Bottoming Out

Now with dog pics

Recommendations—

Let The Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987-1993 by Sarah Schulman
A groundbreaking history of organizing strategies and tactics as comprehensive as it is readable. I learn something new every chapter. I will probably reference it for years to come. Moving without being sentimental. Schulman deftly lays out an otherwise overwhelming abundance of interviews with ACT UP members to exalt no one voice or perspective, but to demonstrate the beauty, brilliance, and effectiveness of many.

my dog, just because

Naming yourself is a powerful spell. When you cast a spell like that, one that tries to reshape and reinvent who you are, it tends to lead to a confrontation with your own desires. Rather, it leads to a confrontation with desire itself, with the way we never know completely what it is we want until we have it, and even then, we usually learn more about what we don’t want ever again. We confront the negative space of all we don’t know, don’t want, and cannot master.

I feel so small, but perhaps the negative space is more truly who I am. Perhaps I am vast and endless, a master of infinite unknowns, and therefore a master of nothing at all. But what about my career?

I’m not sure I’ve ever been all that great at sex. I feel like I created a veneer of sexual power and expertise because I felt immense pressure to brand myself, and my shamelessness around sex and sex work felt like my most valuable asset. I was a non-committal drag performer with a budding porn career when I adopted the moniker “probottom.” I thought it sounded cool and like a good compromise between different identities and interests that I was navigating at the time. It wasn’t lost on me that I was advertising something, but much of my approach to sex work was informed by trans and female sex workers who took their personal branding very seriously. It never occurred to me that I might have more success if I postured as more modest or naive.

In retrospect I think I branded myself as an exceptional bottom in order to create value that I was not certain my own body and looks already possessed. I felt constantly like I had to fight to convince studios that I am appealing enough for them and their subscribers (none have ever offered me to sign me on an exclusive contract, the industry standard for stardom and job security.) Whether I was naturally attractive felt debatable, especially when I could not fit easily into generic porn categories because of my skin’s tone, tattoos, and very distinguishing scarring. But I knew I was a skilled model, that I could get fucked for hours in zany positions without complaining or slowing down the work day. I am a professional bottom, a consummate professional. At least one studio appreciated this, and fortunately, it was the studio with the best pay rates. But they still never signed me.

You have to understand: Being a sex worker doesn’t mean more people would fuck me than people who aren’t sex workers. It means I can quantify how many would. It means I have to quantify how many would. For every starfucker, there are two more people terrified of being naked with a pro— and they’re usually hotter and nicer than the starfucker. Don’t roll your eyes at me.

I won’t sit here and deny the privileges that grant me a rich and exciting sex life. These are the same privileges that have facilitated my success as a sex worker. But I spend each day fucking green with envy toward undiscovered hotties, beautiful people with careers and social media totally independent of their sexuality, and whose experience of sex is unhampered by a whole industry of projections. I feel something resembling shame toward all I’ve crudely exposed and flaunted and given up to the public just to win their support for what I do, compared to people who are so much more desirable because they haven’t given up anything at all. These people are rarely the starfuckers. It feels generous when they are.

I’m not sure I’ve ever been all that great at sex. Maybe I misunderstood what is sexy about confidence, that it’s not a matter of knowing and asserting what you want but of an adventurous disposition toward the unknown, namely your body and what it can do with mine. I tell men what I want, sometimes beforehand, sometimes during. It backfires all the time, confirms men’s anxiety that I have some impossibly high expectation of them and what their dicks can do. I feel like I have committed some kind of crime for asking men to fuck me the way they said they would. Sometimes I think the act of communicating my desires is precisely what precludes their satisfaction. Sometimes I wish I knew how to shut the fuck up.

I’m aware that I’ve cast a powerful spell with the names I’ve given myself. It seems silly to make such a big to-do about an Instagram handle, I know, but I became much more anchored by my efforts at branding myself than I ever expected or intended to be. I am grateful for my career and all the glamorous things that have come out of it. I only wonder what comes next, after baring everything and mastering nothing at all.

XO

TY

Producer Bottom IV

We should collab

Probottom Book Club—

• “And I kept standing six-feet-one
  Instead of five-feet-two
  And I loved my life
  And I hated you”
  — Liz Phair, 6’1”

• “I always tell the girls never take it seriously. If you never take it seriously, you never get hurt. If you never get hurt, you always have fun. And if you ever get lonely, you can just go to the record store and visit your friends.”
  — Penny Lane, Almost Famous

• “I get it!”
  — Tony Soprano, The Sopranos (S6E18: Kennedy and Heidi)

---

My inbox has its fair share of embarrassments. Unanswered flirtations, uncomfortable small talk, ambiguous invitations. I am prone to Internet crushes— have been since I was a kid— and for all the sexual satisfaction I’ve found in my adult life, I still shoot my shot in ways that leave me frustrated and insecure. The network of OnlyFans gays appears as some kind of orgiastic Olympus, where mutual attraction is guaranteed by a baseline ability to convince people to pay to watch us fuck. I think a part of me bought into this mythology, even as I consciously avoided other guys to whom I wasn’t attracted. So I’d slide into the DMs of the hottest locals on my feed with unclear intentions, just a general expectation that because we belong to the same hustle, we could and should connect.

Most people don’t realize how few gay porn performers live in New York, seeing as how plenty of regular models and actors clog the city’s subways, sidewalks, and dating apps. But only a few studios operate in NYC, and the vast majority of porn people reside in southern California and Las Vegas. It only occurred to me recently that my career might have been a lot more lucrative if I’d just relocated to where my industry is based, but I love where I live a lot more than I love what I do. Still, it’s hard to not have coworkers, people in a similar position as me with whom I’d share knowledge and skills and experiences and gripes. Once I started feeling the pressure to produce more hardcore content— and resolved to only work with other pros— this scarcity of creative peers felt like an issue.

Maybe it’s this particular lonesomeness that has made me reluctant to ask guys I like to meet up strictly to film. After several frustrating experiences where guys became intimidated by my film direction, I felt afraid of pissing away any real sexual chemistry by making a production out of it. I felt the need to minimize production elements in order to maximize a sense of intimacy, overlooking the fact that lots of guys might like giving a show. But there was another insecurity nestled in there, too, that perhaps somebody I genuinely felt attracted to only wanted to fuck me for the content like I was just another hole on an assembly line. 

In spite of dozens of experiences that proved the contrary, I clung to this entrenched idea that work sex and pleasure sex were mutually exclusive, and that fucking for money precluded an authentic connection. I felt afraid to just ask outright to collaborate on work because I still desperately needed the validation of being wanted according to ever-shifting, ever-narrowing parameters. (I can see now how worrying whether somebody actually wants to fuck me or just wants to show off fucking me is a bit of a champagne problem.)

Instead, I’d meander around what I actually want, saying things like “we should hang sometime,” that famously non-committal catchphrase of gay urbanites who can’t host and are too lazy to travel. Guys would put me off in favor of more promising opportunities, or perhaps less emotionally charged ones. And in the process, I would wonder why I was being put off, why these men were responsive to me only to blow off meeting up. Meanwhile, I’ve often been on the receiving end of these advances, and seen how guys I’d found initially attractive can start to lose their appeal by coming off eager and impatient. There is a point at which one starts to feel rushed, or worse, supplicated. Flirting is tricky that way, foiling attraction a lot more easily that it can foster it. And yet there I go sometimes, obliterating my own savoir faire with the insecure forcefulness of desire.

It’s been a crucial, long-term lesson for me to be more realistic about other people’s priorities, but also to be more receptive to the fact that intimate connections take place during work projects all the time. It’s never just sex with me, and it’s never just work either. In my studio work I’ve made plenty of friends and had plenty of hot experiences while still focusing on our professional obligations. I don’t fall in love with my scene partners or pursue intimate relationships with them, but in many instances we’ve fostered an authentic mutual attraction to each other to help make the day easier and the product better. Creating things together is an intrinsically intimate experience. Although some guys are more closed off to this and compartmentalize away the potential for real fun and connection, it turns out that a lot of guys are down to make the most out of fucking on film. 

But even with this newfound clarity of intention, rejection still abounds. That’s been the hardest part of this whole gig, and why it’s always been so hard for me to pursue it seriously. I am often disappointed to find that boys I thought were interested in fucking were only responding politely to my advances. Some just admire me and my work without any interest in being involved in it. I suspect that many of those boys may just be intimidated by hardcore sex on camera with someone they don’t know that well. Some may be  intimidated to work with somebody with professional experiences like mine. Plenty of them may be going through some shit that makes them really flakey and unavailable. But I’m sure some just aren’t that into me.

It can be hard not to take it all personally, since sex is quite personal. And in this case, the stakes are economic, too. For awhile, I felt reluctant to try and collaborate with people at all out of an anxiety that I would be strung along, or worse, that I would grow desperate for content and commit to sex that didn’t actually interest me. Over the past year, however, many more horned up New Yorkers have turned to OnlyFans for both extra money and sexual expression, and it’s felt more sensible to reach out to people with both these needs in mind. But I still wonder about the rejections I dole out to others, and why there seems to be such a chasm between who I desire sexually and who I trust creatively. You’re welcome to subscribe to my page, and see if you can tell the difference.

XO

TY

Producer Bottom III

Rank, arrogant amateurs

Probottom Book Club—

• “I’ve been down
  Can you help me out?”
  — HAIM, I’ve Been Down

• “I might even lose my virginity to him. I don't know when will it happen. You know, maybe in five minutes, or tonight, or sixth months from now, or maybe on the night of our wedding. But the really amazing this is, it is nobody's goddamn business.”
  —Olive Penderghast, Easy A

• “A performer at the circus has no theater curtain to come down and hide him and thus preserve the magic spell of his act unbroken. Poised high on the trapeze under the blazing arcs, he has flashed and pulsed like a star indeed. But now, grounded, un-sparkling, unfollowed by spotlights, yet plainly visible to anyone who cares to look at him— they are all watching the clowns— he hurries past the tiers of seats toward the exit. Nobody applauds him any more.”
  —Christopher Isherwood, A Single Man

---

I’d chatted with him a few times on Grindr before I started seeing him at the gym, and then I really wanted him. He wanted it, too, and told me so over and over. But the cruising dragged on for days, New York men being only as hot as we are difficult to pin down. In the meantime we tried to tempt each other to travel across boroughs with lurid sexts. It was amid these horny hypotheticals that I scared him away with my good faith and crude need. Would you be down to film for my page, I asked, just a few minutes of footage without your face or anything. He gave me the answer I was most afraid of: What would I get out of it?

I backpedaled away from my request, but the mood took a sharp turn. He became suspicious that I was hustling him, sensitive to the idea that our primal attraction was tainted by work. Or maybe he was turned off by fucking a porn star, and was disappointed to be reminded about it. I considered offering him some money, but I was barely making rent off of my subscription revenue at the time. Nobody was paying each other to make content, and the standard compensation was just sharing footage and the informal right to monetize each other’s image. Fans pages were still pretty novel, and I can understand how he felt weary of being suckered into something compromising. A few weeks later he fucked my brains out off-camera, and I never heard from him again. I think he was going through something that had nothing to do with me.

In my first year or so with a page I had a hard time deciding whether to ask hookups to film me. My peers-slash-competition seemed to be putting out new hardcore material every week, and I wondered how I could possibly balance finding a filming partner that often while also getting laid off-camera for my own leisure or personal validation. I wanted to do things as ethically as possible, and I felt guilty about trying to make money off of guys who just wanted to hook up, even if they were comfortable with showing off anonymously. But I also felt immense pressure to keep up with the rat race of porn performers building home studios for big cash. I was scared to alienate the men I wanted to fuck, but I was even more scared of alienating paying fans and earning a bad reputation.

The whole appeal of fans pages is that they’re supposed to be more organic, more real than studio porn. They’re supposed to be glimpses at our off-the-clock sex lives, at how we like to fuck when we’re free to fuck the way we like to. We are amateurs attracting subscriptions on the basis of a very individual exhibitionism, appealing to consumers who are weary of the price and predictability of studio porn. Video quality is beside the point, and can even undermine one’s arousal if things appear too distractingly produced.

The problem is, real-life sex is awfully hard to see. You need lighting and angling and the good sense to pull out for a money shot. You need to remember to hold the phone sideways and to focus on the frame without losing your hard-on. You need to not get caught up in sex-time, which feels longer than actual time, and keep that shot going for more than a measly fifteen seconds. You need to be self-conscious about all these things and act convincingly like you’re not self-conscious at all, like all you care about it this ass, this cock, this nut. Some guys are naturally good at filming, know how to link up their libido with a directorial eye, but most aren’t. Even fewer guys are good at being filmed by someone else, especially not by the person they’re supposed to be dominating.

People think they want porn that’s free of all these considerations, just guys being dudes, but they don’t really. No matter how amateur we like it to feel, we need to be able to see what’s happening. That’s the whole point of filming it. The real art of pornography is how you either suspend the facts of production or make them erotic. Every now and then someone’s a natural at fucking on camera, but not often enough to keep up with the competition.

I made the decision awhile back to only shoot with people who have their own fans page, except in the rare circumstance somebody offers to film without being asked. Part of my reasoning is the liability— the model release paperwork we’re encouraged to use doesn’t seem all that legally robust to me, but if somebody posts the videos to their own page, I imagine it’s a bit harder to argue that they didn’t consent to being filmed. (That being said, I’ve always taken down videos when somebody asks me to remove them.) It feels more ethically sound to make content with somebody who also has something to gain from it, and it also makes for better sex when we’re looking for the same thing— that is, to make a hot video and have as much fun as we can in the process. 

But I also laid down this boundary because asserting my directorial point of view tends to make things weird. Perfectly fun hookups have been ruined by my simple request for a horizontal POV shot that exceeds a minute. I’ve tried to work it into what I’m “into,” like it’s just a kink, tried to frame it as something that would really turn me on, because it would. But alas, it always came down to the same tedium of production. The desire to make content was intruding upon my desire for connection and pleasure, even the liminal kind. If I had any hope of sustaining a kind of work that could permeate my whole life, I had to create limits on where it couldn’t.

I think I’m still learning what those limits are, but it’s vital to me that I discern any at all. For awhile, this meant accepting that I wouldn’t be churning out nearly as much hardcore content as other pages, and deciding that that opportunity cost was worthwhile. Now a lot more people have fans pages, though, than they did at the beginning of the year, which means my pool of potential collaborators has expanded quite a bit. But more on that another time.

XO

TY

Producer Bottom II

The Probottom Work Journal

Probottom Book Club—

“This whole trying to be like me really isn't funny anymore.”
—Cordelia, Buffy the Vampire Slayer (S3E5: Homecoming)

“They always said that you knew best
But this little bird's fallen out of that nest”
—Annie Lennox, Little Bird

“It’s not the special technique that turns love-making into yoga; it’s the kind of awareness that the technique makes possible. Awareness of one’s sensations and awareness of the not-sensation in every sensation.”
—Aldous Huxley, Island

---

I signed up for OnlyFans back in the beginning of 2018, and switched to a different platform not long after. It took over a month to get verified, which didn’t establish a strong first impression of the company for me. Other industry folks had been complaining about late or missing payouts, as well as subscribers being double-charged. Nobody knew who was running the site, and it still possessed a thin veneer that it was not primarily a platform for porn. I approached the site with immense caution, unsure if the site would abruptly oust adult content like Tumblr or get shut down by the Feds like Rentboy or Backpage. However, others approached it as a gold rush, worth getting into while the getting’s good.

The site certainly resolved many of the complaints of porn performers who’d been in the industry awhile. Studios don’t book often enough or pay well enough to support models’ livings, yet they expect us to maintain the flexibility to travel across the country mid-week on short notice, making it logistically challenging to balance full-time work with a porn career. Most models get even less work after a few years of overexposure, passed up for an endless supply of newer amateurs, and even the most popular HIV-positive models are excluded from many major studios. We already felt the pressure to maintain exhibitionistic social media personas, hopeful that large followings would bring in bookings, so mobilizing those followings around a paywall made a lot of sense.

Meanwhile, micro-influencers from outside the realm of porn also found it tempting to sell their much-requested nudes, and many had already started to using Snapchat or Skype. Longtime thirst traps mobilized their huge followings to OnlyFans, too, but with a much lower ante than porn people whose dicks and holes were easy to find. For me and other porn folks, this meant competing for attention with people exposing less for more, such that an established model’s compendium of homemade hardcore had as much earning power as an influential thirst trap’s short stripteases and showers.

This didn’t bother me as much as other kinds of competition. It felt unfair to collaborate with someone much better at pulling in subscribers than I was, because they had more robust capital (i.e. more followers) or simply committed more effort to their page. As I was entering the influencer economy, I felt increasingly paranoid of being paid in “exposure” and “collabs” that didn’t properly benefit me. In turn, I felt uncomfortable asking casual hookups if I could film for my page and coin off their cocks for free. Given the amount of regulatory tedium involved in porn production, posting videos of hookups or exes seemed like a thicket of legal and ethical liabilities that I wanted to avoid. It felt like a lost cause to try to compete with performers who produced more content more often by lacking these reservations.

My biggest reservation about fans sites, though, was that it meant taking up a whole new set of skills and responsibilities not because I wanted them, but because what it means to be a porn star is changing. I’ve said before that the reason I got into porn was to fuck hot guys for money without all the administrative work of recruiting, scheduling and ego-stroking. I like the idea of being set up with a stranger by a (somewhat) accountable third party, knowing only that he meets some kind of commercial threshold of good looks and/or big dick. All I’m responsible for is showing up, cleaning out, and taking it like a champ.

I did not want the job of porn director or producer, and I certainly never wanted to be pushed into taking on either job’s labor and liability by the spontaneous currents of hustling under capitalism. I wanted cash in hand for a job well done, not the raw material for variable earnings. I wanted boundaries between when I was working and when I wasn’t, not the inescapable temptation to convert personal experiences into profitable content. So for as long as I could, I resisted the fans site hustle even as I maintained a modest, non-committal stream of clips. I tried to keep my subscribers’ expectations low, and turned down most offers to collaborate. And anyway, I was finally getting booked frequently for well-paid studio work.

Until, of course, I wasn’t. When the pandemic hit, productions came to a halt. As restrictions eased and the industry came up with low-liability production practices, local and contracted models were first in line for bookings while I continued to wait. The months dragged on, and the pandemic unemployment assistance ran out. I took a long break from worrying about what I look like in front of a camera, from thinking about my body in terms of value and comparison. I watched all the people who’d considered fans sites as a last resort suddenly run out of resorts, and their fears about being nude on the internet give away to full-blown nihilism.

Meanwhile, I redecorated my room and jerked off in new and exciting positions. Despite my inactivity, my subscribers didn’t disappear like I always feared they would, and I began to slowly stir up a sense that maybe making content isn’t too complicated or competitive to try finding what works for me. After all, I like getting fucked on film for money, and I need the money.

My personal boundaries have re-settled into creative anxieties, and maybe they always were just that. But I’ve found that working through such anxieties is a practice, not a riddle— something I get better at through trying, not through sitting around worrying over. In spite of my trepidation, I am beginning to make an effort to be my own pornographer. Which leads me to here, the ol’ newsletter, where I hope to share some of what I am learning about how to navigate this strange world of content and collabs and sex and fans. Maybe it’s professional development, or maybe it’s an exclusive look behind the scenes. You’ll have to subscribe to find out.

XO
TY

Pandemic Bottom

A message from our CEO

Probottom Book Club—

“And I'm right on time
And the birds keep singing
And you're right on line
One day they'll be a place for us”—PJ Harvey, A Place Called Home

“We’ll adapt to and accept such measures, much as we’ve adapted to increasingly stringent airport security screenings in the wake of terrorist attacks. The intrusive surveillance will be considered a small price to pay for the basic freedom to be with other people.” —Gideon Lichfield, We’re not going back to normal

“You are a revolting little worm, aren't you?” —Gerri, Succession (S2E4: Safe Room)

---

Libido varies. It comes and goes and sparks and flickers, in as infinitely different patterns as we have personalities. And even if we learn our own patterns, they tend to break right before our eyes. Some of us get horny in a crisis, and some of us feel distinctly dehorned. Some of us learn what a crisis truly means by how our bodies react to them. There can be a delay. 

Sometimes my despair is an erogenous zone. Lately it has not been.

I’m fortunate to have an intimate partner who understands all of this. A few months ago, we started to get frisky, but I had trouble getting aroused. I closed my eyes and focused on whatever depraved thoughts could get me in the right headspace, replaying favorite porn scenes and personal fantasies. It means dissociating a little from the sensations of the moment, which makes me feel a little guilty, but it’s better than overthinking the moment and blowing a fuse. 

Once I get there, to that hormonal altitude where I am level and cruising through the air, I open my eyes and re-integrate into the present. After we’d eventually gotten things up and cumming, I mumble-stuttered an embarrassed apology. He told me, “Our sex life is a journey we’re on together. I don’t expect things to be the same every time.” He’s a better bottom than me.

Even though I don’t always want to have sex, I crave his touch a lot. It’s natural to crave human touch. To be transparent, I get a rather big share of it. I’m fortunate or privileged, depending on how you want to look at it. But the instinctive pleasure of human touch is augmented when it’s paired with intimacy and trust. I love strangers, but I can’t deny that boyfriend touch hits different. That’s all changed, though. We don’t live together, so we can’t quarantine together.

The advisories about COVID-19 coalesce around an ideal practice of quarantine and self-isolation: a family unit encased in their home, having preparedly bought weeks worth of groceries and other necessities, and without physical contact from friends or anyone else. There’s some acknowledgement that that’s not realistic for most people, especially in New York City. Shelter in place orders make exceptions for grocery shopping, laundromats, and visiting family members who do not live with you. They don’t make exceptions for other kinds of loved ones. 

I’m a faggot hooker in New York City. My family is my closest friends. My boyfriend is somebody with whom I’ve been committed, but not cohabitating. We each value our own homes and personal space as much as we also value being with each other, but that’s always been on the condition that we could move freely between these states. It feels like my relationships, regardless of how functional and fulfilling, are unintelligible to the current moment.

Unlike plenty of New Yorkers, I have roommates that I like and can spend time with. However, they also have their own networks of care, and as this situation drags on, those networks will become increasingly necessary for each of us to see, to talk to, but most of all, to touch. I don’t mean to sound like a brat. I know people are dying. But without the right infrastructure to resolve this— and we don’t have it— I am weary of theatrical appeals to public safety and individual duty, especially when that duty also submits us to authoritarian control.

As the days pass, I need a harm reduction model for living like this, a more realistic response than the abstinence-only paradigm of “stay home, period.” I need an evidence-based scale of risk, rather than a singular prohibition. No matter how correct this is, it doesn’t work, especially when most Americans remain fairly distant from the death that COVID-19 has wrought thus far. This paradigm of “don’t do it” has never worked for other public health crises, whether it be AIDS or opioid addiction. We have to anticipate slippages and denial, and recommend less effective, but still impactful measures to accommodate them.

Before we locked down, it took some time for the dread to subside long enough to fuck my boyfriend. There was one day when everything shifted from dry hands and SNL sketches to the leaden, intuitive sense that life as we know it is imploding. For all my experience delivering improbable porn dialogue, I didn’t have the heart to segue our corona anxieties into an apocalyptic hook-up. The doom overwhelmed me. It still does.

Eventually, I became intentional about it. I closed the bedroom door. I put on music. I elaborated my kisses and slid my hands underneath his clothes. We are good at loving each other, but we took our time, pausing a lot. Bathroom breaks, an urgent phone call. I lost focus in these gaps, wondering bleakly about the future, before I found my way back to the present by a hidden route around his hips and against his neck. I feel fortunate, and I feel scared. I fuck these feelings into a few moments of grace. Libido varies, even in the space of an hour.

Since we live separately and out of concern for our roommates, we decided to try quarantining in our own respective homes. I’m not sure how long that’ll last, but since I travel for work, we’ve spent weeks apart before. Albeit in less stressful circumstances. It’s unlikely this is a matter of weeks, though. As I’ve had to tell myself constantly over the past week, we’ll see. 

---

Thank you for your patience as I took a hiatus from the newsletter over the winter. I have been working hard on a column for MEL Magazine titled “This Could Be Us,” and trying to develop a balanced workflow. As we descend further into a likely breakdown of American life and economy, I finally have an excess of writing to share with all of you as we cope with upheaval both apart and together.

XO

TY