“I was numb and oblivious to what I was doing,” he says. He enjoyed the money, which prevented him having to work in another hostile environment, but what was happening internally could not be conveyed by the camera. What emerges now is how conflicted McSwiggan felt. Porn companies started approaching them, asking the three guys to appear in films. “We were told if we continued performing by the end of the month we could win this big prize – £2,000.” They won it, but by then, their earnings from viewers’ tips were five times this amount. If I’d known that years later it would still be there I would never have done it.”Īfter a few weeks of these performances, which ran four times a week, the now popular trio were the most watched on the site. The knowledge of how many were watching made him “uncomfortable”, but, he adds, “I thought as soon as we finished the show nobody would ever see it again.
The shows proved more successful than McSwiggan expected, with thousands watching and paying to see explicit performances between him and his two friends.
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“People started saying, ‘Oh, I’ll tip you £200 if you take your shirts off I’ll send you £150 if you take your jeans off.' So at first it was taking off clothes and then it was doing sexual acts and before we knew it, it was full sex.” “Obviously that was stupidity and naivety because people did record it and now it’s everywhere,” he says.įrom the second show, everything escalated rapidly. The small print reassured him – the live performances could not be recorded or uploaded elsewhere. And we thought, What happens if we take this further? It didn’t feel like a big deal at the time – it was a bit of fun and I didn’t think about the long-term consequences.”īefore turning the shows X-rated, McSwiggan investigated the site on which they were hosted, which also featured many other similar performers. We made a couple of hundred pounds that first show, so it seemed like a really easy way to make money. “We were getting a lot of money – people were tipping. “The first time we did it we were fully clothed and just chatted to people online through a live chat feed,” he says.
The live sessions – in which members of the public can interact with the performers, telling them what to do in exchange for money – began innocently enough. They’d seen people making money off it and hoped I would do it with them as a threeway.” “Two friends suggested we try out webcam shows. “I remember looking around for other part-time work – working in factories and shops – but I was really scared about going back into something like that in case things repeated.” A short while later, an altogether different opportunity arose. He had been working part-time at a postal delivery company when colleagues began homophobically bullying him, he says, and when he complained, he was sacked. The story begins when McSwiggan was at university in Derby. “I‘m trying to put myself back in the driver’s seat and own it and say, ‘Yes there’s things out there, but I’m going to give context to it, explain it, and defend myself.’” As the story unfolds, dark enough to serve as a cautionary tale, it reveals something else about McSwiggan that explains far more than he realises. “I want to be a positive role model for people so these images aren’t what I want people to be seeing.” But his reasons for divulging everything now are not only to pre-empt those threatening to do so for him. “I’d like to apologise for the fact that they’re out there,” he tells BuzzFeed News, his normally perky tone distinctly more sombre. The broadcasts have since been recorded and uploaded to multiple websites against his will.
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So the 25-year-old, whose influence on young LGBT people is such that he is courted by numerous organisations wanting to reach this demographic, now wants to reveal the truth about his past for the first time.Īged 19, McSwiggan performed in a series of live webcam shows having unprotected sex with two other men. Threats have been made to expose him – it is, after all, a revelation at marked odds with his wholesome image. It is understandable then that today McSwiggan is feeling more than a little bit embarrassed as he tells BuzzFeed News about a secret he’s been hiding for six years: He used to do bareback porn.įor months, rumours to this effect have been swirling online.
“You should always, always use a condom,” says LGBT YouTube star and sexual health campaigner Calum McSwiggan in a recent video for an HIV charity.