I Survived the Porn Industry. We Must Protect Kids From What I Experienced
The reality is that pornography is harmful to the LGBTQ+ community because it portrays LGBTQ+ sex as aggressive, violent, and degrading.As a gay man who performed in the pornography industry, I know first-hand that the acts shown in porn fostered shame and homophobia within me.
Porn taught me it is normal for me to be raped because I'm gay.When I was nine, pornography became my sex education. Like many gay youths, I watched gay porn because I was curious about my sexual orientation.The images I saw were dominated by sex acts in which a man was being punished, humiliated, and/or dominated by another man—or men—through acts of rape, economic coercion, harassment, and other forms of extreme abuse.These sex acts became normal to my young mind, and it's difficult to see what is wrong with something we think is normal.
The homophobia that gay porn bred within me shaped my understanding of what it meant to be gay.In college, a group of men raped me.
They took pictures and shared them online without my knowledge or consent. Since I had spent years being taught by pornography that this was normal for gay men, I accepted it as normal.Like many rape victims, I subconsciously thought: "If it's going to happen to me anyway, I'll be in control of it next time."I became hypersexual, seeking situations like the rape with the hope that I would regain some sense of control.
