James and Frosty have a way of keeping people engaged. The commercial is no longer placed beside the life. It has become the life.
What does one get to see? It shows the life of someone who has it all. Art talks about his “6000K” per month apartment in New York City. He travels the world, usually to other gay places, where the scenery already seems to belong to him: hotels, beaches, parties, flags. There is the boyfriend, serious and decent-looking, giving the whole thing form. Around him there is sexual openness, never quite separate from the relationship, never quite swallowed by it either. We see the apartment, the shopping, the friends, the small circle around the creator.
With someone like Frosty it takes another form: the gym, the in-your-face promiscuous life, the politics, all folded into the same public figure. There is less arrangement, less domestic scenery. The life is louder, more exposed, more frontal. Sex, body, opinion, and performance arrive together. Nothing has to be reconciled. It is enough that it all belongs to him.
Andrew Mize gives the same arrangement its more artful form. He is a popular OnlyFans creator and my favorite, who also makes some genuinely good material on YouTube. He clearly targets a more alternative, more cultivated crowd. He often makes the essential point without stating it. The body, the calmness, the taste, the studied atmosphere already suggests the life being sold. In one of his videos, he makes the point that without the income from his platform he would not be able to go to the gym every day, have the body he has, or afford studying Japanese. The body finances the body, and then the body finances a privileged life.
In my early twenties I met a relatively successful television personality. He invited me to his house. I did not feel particularly attracted to him, yet I spent the night with him in his jacuzzi. At some point I asked him why he did the work he did. His answer was simple: he wanted to make good money without having to work much. I knew many gay men with the same attitude and the same desire. It was not uncommon. That was the dream. Not fame exactly, not even sex exactly. Money, ease, a house, a certain body, a life arranged around leisure. The new gay influencer has not invented that wish. He has only found a more direct way to display it.
That old desire now has a public form. Online it is no longer confined to the private sphere or to a small circle of men who know how these things work. It is put out there: filmed, edited, captioned, repeated. What was once understood through proximity, invitation, and atmosphere now appears as a finished lifestyle. Art and Frosty give the loudest version of it. Everything is shown. Everything seems available. Everything looks as if it belongs naturally together.
The life is not merely displayed. It is made to look available, even within reach. Do this, live like this, make the body work for you, and the ordinary terms of life will loosen. Yet the whole promise depends on exception. The body has to be good enough. The face has to be good enough. One has to be noticed, pushed, picked up by others. Even OnlyFans, however democratic it appears, is driven by accident, timing, and the unequal distribution of attention.
One should not forget that many homosexuals still have to work. Most homosexuals cannot organize their lives around showing themselves off. They live under conditions that do not allow the self to become a full-time display. The audience is not meant to become the model. It is meant to keep watching — and pay.
Here the object is no longer skin cream or protein powder. The object is sex, placed inside the same mythology of use. It is no longer sold as an isolated act, nor even as a single image, but as a life in which sex appears organized, social, cheerful, almost disciplined — one routine among other routines. The subscription is only the till. What is being sold is sex made livable as a style.
And then comes the story. The bullying, the shame, the years of hiding, the courage to be visible, the right to be oneself. Without it, the whole thing would look too naked. The victimhood narrative softens the spectacle. It does not only make them more relatable. It makes the lifestyle feel earned.
Once sex is sold this way, beauty standards start to shift. It is no longer the old unattainable movie-star beauty: too distant, too finished, too severe. A subscription market needs a different beauty: hamster cuteness, skinny and boyish, camera-friendly, a little flawed, cute enough to invite desire, ordinary enough to keep desire from turning into resentment. Imperfection and certain flaws govern the attraction. They make the man less like an image than a presence one can imagine approaching. The market does not ask for the most beautiful man. It asks for the man one can keep watching.
That is why these men feel familiar. They are not only sex objects. They resemble an older brother, or the guy from a higher grade at school: slightly ahead, slightly unreachable, already in possession of certain knowledge. He knows what clothes to wear, what gestures to make, and how to speak about sex without seeming embarrassed by it. One watches him partly with desire, partly with imitation. He does not only display a body. He shows a way of moving through the world.
That closeness matters. A world, the gay world, that once depended on nerve and invitation now arrives through the feed. One can watch from bed, learn the tone, recognize the codes, absorb the kinds of bodies that circulate there. The hidden world begins to look ordinary. It has been democratized — not first as practice, but as image, style, and increasingly an expectation.
Sexual promiscuity has traditionally belonged to particular kinds of people, either elites or outcasts, men with access, men with a certain stomach for it, men with the right temperament. One had to know where to go, whom to meet, how to behave, what to risk, which door to enter.
What is being sold now is the democratization of sexual promiscuity. Not necessarily as practice at first, but as image and style. The gay influencer gives that lifestyle a dignified and cool form. Promiscuity as something ordinary and manageable is shown, a livable gay possibility.
This world exists, and one may take part in it. More than that: it is presented as the new standard. The influencer does not merely appear as someone who has found his way into a freer, more sexual, more comfortable life. He appears as proof that the life is attainable. The sexual figure becomes instructor. Everybody can do it. In a society where social mobility has largely died, he keeps its illusion alive inside the sexual marketplace: the exceptional life presents itself as a realistic path. He successfully escaped the rat race.
GAYS IN THE GLASS HOUSE
For many gay men, at least among the ones I have known, sex has never been primarily about pleasure or the fulfilment of certain urges. It is often a way of surviving. An escape from an otherwise ordinary and often unbearable life. A place where one can feel someone else, wanted, daring, unburdened, even briefly free.
That does not make it innocent. It explains why it matters so much. I know this from personal experience. The best sex I had did not happen during the most orderly periods. It happened when my life was a mess. Those were also the moments when I encountered some of the better people I have known, or at least people with whom something honest, direct, and unforced was still possible. I could enjoy myself there. I felt good at it. It was one of the few things that still worked, perhaps the only.
It saddens me listening to the Gay Brotherhood one could think these men were never truly able to enjoy sexuality. I’ve met many such people. Not simply that sex got them into trouble; that would be familiar enough. The world of the other creators was never really open to them. The act happened, probably often, yet it remained something outside them, it never gave them what they were looking for. To some extent I understand why they still chase after that sexuality they feel entitled to.
I know from personal experience that too much comfort makes that more difficult. So does ambition. A life organized around work, discipline, improvement, money, health, respectability, or a future one is trying to secure leaves less room for the other world. One’s energies, including sexual ones, have to go there. It makes one careful. It teaches one to protect the body, the schedule, the reputation, the next morning. That may be good for life. It is not always good for one’s sexuality.
The kind of sex these men are after often depends on the very things a well-ordered life tries to remove: accident, night, wasted time, strangers, unclear intentions, and sometimes bad judgment. Too much order closes the door.
The world I used to move in, the world that made a certain sexuality possible, was protected by privacy. It belonged both to decency and hypocrisy. It allowed people to keep up appearances, to look away, to lie a little, to know without saying what they knew. It was not innocent. In reality it made experimentation possible. It also created a space in which things could happen without immediately becoming content, identity, or proof of a life. Technology and social media help reverse that arrangement.
One could disappear for a night, enter a room, make a mistake, learn a code, leave without turning the experience into an announcement. The life was not innocent. It was shielded. It could remain half-known, uncaptioned, unmarketed. Secrecy did not only hide shame. It also protected play. One felt protected.
One hears a lot of talk about how AI will take over the world and perhaps suppress or kill everybody. I find that laughable. Why all the doom scenarios? Things will change. One thing will change is what a liberal society thrived on: the private sphere, or at least as we know and got accustomed to.
One can already see the change in small acts that people my age still find slightly disturbing, or simply shameless: sitting in the sauna with a phone, taking selfies of the body without embarrassment, exchanging nude pictures, sharing “stats.” With very little data, one can increasingly know a great deal about people, including things one would never have associated with those facts before.
People are gradually becoming more casual about sharing intimate things. In that sense, these influencers are onto something. They understand, perhaps better than I do, that privacy is losing its old authority. What still feels shameless to me already feels ordinary to them.
When watching these gay influencers, one can sense a certain authenticity in what they produce. It is not quite like older advertising, where everyone, including the person appearing in it, knows that the scene is not real. These men present a kind of realness. They seem to take themselves seriously. There is little visible distance between the person and the performance. That is precisely what makes it difficult to dismiss. Still, I keep asking myself what remains outside the frame.
I experienced this most clearly when I asked Art a question. When these videos found me and I started watching them, they upset me. I did not yet know exactly why. There was something in the cheerfulness, the ease, the sex made ordinary, the whole confident surface of it, that irritated me. So, one day I left a mean question. I asked, more or less, why he, as a Ukrainian, was showing off his genitals instead of fighting at the front in Ukraine.
On a personal level it was a cruel thing to ask, I admit. Yet a few hours later a video appeared on Art’s YouTube channel, responding to all his “haters”. My comment was addressed first. He was visibly upset. The question had touched something. His answer was strangely evasive and short: “It’s not just my country.”
What did the moment reveal? It revealed that he recognized it as a serious one. He felt under threat because the question touched a contradiction at the heart of what he was doing. The Pride imagery, the sex talk, everything gay this and that, the suggestion of activism — all of it presents him as more than a performer. He appears as a figure of courage, almost a political figure. Yet it is a strange kind of activism: activism with privileges. Not only the privilege to live a certain lifestyle, but also the privilege of being exempt from responsibilities that are less pleasant.
The speed of the response also made me wonder who, exactly, was responding. The video did not feel like a spontaneous private reaction either. It had the shape of something that had to be dealt with quickly, as if things seemed to get out of hand. Behind the scenes, there seemed to be a fear of losing control. I had the strong sense he was being pushed to respond.
Other creators are open about having agencies behind them. So perhaps the fantasy of spontaneity should not be believed too quickly. The upset may have been real. The response may still have been managed. His image as a brave and daring figure, almost an activist, someone pushing boundaries, had to be carefully protected. I suppose, if everybody lived the life Art lives, and talked the way he talks, there would not be any wars.
These people are being put up as role models for others. One can only be a good role model if one leads by example. This is not what this is. These men talk the way I talk with some of my gay friends. I recognize their lives. I recognize the tone, the jokes, the sexual confidence, the little world around it. The difference is that I never saw myself as a role model. Even though I knew there were people who saw me that way. I never thought this was a life others should copy. I was always aware of its exception. They seem completely unbothered by that.
The difference is that I never saw myself as a role model, even though I knew there were people who saw me that way. I never thought this was a life others should copy. I was always aware of its exception. They seem completely unbothered by that.
That presumptuousness is at the heart of what they are doing. It is not only that they rub a privileged lifestyle into people’s faces — materially, sexually, socially. They also want to convince others that this life is good, liberating, even exemplary. That is what I do not understand. I myself always saw my lifestyle as privileged. If one lives such a life, why turn it into a lesson for everybody else? Isn’t that life enough for them?
They do not see themselves as privileged. If one listens to them, the lifestyle appears less as privilege than as bare-minimum compensation: a Band-Aid for everything that came before. Their suffering is something they will probably never overcome, no matter how much sex they will have and how much material wealth they will assemble. It is snobbery dressed up in victimhood.
Not only that, victimhood also protects the behavior around it. Everything must be read as authentic, brave, vulnerable, hard-won. They want to be shielded, as they would say “protected from” the very world they look down on. From there, it entitles them to instruct, educate, and bring other gay men up properly, so they may join the cult in the correct way.
They are here to help. Art and Frosty do not have to lecture very much. Their youthfulness lets them get away with a lot. I admit that a promiscuous lifestyle can be cool when one is young. At that age, one can still carry it with a certain dignity. The Brotherhood is attempting to continue that well into a more advanced age. On an individual level, there may be a lot to say for that. But why act as missionaries? The pull of the void seems way too strong.
Convincing others seems to be part of the need. They cannot simply live the life; they are still deeply insecure, so they have to make others recognize it as good, free, brave, healing, necessary. The OnlyFans boys do this through display. The Brotherhood does it through talk. In both cases, the gay identity is not allowed to remain one possibility among others. It has to become the correct way to understand homosexuality. It is a specific western way of looking at it. Through the new media, it is broadcast into the world. Every homosexual has to adopt the identity. The beast has to be fed. The pull of the void remains too strong.