Bare Market
Written By Cory Bradshaw 

I got hot the way a guy with ED gets hard: concerted effort and the occasional pill (… creatine). When I say “got hot” I really mean “got yoked.” I don’t mean to conflate hotness with musculature—Lord knows I love a twink, and there’s no gym for your face!—but the reality is my metamorphosis was met with an equally stark shift in how I was perceived, desired, and, most noticeably, discussed online. Becoming a content creator helped make this shift perceptible in likes, follows, and USD. 

To be clear, I’m not the biggest fan of the industry. If creators’ virility relied on professionalism—or dare I say, respect—most of the porn ecosystem would collapse, though a dribble of life would prevail in the fact that all kinds of morphologies succeed within it. My modest success on OnlyFans isn’t the result of my physique per se, but the inarguably more erotic qualities it bestowed upon me—namely, confidence and self-esteem. X-factor, je ne sais quoi, aura—call it what you will, hotness, however related, can’t be reduced to muscle alone. It’s a relational field, ontological. It’s something people give us, often in ways we rarely expect—or want. 

In the first essay of Sam Delany’s Times Square Blue, he takes a friend, Ana, to a porn theatre. However nonplussed she is by the crowds of men swapping sloppy and propositioning her to join, she’s more shocked by how easily they accept her rejection. “So many people say ‘no,’” she observes. “And everybody pretty much goes along with it.”

The theatre is so flush with desire that “no” is both expected and respected, even when yes is tacitly presumed. Ana experiences this as an inversion of heterosexual consent, one in which refusal is neither catastrophic nor punitive. Delany frames this porn world delicately, even tenderly, though I suppose one would before the advent of Grindr. Where anonymity used to be chic, it now stands in for a taciturn DL loserdom I’d rather see rotting with the popcorn and splooge on the playhouse floor.

Today, this inversion reproduces itself on the promise that what we’ve lost in anonymity, we’ve gained in possibility. The circuit, the afters, the darkroom are survivable, titillating even, on the assurance that rejection will dissipate under someone else’s wet, hot alacrity. At least that’s how it should be. Lately, I find myself (and more so, the men around me) struggling with this paradigm.  

Though molestation is no barometer for attractiveness—or really anything other than the perp’s moral insolvency—I have found unsolicited touch has risen in step with my weight. On a recent trip to Puerto Vallarta, I was violated in particularly callow, albeit novel, ways. Captive in an elevator, one man cornered me, cupped my chest, and audibly shuddered before exiting at his floor. Some sixteen hours later, another guy—in a darkroom, admittedly—reached around to grab my erect cock while I was making out with someone else. I removed his hand. When I looked back some five minutes later, he was still there, glaring in the corner, visibly dejected. This is to say nothing of the dozens of gropes and kisses stolen from me on the street. To friends, I called it Epstein Avenue; to my assailants, hijos de puta. 

The first incident honestly felt worse (context matters, and seriously, what the fuck?) but the second left me feeling guilty. Don’t get me wrong, he was pathetic. I don’t owe him, but I get him. We were hot; I’d want in, too. We’re all just sticky children running around the Gay Arcade, frantically amassing coins of affection to exchange for validation ephemera. What’s an unwanted kiss or grope but a coin found ground into the pilling carpet? Maybe giving in would have cost me less than his disappointment cost him. In these spaces, rejection can feel worse than transgression. And besides, for faggots, transgression and validation often confirm the same thing: I’m wanted. Two sides of the same coin, if you will. 

That is to say, disgust and arousal are hardly opposites. On the contrary, however regrettable, they’re often co-constitutive. Mere moments before Corner Boy squeezed my dick, another man was pissing in my asshole as a means of douching me for sex. It’s not a matter of principle. 

Nor is it a matter of looks. I didn’t say Corner Boy was ugly—he just wasn’t hot. I rarely fuck Tens for the same reason a Five occasionally graduates to my roster. Tens are perennial pillow princesses, assured that if I won’t do all the work, someone else will. The mid among us have no such security. They meet the men they desire with a zeal and joie de vivre that closes the gap and opens the throat. Corner Boy was giving nothing, and enthusiasm has to count for something. I don’t want to be wanted, I want to feel wanted. 

That can be a hard conversion to make when my face is getting cream-blasted online, though your seasonal thirst trap isn’t so different. Whether it’s X or Instagram, digital connectivity has hollowed desire out, convincing us we know one another when we don’t. This is obvious enough, yet the desperation it breeds remains shocking. I followed scores of men on Instagram in the five days I was in PV and anticipate seeing precisely zero of them ever again. We trade likes as futures in desire, insurance against the inevitability of rejection, then arrive on the dancefloor expecting dividends. Who am I to refuse your touch? More coins on the ground, more contributions to my ROI. I’m too absorbed by what isn’t in my portfolio, anyway. That guy didn’t like my post, that one didn’t follow me back. I’m in the red before I even hear the beat drop—talk about behind the velvet rope. We lock eyes, but you didn’t respond to my DM (u in pv?? 😈). Premeditated disappointments masquerade as expectations, allure bankrupted in the process. The algorithm has subsumed the club: a never-ending doom-scroll at 140 BPM. I grow cold, callous, defensive. I reach for my GHB. The dose will log me out, return me to your gaze, or at least will me to forget your handle. If neither, so be it—I’ll take my chances with the genie in a bottle.

I find your eyes again, swirl down them like a drain. Are we making out or falling out? I’m so high I can’t tell. You’re suddenly begging me to fuck you, pleading for me to fill the dick-shaped cavity in your ego. Hotness is a paradox. It alienates by virtue of the very thing that confers its status. Rejection—the currency in which hotness trades. Gotta spend money to make money!

Delany’s porn world depended on possibility appreciating against rejection. Ours collapsed when visibility flooded the market. A runaway sense of intimacy with no real connection; stagflation of the heart. Desire boomed, meaning busted. What’s left? Shock doctrine—bodily austerity. Allure used to be a kind of affective socialism, giving us all some equal footing, but now it reads as dispensation. I’m more than complicit. I bet against it, shorted possibility by hocking hole online. Now men feel entitled to me, as if knowing my body means I’m supposed to bail them out.

Rejecting them is the only way I can shatter that illusion. Late-stage fapitalism: Hard to get is the only way to get hard. It took perfecting my body to realize becoming hot wasn’t about my body at all, but about how I police its access—how and when I refuse. You see me get fucked online, so the only way I can make sure you still want to fuck me is by not fucking you. Catch-22, stuck between a cock and a hard place. Maybe the tens aren’t apathetic, I think, trying to swim past the whirlpool of G to buoy what’s left of my own ego into your perfect pussy. Maybe they’re lonely.

You can watch Cory Bradshaw you-know-where and read more of his writing on Substack.