OnlyFans model Sophie Rain became a topic of conversation when it was revealed that she made $43,000,000 in the first year of opening her account. Her success started a debate online about normalizing sex work to very young women as Rain is currently 20 years old, but for many people, appears to be underage. Many of the women I follow who speak out about sexism were drawn to this story as it seems to highlight men’s desire for very young women. A desire that has historically resulted in the abuse of women and girls that is maintained beneath the patriarchy. Rain took her earnings and decided to open up the “Bop House”, the first OnlyFans content creator house. Taking a page from the Youtube content creator house, The Hype House, these Gen Z sex workers live together, work together and use each other’s platforms to cross promote. They predominately promote their content through apps like Tiktok and Instagram where the Bop House has gained a large following; some of it underage. They participate in many trends, and even create their own. In one trend they created, they put out an open call for auditions and of course some of the girls who answered were underage. Right now, the highest requested new member of the Bop House is a 17 year old blogger named Piper Rockelle. Rockelle is no stranger to content homes. She, along with her mother, started a teenage content home called “The Squad” in 2020 that would dissolve after her mother, Tiffany Smith was accused of pressuring the female members of the house to be more sexual, wear tighter clothes and placate to a male gaze. While she made those comments about the girls in the home, she also made a slew of sexually inappropriate comments towards some of the boys. Today, Tiffany Smith runs Piper Rockelle’s Brand Army account; which, similarly to OnlyFans, offers members access to exclusive pictures and videos for a small subscription fee. Based on the comments some other content creators were able to find on her Brand Army account, it’s clear that Piper Rockelle’s content, while not overtly explicit, is catering to an audience that wants to pleasure themselves to images of underage girls. And unfortunately, this is a growing trend among content creators who start as child bloggers. Piper Rockelle would appear in several social media videos with members of the Bop House, even a video “welcoming” her into the content house; to which they claim to have meant the physical home, not sex work.

Listening to these young women respond to criticism around their actions, it becomes pretty clear that their brains are still developing. There are judgement calls that they’ve made hastily, and of course that calls into question whether or not these young women are able to truly make these decisions with a full understanding of their consequences. The Bop House has been the source of much debate, especially as other content houses inspired by them start to appear. A content house full of tattooed and edgy models called “The Alt Bop House” has invigorated a conversation about fetishizing alternative women, with many saying that sex work is the antithesis to what they call “alternative principles”. As a goth who is a former sex worker, I have a lot of things to say about many aspects of this and I had a very interesting experience that touched at the heart of this issue while I was working on my script for my Youtube channel.

When I was 19 years old, I was scouted by a porn company. In 2009, I was in my first few years of college, my family had stopped financially supporting me and I was at the very start of my hormonal transition. Living in Valencia, at the time, it was very hard for me to find normative work. Especially being one of the few black people, and one of the few trans people in the area. It was virtually impossible for me to find employment and legalized protections for trans people wouldn’t exist until 2010. So when this scout from a porn company approached me at a sex party, it was a proposition I considered.

At the time, this very successful transgender porn company was running a full service porn studio, an online portal for web camming and a night at a strip club. I knew a girl who worked at the club and I’ve always loved to dance, so I considered it… but then I became mortified about anyone seeing me, so I opted for the cam girl thing instead. I’m pointing out my logic here because back in that time, it was pretty feasible that you could be a cam girl and be relatively unknown, where as it was very hard to be a successful dancer and also be unknown. Most of the dancers were also either working for the cam studio or in the porn studio and their dance sets were really just a way to meet and greet their fans and potentially new customers. Back then, I had a lot of fear around my parents finding out and I didn’t want anyone to know I did porn so cam girl felt like a good choice.

I feel like I need to draw attention to the fact that at 19, I wasn’t doing well. I had been in the full swing of my hypersexuality because of sexual violence phase and I first gained the attention of the scout through my pictures that I’d post of myself on social media. Often times, my pictures were suggestive or flirty. I wanted to be seen as sexy, really, before I had a good sense of my own sexuality. As a teenager, I had an awareness of men’s attraction to me, but I didn’t necessarily understand what it was supposed to be for me. My hypersexuality was set off by being drugged and assaulted by this artist I was working with when I was 15. I was focused on making money so that I could move out of my parents house and finally be myself, so I found this guy online who gave me a job in his studio. Then he raped me and because I needed money, I kept coming back. My groomer also gave me the perfect space to be myself and be creative. It just came at a cost. After that, I’d try my best to repeat these experiences but do so in a way that made me feel empowered and that’s how I got to sex parties where in retrospect, I was abused much more, but felt it was empowering. Some perv took me to my first party the week I turned 18, and for a while, I’d say that I was servicing these parties, almost as if I was an employee. This is the mindset that allowed sex work to feel like not that big of a deal.

Back then, if you wanted to get into sex work, you really only had the option to do so through a larger company. They controlled distribution and had the large platforms to promote models and you would have to hustle way more and have way more resources to be able to do it independently. What this meant was that our income was often split between both the platform and the company I was working under. I remember thinking that being a cam girl would be easy, but I figured out pretty quickly that sex work is work.

In many ways, sex work is all about selling a fantasy. In my actual life, I’m a femme bottom who is completely submissive. But when you have a body like mine, it’s harder to sell that fantasy. These men wanted me to perform a type of dominance and aggression that I do not really have. The audience doesn’t really want who you really are, they want a fantasy that suits your appearance. That draws them in, but if you want to get them to stay, you have to change it up. You change your hair, your body, your aesthetic, your vibe to draw in new customers and to keep your existing ones who may have tastes that shift. You have to think about marketing yourself in a way that you probably don’t actually want to. And while I was doing this, the porn company was making most of the money. I’m not proud to say that in my short 3 month stint as a cam girl, I made under a thousand dollars. Which was more than I had before, but at this point in my life, I really recognize how much I was getting screwed because I make that in a much shorter period of time in a way that I don’t feel exploited. I didn’t like being a cam girl. I’d go as far as to say that I hated it and it kinda ruined my sexuality for a bit; and I’m only really just now starting to feel like I have an accurate relationship with my sexuality. However, apparently I still have that sex worker stink on me.

After doing cam work, I got out of sex work, but would continue doing a lot of sex work-like things. I relied very heavily on men because they had the money. I would sabotage aspects of my education to spend time with a man because he had money and wanted to take care of me. I got hurt a lot before I graduated college and eventually fell in love and desperately wanted to put all of that behind me.

My ex almost dumped me when he found out that I was a cam girl in my past. He had exes who were sex workers and he didn’t have a fond opinion of them. I remember feeling like I was better than other trans women because I no longer had to do sex work; to the point were I’d deny that I ever did it. He picked me, and I was special because I was better than a sex worker. But there was a shift in our relationship as I started to become mores successful as a content creator. Eventually, I started making more money than him and started paying all of our rent. As I matured, he purchased more Funkos, smoked more weed and would bring home plates of his mother’s Lasagna after I’d slaved over a stove while he was at work. He started to feel undermined by me because I no longer needed him. Because I started making enough money to no longer need his permission or guidance. I remember finally getting to a place of financial comfort and many of the ways that I relied on men, I was very relieved to not “have” to do anymore. Looking back, I overlooked a lot of abusive behavior from men because they had money and were attracted to me enough to want to support me. As I type this, I’m giggling at the previous version of myself that wanted to be a house wife. I’m glad I out grew that. I’m glad I never married that guy.

Moving to LA, it struck me almost immediately that men had a certain response to me having money. Up to this point, I had lived in conservative communities for most of my life. I was stealth before moving to LA and if I’m being honest, I had a hard time adjusting to the more liberal environment. In the OC, it was a bit more socially acceptable for me to kinda expect for men to pay my way, and I’d honestly became kinda used to that. But in LA, I wanted to be empowered. There were many times when I’d go out on a date with a man and when the check came, I’d grab my card and naturally want to pay my portion; I was proud to do so. And there were men who’d flinch at me for doing so. To many of them, it was an affront to their masculinity that I not only wanted to pay, but was able to pay. Most of the time I’d pay my portion, those relationships ended. In the OC, whenever I’d be out by myself, the men around me would ask me where my children were or if I had a husband. It was as if they expected for women to only exist in relation to men, who of course have the money in the relationship. I was a bit younger back then, but I could tell that there were men that were kinda disturbed by this reality of me being able to do these things for myself. Sure, men in LA are a bit more overtly liberal, but I find that a lot of men struggle to be with women who make more than them, because they rely on their finances to command power in their relationships. That’s also why so many red pilled men shame women for wanting to date men who are financially secure.

These days, I live relatively comfortably, by myself in a cute little apartment in Hollywood. While I have my partners who do indeed do a lot for me, I do not rely on them financially. I don’t do a bit of handy work around my home, but I don’t really rely on them for anything other than companionship and the time we spend on this rock together. Plainly put, I do not need men and have not needed men in a very long time. My job as a content creator is one that has become lucrative enough for me to be comfortable. I work hard, I don’t exploit myself in the way I once did, and I’m very proud of myself for it. Sex work was a way I pulled myself up, but now it feels like a footnote. Nothing at all comes up when I look up my old stage name and the evidence of my sex work has evaporated as websites got updated and the online atmosphere for sex workers changed. But still, like I said, even after a lot has changed, apparently I’ve got that sex worker stink on me.

I go to the Goth club every Wednesday night. It’s basically my religion at this point. I go there, I see my friends, I catch up with them, I commune with them. I feel very at home in the Goth community. My ex fetishized alternative women, but would shame me a lot for my alternative aesthetic when we first started dating so I was slowly weened out of it. It’s been nice to marinate in LA for a while now and really find myself again.

After the club, I usually go to an after hours. I wouldn’t suggest this, but it is certainly a thing I’ve taken to. I don’t do coke and I’m not looking to fuck, I’m just an insomniac who really enjoys meeting people. I was sheltered for so long in the OC that I’m honestly still adjusting to how interesting people are in LA. Not that there weren’t interesting people in the OC; they were just playing a particular role. in the OC, you only really found out who people were when they had a bit of liquor in them and were around friends. People are more out there in LA and I kinda like that.

The after hours I go to is in this small little house off the boulevard. Tucked away in a quiet little corner. It’s run by a former gang member who I will often see on the boulevard; a nice guy who’s really all about his business. The space isn’t large, but there are several stages for girls who want to dance. I know the guy who runs the girls who dance there; also a nice guy from what I can tell; you never really know. Men come to this little house to meet people, to socialize and yeah, sometimes to pay for dances. Sometimes we have to clear out of a section of the club so that the girls can give special dances to the men who have the funds for them. Perhaps this seems like a strange environment for me to be in, but of the after hours I’ve gone to, this is the one that feels the most chill. Every after hours is going to have a presence of drugs and sex work. They just go hand in hand and late at night, after the bars close, there’s a demand for both.

Every time I go to this after hours, I end up meeting this guy. He’s a handsome man with a darker complexion, and a very pleasant speaking voice. I think we both registered that we do public speaking and so when we have interacted with each other, we end up having some surprisingly articulate conversations and verbal sparring matches. Perhaps this is the trauma, but I kinda like being able to argue with men, especially when I know they’re attracted to me. There’s something really sweet about being able to twist a conversation a certain way because you know the person wants you. And this guy has always been very clear about wanting me, even as I relented.

This is an older guy and I think perhaps for that reason, he has always had a very hard time wrapping his mind around what I do for a living, and he also had a hard time understanding my polyamory. So we often get into these debates about these things where he essentially reveals that he doesn’t really believe me. He doesn’t believe that I have multiple partners who care about me and he doesn’t believe that I have been able to pay my rent and more from my earnings as a content creator. The way he responds to me is as if he believed that I was saying these things to simply cope. Keep in mind, he’s doing copious amounts of cocaine most of the time we are speaking and I’m usually drinking a white claw because to me they’re somewhere between a drink and a glass of water. But still, he did entertain me and I was attracted to him. I’ve accepted long ago that more people do coke than I recognized and while I think its a stupid drug, I don’t really judge people for doing it, just abusing it.

I’ve known this guy for a while now so when he begged to go back to my place for a drink, I unfortunately entertained the idea. Maybe just because I wanted to go home. So we went back to my place and he navigated through the artistic clutter in my apartment to my kitchen where he rummaged through my bar, found the most expensive bottle of liquor and poured himself a large drink that he did not want to finish. This really annoyed me and then he asked me another annoying question as he looked around my apartment, which I will admit is a bit nicer than your average apartment in LA. He asked me how much I paid in rent and I didn’t really want to answer this question, but as I thought of a tactful way to respond, I blurted out

“Unless you plan on paying my rent, I don’t really think I need to tell you how much I pay”

He stumbles into my kitchen to find himself a plate that he could use to snort drugs off of and I get into my bed, defensively, under my covers. I really regret inviting this man into my house, but we carry on our conversation. I start trying to talk to him about what I’m working on as he looks around my apartment fascinated by the corners of unfinished art projects and my filming set up. I tell him that I’m working on a piece about this only fans creator home and the conversation quickly derails into a question I’ve now become kinda used to hearing”

“Are you on Only Fans?”

Whenever I tell people that I’m an online content creator and they meet me in a goth club where my tits are typically hoisted up to my chin, they often assume I’m using a euphemism about sex work. I suppose it’s true that many of the women I know at the club also have only fans; which is part of why the criticism of the Alt Bop house is so strange to me. Sex workers are a huge part of the goth community and many of the commodified aspects of alternative culture are directly inspired by the presence of BDSM fashion in these spaces. Most of these things are associated with each other because the Goth scene is one full of misfits and weirdos and those on the margins. Naturally, many sex workers feel embraced there. While it is indeed frustrating that many men see alternative women and fetishize them, it’s silly to ignore the sex worker presence in the goth scene; and to be fair, it hasn’t just been men who’ve assumed that I was a sex worker.

What bothered me though is that this man has had many conversations with me about my job, he’s even met some of my fans who occasionally end up at the after hours. However, he still believed that once he got me alone, I’d somehow reveal that I was indeed a sex worker and that all the things I have did not come from my hard work, but from a man. He started to ask me if I had ever been behind on rent; and I’m very happy to report that I’ve never managed to struggle in that way. We never returned to our friendly banter about my latest project. Instead, he propositioned me.

I will not get into the details of what he offered, but he wanted to establish a relationship with me where he comes over to my place every day and I service his very taboo fetish. In exchange, he’ll pay all of my rent and then some…and what he was asking for, while strange, wasn’t something I necessarily minded doing…but daily?? For some reason that really stood out to me.

Because I tend to socialize in after hours like I’m observing people’s personalities, I hadn’t really fully calculated some of the aspects of our interactions. During our conversation, he as begging me to show him my Youtube channel, and the thing is, I already have. I showed it to him and one of the first things he said about my channel, which isn’t about my appearance, was that he didn’t like my nails being as long as they were and that he preferred me with more natural makeup. I dismissed it at the time, but as he sits at the foot of my bed, using my sewing table as a platform for him to snort drugs from, I finally started to get a fuller picture.

When you’ve been liberated from men’s financial control for so long, you can forget how it works. You can forget that when men feel like they can control you through finances, that they also believe they can control everything about you. Seeing him every day and doing what he wanted me to do everyday, would have worn away at my spirit. Sure, I’d get my rent paid, but now this man has control over me every single day. I couldn’t share what I shared with him, with anyone else if I was in this agreement with him. It started to register to me that this man was actually frustrated with the fact that I wasn’t in a position where I was struggling so much that I’d entertain his offer. There were much sadder, much more dejected times in my life where I’d probably jump at the chance, but now? I’m not remotely close to needing it and I can tell that many men do not like that.

I can understand why many people take issue with the Bop House specifically, I also feel that much of the criticism is done without an understanding of how the industry has changed. When I did sex work, it was during an era where porn producers and pimps relied on the desperation of the young, often abused women who came to them looking for a way to do sex work lucratively. These companies and these pimps felt like the safest way to do sex work and many women were abused. Many sex workers still are, but OnlyFans has indeed, changed the game for many sex workers.

These days, if I wanted to be a cam girl, I could easily make my own account on a website like Chaturbate and start earning income without the help of a porn company. I’d still have to split my income a bit, but I could control my content. I could own it and I could produce it all myself. Expensive studios and cameras have been replaced with smart phones on tripods. OnlyFans models can simply upload their content and advertise it to people around the world very easily through twitter and now apps like Instagram and Tiktok. The reason why the Bop House is on these apps to begin with has to do with FOSTA SESTA laws which have made it so that sex workers can’t communicate their services through the platforms they were once able to. These laws were made to prevent human trafficking, but in all reality, they prevent of-age sex workers from using the promotional platforms they’ve been using. For many sex workers, these laws have pushed them offline back onto the streets and back underneath the thumb of exploitative pimps.

On Red Pill podcasts, you will commonly see men hold court around how degrading it is to be an OnlyFans model, but they will invite them onto their show to be degraded and ironically, this functions as self-promotion for their OnlyFans. In that way, I think the irony is on full display. There are an increasing amount of angry men who take issue with feminism and the progress it’s given to women, but those same men will complain about being a traditional man who provides for his wife. Yet there’s also men who feel frustrated that women feel entitled to their money, who also believe that when they become rich, famous and hot, they should be able to have as many barely legal girlfriends they want. Then there are men who want to see the money they spend as a downpayment on sexual favors, who absolutely resent sex workers. For many anti-feminist men, OnlyFans models represent the fall of man-kind; the end of “western civilization”. They see women who sell sex as a sort of infinite-money-hack, as these days, women can do sex work without a man in the middle. It used to be that because men took most of the money from the girls who worked for them, that many sex workers were stuck in perpetual poverty. Poverty that ensured that these young women always had a reason to come back to sex work and to use these men as middle men. But now that men are no longer benefiting from pimping in the same way and these women are able to make most of the profits, as these women come out and start sharing the numbers, of course these men are going to be upset. They’ve never made 43 million in a year. In their mind, why should she? She’s a whore!

While I think it’s worth discussing why models like Sophie Rain are successful and its worth criticizing how the Bop House promoted a teen who’s likely already being exploited, I think the anger people have for these women is misplaced in many ways. What people are really responding to is the fact that sex work is no longer underground. Our society has humanized sex workers so much during my lifetime, to the point where I can think of several who have fairly vanilla Hollywood personas now. With that has come improved conditions for sex workers, and are things perfect? Not really. However, what many don’t seem to be understanding is that while pushing these women off social media may seem like a solution to you, disempowering and shaming them makes the abuse porn producers, traffickers and pimps want to accomplish, much easier.

Shame is a big reason why many women who do sex work never report anything that happens to them. The attitude many have of dismissing and discarding sex workers is the same social attitude that encourages abuse towards them. For those personally affected by the patriarchy, it may feel empowering to shame women who do sex work because they are a tangible and precise target. However, since capitalism has existed and patriarchy was established to feed it, there have always been men who were willing to pay to have access to women, and women whose circumstances have been that their only path to financial mobility is a man. For as long as women have been able to have their own bank accounts, men have conflated our outward expressions of femininity as not that far from sex work. My experiences in multiple ends of this has made it very clear to me that at the heart of this anger around OnlyFans models is a resentment for women being able to become so financially comfortable that she objectively does not need a man. Men look at a gorgeous young woman like Sophie Rain and they resent that the closest they’ll ever get to her is being a paid member of her audience. Her financial freedom reinforces to them that she will never be so disempowered that she’d need to settle for them. That if she ever did date them, it wouldn’t be because they were the richest, hottest, coolest guy; as red-pillers like to suggest. She’ll date them because, well she chooses to; and its become clear to me that many men resent women being able to choose anything for themselves.

I think the subject of choice is worth considering because ultimately, many of these choices are simply illusions. I guess you could say that I chose to do sex work, but only because my other options were starving, with no school books and no medical care. No one wanted to pay me to flip burgers, but they would pay me to flip them on their backs. I don’t think most people who end up doing sex work would necessarily choose it. I know a lot of sex workers, but very few who I’d say loved their job the way I love mine. But what I’ve learned is that this can be said about most jobs. Sex work is only degrading if you see it as such, and in many ways, I actually think it’s much more degrading to let a corporation use your body and labor to maintain something you will never own that never feeds back into you beyond a small paycheck and then discards you once you fall out of line. I had a negative experience as a sex worker and I’m glad its no longer my gig, but if I got into it now, who knows. I hated taking off my clothes and being paid pennies for it. I hated how isolated I felt within it and I hated having to depend on men.

Sophie Rain and many other OnlyFans models have come out to say that young girls shouldn’t quit their day jobs for OnlyFans fame. That only happens to a very small amount of people. Most OF creators make just above minimum wage. I don’t think young girls are turning to OnlyFans creators and viewing them as role models, and if they are, I’d like to speak to their parents. Frankly, I think that’s where most of the blame should be placed. Tiffany Smith is feeding her daughter to the sharks because it pays to do so, and that’s very sad to me. More than these sex workers, I believe we should criticize the capitalism that would allow her to feel completely fine selling her daughter. Would she do that if it didn’t pay?

Sex work is work and we only think of it as easy because we view sexuality through a certain lens because of how sex factors into our lives. However anyone whose done sex work will tell you that if you think it’ll be easy, you will fail. As sex workers have built and gained their own platforms, they can have open conversations about that. To me, it’s hard to get the impression that sex work is glamorous if you’ve heard those conversations. Frankly, sex workers make it look easy, but that’s also part of the job. I personally find what I do now to be much easier. I found out pretty quickly that i don’t quite have the heart for it and I’m not very good at pretending.

At the end of the day, this is all marketing. The Alt Bop House is not catering to teenagers who are alternative who care about “alternative principles”, they’re catering to men who fetishize alternative women; and if you are one you know they don’t really like them, they just view them as more adventurous than the women they typically go for. They are selling a fantasy the way we are incentivized to do so under capitalism. About 6 months ago, some of you may have noticed that I have started playing up my appearance and have committed to a certain aesthetic on my Youtube channel. I’m also more overtly flirtatious and I’ve finally started wearing bras on camera (lol). Since I’ve made that change, my following has grown dramatically and I’ve made twice as much. On Patreon, I went back and forth with my audience about shifting into “Kat Blaque, the character” and that’s what you now see on my Youtube channel. It’s still me, but it’s a very curated, hotter version of me. My experience with sex work has made it so that I honestly have really struggled around the idea of putting myself together to film Youtube content. I hate the idea of selling my appearance, but I had to shift my thinking around this and I’m glad that I have. Now I see it all as a work uniform of sorts. Soft makeup, a Victoria Secrets push up bra and Jovi by Outre teased up to remind my audience that I’m a Goth without dark makeup that often distracts my viewers. It’s a look that’s worked; it’s a fantasy that sells. I could argue with myself all day about how I’m reinforcing some unhelpful things by leaning into these things so heavily, but at the end of the day, whether I wear a bra or not, whether I wear makeup or not, I alone will not defeat this societal trend of expecting women to be glamorous and presentable within the industry I work in and it doesn’t serve me to act as if it is my responsibility, because it isn’t. In fact, I’d say that trying to make it seem as if it is, does a great job of providing cover for the much harder to destroy societal reality of patriarchy.

These sex workers are easier to blame than the men who patronize them, but the demand for them will continue to exist whether or not they’re on the main stage or in the shadows. Personally, I like that things have gotten so much better for sex workers that they can finally get paid what they deserve without having to hand their paychecks to a man first and I will always support improved conditions for sex workers over blaming them for being sex workers. To me, that argument is no different from “what was she wearing”. It’s easier to criticize the clothes a particular woman was wearing than it is to deconstruct a rape culture that says if certain women look a certain way, they should expect abuse. But we lean into those half baked ideas because they’re easier to latch onto and we want to maintain the stigma around women dressing immodestly, and therefore maintain a central part of controlling women. There’s a reason why rich men who’ve historically abused women and participated in human trafficking are suddenly trying to “protect women” by creating laws that make it easier for them to keep sex workers and their abuse of them, in the underground.

I’ve lost track of the amount of times I’ve made posts like this on new blogs I’ve created. I started my first written blog on Xanga over a decade ago, and have since created several blogs all with the desire to reframe and re-represent myself. In truth, rebirth is a central part of who I am. I am one person, but I feel I’ve lived many lives and sit at many intersections. I suppose this is why I’ve spent so much time reestablishing and recreating myself. Finding the honest person between those intersections has been quite the journey for me, and I suppose that’s what this blog will be about.

I am many things, but if people were to ask me to describe myself, I’d say that I am a creative at heart. One of my first blogs was about my desire to go to, what was to me at the time, the best art school in the world: Cal Arts. In the 5th grade, my parents took me to a conference for creative children of color. They’ve always invested in and supported my creative endeavors and that’s really the only thing they’ve ever supported me in. Nonetheless, it was this conference and their support that would introduce me to Cal Arts. I left completely inspired and would devote all of the following years to getting into Cal Arts. The California Institute of the Arts was a school started by Disney and because of that, it was very prestigious and well respected. It’s rare that people get in on their first try, but I did; and thank god for that because it was the only school I applied to. However, college was rough for me because it was also when I very solidly discovered that I was a transgender woman.

Not to be a tired cliche, but ever since I was young, I always knew I was different. I innately understood that the narratives projected onto me didn’t feel truthful to me. However, I didn’t exactly know what those feelings were. I investigated the stories of people who had similar feelings and started to recognize that the feeling related to the misalignment between my gender and sex. If you manage to track down some of my earliest blogs, you’ll find me describing myself as gender queer as young as 14. College was where I recognized that part of my gender queer identity was this desire to hold onto a previous version of myself while reaching for the next, more honest version of myself, which was undeniably, a transgender woman. So when I went away to college, I understood that I had zero responsibility to be the person I said I was the day before and I decided to be honest with myself and begin my transition. As you can imagine, that was quite the challenge; going to one of the best animation colleges in the country, while also medically, socially and physically transitioning. But frankly, most of my struggle was specifically in the complicated journey of confidently claiming who I was and doing so without shame. Shame has been a constant and powerful emotion through my life in many ways.

After I graduated college in 2012, I got into the animation industry and was surprised to discover how much I utterly hated it. All those years working towards a goal and ultimately discovering that it wasn’t for me. It wasn’t the art so much as the pressure to constantly kiss ass. I’ve always been allergic to groveling. I don’t enjoy creating things I’m not proud of for the mere chance that one day I might potentially be able to maybe work on a different thing that might, just maybe, make me slightly more money and be more along the lines of what I actually want to do. It’s not that I don’t believe in hard work, I absolutely do, but I found it very hard to essentially exploit my labor for very little pay to create something I didn’t care for. I was foolish to believe that this was a standard 9 to 5 job. No, they wanted me to get there early in the morning and leave late in the evening. And I didn’t have the privilege most of my other classmates had to be able to be underpaid while groveling for a better job. My first animation job paid me $8 an hour and the only thing I was really able to afford after 3 months of working there was a pair of Doc Martens and my bus fare going to and from work every day. 3 hours to and 3 hours from; I spent 6 hours a day on the bus. I remember those days when I’d get home and only have enough time to shower and quickly eat before going to bed. It was exhausting, unfulfilling and exploitative and I haven’t worked in animation since.

Going on from that phase of my life, I started doing Children’s Illustration. Afterall, my final review in school concluded with my teachers saying that I was likely more properly suited for Children’s Illustration than Animation anyways. But I did it in the ass-backwards way of working directly with often very egotistical authors and not through a publishing company. What this meant is that for two years of my life, I put a lot of energy into projects that I couldn’t actually share. Projects that still to this day aren’t published. I made very little money doing so, but at the time, I didn’t exactly need to. I was living with my unaccepting parents and thankfully my expenses were low. So I didn’t need to make a lot of money, but I certainly needed to get the hell off of their couch. I was able to do that once I go into a relationship with a man that would inspire many of my musings to come.

I moved with my ex into a small room in a house in Long Beach. It was my first time being on my own and I really started to feel like I was doing something. Because of my work ethic, I was able to continue working from home in Children’s Illustration, as well as complete commissions and such on the side and I was able to make far more than I made at the Animation studio I worked at. I would spend from the time I woke up to the time I fell asleep working tirelessly on art trying desperately to make art my career. Over time, however, I would recognize that a lot of people struggled to see the actual value in what I was creating. I found myself fighting with clients about my payment, which was always quite modest. This became unfulfilling and at the same time, I started to recognize a misalignment with how I saw work and how my partner saw work.

He was an overtly privileged biracial, but white passing man who’d never once had to really struggle in his life. My struggles in life were related to the amount of exploitation, abuse and othering I’d experienced as a black transgender woman and his related almost exclusively to familial disappointments and a college sports injury. I wish my life could have been like that, but because it wasn’t, we saw work very differently. He always had someone to catch him when he fell, and I’d been on my own since the day I told my parents I was transgender and they decided to no longer financially support me. They’d only very begrudgingly allowed me to sleep on their couch while I figured myself out. That time with them was quite toxic, but I was still thankful. When it came to my partner, our different lives meant that he would start several jobs, and then be frustrated that he had to work his way up the way everyone else did and unlike me, the response to that annoyance was not to continue working in another way or seriously invest in himself enough to be able to work a different job; it was to whinge and complain while never changing. This was hard for me to watch as a person who had much less support and much less privilege. We were together for 5 years and while I loved him very deeply, I recognized that I had to start a new, more genuine life for myself. Not to mention there were traumas I hadn’t addressed that were sabotaging the relationship in other ways.

Unfortunately, when I was coming into myself as a teenager, the most supportive people in my life were older men who wanted to sexually abuse me. I’ll spare you the details, but I experienced a lot of sexual violence before turning 18, long before I met my ex. Growing up very sex negative, I had internalized all of these abuses as my fault and of course that encouraged me to have really dark feelings about myself. I got mixed up in the wrong crowd and they would sexually exploit me and use me as a bargaining chip for their business. It was a very dark phase of my life I wanted to put behind me when I met my ex. So I recreated myself yet again; I was the chaste, intelligent, hard working transgender woman with a degree, which was so much more appealing to him than the trans women he dated before who were sex workers with zero education. Back then it also felt good to be preferred over other women in this way, but it would take me years and years to unpack the toxicity of that pick-me mentality.

Towards the end of that relationship, I recognized that as I became more confident in myself, there were aspects of that old life that appealed to me. Towards the end of our relationship, I had shifted quite a bit as a person. I became more extroverted, more financially independent. I had more professional success and I was traveling the country speaking about being transgender. I was a more self assured, confident person who no longer functioned from a place of desperation. I didn’t miss the exploitation or the abuse, but the unabashed sexual freedom; and I was curious if it would feel more empowering at this current phase of life. I started privately investigating BDSM and Polyamory and found that these were things that appealed to me. So much so that I wanted to present them to my partner, but I would never get the chance to do so as our relationship had other issues. Primarily the fact that I hadn’t spoken about any of this with him because I hadn’t yet addressed or attempted to heal from my trauma and the shame I’ve felt for what I’ve experienced in my past, and now what interested me for the future. So I broke up with him and began yet another cycle of rebirth. I moved to Los Angeles.

When I was a teenager, I’d often run away to LA. I thought the city was more progressive than the small town I lived in where I was one of two black people i knew and the only openly trans person. I’d put on my sewn dresses and stuff them into a pair of baggy jeans and a baggy hoodie so that my parents didn’t see how I was dressed as I walked to the bus stop. Back then, I was able to catch a bus that took me directly to Hollywood Blvd. I’d change at the bus stop and go to the city and live a completely different life.

This was the time I’d spend with these random men who were abusing me, but they felt safer than my unaccepting parents. I fell in love with the city during those teenage adventures, but I spent most of my 20s in aggressively white and suburban Orange County with my ex. I felt even more alien there than my hometown because while I grew up in the suburbs, I did not grow up steeped in a bastion of whiteness. So I hungered for a connection to diversity, better food, more color and more art. So when I broke up with him, I naturally decided that my next stop would be the city.

And that’s where we are now and why this blog is called Blaque in The City. I moved here four years ago and it has been quite the adventure. The reason I’ve created so many different blogs is because I was constantly trying to rephrase and recreate the kind of person I wanted to be. The kind of image I wanted to maintain, and how much I’ve compartmentalized myself. I’ve worked very hard to feel like I am finally a shameless embodiment of everything I am. So we will not be compartmentalizing on this blog. We will talk about it all. Gender, race, sex, kink, creativity, travel, adventures and nightlife. This will be my space online to share and synthesize thoughts, ideas, and the many lessons I learn through life. Let’s hope I stick with it this time!