My online presence makes sex a bit of a minefield. There’s nothing worse than asking your hook up to hand you a towel and he says, ‘it’s so weird to finally be in the room I’ve seen on instagram so much.’ I mean seriously, it makes me want to scream GET OUT MY HOUSE. It’s totally weird as fuck, but the likelihood that a guy has seen me online is pretty high, so it’s something I need to get used to I guess. I mean obviously I get the fans that want to hook up with me, then I get the other guys who find the IG thing quite hot, so they wanna hook up too, then there’s the guys who don’t really want to hook up with me, they just want to have control over me for a bit. It’s a jealousy thing. If I can’t be him, I’ll have him. I had an encounter in NYC with a well known gay guy, we’d never had the greatest online relationship, and so I was kind of confused he wanted to meet me. Anyway, without going into details, I went over his, and after a couple of beers we started fooling around. I felt really uncomfortable. I can’t shout rape, because I was fully consenting (on the surface), but something inside was telling me it was wrong. I felt that in that moment, he didn’t actually like me, he just wanted to have power over me. To say he’d tapped that, or whatever. Shortly after he finished, I was ushered out of his apartment, and I left feeling like he’d stolen something from me. I felt like a tick in his checklist. It was really troubling. Now I am very careful with who I hook up with, because like any gay guy, I have a sex drive and my needs like anyone else, but trying to avoid sleeping with someone who already knows of me is tough. I’m not pretending I’m famous, because I’m not, but the instagram thing is a weird reality. I also get photographers or ‘photographers’ who want to shoot me, and sometimes I leave a shoot feeling like I’ve been sexually abused, and I leave thinking, they didn’t want to shoot me because they think I’m a good model, they wanted to shoot me so they could get off for an hour looking at me naked through a lens. A license to be a pervert for an hour or so. There have even been some shoots where I have actually, on paper, been sexually assaulted, but you start to tell yourself that it comes with the package. I’m a strong guy so I can quickly rationalize these scenarios in my head so as not to go nuts. Anyway, because of this I’ve started to lose trust in boys, and their agendas. Which is a main reason I keep going back to ex’s because I’m too nervous to move forward. I don’t know if a guy actually wants to go on a date with me, or just wants to so I take a selfie with him and he gets a few more followers. It’s a weird world we live in huh? The control/power goal in sex is very troubling and scary, but it’s something I’m becoming much more aware of with every day that goes by