I sought out adult men as a child for money. I'm finally starting to feel exploited.
I’m a 34-year-old man, and I am only beginning to understand what happened to me between the ages of 13 and 17.
My relationship with secrecy started even earlier. When I was nine, my mother began taking me out of school and telling me to lie to my psychiatrist to get her Adderall through me using my dad’s insurance after they separated the year earlier. She would pull me from school and buy me things and i thought it was great. When I realized she would buy things for me, I started asking. By the time I was 16, she was paying me $50 cash to continue doing it.
I learned very young that keeping an adult’s secret could make me feel special, useful, and rewarded. I also learned that telling the truth could expose both of us and destroy the connection.
When I got my first cell phone at 13 (2004-05), I was already visiting adult chatrooms out of sexual curiosity. I went from AOL chatrooms to MenChats and Craigslist (before Grindr). One of the first men I spoke to lived several states away. He called himself "Billy". We exchanged explicit messages, he told me how he would love to take me away from my problems and keep me safe and teach me things about my body. It got to a point where I was texting him every day and the thought of being caught and reprimanded was enough to make me block his number and stop messaging him.
About a year later, when I was 14, I chatted with a 20-year-old through the same website. He knew exactly how young I was and talked about not wanting to get caught. He left from his job at the mall nearby and came to my parents’ house where I was alone and that was the first time i was raped. It was my idea and I didn't do anything I didn't agree to, so it just felt like another secret.
After that, meeting adult men became increasingly normal. Dozens of men knowingly met me while I was between 14 and 17. Some picked me up and took me to cars, hotels, public places, or their homes. Some came to my parents’ house. I frequently initiated the contact and arranged the meetings myself.
After a few encounters, money became part of it. I don’t remember whether an adult offered payment first or whether I first asked, but once someone paid me hundreds of dollars, I began requiring money. I negotiated prices and eventually thought of it as my “secret profession.”
At 17, while living with a girlfriend, I left her at home to meet a 60-year-old man, had sex with him, and returned with $200 without explaining where I had been. I convinced myself it wasn’t cheating because it was transactional and I was “providing.” Sex for money occupied a separate compartment in my mind from relationships and ordinary life.
For years, I believed that because I searched for these men, arranged the encounters, sometimes wanted the attention, and eventually demanded payment, I must have been responsible. It always felt as though I was the one with something shameful to hide. I still struggle to feel hatred or blame toward the adults involved. I still don't fully understand my sexual identity, having identified as straight, bisexual, pansexual or just a sex addict.
I’m now realizing that I was a sexually curious child whose curiosity was repeatedly met with exploitation instead of protection. Even though it felt like a crime I was committing or a dark secret that would be misunderstood, I never felt like a victim and I struggle to understand my feelings on this. I was independently arranging my own commercial sexual exploitation while adults knowingly participated in it.
If i'm being honest, I think seeing To Catch a Predator as a kid might have started the fantasy or leaked in the possibility of a relationship with an adult. The idea that there are lonely adults online looking for someone my age to be nice to. I think I actually started looking for a woman when I was searching the chatrooms, but they were never there and finally I got some attention.
I've been rewatching the TCaP series and the new show Hansen does recently and I get a different kind of satisfaction from them. It is completely baffling because it's almost like I'm watching a fantasy of what i wished had happened and rooting for the version of me that gets help, the version of me that isnt abused. In those programs, someone notices what the adult is doing, confronts him, names it as wrong, and intervenes before a child is harmed. I think part of me is still the unseen child waiting for an adult to notice and save him.
I’m at a place in life where alcohol has become a problem and lost me my relationship and I've developed increasingly dangerous habits. I'm concerned about what all of this did to my development. Secrecy, sex, money, usefulness, validation, and affection became tangled together before I understood healthy intimacy. Sexual behavior became compulsive, and secrecy became so normal that it didn’t always register as dishonesty.
I want to believe I can eventually have a healthy, honest, monogamous relationship. Right now, I am trying to understand how much of what I considered my personality or sexuality was actually an adaptation to grooming and exploitation. I have a fantasy of hanging from a rope, but the guilt of putting that on the children in my family would never let it be a plan.
I'm not really sure what I'm looking for here. Maybe someone that knows what I'm going through? Maybe just someone to tell me that i didn't create the person I am today and there is a chance to feel better about myself.
Thanks for reading