Backup Account is brief—not 280 characters brief, but brief as in each edition focuses on (1) TikTok only. Paid subscribers thank you for your support, new perks are below the paid line. Follow me on IG or TT for antics. Please consider signing up it helps me continue the independent queer documentary work I am doing.
When I open up Instagram, waiting behind the main feed is the ugly truth of the ‘Explore’ feed (the section of IG that uses your activity on the app to hint at people to follow). This grid of ‘suggested’ bodies and products strikes me as rudely reductive. The way Instagram undresses our simplest sexual desires is insultingly basic. TikTok on the other hand, that yenta does her research. TikTok’s algorithm has an impressive way of guessing my most intimate kinks. The severe limits on adult-themed content also forces creators to get incredibly crafty when selling it.
When I first saw this week’s TikTok I was already knee-deep into the narrative of Hunky Hank and his bestie Geebzer when they snake-charmed my credit card right out of my wallet. They got me hook-line-and-sinker.
→ → Watch this week’s TikTok (watch via TikTok):
Using TikTok as a pipeline to your x-rated content has flipped the importance of the ‘acting before the sex’ in porn. For any of your content to get views on the app, it needs to get the algorithm hard first. Sure, shirtless content works here and there but it can be difficult to get content around TikTok’s fierce censors. The roulette wheel game to get views on TikTok calls for an excess of humor-forward content to be created. Younger content creators like HunkyHank and Geebzer, living in a suburban party house (with their girlfriends), have all the time and Monster energy drinks in the world to see what sticks.
Show me a successful creator under 30 right now that isn’t explicitly playing around with gender, queer code, or same-sex body contact. This was the foundation that Geebzer, a twentysomething “bi-sexual” TikToker was building his content off of when his doofy doh’y friend Hank came home from his military service.
These two are masters at a new form of gay-baiting I have named ‘Doh! Homo’. The days of No Homo’ing are canceled. Sure there is plenty of homophobia at play here, but Gen Z has HBO’s Euphoria and ContraPoints to unpack it for them.
‘Doh! Homo’ can be summed up at that moment in a comedy skit when the bros get intimate but now they actually kiss instead of reconsidering it at the last second. But ‘Doh! Homo’ adds an absurdity, an intentional aloofness, a controlled chaos to the whole thing that protects the fully committed act from being 100 percent gay.
Geebzer isn’t my thing, and somehow TikTok knew that already. He had a fanbase on TikTok (and OnlyFans) long before his content ever made it to my FYP page. Enter guilty fantasy HunkyHank, stage right -> onto my feed. Long before Hank decided to create his own account, I could only see him being paraded around the app by his twinky brunette roomie. I distinctly remember an early video that featured Hank so impressively drunk it felt like I might need to call Veterans Affairs. But, alas, I was the one being taken advantage of, not him. This was baiting Z.0
It is a trick that dates back, according to Robert M. Beachy’s showstopping Gay Berlin book, over 130 years (a historian friend hinted that this goes much further back in history). Man gets out of the military and finds a quick cheap buck in seducing gay men. According to Beachy’s book, there was a German military base not far from the famous Berlin central park Tiergarten.
Some personal context: Tiergarten is just a 5-minute bike ride from where I currently live and equidistant to where my great-grandmother lived before she had to escape the Nazis. You can even take a listen to the episode of Leo Herrera’s A Bumpy Ride that I recorded in the Tiergarten cruising area last summer.
After WWI ended, young cadets hard up for cash (who presumably lean enough on the gay side of the Kinsey scale) heard about a nearby park you could pick up men for money. A quick sexual encounter could lead to a longer trail of cash through blackmail. Beachy makes an interesting case for the role sexual blackmail has played all along the road to queer liberation. The bait and switch is as old as the word Gay itself. So, I pay it no mind that I am, against all better judgment, still attracted to the HunkyHank rouse.
But, as a 37-year-old who has had a fair share of sexual fantasies fulfilled, I was shocked that the storyline of a wayward military bro hooking up with his seemingly gay best friend still turned me on. But, it wasn’t just the sexual fantasy that got me, it was the TikTok’iness of it all. Even though I know TikTok put these faux-lovebirds in front of me based on some metadata I fed it, I still feel a sense of ownership and self-discovery. A community bond formed from the flood of comments by other confused admirers glued to this soft-core cabaret. You wouldn’t get this financial domination world-building on Instagram, there were no ‘hype houses’ built for that app.
HunkyHank and his bestie Geebzer’s OnlyFans was admittedly the first I had ever signed up for. By the time I actually got around to seeing the dicks I didn’t care what they looked like. I was starstruck at that point, a fuller narrative built around these two strangers than any porn star I followed as a teenager.
TikTok, which spends so much time keeping itself PG-13 has unintentionally birthed a new level of reality porn. Hey girl, your blackmailer just started livestreaming.
Subscribers get access to my Yelp review of the most hilarious video on Geebzer’s OnlyFans below