People ask how I got into this like they're expecting a story with a shape to it. A moment. A turning point. Something with a before and an after that explains everything that came next.
I don't have one. What I have is 2020.
Everything closed and nobody said when it would open
I was in my early twenties, working the kind of jobs people in their early twenties work. Nothing that had a plan attached to it. Nothing that would have survived contact with a serious question about the future. But it paid, and I was fine, and then in the space of about two weeks it stopped paying and I was not fine.
That's the part that gets flattened when people tell this story. It wasn't a dramatic collapse. It was a very quiet one. The shifts stopped. The callbacks stopped. Nobody fired me; the work just evaporated and left no forwarding address. And the thing nobody tells you about that kind of loss is how long it takes to feel real. For a while you tell yourself it's a few weeks. Then it's a few months. Then you're doing arithmetic with your rent at two in the morning and you realise the ground has been gone for some time and you've just been standing there.
I had time and I had no money, which is a specific and corrosive combination. It's not the broke that gets you. It's the broke plus the nothing to do.
The idea, and then eighteen months of not doing anything about it
I want to be precise here, because the version people prefer is that I woke up one morning liberated and decided to sell my body to the internet. That is not what happened.
What happened is that the thought arrived the way any practical thought arrives when you're out of options — as a line item. A thing you could theoretically do that would theoretically produce money. I looked at it the way you'd look at driving for a delivery app. And then I did absolutely nothing about it for a very long time.
That gap is the honest part of this story. Between deciding something is possible and actually doing it, there's a distance nobody talks about, and it's where most people stop. I sat in it for over a year. I opened the studio's site and closed it. I drafted an email and deleted it. I told myself I'd think about it properly next month, and next month I thought about it exactly as unproductively as I had the month before.
Deciding is free. It's the twenty minutes after you decide that costs you something.
What finally moved me wasn't courage. It was attrition. The situation didn't improve and I ran out of reasons to keep putting it off. I sent the email. Somebody answered. That's it. That's the whole inciting incident.
What I was actually afraid of
Not the work. I want to be clear about that, because people always assume the fear is about the act itself. It wasn't. The act was, if anything, the least abstract part of it.
I was afraid of the permanence. I understood — dimly, then completely — that this was a one-way door. You can leave a lot of jobs and take nothing with you. You cannot leave this one. Whatever I shot would exist for the rest of my life, findable by anyone, forever, and there would be no version of me afterwards that hadn't done it. That's a strange thing to weigh at twenty-four with a phone in your hand and a landlord who wants an answer.
I was also afraid of being bad at it, which sounds trivial and isn't. I've written elsewhere about the specific pressure that lands on male performers, and every bit of that anxiety was already in the room before I'd worked a single day.
December 2021
My first scene was shot that month. I was twenty-four. I'd built the day up in my head for a year and a half, and the actual experience of it was — and I mean this as the highest praise — administrative.
There was paperwork. There was an ID check. There were test results that somebody looked at properly before anything happened. There were people setting up lights and talking about lunch. Someone asked me twice, without drama, whether I was comfortable and what I did and didn't want to do. Nobody was in a hurry and nobody was leering. It was a small film set, run like a small film set, staffed by professionals who had done this many times and would do it many more times after I left. If you want the hour-by-hour of it, I've laid out what a shoot day actually looks like.
I had braced for something transgressive and got something procedural. I don't know what I expected. Something to happen internally, maybe. A click. A door closing behind me. And there was none of that. I drove home, and I was the same person, and I had money, and the world had not ended or begun.
The thing I didn't anticipate was that it would become a career. I went in thinking about a shoot, not a profession. That it turned into a body of work — into studio sets and crossover into mainstream work I never planned on and eventually into whatever this is now — happened one booking at a time, the way most careers do, without anyone announcing it.
The two stories I won't tell you
There are exactly two approved narratives for how someone ends up here, and I refuse both.
The first is the tragedy. Something went wrong, someone was hurt, the industry preyed on a vulnerable kid, and everything since is damage. People want this one badly. It lets them feel sorry for me, which is a comfortable thing to feel. But it isn't true, and dressing my life up as a cautionary tale so a stranger can feel compassionate about it is not a trade I'm making.
The second is the fantasy. I always loved sex, I was born for this, I found my calling and it set me free. This one is more flattering and just as false. I got into this because a virus shut down the economy and I needed to pay rent. If the shifts had come back in June 2020, there's a version of me who never sent that email.
The truth sits between them and it's duller than either. I was young, I was out of work, I thought about it for a year, I was scared, and then I did it — and it turned out to be a job I was good at, which is not the same as a job I was destined for. Nobody wants that story. It has no moral in it. But it's mine, and I'd rather tell it plainly than let someone else write a better one on my behalf, which is more or less the reason this whole site exists.