On exposing my xxx photos

Sorry, parents. (But also, not sorry. And also, thanks.)

Panic was the emotion. The urgent need to escape. Doors sealing off and options limiting themselves, just one last door ajar screaming at me from across the room, a door opening to a cliff’s edge. This couldn’t be happening.

They had saved messages and photos, and threatened me with exposure. I felt my life on the line, unraveling with message after message.

A voice told me, “You deserve this. And it is all over.”

Layers of skin ripped off and stolen. Just a lump of open wounds dragging itself across the floor, listening to the siren song of the cliff’s edge. I wasn’t the only one hurt, and I had run out of coping mechanisms.

Somehow I forced myself to type “988” into my phone, to triage from helpline to friend.

Survival in the minutes and hours and days and weeks afterwards was a group effort.

But, having been exposed, maybe I had a chance for new skin.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Years before, I sat in a repurposed home in New Brighton, Minnesota. She was this Asian lady with a PhD in psychology. A Catholic, but “progressive,” which made me skeptical.

I told her I wanted to be celibate, and she said, “So you want to be asexual?” But she’d given enough helpful tools that I chose to keep going.

We talked about my parents, my childhood, college, the first time I fell in love, heartbreak, faith, masturbation, pornography. She asked me, “Do you think that you sought out pornography because that was the only place that you could find connection for that part of yourself?”

I remember the first time I saw porn. My seventh grade computer teacher told the class that porn was prohibited at school. I wonder how many other Catholic school students did what I did. Sitting at the desktop at home that evening, I couldn’t remember the word. I googled “k-o-r-n”. The results did seem pretty bad.

Then I remembered. “p-o-r-n”.

I carry a vague memory of the first image I saw.

I spent a lot of time in front of that computer, searching and searching and searching.

Other boys might have searched and then left the screen and tried to figure out how to relate to actual girls. They might have discovered that love with touchable skin is really different from what they saw on the screen.

I didn’t make that discovery. There were no discoveries for me. There was no transition from boys on a screen to boys in real life.

Once, my father tried to talk to me about the computer history. I lied. Half-truths kept me alive.

I was a golden child, a perfect Catholic boy. I had nowhere else to go, other than that computer screen. I gave it my secrets, and it gave me relief.

I later discovered that you could trade these secrets, that others sought this too. You could find them on the internet. The one safe place. Until it isn’t.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

The F.B.I. has confirmed that more than 20 teenagers faced “sextortion” and died by suicide between 2021 and 2023. This is becoming a common practice. Scammers target teenage boys, pose as attractive women on Instagram, solicit explicit photos, and then threaten to ruin their lives if they don’t pay up. A New York Times article detailed these scams and included a screenshot of one message:

“Hey I have ur nudes and everything needed to ruin your life, i have screenshot all ur follers and tags and those that comment on ur post. I can send this nudes to everyone till it hi go virals or send this to ur school and u know u will be expelled from school... u will be exempt from universities if u don't cooperate...all u have to do is to cooperate with me and i will not expose u ,if u block me i will ruin your life”

In that article, Mike Prado from the Homeland Security Investigations Cyber Crimes Center emphasizes the need to educate. He says that for kids who are the targets of these scams, “It is important to note your world is not over.”

We like to think that kids can turn to parents and will find support. But I have friends whose parents found out about their sexuality and kicked them out of their homes. In the name of Christianity. In the name of God.

Sometimes God can feel like a sextortioner. He puts these desires in you, and then he threatens you with homelessness if you let anyone find out.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Sometimes you have to die to find another God.

Thank God for my parents.

Thank God for another God.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Last month, I posted a tweet about reading Dignitatis Infinita while waiting for a date to arrive. A friend messaged me, sharing that an hour later a guy named Jim Russell had posted a screenshot of my tweet. Russell included the caption, “Catholic dude who ‘dates’ others dues gonna read new DDF doc on human dignity before his ‘date’ shows up…”

I had blocked (former Deacon) Jim Russell after years of receiving constant jabs and unsolicited comments from him. But even after being blocked, his preoccupation with me continued.

He hasn’t been the only one. While in law school, I wrote regularly in defense of Church teaching on homosexuality. A much older man took issue with it. He asked very personal questions in response to my online posts. Then he tried reaching out to me over email, again and again. I didn’t respond. Then he called my law school trying to reach me. Through a mentor, I communicated to him that if he continued to do this I would get an attorney involved. He stopped. I changed my social media handles.

Today, a handful of anonymous accounts linger around my social media pages. I don’t respond to them. I wonder what they want from me. I have my suspicions. They are always there.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve had people trying to “expose” me, people trying to reach me, people trying to control me.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

While I was recovering, a friend loaned me Brené Brown’s I Thought It Was Just Me (but it isn’t). Brown writes about the dynamics of shame, developing resilience and empathy, and how blame and shame inhibit our ability to change. We must make “the journey from ‘what will people think’ to ‘I am enough.’”

Am I enough? Am I enough, with this history?

We want to be wanted, found, touched, seen, appreciated for who we are, or at least for who we think we are, or at least for who we think can possibly get some little bit of intimacy and connection in this world. I’ve sought these, in my own little ways. At times through online encounters, sharing photos or lurid bits of text, exchanging secrets.

My philosophy professor had talked about how college students take off their clothes in order to be seen, but, in reality, it is as if they slip into a suit of skin that makes them less exposed than before. We are both more seen and not seen at all.

I’ve liked to believe I have full control of what I share. But control is an illusion. In the digital age, there’s so much that can be stored away and that never really leaves, that is never really deleted, whatever you think you might have done on your smartphone. I look back to that time in my life where I had shared in private, messages that I thought were between two people, where I thought we were operating under shared norms but that, I found out too late, applied to me but not the other party.

They gathered messages, messages that I’m still really embarrassed about but that I need to find a way to live with.

I survived the incident. And that person, and the words we shared, faded into my history. But I suspect they’re still out there, and one day could resurface.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

In the months after the exposure, I asked myself what I had wanted.

Connection.

To be seen.

To be wanted.

To feel taken care of.

To be desired.

To desire.

To feel alive.

To spread wings beyond the parameters of the cage.

To share my skin, and to be loved.

As a child, I went to the beach and wore board shorts and no sunscreen. “I have island skin,” I said once. “I only wear sunscreen when I go to Guam.” And, even then, sometimes I didn’t. I burned.

As an adult, I wear short shorts and lots of sunscreen. I am more exposed, but protected all over.

I learned the lessons of a burned child, and I found some ways to be free. I am learning to unclothe myself, and to wear a thick layer of sunscreen. I have survived the burning sun on my hidden skin.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

On the other side, I’ve reconnected with a younger self, that self who longed so deeply to be seen and was so terrified of being seen. Terror and compulsion were his twin beasts. The suit of skin always at hand.

If we are lucky, we eventually see it all for what it really was, we see ourselves for what we really were. And we find compassion for it all. Maybe we learn that we are incapable of truly exposing ourselves, that the suit of skin is a myth, even if a lovely myth, that we must be exposed through others, and that this is the only way we can learn the truth.

The digital world is like the mind of God. It holds everything. And it never really forgets. It can forgive, but you must forgive yourself too. I can’t fathom the work involved to get there. I can only fathom the effects of the unfathomable, that is, grace. The thing that I thought could destroy me is just a reality of a world sustained by a loving God, a God I couldn’t have imagined in the depths of my despair. But somewhere between there and here I discovered that God sustains it all. He is the supreme archiver. All this is held in the mind of God, and I am still here. Because I am held in the mind of God. And he sees all.

Maybe one day if all those things resurface, I’ll find some happiness in them. We will learn to be more like God, by seeing just a bit more, and working to hold it all with grace. I think about the advice of Moira Rose to Stevie Budd, and how all created things, even time and age and history, are gifts. Moira tells her:

“Take a thousand, naked pictures of yourself now. You may currently think, ‘Oh, I'm too spooky.’ Or, ‘Nobody wants to see these tiny boobies.’ But, believe me, one day you will look at those photos with much kinder eyes and say, ‘Dear God, I was a beautiful thing!’”

I wonder if I’ll come across those spicy photos, those lurid bits of text, and think to myself, “I had such a longing for vulnerability. And I didn’t know yet that, years down the road, I would find it.” Those spicy photos, those lurid bits of text, however horrible they might feel at times, are signs that there is greater goodness than one can yet imagine.

I hope I’ll look into the world of that young man beneath the suit of skin and think about how I wish he knew how loved he was, how I wish he knew how good he was, how I wish he knew the things that would come that he couldn’t possibly imagine and that he won’t want to miss out on. Each year I learn to love that young man, to tell him the things he needed to hear, to tell myself the things I still need to hear. I hope that I’ll look back and think, “If I had to have a suit of skin, that wasn’t such a bad one to have.” Even today, a suit of skin isn’t a terrible thing to have in one’s closet. You just need to know what it is. And it needs to be yours.

Saint Sebastian by Jean-Jacques Henner

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

I’m a man who sometimes needs to learn his lessons the hard way, and multiple times.

I discovered that a man had saved—which is to say, stolen—some images of my skin suit, and had shared them. Panic was the emotion.

But I am older. I have lived. I have thanked God for my parents. I have thanked God for another God. I have discovered friendship in the shared will to live. I wear short shorts and lots of sunscreen. And so the door at the end of the room, the door opening to a cliff’s edge, remains shut. It is guarded by many friends, and my therapist. And me.

Over time, I have learned many ways to be a gay man. Deconstruction comes with the opportunity to relate to my body in ways no longer constrained to the secrets of pornography on the internet, secrets of spicy photos and lurid bits of text. Sure, these can be fun. But I have found a path from the computer screen to real touchable skin. I am a gay man in my work, in my writing, in my voice, in my friendships, in my prayer. To be seen as a gay man is to be seen in this body, but not just to be seen in this body. There are so many ways to be in the world, as long as I am out in the world.

Fifteen years after my father tried to talk to me about the computer history, I brought it up again. For me, being out in the world means being out with my parents, which sometimes means asking hard questions, which sometimes means returning home, including the home of fifteen years ago. It means finding the unspeakable, and giving it a voice. Now I say things to my parents like, “I needed you to talk to me about it, to tell me that I was ok, to help me process, to help me find what I needed. But you didn’t give that to me. But I understand that you did the best you knew. And I’m grateful for that. And I want to talk about all this now.”

And we do.

We talk about that conversation we never really had. We give voice to the unspoken, the unspeakable. We talk about pornography, my childhood, falling in love, fear, hiding, why he never followed up, how I struggled because the message I got was, “We don’t really talk about that stuff. You’re on your own.”

If you have good parents, parents like I have, they grow up with you. They never stop learning how to be better parents. You never stop learning how to be a better child. There was no manual for the type of child I was. There couldn’t have been. I understand that now. I deserved to be seen, but none of us knew what that meant yet. We’re working on it now.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

When you’re young, you think you’ll find liberation in “coming out.” But as you age, you realize that liberation is a process, a journey, an ongoing commitment, first and foremost to yourself. Liberation begins, over and over again, with the unspeakable finding a voice.

So I guess I’ll say it. I’ll end this exploration of exposure with an exposure, one I’ve been trying to give my whole life, one I am giving again and again here.

Everything Jim says is true, in a way. He and others linger in the peripheries of half-truths about me, bathing in them day after day. I’ve known the pleasures of the bath of others’ half truths, of lathering myself in the move to expose them. It is a bath and a lathering that eats away at you, until you become the mirror image of that which you claim to oppose.

On social media, we all want to expose each other. This is the ‘hot take.’ We like to think that ‘hot take’ has everything needed to ruin someone. It is the extortion that doesn’t need a response. The satisfaction in delivering a message to the masses is our payment.

This is the lifeblood of so much “discourse” today. Spicy scandal has more cultural relevance than deep truths, even when the scandal is a falsehood. Zena Hitz writes in Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life:

“Nothing could better illustrate the condition of preferring an unpleasant falsehood to an agreeable truth than the social-media platform Twitter. The outrageous, shocking, horrible 'fact' is circulated thousands of times, but the simple correction that surfaces later, the evidence of its untruth, gets hardly circulated at all. The love of spectacle wallows in novelty and negativity; it prefers the thrill of the shocking news story, the horror of revelation, to the quiet, truthful correction.”

The scandal has broader appeal than the recovery. I once heard from a couples therapist, “Be careful who you disclose your hurts to. People can easily understand the harm, but the healing is something only the two of you can really understand.” The scandal is our horrible fact, and the recovery, if we make it there, is the evidence of its untruth. This is why the Church has learned to punish perpetrators but is abysmal in helping victims.

If you want to be free, allow me to expose myself, because I have received the gift of exposure: the things you say are true, in a way, and I am learning to not care. I’ll give you the scandal, and the hint of the recovery.

The Gospel of Luke tells us, “There is nothing hidden that will not become visible, and nothing secret that will not be known and come to light.” Is to be exposed to be made holy? I sometimes wonder if purgatory is spent illuminating and metabolizing the truths we kept hidden.

One day I may have another “exposure.” Someone might find and share and spread those photos, those messages. They’re out there. Or maybe, with our new AI world, they’ll try to make something to “destroy” me.

By that time, I hope it won’t matter, at least for me. I hope to be soft and indestructible.

I hope to tell myself,

“Know who is worthy of an explanation, because it’s not everyone, but it is someone” and,

“This is why you put on sunscreen, a generous layer of vulnerability and boundaries,” and,

“These are longings for connection, intimacy and you deserve connection, intimacy” and,

“There is no growth in the darkness of shame” and,

“Don’t forget about the transition, boys on a screen are not like boys in real life” and,

“Call your parents” and,

“Dear God, I was a beautiful thing!”