Actually a guy, but Cam Boy sounds funny. I write a lot (recently started getting some recognition for it) so I figured I might share some stuff anonymously. I’m sure a few people will know who I am. I didn’t put in any specific info like my YouTube not so much out of fear of dox, but rather I wouldn’t want it to come off like tacky self promo. This is just from a text file I’ve kept on my phone since I started 2 months ago. I went from having nothing to 6 figures in the bank, about to sign a lease for an apartment tomorrow.
I started camming at the end of May after I was put on house arrest. I had been sober from 2019 until April of this year. My grandmother died and I went through a bad breakup and blew through $2k of heroin, fent, coke, etc in a few days. I came clean to probation and got absolutely FUCKED.
I had just finished my first semester of college as a 33-year-old adult. I remember being fucking terrified of walking on that city school campus, I felt like everyone could tell I was “different” from my tattoos. I was so proud when I finished my first semester. I was 3/4 into my second semester when I was forced to completely drop out (losing all the money) to stay at home for house arrest. I get that I made my choices, but I don’t see how this helped me.
My PO wouldn’t let me apply anywhere but the McDonald’s in town within walking distance. I applied online, waited a week for an interview, interviewed…then waited. I waited another week just for Mcdonald’s to deny my application. I then applied at a job holding road signs for construction work. I was on 24/7 house arrest for this and had to get permission ahead of time to leave. This was a logistical nightmare and it took 2 weeks to get through interview and orientation. I told my PO the scheduling worked like so: I would get a text the night before with the location and I could be gone from 6 am-8 pm. On Friday morning I got two texts: one from my PO telling me to report in person Monday morning (She came to my house before)…and a text telling me my first day of work was Monday. I immediately texted back my PO…who proceeded to ignore more. I missed my first day of work and lost that job. Keep in mind she didn’t even give me permission to apply for this job, I did it without her permission…so you can get an idea of how limited she made my options.
My family stuck by me throughout all the addiction shit. I moved back home in January 2022 to help take care of my Grandmother. I met an awesome girl last August and began dating her. She had a great job, worked with kids, and had her own house and car. My family was psyched that I scored such an accomplished woman. Took her to Thanksgiving and everything. We ended up breaking up in March. Sometime around then I let it slip she was trans (figured they knew, the younger women in my family did)…and I’ve caught endless shit for it since. From screaming matches in the yard with my dad/grandfather calling her a tranvestite, saying I disgust them, etc. It’s fucking bizarre they stuck by me through 7 felonies…but apparently the chick making $25 as head trainer for her region wasn’t good enough for a 7-time felon.
I tried to make the relationship work for months, but have since given up. I can’t reconcile someone saying those things about someone I loved and still care what they think. My ex had convinced me I’d do very well with gay men and encouraged me to try camming while on GPS tether.
The first night week I hit the top 5 for males on chaturbate every night. I’ve never been so successful at something in my life. I have self-esteem issues (I’m fit, but grew up chubby), and making money off my looks and personality is definitely cool…but I understand what it is. What makes me feel truly good is to be able to support myself. To be able to buy my own groceries. To do something BEYOND just getting by, to do something on a high level. I even started doing non-adult content on YouTube and got fucking monetized by telling stupid prison stories! I wrote an entire book about my life with addiction, prison, etc, and no one but my mom has ever inquired about it.
Because of addiction, living up north, and prison, I don’t know anyone socially (friends) the only person I was hanging out with was my ex. She is always struggling with money and I knew she was open-minded since she sold pictures over snap. I showed her how much money I was making and she immediately wanted to try. Her enthusiasm waned as soon I started talking about things other than money. She wanted me to walk her through the entire process of signing up. She ended up coming over to my house so I could just do it for her, plus she wanted to burrow my family’s IPad for streaming. I was already getting pissed that it seemed like she wanted me to do -all- the work. Whenever I would try to teach her how to do something: install an app or bot on chaturbate, make a menu item, etc…she would just get frustrated and tell me to do it. Trying to make her menu was like pulling teeth. I asked her what she was willing to do, “I don’t know,” I asked what she -wasn’t- willing to do, “I don’t know”, finally I just copied my menu. She thought my prices weren’t high enough (they were), but then got frustrated when I asked her what she would like them set to instead.
Now…I get that I’m the one narrating this story, but I’m not lying about this. My ex can be…difficult. She’s also pretty abusive, which I’ll get into later, but I still have love for her. She’s the person whose been in my life the longest. I met her when I first got out of prison in 2015. We dated for most of the first two years, then just remained friends. She’s the person that came to my GamGam’s funeral with me. I know she has severe bipolar, bpd, and whatever else. I also know that’s not an excuse for how she acts. I fucked up for years on drugs and she always kept me around, so I cut her some slack out of love and loyalty.
We end up doing a couples show and make out pretty decent. We made $300 in less than two hours. I told her that I’d send half of the tokens to her Chaturbate account as we discussed previously. Now it becomes a problem and she wants the money as soon as I manage to cash one of the checks I already had. I was having a problem getting to the bank due to the house arrest.
I explained the way the taxes worked. I told her that if I sent her the tokens she could get the whole $150, but she would owe 25% or so in taxes. She grumbled a bit and let it go. She pestered me to buy her little cousin a small gift with some Amazon money a client had sent me. I’m a people please-er by nature and have a serious problem spending money on women and friends. I love Kass, but I know she exploits this (even if she isn’t conscious of it). I concede to her request and she then tries to convince me to spend $15 on some algae supplement. She does not take “no” for an answer. She demands to know why I don’t spend the small amount of money. The reality is I don’t fuckin’ want it, also I need to save money to invest in camming. I refuse to elaborate on “why”. I don’t think I need to justify myself for why I don’t let her control how I spend my own money. It’s a classic Kass freakout.
“It’s fucking SICK that you do this! People are going to get sick of you and you’ll get old and no one will care!” She screams all of this at the top of her lungs as she leaves my house. I resist the urge to engage.
The next morning she texts me as if nothing happened. Except now she’s a tax expert. She tells me that Michigan “actually” only has “like an 8 percent tax rate”. I calmly explain there are different types of taxes and state tax is only one and that I DEFINITELY researched this and asked my Business-owner Grandfather, all of which lead me to the 25% figure. She persists, showing me pictures of her pay stubs from a Chinese restaurant. I feel my blood boiling over.
The couple’s show the day before was a nightmare in every way but the payout. Kass refused to interact with chat and stared at her phone the whole time. I am very comfortable on camera, but alas, no one cares about the guy in a couples show. It was such a change of tone from my solo shows; in which the audience is sycophantic pandering fans. The people in this show said I looked like “white trash”. Getting Kass to answer questions or respond to tips was like pulling teeth. Anytime I tried to encourage her I was met with some mild verbal abuse culminating in the blow-up at the end. I had already resolved not to cam with her ever again before the tax argument.
I snap.
“Fuck it, I’ll send you the whole $150 on Chaturbate RIGHT NOW and you can pay your 8% tax rate, you can pay NO tax, you can pay whatever tax rate you want, actually, and explain your math to the IRS!”
Not only does she have my family’s Ipad, she also has my Nintendo Switch. She tells me if I don’t cash app her the money by the end of the day she’s selling both. I consider the Switch to be worth about $150 and consider it a fair deal. Now I don’t have a single friend.
My mom is supportive of me, which rules. For the same reasons: she’s proud of me for making good money and being successful on my own. She seems to have a fundamental misunderstanding of what camming is though. She keeps thinking I’m “selling dick pics”.
She actually told one of her friends about my success camming which piqued the friend’s interest. She stops by the house one day with her friend and brings her up to my room and asks me to explain camming to her. Thankfully she left to run an errand so I didn’t have to talk in front of her. The friend texted me some questions over the next few days which I answered. One morning she starts asking about couple shows and I told her I had a lot of success doing one with my ex. She then asked if I’d be interested in doing one with HER…that day! As fate would have it, her car was in the shop and she got a ride from my mom.
We made about $400 in 2 hours and split it 50/50. I think on some level she might have wanted to have sex with me, because as soon as we finished the last private she started freaking out about how my mom was one of her best friends and that she can’t find out. We were all covered in sweat so she took a shower, but she definitely looked a bit frazzled. We told my mom we just cammed separately in different rooms. Crazy my mom thought I’d have someone cam in my dead GamGam’s room…
I’ve never had a lot of attention from women and this was odd for me. She was a nice lady and the relationship with my mom didn’t actually bother me. We just had nothing in common besides the sex work. I didn’t plan on anything more than some potential future shows. Out of the blue, she texted me a few days later telling me she had to cut ties because of her friendship with my mom. This kind of bummed me out considering I definitely did not push for any sort of non-professional relationship.
This can be a very lonely job. I often don’t speak out loud until late in the afternoon when I get on camera. I have this weird contrast of being invisible throughout my day: to my family, to the people at the gym, to the few people on my Facebook. Then I hop online and am showered with praise and money simply for being me.
This juxtaposition of extreme loneliness and parasocial popularity is punctuated by extremely dark moments of home life. I’ve been diagnosed with OCD; a diagnosis I’m not sure I agree with, but I certainly have symptoms. I misplaced a housing application for an apartment the other night and kept wandering the house looking for it. I’ve always been like this when I misplace things. I remember GamGam would see me pacing back and forth, seeping with anxiety, and insisting on helping me look no matter how much I told her not to.
I can hear her chair creaking as she struggles to stand up. She was 80 years old, overweight, and still a Marlboro smoker. She struggled to simply sit in a chair and breathe, and the noises she made actually moving around were downright ridiculous. You could tell how much her old body struggled to do these unnecessary services to others. Her wheezing over the sink, slaving over dishes, when I insist to her I will finish them. Her complete refusal to use the dishwasher. I would actually get mad at the frustration she would cause me with her selflessness. I begged her to stop helping me look, to let me do the laundry.
Amber, the trans ex, worked in the care field and had a different approach. She would soothe me and try to relieve the anxiety. She would make me think if I -actually- needed what I was stressing about. She would calm me and make it easier for me to drop it.
The night of the missing housing application my Grandpa responds by screaming at me. He yells, “What the FUCK is wrong with you!” All for going to my car’s glovebox at 10pm. I stopped trying to explain things after the fight outback, by the pool, where he called Amb’s the T slur. Fuck them. I just try to walk away and focus on something else. It’s a shitty day-to-day living situation, but I stopped caring about what anyone but my Mom thinks.
Everything changed with Grandma died. Our relationship got worse and time stopped healing it. It’s like he went out of his way to hate me. He has the same level of disapproval for me smoking weed as he did for me doing heroin. The $8k I made in my first month meant nothing: I’m still a loser for not having a respectable job. My Grandpa has drank every day for as long as I can remember, and while he never seems intoxicated I can’t help but think the half a 5th or so he drinks a day is fueling this rotten mood. My dad has drank every day for as long as I can remember…and it shows. He only drinks beer, in contrast to my Grandpa’s liquor, but he has the perma-slurred voice of long-time alcoholics now. Even when he’s sober his voice is like that.
The other day my Grandfather came into a show and screamed a bunch of horrible shit. All based on his absolute disgust of me being friends with trans women. The footage is fucking brutal. I think it has the potential to go viral as one of those deeply disturbing glimpses into a toxic household. I got banned on chaturbate for telling someone to talk to me on Twitter. My YouTube success exploded my popularity and now I have 4K on Twitter. I got verified on OF and am going to start have prerecorded content for sale.
I showed someone from the discord the footage. He agreed: it’s fucking bad. I think this footage, if shown and explained, could get a LOT of attention and be used to pump my OF, CB, and other projects hard. I’m considering how I want to handle this. Tomorrow I will know if I am able to move into the apartment I looked at.
I chat on the CGP discord in between all the solitary loneliness: the cam shows, all the hours filming and editing YouTube, the 2 hours a day on the treadmill, the two hours a day at the gym, along with being screamed at for smoking thc vapes (fully legal in my vapes) along with every other thing. I wake up in an empty house and see a new member named “BIGJACK” joined in the early AM and has posted wall of bullshit into general. He’s saying he has a HUGE DICK and wants to know how to buy bots to push his show to the front page. And wouldn’t you know it…he doesn’t actually want to do this for profit! He does it for fun and actually gives all the tokens to other models (like us!!!).
Dudes coming into the discord like this is a weekly occurrence and it cracks me up every time. Almost on queue I see “<Discord Admins name> is typing…” and almost spit out my coffee. The admins are way too nice with giving these clowns the benefit of the doubt and when she gives this clown a slight benefit-of-the-doubt I can’t help but think she has experience in retail.
All these people in my personal life (but my mother) tell me I can’t do this, that I should get a minimum wage job. Then I open this purple app and all these strangers take time to dash their fingers across a keyboard to send: words of encouragement, advice, greetings, and sympathies. I would say a good couple dozen of people on discord have invested more time than me than just about everyone in my personal life in the past year. My bank account looks great, in part thanks to them. Hell…I didn’t HAVE a bank account before this. Being a perpetrator of para-social relationships, I am very aware of what online friendships are and what they are not, yet on an almost daily basis I find myself grateful for help or conversation I have with fellow SWs.
