IN 1999 A GAY FRIEND confided to me a unique way of making money that capitalized on the growing technological possibilities of the Internet. The idea, like many Internet schemes, sounded too good to be true. With a seventy dollar webcam, a few dozen gay porn photos easily pinched off other porn sites, and a basic knowledge of HTML programming, I could build my own webcam site where the producer, director, and ostensible “star” would be myself. Gay men would flock to it and pay to watch me do … well, whatever! To a poor, 21-year-old undergraduate intrigued by the hubris and hyperbole surrounding overnight dot-com millionaires, the idea sounded like an easy way out of undergraduate poverty.
My relationship with HTML programming began when I was seventeen and set up my first webpage, a simple collection of poetry, personal photographs, and links to my favorite websites. Since that initial homestead, through which I tried to define and declare myself to a wider, more anonymous world, I had consistently maintained a home page that hadn’t progressed beyond portraying a current distillation of my life for anyone who happened by.
I called my website “As You Gaze Upon Me” and put some effort into marketing it to on-line clubs and directories that listed and discussed gay webcams. I needed only a few hours to construct a series of rudimentary pages, nested so that as one traveled “into” the site, each subsequent page promised greater access to the identity of the person introduced on the first page. This introductory page displayed suggestive photos of me taken with the webcam: grainy, color images showing off my skinny body in a tight T-shirt, flexing non-existent biceps, and pouting for the camera. I introduced myself as a college student and aspiring writer saving money to study abroad in London (which was true). Samples of my creative writing could be read for free on the next page. In addition, I posted my mailing address (something no webcammer is ever advised to do), so that “fans” could send donations of a hundred dollars and receive, in gratitude, a self-published chapbook of my poems, humbly titled Veritas et Excrementum. Posting my address meant that donations came more easily, but also that, if someone really wanted to, they could find me. Once at a local theater, a man approached me and told me what a fan he was, adding, “By the way, I live across the street.”
Much of the website was free, but to get to the meat of my site—the porn and my webcam—one had to pass through an adult verification “gate.” Adult verification services sell passwords allowing access to thousands of pornographic sites. These services purport to restrict access for minors—often a requirement—but anyone with a credit card can buy a password. The verification company I used charged twenty dollars for a yearly membership allowing access to thousands of websites with adult content. If a user accessed my site and had already purchased a password, he was free to enter. If he didn’t already have a password and purchased one through my site, I received half the fee. All the material within this gate was poached, or taken from other websites, including the pornographic photos—a requirement for using the adult verification company is constant pornographic content—and the code that refreshed the webcam image. A simple file transfer protocol (FTP) program hooked up to my webcam and snapped a photo every twenty seconds, uploading it to the website and in the process erasing the previous image. A code I inserted prevented users from right-clicking on the photo and saving it to their own hard drives. This would, I hoped, ensure that my images vanished into the ether.
In 1999 webcam sites were a relatively new phenomenon. Most were produced by amateurs interested in connecting with others. Webcams by and for gay men quickly formed their own subcategory, with newsgroups and forums devoted to discovering and promoting new webcams springing up where “fans” could discuss their favorites. As competition among webcams grew, sites began to add chat features, on-line diaries, and other angles of access to the person in front of the lens. Webcam sites generally attract thousands of visitors a day in their first weeks, but as the novelty wears off, more and more features must be added to keep attracting visitors. At the height of my popularity, I was pulling in around 30,000 hits a day and making $1,000 a week. Most of these men remained faceless and nameless to me; I had a counter that tracked how many people accessed my website, but the only demographic information it provided was where the visitors were from. Most came from the American east coast and the Midwest, along with several thousand visitors from Great Britain. A few hundred Japanese and Koreans and twelve people from Saudi Arabia also stopped by. Although my website was advertised to gay men, women must have visited as well, though none of them ever contacted me.
Gay webcams have evolved in the few years since “As You Gaze Upon Me.” It isn’t as easy for an amateur to produce a site and make money. Today, webcams marketed to a gay male audience can be divided into three categories: single cams run by one person, which are either free or charge a monthly fee to access their site; portal sites, where subscription to a single commercially run website offers access to several different amateurs; and webcam houses. The latter two types are becoming increasingly professionalized. Webcam houses, which started appearing in the late 90’s, were largely put together by entrepreneurial college students, offering several webcams spread strategically throughout a house in which gay men actually lived. These now seem to be giving way to professional operations filmed in porn studios designed to look like houses. As professional sites begin to dominate the webcam scene, much of the discourse in the webcam community laments the passing of the “good old days.” The unprofessional, amateurish aspect of earlier webcams was obviously a draw for many webcam fans.
I usually tried to be live on camera about two hours a day. Most of the time I must have been boring to watch. I typed papers and wrote e-mails, napped in the nude, ate ramen noodles. The camera was perched above my computer, focusing on my face, but occasionally pointed toward my bed when I read or slept. Often I was sexually explicit, stripping and then masturbating. I usually began the night with the mindset of “putting in my hours,” but the thought of men across the world watching me, and some finding me beautiful, usually shifted my attitude to enjoying being sexually explicit on camera.
I realized that in addition to wanting to make money, I was also drawn to webcams in the same way I preferred interacting with men on-line rather than in clubs or cafés. Though my first webpage had gone on-line when I was seventeen, I’d been surfing the Web since age fifteen, progressing from using free trial disks from AOL for ten hours of lurking in gay chat rooms, to logging into local Bulletin Board Services (BBS) in my hometown and “gophering” (a rudimentary way of accessing the Internet) through my local university. These initial steps into an on-line community allowed me, a teenager slowly coming to terms with his sexuality in the Midwest hinterland, to articulate my sexual feelings and to begin developing a vocabulary to describe myself as gay. I met my first boyfriend on a local BBS after another user gay-bashed him. As a senior in high school, I took classes for university credit, allowing me free dial-up access to the Web, where for the first time I found images of men having sex with men. That first webpage with its poetry and Allen Ginsberg quotes was my way of reaching out; HTML was my Morse code, my semaphore.
When “As You Gaze Upon Me” went on-line, I had been living in a very open gay culture for over a year but had yet to feel comfortable with meeting and dating gay men I saw as more cultured, more beautiful, and more advanced than myself. I found it difficult to move from meeting and speaking with people on-line to doing so in person. Shy among gay men in cafés and clubs, I felt more at ease finding men for dates and sex in Internet chat rooms. I had deep reservations about my own body image—I had a lot of body hair and felt fat no matter how thin I became—in a subculture that exalted the tanned, toned, smooth body type. On-line, first impressions were created through words, through kindness (my strengths, I hoped), rather than looks.
As much as I despised a system I felt scored me low, my critique didn’t go beyond the criteria of what gay culture found desirable. I still wanted to be found beautiful and to be recognized for my beauty by as many people as possible. The webcam attracted thousands of men and then distilled out of those thousands a coterie who found me attractive. I knew they were out there, and the webcam allowed me to distance myself from the rejection and reap the praise.
At the start of my webcam, I wasn’t consciously interested in exhibitionism. Not until I realized how much I enjoyed being on camera did I begin to see myself as an exhibitionist who depended on the comments of others to form opinions about himself. I began each night wondering who was watching and who was passing me by. But as the e-mails rolled in—sometimes four or five a minute—telling me how beautiful I was, how aroused my images were making them, I felt emboldened. These words of encouragement validated a young gay man deeply troubled by his own body. Feeling beautiful turned me on, and so I masturbated, garnering even more praise. Finally, thousands of men were noticing me and finding me thin and my body hair attractive. Masturbating with these invisible men watching made the act less personal, of course, because it ceased being an onanistic communication with myself, a closed circuit. But it never became a clinical act, something I felt I had to do and pretend to enjoy to keep the visitors coming. I had become a true exhibitionist. Pleasing others amplified the pleasure of masturbating on-line.
Exhibition acknowledges the set of eyes watching from outside the sexual act and pulls that participant in across the distance of the gaze. The voyeur is a physical part of the sexual act, though spatially separate from it. Exhibitionism is defined by that extra component, which adds pleasures in different ways. For me, being an exhibitionist meant showing off a body that I hated in order to attract praise from someone who didn’t—validation was the extra ingredient I craved on camera. The impetus behind my exposure could be explained by my hope that someone, somewhere, would find me beautiful.
THE TITLE for my website was undoubtedly influenced by the cultural studies classes I was taking at the time, where the term “the gaze” was making the rounds. As I understood it at the time, the “gaze,” always masculine, represented the flow of power between voyeur and subject: the gaze was an act of consumption directed against an object by a more powerful subject. This concept may have merit, but the gaze worked differently for me. It was an act I courted and a part of my own erotics as an exhibitionist. Rather than seeing “the gaze” as a source of insidious power, I came to see it as a major component of my own pleasure.
Because webcam sites only allow one-way voyeurism, one could apply a traditional critique of power to them, such as that of anti-porn feminists like Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon, who see pornography as one of the tools men wield in their relentless pursuit of power over women. While their argument derives from their general critique of gender relations, it’s clear they regard the porn industry as driven by a power relation in which the viewer exerts power over the person being viewed. Applied to webcams, such an interpretation would see any webcam subject, whether Jenni Wrigley (whose jennicam.com webcam site made national headlines in 1998) or a skinny gay boy trying to earn extra cash, as allowing her or his privacy and domestic space to be violated and probed by invisible, male eyes, reducing the person on camera to a prostitute and a commodity. In short, power is seen to flow in one direction only, from the invisible eyes of the viewer to the exposed body on camera.
But these traditional distinctions between voyeur and subject, which most people today would agree aren’t very clear-cut off-line, are even less rigid on-line. The technologies of the Internet that allow images to be manipulated and identities morphed also permit power to be diffused. There is a pleasure that comes with spying, consuming, and watching the exposed while remaining hidden. But with webcams, another pleasure is enjoyed, situated in the subject: the pleasure of showing off, of exposing oneself. Subjects of webcams are not the helpless victims of voyeurs whose commodification of bodies produces their own sexual gratification. Instead, webcam subjects really define the rules of the game, taking pleasure in performing certain acts on camera and in projecting their own images.
Take, for example, the e-mails I received while on-line telling me I was beautiful. They turned me on, so I revealed more. The men watching me must have known that it took a certain exhibitionist to do what I was doing. They might have understood that I was on-line for attention, and that flattery, whether genuine or not, would goad me into doing more. Perhaps the intent of those e-mails was to play upon my perceived insecurities in an effort to get me to take off my shirt, my pants.
I was ultimately in control of the images shown on my site. A clock on my end allowed me to say “cheese” at the moment an image was snapped. Thus images could be highly scripted and yet appear natural, as though I had forgotten the camera was on. (A great “performance” occurs when the aura of a hidden camera is produced despite careful attention to each shot). Often, whole evenings were “posed” so the end result appeared to be a natural flow of images—the subject “caught” unaware by the camera, performing intimate acts such as sleeping, reading, picking one’s nose, masturbating. I often performed this intimacy on camera, with the webcam the focus of my evening. I would watch the timer counting down and at the last second strike a sexually suggestive, though natural-looking pose. I rubbed ice over my nipples; I made pouting faces. I often looked sad, suggesting that I would never be able to afford studying in London and reminding people they could donate money to my cause. Surely viewers didn’t think I had forgotten the camera completely, but it would have been difficult to determine the level of contrivance by the images that were uploaded. Most, I’m sure, didn’t care. The majority of men who accessed my site did not read my poetry or send inquisitive e-mails asking about my personal life. Most were content simply to watch, consuming my images as they would photos in a pornographic magazine.
However, unlike the subject of a photo shoot, I was also my own photographer. I determined the angles, the lighting, how deeply the camera probed, what articles of clothing were removed. And I received all the money. Those content to watch might not have realized the potential of a webcam to blur the distinction between voyeur and subject in the way that the men who tried to interact with me did, but accepting that most of my visitors watched anonymously doesn’t negate the fact that I still had control over what they saw. Of course, there were times when I would forget about the timer, so a shot really would be unplanned. Sometimes people sent images back to me that showed a “me” who wasn’t aware a photo was being taken—frowning, sitting with his mouth lazily hanging open, his body sagging—poses that certainly didn’t make me look as sexy as I wanted to be.
The men who made themselves known to me provided the greatest opportunities for the potential of a webcam to be explored. Interaction usually began with an e-mail asking me to do something specific on camera: “Show us your asshole”; “Play with your nuts”; or “Can I see a close-up of your nipples?” Not one to take orders easily, I always e-mailed them back, asking for a private moment from their lives first. “I’ll show you if you tell me about the first time you had sex with a guy,” I’d write. I usually got my story in return: brief narratives about best friends, sleepovers, furtive pre-teen crushes from the 1960’s, 70’s, and 80’s. Whether they were true or not, I’ll never know. My viewers and I eroticized these blatant power games; both of us got what we wanted and got off. By interacting with me, these men stopped being voyeurs and instead took on altered roles we both defined.
Some were quite adept at beating me at my power games, as well. I soon discovered that men were “bookmarking” my inner webcam page and sharing it, allowing visitors to skip the password “gate” and forcing me to change the address of my inner webcam page frequently. Perhaps more interesting were the men who admitted that they had found ways of bypassing the codes I’d set up to prevent my images from being saved. They were meant to be ephemeral images, but some men admitted to storing hundreds of them, meaning I was no longer in control of how my images were being used. Just as I “poached” porn images from other websites to create my own gallery of porn, my images were being stolen as well.
Most of the men who frequented my site must have grasped that what they were watching was a performance of an identity; those who sent me e-mails accepted it and for the most part told me that they enjoyed their own altered roles. But what had initially drawn them to my site was the desire to see a body on display and the erotic charge produced in watching intimate images of a young man pleasuring himself in his own bedroom; many of the men, according to the e-mails they sent, masturbated along with me. They didn’t seem to mind that I knew they were watching, that I knew the camera was on, that it was theatre.
Connections did form between me and a handful of men, on the whole middle-aged, who regularly visited my website. Posting my home address on the Web encouraged contact, both positive and negative. Along with the donations and occasional gifts, handwritten letters occasionally arrived detailing exactly how a certain gentleman in Michigan wanted to suffocate me and what he would then do to my lifeless body. Though erotics had initially drawn them to the site, these men became interested in the real person behind the images. Once they got to know me, they saw a younger gay man trying to make it in the world, and sometimes helped by sending donations for my “London fund” and encouraging my poetry. One man I still consider a close friend. Upon meeting for the first time, he showed me the archive of photos he had taken off my website. I had shut the webcam down two years earlier and was surprised by how much I had changed. I looked younger but also very, very thin. I discerned a certain desperation in my demeanor and remembered how poor I was at the time, how precarious were my plans for London. There was also a sadness to the images—I never smiled—and a loneliness, too, because it was always just me within the frame. Ultimately, the images pointed away from me and toward a much younger man, another identity I once performed on camera. I don’t know who the person I performed on camera was. I often wonder if any of the men who watched me thought they knew.
Jason Weidemann lives and works in Minneapolis. He can be reached at jrwbrit@yahoo.com.
