In his memoir, Damn Shame, David Pevsner writes about feeling aroused by the very idea of having sex with men as part of his job. As the years went by, he found himself feeling increasingly attracted to the idea of sex work. So after years of exploring his sexuality through bathhouses and leather bars, David decided to try out his ultimate fantasy – and it was everything he could have dreamed of.
“I know plenty of guys who have done it, and everybody has a different experience,” he says. “My experience was very pleasurable. It taught me a lot about myself, it taught me a lot about men. When I was escorting, it wasn’t just about, ‘I show up, I f**k and I make money’ – it was so not just that, because I was dealing with individual people.
It wasn’t until David started escorting that he was forced to challenge all of those preconceptions he had about what makes a man sexy.
“Escorting really changed how I looked at men’s bodies,” David says. “ I was trying to deal with my struggle about how I felt about his body, which I think about now and I just go, that’s ridiculous. But it’s what happened as part of my journey. And then came escorting, where I was having sex with a lot of guys whose bodies were not ‘the ideal’, but I still had to perform sexually. How do you do that? You start to look at a guy differently. It made me look at personality and brains and humour. I had to because I was being paid, but what it was doing was it changed my aesthetic when it came to men. I was much more open about the physicality of men, and from that point on it really changed me.”
Escorting wasn’t the only way David expressed his sexuality – he also did numerous erotic photoshoots over the years with a wide variety of photographers. That led to him curating his own Tumblr account where he shared his pictures with fans all across the world. Later, after Tumblr banned adult content, he moved to OnlyFans.
“OnlyFans is a great place, because it’s very much the case that you are there because you want to be there,” David says. “You pay to be there, so it’s not like it’s going on XTube where just anybody can click on it and have an opinion. I’m not interested in your opinion, I just want to do my work.
“I started posting those videos and I started shooting more and more stuff, and I found that I can approach the videos I shoot the same way I approach the photoshoots, the same way I approach my acting work, the same way I approach escorting – there’s lots of layers to everything. When I shoot a video, sometimes it has a story to it. Sometimes it’s a role play, and sometimes it’s just me shoving a dildo up my ass. But I’m not going to post it if it’s just a one layer thing.”
The main thing, of course, is that David is enjoying exploring his sexuality with the world on OnlyFans. But it’s about more than just enjoyment – he also thinks it’s important that men his age show the world that they can still turn people on.
“Doing this, to me, feels like activism,” he says. “A 60-something year old guy filming these videos, putting them up shamelessly, and saying: ‘This is what I do at home.’”
“Everybody had different needs, everybody had different ways of asking for their needs. As an actor, I found it fascinating the characters that I met – some really sweet people who were either lonely or needy or hungry – whatever it was, I always tapped into it. It turns out, I enjoyed it. Sorry everybody who wants to take sex work and put shame on it – my personal experience of it was great.”