At one point, Pornhub hosted some fourteen million videos, including studio-produced adult films and user-generated content, and it is one of the most visited Web sites in the world. The pictures and videos soon spread to Pornhub, one of the largest pornography sites on the Internet.
“I actually ended up getting on a train, but my friends stopped me,” she said. Rachel told me that she thought about going to another city and killing herself. She asked the boy to report the account to Tumblr. He included a link to a Tumblr page that contained dozens of folders of pictures and videos of several girls, all in similar poses, many of them crying.
Then one day she was in a taxi when a boy who lived near her sent a message asking if she was all right. The next day, Rachel (a pseudonym) checked her social-media accounts every hour, waiting for the pictures and videos to surface. Rachel pretended that everything was fine. Later, her mother came in to say good night. She cut off the correspondence and sat on her bed “in a state of shock,” she said. The videos became progressively more explicit, Rachel told me, until the man asked her to do something so revolting that she refused. He then had her take more photos, this time naked, and take videos of herself stripping and masturbating. He first instructed her to brighten the lighting in her room, and to take photos of herself in her underwear. Panicked, she complied with his requests. Immediately, she recalled an episode from a few years earlier, when classmates passed around a photo of her in her underwear, which precipitated months of bullying and a bout of depression. Then he sent a link to her mother’s Facebook account and the names of other family members and school friends, threatening to forward the picture to them if she didn’t follow his instructions. The man who sent the text forwarded a nude photograph of her, the source of which she couldn’t figure out. “I was a complete mess, I didn’t trust anyone, I was in complete self-destruct mode.” “I had a really unstable home life, and I didn’t have good support around me,” Rachel told me recently, while sitting on her bed in a fluffy white bathrobe. She had just returned home from a party and was in her bedroom. Rachel lived with her mother, stepfather, and siblings in a midsize town in the United Kingdom. One night in 2017, a fifteen-year-old girl named Rachel received a WhatsApp message from a number she didn’t recognize.
For many, these images represent a small fragment of LGBT history that was repressed and concealed for so long.This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from. There is little information about the individuals in the photos and it is quite extraordinary that these images still survive - as many old photos of homosexual couples are believed to have been purposely destroyed by family members.Īlthough it is unknown whether the people in these unique photos were related, gay or just friends - the tender and close relationship between the men pictured is poignantly evident. The images, taken from various websites, capture Victorian and early-twentieth century males in intimate positions - and showing a daring amount of openness with one another for the time. At a time when homosexuality was a criminal offence and harsh sentences were brought down upon gay men, these images of male affection from the 19th century are truly remarkable.Įmbracing each other, holding hands and reclining together, these incredible black-and-white photographs provide a rare glimpse into men showing physical love to other men in the 1800s and early 1900s.