Recently, I published a video about Blue Panties and Bourbon, a series of videos that Brandi Hammond is uploading on TikTok. In the series, she reads through her deceased husband’s emails, which reveal quite a bit of infidelity with men, women, and apparently “boys”. Brandi had no idea that her husband, David, had been trolling the internet for 8 of the 17 years of their marriage, seeking sex primarily with other married men. At some point, she discovered that he was even stealing her panties, wearing them, and even loaning them out to men. Soon, she even discovered that he had been taking photos of her without her consent and trading and sharing them with men. In some emails, he was David, a married man unsatisfied with his wife, trying to find a mutually beneficial situation with a man who enjoyed seeing him in panties. In other emails, he was Michael, a smooth bull who pleased wives and couples. And occasionally, he pretended to be his wife, eagerly curious about sex with a younger, athletic man who could please her in a way her husband could not. Despite doing this for at least 8 years, as far as she knows, he often described himself as inexperienced with men. As Brandi reads through some of these emails, it becomes clear that many of them went nowhere, but she later discovers he did indeed meet up with several men and even snuck them into the home she owned. Brandi wouldn’t discover any of this until she could one day access his laptop, where she found several emails that she later forwarded to herself. Now, she sits on TikTok reading all of the dirty details, hoping to feel some relief from what was clearly a very traumatic and upsetting thing for her to discover about the man she’d been with for so long. As a former Craigslist rat, I found this story fascinating in many ways, and I wanted to expand on some of my thoughts after publishing a video about the series on my YouTube channel. Since filming that video, I have a bit of additional context I also wanted to add to my coverage.
I questioned whether this was a story I should highlight, but I decided to because I often feel like situations like this aren’t really discussed. Growing up, I interacted with a lot of men like David. Men who were cheating on their wives, often maintaining multiple personas online and frequently deciding that their wives didn’t need to know what was going on. I find that we have a very hard time having frank conversations about men like this because, on one hand, we want to entertain the premise that our homophobic society necessitates that some men with queer desires remain closeted. I know from many of my interactions with these men that many of them have something akin to an addiction when it comes to both meeting up with these men and having these conversations. It’s a habit that is very hard for them to drop, and they get off on the secrecy of it. At some point, David pushed Brandi to try some of the things he fantasized about, but she really had no interest in any of it. Sex for her has an added layer of anxiety, as she lives with a seminal plasma allergy, which makes her allergic to sperm. While she suspected that something may have been up, she didn’t know that he had been welcoming men into their home, where they were able to leave seminal fluid on her towels, bedding, and more. For years, she complained about her allergic reactions and the suspicion that she had an allergy to semen, but her male doctor would dismiss the possibility. Reading through his emails, she found that her husband had a particular fetish for cum, and no doubt, many of the allergic reactions she’d been struggling with for multiple years were the result of her being exposed, without her knowledge, to the semen of some of the men he was cheating on her with. David was certainly aware of this allergy, but he didn’t seem to care how it affected his wife. This is a constant throughline of these messages, and part of why I want to talk about this story is that this intentional cruelty is often dismissed and, in some cases, even defended.
Brandi would ask David if he wanted an open relationship, and he’d affirm that he very much did not. When she started to suspect something was up, David would not only deny the possibility of him cheating, but would often dismiss her as hysterical. She would likely have continued to believe that was possible unless she read the messages he sent to men. In recent discourse around bisexual men, it’s often been asserted that cisgender heterosexual women do not do enough to make bisexual men feel comfortable and affirmed enough to be honest about who they are attracted to. While it is indeed biphobic to assume that a bisexual man is a cheater, I’d be lying if I told you that I haven’t known a large chunk of men who see their bisexuality as something they intend to hide forever from their cisgender heterosexual partners whom they plan to marry and gain social capital from. Brandi was David’s third wife, and at 67, she begged him for years to take out his Social Security so he could start contributing financially again. The house was hers, but money was getting tighter, and his Social Security wasn’t increasing. However, he knew that if he took that money, it would quickly go to the children he had with his second wife. Children who needed financial support that he had avoided giving them for years. Being broke on paper worked in his favor. He had no place to go, and if you ask Brandi, the marriage should have ended six years ago, but they had a wellness business together, and after 17 years, it’s hard to turn your back on a person you once loved.
Every Thursday, Brandi would visit a friend outside Columbia, South Carolina. This became the primary day when he would sneak men into their home. Crossdressing was a major theme of many of his encounters. David often wanted to take on what he described as the “feminine role,” as a verse bottom, and many of his Doublelist posts were of him seeking a dominant male who would “breed” him. He would steal Brandi’s panties and photograph himself in them, and send those photos to men who often got off on seeing a masculine man in his wife’s panties. As he started to lose his hair, it went to his lower body, creeping down his back and forming a distinct tuft on his lower back. Quite frequently, he’d ask Brandi to help him shave his back and his bottom, and then he’d write later in his emails to the men he was cheating with that he was a “totally smooth bottom”.
While going through the emails, he found that he was actively taking nude photos of her and trading them with other men. There’s an entire subculture of this online. In some of the emails Brandi reads, you do get the very distinct impression that quite often, David was speaking to men who, similar to David, were pretending to be women, often masquerading as curious wives seeking sex with younger, muscular men. Some of the oldest emails she found were from Craigslist, where he frequently offered himself as a “bull.” A bull within this context is a man with a certain degree of sexual prowess who enters into a dynamic with a couple, usually with the intention of satisfying the wife. Sharing and trading photos of wives is central to many of these interactions, but most of his emails involving images of his wife or other wives do not end with him meeting up with a couple. In fact, many of them left the back door open for the possibility of these men interacting with each other, and fizzled out when the other man clearly didn’t seem interested.
While David was in his 60s, he’d often tell people he was in his 40s, sometimes 50s, and in his 20s when he pretended to be a young man eagerly seeking out couples. What stood out to me about many of his messages was how incredibly verbose they were. Many of them went into almost fan-fiction levels of description, where he’d write in much detail about who he was, his background, where he came from, and even claiming to be in various branches of the military. He would string together these little pieces of his real identity and warp them into a new character for almost every new person he spoke to. His penis would either grow or drop a half inch depending on who he would talk to, and the entire time, he’d been struggling with ED and, according to Brandi, remained very quiet during sex. He spent much more time forming deep, transparent intimacy with the men he met up with. In many of his emails, he often spoke of being able to find the passion that was missing in his relationship with his wife in a sexual relationship with the men he met online, and most of his posts on Doublelist or Craigslist stressed that he was looking for a long-term connection with one particular person. Many of the messages had the theme of wanting to be, specifically, with other married people; not just because of the mutually assured destruction aspect that would keep the relationship private, but as an explicit fetish. When he would give his wife’s panties to men, he’d also steal some of her Chanel perfume and spray the panties with it. The idea was that it would suggest her, as he put it, “married pussy”. These men didn’t just enjoy exchanging photos of their wives; they explicitly wanted photos of a “married,” and presumably “owned,” woman. There is an incredible subtext of misogyny woven through not only his messages, but also his choices.
Some people have been disappointed with my mention of the recent discourse around bisexual men in this context, but to me, this story does partially feel relevant. Yes, this cheating man does not, and certainly does not, represent all or even most bisexual men. However, this story is a good example of a tangible, real thing that many women are trying to avoid when they say they do not want to date a bisexual man. I think that there needs to be a conversation with those women about how men like the one in this story are men who get off on dishonesty, and that while his sex with men may indeed be shocking, his sexuality isn’t as relevant as the explicit enjoyment he clearly received from being deceptive. David would hide her panties underneath the hood of their cars, so that he could sneak into the driveway and give oral sex to men in the wee hours of the morning. This apparently kept the dogs up all night barking and kept her up, but each morning, he’d greet her with the question, “How was your sleep?” As Brandi read through the messages, it became clearer to her just how much he seemed to get off on torturing her by doing things that were indeed abusive. He gaslit her for multiple years about the truth of his infidelity and was allowed to open the marriage and communicate clearly and honestly about his interactions with other people. Still, he did not want to do that. He preferred sneaking around, being dishonest, and exposing her to things that she didn’t consent to. This has nothing to do with his sexuality or his crossdressing habit.
I wrote about this before, in the context of Sam Rockwell’s monologue in The White Lotus, where his character speaks about crossdressing and shifting sexual roles. Crossdressing is not inherently fetishistic, and many people do it as self-expression or just because they like to. Still, there is a segment of men for whom femininity is only appealing on them when they’re being degraded. For some men, crossdressing fetishism can be a manifestation of sexualized misogyny. Some men view women as inherently degraded and degradable beings, and they conflate femininity and feminine gender expression with degradation and sexual submission. In one of her videos, Brandi speaks about a queer relative of theirs whom David was apparently quite cruel towards. It seems like David, in his daily life, was quite homophobic despite what he was up to behind the scenes. This is not at all uncommon among men who crossdress. Many of the men I’ve known who were crossdressers were indeed conservative men who held onto these very binary ideas of gender roles and expectations. They partially crossdressed because they could not justify the idea of being submissive without also being feminized and thus degraded. In some of the emails, David desires the role of the feminine bottom; in others, he desires the role of the dominant top, often seeking a younger man who also crossdresses. As I’ve discussed a few times, I’ve often found autogynophilia as an idea to be mostly entirely laughable and untrue. Still, I do see a version of that among crossdressers, who do often enjoy creating sexy tableaux for each other to get off to. It’s not uncommon for these men to move freely between these roles, but I’ve noticed they often make a point of creating completely distinct personas for these pursuits, which we see in some of David’s emails.
In my life as a sex positive person who is within several kink-positive spaces where most of the things David is curious about are pursued openly and without shame, it makes me a bit sad that some people feel like wasting another person’s time is excusable. What frustrates me a lot in these conversations is that women like Brandi are often attacked for speaking out and are accused of being homophobic or otherwise closed-minded, largely because they don’t accept being cheated on. While I can understand why some people look at Brandi and immediately assume that she isn’t an inclusive person, the sense I’ve gotten from her videos is she very much is, and that most of her frustration with this is not that he was with men, but the fact that he lied to her and gaslit her so much through their relationship that it was clear that he absolutely never wanted her to know. As I said, I’ve met more than a few men who feel like the women in their lives don’t deserve any clarity about who they’re dating. There are indeed people who believe there’s no reason to tell your wife of 17 years the truth about your sexuality, especially in a monogamous relationship, and people who downplay the actual impact of infidelity. I feel the need to remind people that you can do all of these things openly and still have a wife who fully accepts you. Some of my personal friends are cis women who are dating bi men, and they will often even look for men for their husbands to have sex with.
Last year, I went to Bisexual Fuck Fest, which was a swinger event full of married bisexual men who openly and clearly communicated their desires with their wives. There, I was able to connect with a full range of married swingers who celebrated a man’s sexual fluidity. There was a version of this where he could get every layer of what he wanted with his wife’s full communication and support, but he didn’t really want that. The people who’d say he was hiding all of this because of homophobia may have a point. Still, ultimately, there’s a version of this where his wife wouldn’t have to wait until he gets a brain tumor and dies to find out that he’d been forming deep, continued relationships with men for almost a decade, likely longer. Many of the closeted men I spoke to in my youth blamed the cis women in their lives for why they weren’t open about what they were doing, and, paying attention to them, you always got the sense that this complaint didn’t exist independently of their misogyny. These men often resent women, and their resentment of them comes out in their paraphilias, where women are degraded and given very little choice. Brandi would discover that for quite some years, sometimes on those Thursday nights, David would keep a thumb drive full of some of the photos he took of her unconsensually; he’d tape it to the back of a TV in the guestroom, and he’d regularly invite men over and orally service them while a slideshow of her photos played. At no point would it have mattered if she was open-minded and accepting. He actively enjoyed the deception and the gaslighting and had no intention of ever communicating about what he was doing.
David is one of many men who recognize that in a society where homophobia thrives, there is an incentive to seem heterosexual and remain married. Thousands of men are not closeted because the women they’re with won’t accept them, or simply out of self-preservation. There is indeed a subset of men who cheat on their wives because it’s exciting, not because their wives are too closed-minded. David’s sexuality was a secret he kept through their entire relationship. However, at the end of the day, the fact that he was cheating with men, while shocking, is almost irrelevant. I’ve known many men like David, and I know that while they live with a certain degree of homophobia that causes them to be incredibly self-destructive, they also often live with a particular strain of misogyny. A misogyny where the women in their lives exist as props that are useful to them, where they are expected to stand by them regardless. There is immense misogyny in deciding that the woman who’s legally bound to you is yours to trade freely without her consent. David decided time and time again that her boundaries not only didn’t matter, but were worth negating if it turned other men on. He used her for his fetish, and even after being presented with the option of opening up the relationship, he decided that he preferred sneaking around over being open and honest. He needed a place to stay and access to a bank account without his name that his ex-wives couldn’t access. He had to die for her to find out the truth, and in the end, Brandi is left to put the pieces of her life back together. There is an incredibly misogynistic expectation for women in Brandi’s position to remain silent and deal with it alone so that they can protect the image of a man who was, in fact, abusing them. I’m very glad Brandi has found support online and connected with a community of women who have gone through the same things. I hope she continues to share her story so other women in similar situations know they are not alone.