He Chaturbated His Way Out Of A Dictatorship
TRUE STORY :: Ramón (not his real name) can’t stand the silence or solitude of his big Canadian city apartment, especially when his roommate, who often travels, is away. It drives him mad. It’s a kind of PTSD, after spending his entire life sharing a noisy, small, no-privacy two-bedroom apartment with nine other family members in Venezuela’s capital. It was a miserable existence he suddenly escaped nine years ago thanks to being on the world’s fifth most popular pornographic website, Chaturbate.
Ramón, 31, is a handsome, dark haired man with bright eyes, and easy, winning smile, and exudes a safe and warm energy; he laughs easily and is fun to be around. He is a Caraqueño, and Caracas, located in a northern mountain valley, is famous for being a busy metropolis known for its food, cultural diversity, and, thanks to its high elevation and proximity to the Caribbean Sea, a perfect climate. It is also celebrated for being a UNESCO city of music, but Caracas hits several wrong notes: current travel advisories warn of high risk of wrongful detention, torture while in detention, terrorism, kidnapping, arbitrary enforcement of local laws, crime, civil unrest and poor infrastructure and health care.
Venezuela is a dictatorship, ruled over by President Nicholás Maduro after the death by an undisclosed type of cancer in 2013 of President Hugo Chavez. Maduro extended his 12-year authoritarian rule this year, despite being widely suspected of stealing the election. His challenger, Edmundo González, fled abroad to escape draconian post-election crackdowns.
“Venezuela was chaos,” Ramón says of his life there, especially in 2016 and 2017. “Venezuela was going through the worst economic, political and food crisis that a country in South America has had to endure. A lot of people were dying from hunger. During those two years, everyone was miserable. It was very difficult to navigate, everyone was suffering collectively.”
It was during these dire circumstances, hungry, broke, unemployed, living in an unlivable crowded home with zero privacy, that Ramón, using a laptop someone had lent him, discovered Chaturbate, the fifty-seventh most popular website in the world.
The worst part of living under authoritarian rule for Ramón was being part of the LGBT community “in a country that so openly disrespects the LGBT community.”
In Venezuelan politics, leaders use terms like “faggot” and “sissy” just to insult one another. “Homophobia is so internalized in the population that (politicians) think using those terms might gain them more followers - and it probably, in reality, does,” Ramón notes.
Ramón says he was effeminate his whole childhood. His family forced him to act “straight.”
“Part of my femininity was left behind just because of all the prejudices and opinions I had to deal with when I was a kid. I think that I’m dealing with unresolved trauma because of it,” he says.
Homophobia abounded in Ramón’s life. That - and the police - were the worst part of life in Venezuela. Ramón was detained by them a number of times for “acting like a faggot” - being a little flamboyant, in other words. “I remember one time, the only thing I did was wear some leopard printed shoes and the police officer felt I was a faggot for wearing them. So the most insignificant things you could think of would be things that would get you detained in Venezuela. You can get beaten up in Venezuela, you can die in Venezuela, there’s a lot that can happen to you in the blink of an eye if you don’t take care of yourself, for sure.” Ramón had to bribe the police to release him during the leopard shoe incident; they took his phone and other personal belongings.
His aforementioned home life was less than ideal too. “I was in an overcrowded space my whole life,” Ramón recalls. “My family was extremely poor, and when they moved to Caracas they could only afford this really small two bedroom apartment. And so my whole family lived in that very small apartment. A lot of people,” he laughs.
“It was crazy,” he says. “Of course you cannot do what you want at any given moment. You have to be very careful how you do it and when you do it.”
The most difficult part, Ramón says, was being on top of each other where aspects of their private, personal lives were concerned. Like the tiniest of towns, everyone knew everybody’s business, and all had opinions. Arguments would flare, it was impossible to hide anything. Ramón says, “The whole family would discuss together the things you wouldn’t want your family talking about, things that were deeply personal.”
Ramón shared a bedroom with five other people; four shared the other bedroom. Ramón bursts into laughter when I ask him the obvious question: “And so what happens if you have to fart?”
“If you have to fart, you have to fart,” he says. “And the other people just have to put up with the smell.” But there were many other things that you couldn’t do in the tin of sardines in which Ramón and his family lived.
You couldn't do something natural, like masturbate. You couldn’t use the bathroom for any extended period of time. There was no room to just … be. “The worst was not having any sense of space that was yours,” Ramón remembers. “Yet also feeling like you were in someone else’s space the whole time. You really didn’t know where you belonged.”
“Grandmother was in the living room usually, but if she or anyone else suddenly came into the bedroom, I would immediately have to cover up with a blanket and pretend nothing was happening.”
Ramón was unemployed at that time. He lost his government job at the Venezuelan Institute For Scientific Research where he had been a research assistant for four years, after an election in which he voted for the opposition, who lost to the dictatorship. He confided in a colleague about how he’d cast his vote; the co-worker ratted him out to his government bosses, and he was promptly fired.
It was during these dire circumstances, hungry, broke, unemployed, living in an unlivable crowded home with zero privacy, that Ramón, using a laptop someone had lent him, discovered Chaturbate, the fifty-seventh most popular website in the world.
A portmanteau of “chat” and “masturbate,” Chaturbate allows you to watch models for free (with the exception of private shows) but pay money in the form of tokens to see certain sex acts performed. Models can even synchronize remote-control vibrators and other sex toys to be activated when “tipped.” (The frequencies are activated by the amount of tips given, with the intention being the user trying to make the model orgasm.)
“I was going through a period of depression,” Ramón explains. He didn’t have a job, and was unable to complete a thesis he was working on. “I was purposeless at that time. I had no money, and I was literally hungry at all times as my family wasn’t able to get any food.”
Ramón Googled “ways to make money” and in a forum someone mentioned Chaturbate. He joined the site as a model and started to masturbate on camera for an audience. But in an apartment with nine other people milling about, it wasn’t easy.
Ramón giggles at the memory. “Oh my gosh it was impossible. I used to do it only in the mornings when everyone else had gone to work” Everyone except his grandmother.
“Grandmother was in the living room usually, but if she or anyone else suddenly came into the bedroom, I would immediately have to cover up with a blanket and pretend nothing was happening,” Ramón recalls, laughing. “They wouldn’t even knock on the door, you weren’t supposed to be doing those things in an apartment populated by ten people.”
But on the other side of his camera, watching Ramón on devices around the world, people became intrigued by the obvious fact that here was a Chaturbate model being clandestine. It was apparent Ramón was putting on a show he wasn’t supposed to be putting on - and that he could get caught and sometimes nearly did. The intrinsic risk factor gleaned him a growing, fascinated audience as Ramón Chaturbated for them daily.
“They were tipping me,” Ramón explains. “I was making approximately $20 a day, which I was using to go to McDonalds and eat, and for other expenses. That was plenty of money back then in Venezuela. We used to have an illegal, black market exchange between the dollar and the bolivar and the dollar was so expensive a few dollars would get you a lot of bolivars. And you could do so many things with that. So $20 was a lot of money for me, for sure.”
It wasn’t easy though for Ramón to get his money. Converting the tokens he received via Chaturbate into US dollars and then into bolivars was almost like an impossible task that took weeks sometimes. So, he asked people interested in tipping him to do so via PayPal, and most, who could tell from what they saw on screen that Ramón lived in difficult circumstances, did.
One of those people was a man named José. “Our first interaction was very meaningful between us,” Ramón remembers. “After I came, we started talking about our lives, and eventually we moved the conversation to Skype.” Ramón was worried about TMI: “I didn’t want to scare anyone away by oversharing my life.”
One night, Ramón went to drink in Sabana Grande, which contains a very down low LGBT area in metro Caracas. He was attacked by a group of people who grabbed his neck and caused him to pass out. He woke up on the street in the middle of the night with no shoes and his jewelry stolen. He walked the 3km back to his home, where his mother took one look at him as he entered their little apartment and burst into tears.
That day, Ramón was scheduled to talk to José, and kept his appointment. He told José what had happened in Sabana Grande, and José was immediately more interested in and curious about Ramón’s life, “in a way that wasn’t there before,” Ramón says. Ramón began to cautiously share, about how Venezuela affected him, and what being queer in Venezuela was like. “The conversations turned from being mostly sexual,” Ramón remembers.
One day, José asked Ramón for his home address. Ramón was tentative; José wouldn’t specify why. Ramón hesitantly gave it to him.
“Two weeks later I received two boxes full of food from the US to my place,” Ramón says.
The awkward catch was: how to explain to his hungry family how someone in America had sent him all this food? “I didn’t know what to tell my family,” Ramón laughs. “That a random man I met online had sent it?” His grateful family didn’t force the issue.
Two weeks later, four more boxes of food arrived. Then more boxes of food still, two weeks later. “He started also sending clothing, shoes, things he wasn’t using anymore. My family was very grateful, it was life-saving.”
One day José asked Ramón a life-changing question: Did he want to leave Venezuela?
Ramón’s answer was yes.
It isn’t easy to leave Venezuela. The exchange between the bolivar and the US dollar makes buying a $900 plane ticket absolutely unaffordable to a population who mostly make minimum wage. And few airlines operate out of Venezuela.
Says Ramón: "Immediately José started assembling a whole plan for me to leave the country. From buying the plane ticket, to finding accommodations for me in Canada, to an allowance.”
Ramón chose Canada because he had visited before, and still had a travel visa. José, who was an artist, began to sell pieces just to raise money to help Ramón leave the dictatorship. “He also paid $5,000 for my lawyer here in Canada to make my refugee claim. He did a ton of incredible things that I’m so grateful for. He was incredible.”
Was there a part of Ramón that couldn’t believe his luck, a part of him that expected it all to blow up in his face?
“I definitely felt like that so many times,” he says. “In fact when I left home, I couldn’t stop crying because the unknown was so big, the uncertainty was so big.” He flew to Canada via Trinidad and Tobago; one of the criteria for making a refugee claim is that you make one in the first safe country you land in. José had done the research and knew Trinidad and Tobago wasn’t a safe place for Ramón to make his claim, given its reputation as a homophobic country.
The trip to Canada was challenging for Ramón. “It was crazy. I was super scared. I didn’t know what to expect or what would come out of the situation.”
A friend of Ramón’s from high school was living in Canada, and met him at the airport upon his arrival. A couple days later, Ramón and José, six months after meeting on Chaturbate, met in real life when José drove from his home in the US to Canada for week to help Ramón get settled, helping him find an apartment, signing for the lease, taking Ramón to IKEA to get a bed and bedroom furniture.
“Meeting him was extremely emotional,” Ramón recalls. “I didn’t have many words at that moment. I was really shy.”
Ramón admits he was concerned he’d have to have sex with José to thank him for all he’d done - after all, they met jerking off - but it never happened. José has never asked for anything in return.
The two stayed in touch, but lost contact for a while. They have recently started talking again - but not on Chaturbate, Ramón has given that up.
“I tell José thank you every single day of my life. He really did save me. He took me out of Venezuela when I needed to go the most. I still text him thank you all the time and tell him about my journey here in Canada.”
It’s a journey that has seen Ramón go back to college to retake chemistry courses he did in Venezuela that don’t count here. Ramón recently graduated university with a Bachelor of Science in Chemistry with Honours, and has applied to a major North American university to pursue his master’s degree.
“José feels really proud about what I have done,” says Ramón. “I haven’t wasted my time here, I have been doing meaningful things, and that is the best way to pay him back and say thank you. He saved my life. He gave me a purpose to live again.”
Angels live in the most unexpected of places.
Shaun Proulx hosts The Shaun Proulx Show heard weekends on SiriusXM Canada Talks 167. You can listen to it on this Substack as well. More: ShaunProulx.com