Written by Bridgett Magyar
In the Venn Diagram of Queerness and Being a Sex Worker, the center would be full. We are two communities forced to be vigilant about our safety, hyper-aware of our self-expression to the world, and often compartmentalize the selves we bring and where we bring them. To be queer and to be a sex worker, is to use the extent of this information as tools to better understand how to capitalize off our image.
I’ve been a Sex Worker for almost all of my adult life, and a lot of that work has taken place online. Before realizing the spectrum of my sexuality, I didn’t have much of a problem identifying who my clientele was going to be: mostly Cisgender-Heterosexual men. I didn’t even consider women or queer people being interested in cam sites, let alone spending money on me, on these sites. I’m now in a queer marriage, and as my comprehension of my queerness has grown deeper and richer, I’ve started to struggle with the way I portray my gaze, and therefore what content I put out into the world.
Maybe it would be easy for me to say that porn performers and online sex workers aren’t responsible for certain beauty standards, and the onus is on the Adult industry and patriarchy at large, and although I believe that to be true, I also have to ask what role I play in perpetuating these ideals. As someone who creates content with my body and image, I am responsible for responding to said standards, right? Am I going to uphold them or transform them? How can I radicalize the work so that I’m not confined by it? What if my desires overlap with the male gaze? Are the two mutually exclusive, or can they co-exist? I’ve been in the adult industry long enough, and I feel I’m accountable for investigating this, because if not now, when? I have to be the whore I wish to see in the world.
I first started camming when I was 21 years old and just moved to London for my semester abroad. I signed up for a UK-based website and chose a name that was wrong in every way. I was on a short-term student visa and couldn’t get a job anywhere except on campus, and therefore had limited expendable cash. I knew I had to figure something untethered to my passport/regional status. What is a universally accessible job?
I always wanted to get into sex work and it took very little time to land on camming. I did my research and found a site that seemed legitimate enough (pre-subscription sites). I was quickly “approved” and off to the races. I would cam at night, when my 4 other roommates, whose rooms were conveniently located on the upper levels of our 3-story flat, were asleep. In the beginning, I didn’t have any particular look I would work in – I knew I would take it off anyway. I was 21, naive, and perky. I occasionally put my hair in pigtails because I figured men liked that sort of thing.
I found myself falling in love during sessions, entranced by the relentless verbal affirmations I was receiving. I would stay on for hours and that translated to bigger payouts, so I could tolerate my exhaustion the next day. I was having a lot of casual sex and dating at the time, blurring the worlds of camming and real-life intimacy; dancing a fine line, and using the information gathered from dates to inform my sessions and visa-versa. I would come home from a date and log on to begin camming, charged with the residual sexual energy or lack thereof. I wasn’t closeted per se, but I also wasn’t aware of my sexual identity as it is now either. I was pandering to the desires of men 24/7 both in real life and online.
Fast forward, I got a boyfriend, stopped camming altogether, and moved back to California. Fast Forward again… my boyfriend passed away, I just graduated college, moved to New York, and started doing online work again. I signed up for a subscription site and decided to do hardcore content. This time I invested in outfits and experimented with hairstyles, makeup, and toys, I was ready to push my limits. Although, I still wasn’t aligned with what I was putting out I allowed myself grace to figure it out. I knew something had to change, and I started paying more attention to my queerness and decided to put the same amount of energy and seriousness into exploring it as I had in my straight dating life.
As I started having more queer sex, I was constantly undoing these narratives I was convinced were hard truths…body hair is unattractive! infantilize yourself! be submissive! make dumb big-eyed faces! penetration is the only way to be fucked!
I felt like I kept landing at this in-between place of how I thought I was supposed to be fucked vs. my true desires and curiosities…. the content I was convinced I HAD to make vs. what I wanted to make. I was blurring worlds again, but it was being reinforced with money and requests from my subscribers, etc… so, I had to ask myself, “Why don’t I have any sapphic subs? Where is my queer following?” when I realized I wasn’t making content that represented my queer desires.
I’ve been doing online sex work for over 7 years now, and my work has transformed, regressed, and transformed again. I’ve built a following on X – and expanded my online and IRL sex work community, over the past few years I have seen porn trends come and go, and I’ve also seen a significant rise in queer porn creators. So where have I arrived with all of this?
Upon departing from the male gaze (slowly, but surely) – it is quite literally built into everything after all – and nurturing the queer gaze in my life, I’ve learned a lot about pleasure. Pleasure can be purposeless! My biggest discovery is that in queer porn there needs to be justification for the kinds of sex we have. Queer sex can exist purely for fun, like there also doesn’t need to be a reason for two femmes to want to have anal sex, other than it’s hot and feels good! Pleasure can be found in the experimental nature of sex and having a body.
The male gaze has certainly informed my gaze. I’ve discovered I DO enjoy being submissive but I also love topping, I’m a true vers, which has opened up a new way I approach sex altogether. I also love getting cute and exaggerating my femininity, one of my favorite things about performing sex is the chance to dress up. I love rough sex and defining those limits as I go. I love incorporating playfulness and trying new positions and restrictions.
The queer gaze to me is so delicious! It’s messy, extreme AND tender, exploratory, wet, loud, quiet, kinky. I feel comfortable getting to a place where I don’t have to perform pleasure but can experience pleasure by making space for what I want. Queer people have all kinds of sex and although in the work that I do, I have an audience and tend to their requests and needs, I’m working on tending to mine first and foremost now.
To follow and see more of Bridgett Magyar:
Instagram – @brdgtmgyr & @realnastyandloyal
Twitter / X – @tasteslikehevn
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