Revenge Corn
A cautionary tale about sending your photos to strangers on the internet.
One by one, the novice burlesque dancer threw off her garments to the music, revealing her supple body, covered in glitter and cheap pasties to a room of just seven people. I was joined by my roommates and my friend who was visiting me, and we ventured to a gay bar in Williamsburg to see our friend perform in drag. The dancer finished her number and the host announced that there would be a ten minute break.
I checked my phone. Earlier that day I posted a shirtless photo of myself that was taken on a camping trip three weekends prior. In the photo I’m sitting on a rocky river outcrop, leaning back on my arms facing the sun and enjoying what I’ve called the best day of summer in 2024. The highlight was when I swam out to a huge cliff with some of the locals we met and watched an old hippie fling himself sixty feet off of it with a scream. I soon followed, barefoot and grasping pine branches ascending until I jumped as far as I could. I fell for what felt like hours.
The aforementioned photo was receiving a fair amount of attention. Short of viral, but still statistically greater than anything else I’d ever posted on Twitter. It attracted some gay guys to my profile who followed me, and even a few DMs - which I was now checking. One in particular caught my attention: a hairy older man in his 40s with a Tom Hardy vibe. And while we made our way through the almost-empty club back to our seats, the messages became quite frisky.
There was something about having a sexy secret suitor on my phone with a drink in my hand that made this particular Thursday exciting. But after my friend finished their performance we finished hooting and hollering and throwing of dollar bills, I ultimately forgot about my suitor. Our last message on Twitter concluded with me sending him my Instagram.
The next day I worked from home while my friend that was in town did some solo-exploring in Bushwick. My suitor was becoming very active on Instagram, and was urging me to send photos of myself. It only took one shirtless selfie above the shoulders to drive him into a frenzy, demanding to see the rest of my body. To do so over Instagram messages felt uncouth, so naturally I gave him my phone number.
I did what he asked and sent him the photos he wanted. It wasn’t hard to take them considering the photos I was receiving of him. The only good decision I made that day was keeping my face out of the photos. But it wasn’t enough. He wanted more and more and more. I was in the bathroom when I decided to block him entirely before things got weirder. First on Twitter, then on Instagram, then on the phone. I dusted it off as just another random horny guy and moved on.
Since it was August, there was little to do, so for the rest of my workday I laid around Tik Tok and got my flute out to pass the time and started playing in my room. My slight hangover made the playing wimpy but was enough to distract myself from the pesky daddy I had just blocked on the internet. My friend came home around 4:00 in the afternoon. He told me about his little adventure and we started playing Fortnite when I got a text from an unknown iMessage email.
“I have your photos ready to send to your followers. $500 or I’ll send them right now.”
The message was sent with screenshots of the photo in the DMs of some very varied followers of mine, ready to send at any moment. I shot up off of the couch, entirely panicked, and showed my friend. Spiralling, I ran up the stairs,showed my roommate and asked him for his advice. No one knew what to do and the messages kept coming.
“$500 and I’ll unsend the messages with proof in a screen recording”
This time, the screenshots showed the messages he sent not only to the random followers but also to my place of employment. The worst was done. The only thing I knew is that I was not going to give this man any money. I scrambled to gather evidence of his Instagram and Twitter, which were now obviously fake in my mind. I began to hit my friends vape over and over again while sipping an iced latte pacing around the living room.
Every time I’d block the number, a new message would appear. Eventually, after he saw that I wasn’t reacting to my job seeing me at 100% with flash, he laid off the messages. An hour passed with nothing. Another hour passed. My heart rate went back to normal but the logical part of my brain was pulsating. Am I going to get fired? Did he send it to my family? What do I say to the girl from my production of the In the Heights production in 2021 who received this photo?
We had a dinner reservation at Don Angie at 6:30 PM which killed the possibility of going to the police station to report what happened. Revenge porn is a crime but considering the worst possible scenario had already unfolded, I wondered what standing around in the 83rd Precinct Police Station would do, other than make me look like a homosexual having a panic attack. I spammed my friends that work in law, detailing the offense and the timeline.
The adrenaline persisted until we got to dinner. My friends got back to me about my rights and what I could do, crafting messages for me to send back to the perpetrator if he continued his attack on my privacy. I was no longer afraid of losing my job. I was the victim after all, and sending nudes photos to other adults on the internet is not currently illegal. Our food arrived along with a much needed espresso martini, and somehow I was able to enjoy my night.
I haven’t heard from him since. I can’t tell you the amount of times that the adrenaline spike returns as I hypothesize some database of victims, and if the perpetrator will circle back on me sometime in the near or distant future. That day I lost so much trust in my own community. At first, I lost the ability to send nudes on Grindr (a crucial feature), but it slowly devolved into the inability to communicate with any new gay man online. I was so afraid. Paranoid. I felt stripped of something I could never get back.
I have always told people that I don’t get embarrassed. I’m not embarrassed to go up to strangers in bars or perform on stage, so I’m not embarrassed to tell this story. But the difference is that in these instances I’m choosing to reveal parts of myself with the world and he took that away from me. I don’t know if I’d go as far to say that I have some sort of PTSD from being revenge porned, but my relationship toward sex and meeting people on the internet has deeply changed.
Looking back, my mistakes were glaringly obvious and most people wouldn’t have done what I did anyway (unless you’re a gay guy). I don’t regret sending the weird man from Twitter a private photo of myself. In the moment, it felt right. When I look at that photo now, I’ll remember jumping off of that cliff and feeling like Bella in New Moon, instead of my job, and that girl from In the Heights seeing my nude body.