Not all of this is a surprise. Sex workers were among the first technologists. They were the vanguard of sex-via-tech in the pre-dotcom era—remember the uber-popular, uber-sensual 1-900 hot lines from the ’90s? Once desire was digitized, they pioneered a more intimate kind of connection through pathbreaking mediums: using webcams to entertain client fantasies, leveraging streaming video as VHS died out, relying on ecommerce alternatives to get paid.
launched during lockdown, in February 2021, as a means to safely bring together Black men who, as Bandit says, felt fetishized in non-Black spaces., it wasn’t until 2020 that he began hosting virtual bate sessions via Zoom . “That became my main source of hosting,” he says. “It blew up overnight, and within two weeks there were over 100 people joining. It became so big that I decided to organize a digital space on Telegram.