him, embodied.

This project is a journal of experiences, mostly sexual, collected selfishly for self-gratification. Over the years it grew to find new meanings. Sharing these experiences gave visibility to queer subcultures. Some found the stories and photos relatable to their own lived experiences; others found pleasure in the raw depictions of sex and bodies. Both, I cherish providing.

I enjoy pushing limits: of what gets seen, what gets censored, and where the fine line between art and pornography lies. From experiences with Instagram and other platforms taught I knew that true freedom in my process meant making my own site, free of terms & conditions I did not enjoy conforming to.

Who is it for? Me. I enjoy the obscenity and the politics of running this project. It mirrors the conundrum of life, letting me experiment, challenge and seek answers in an ambiguous space. I don’t wish to speak for anyone but myself. I do hope anyone who visits keeps an open mind, and sees this as the project and not the person.

Sit with the discomfort of looking through a peephole at what should not does not get seen. Feel celebrated, degraded, aroused, or any other range of valid feelings. Make of it what you will.

Social media was once my only outlet for information on sexuality, and my only way of finding others like me. We made anonymous Facebook profiles at a time when being gay was still a crime. We consumed any media we could find and built our identities out of the scraps. For gay and queer people across the world living under varying degrees of oppression, the online is sometimes the only escape. Social apps, Grindr, porn, OnlyFans, online forums and articles are where they access knowledge, form identity, find community and seek intimacy.

My problem with new media hasn’t changed since then. X, Instagram, even the ‘sex positive’ Bluesky present themselves as queer-positive havens. In practice they are curated, hyper-sexualised feeds that promote hegemonic gay masculinity. These platforms know queer people rely on them to be heard. They profit from that reliance, yet still surveil and censor anyone outside the hegemony. Sure, there is a niche for everything on the internet, but the rules are never written by us.

Instagram was my favourite tool for sharing my stories and experiences, and also the most agonising. Sharing my photos there always came with risks: being outed, being hunted and mobbed, being reported and shut down. Over time, every one of those has happened.

Censorship has often been the tipping point for me to question why I take the risk of sharing the private in the public domain. Self-expression is deeply important for queer artists. This site is the archive of photos I have taken over the years, free of conformity and censorship. It is a much-needed space for content that never found its rightful place. Memberships keep it independent, so no advertiser or algorithm decides what stays up.

I grew up in India and now live in Brighton. In the UK I live openly as a gay man, albeit as a person of colour navigating a predominantly white scene. I miss my connection with the gay community back home, and at times still feel alienated trying to fit into gay culture here. That in-between weaves into the perspective this site is curated from.

Mainstream gay culture is hegemonic. Its representation in media is dominated by white gay men and their stories. Muscular white men in social feeds, gay clubs, washrooms, at wedding altars and on porn sets set the aspiration for all gay men. On Instagram, those bodies are celebrated as art, and white bodies are less likely to be removed than bodies of colour. On Grindr, the hegemony is blatant and normalised: masc only, straight-acting, fit, ‘clean’, no Asians, no immigrants, no femmes, not into older guys. Queer men of colour measure themselves against these standards, long for lives, love and sex they are told they cannot have, and pay for it with their mental health. This is the result of years of conditioned desirability politics, and of a near-ubiquitous preference for Eurocentric features that few of us escape. I still succumb to it myself. (I justify it by reminding myself that here, I control both the literal and the figurative lens.)

There are few places to turn to for an appreciation of brown bodies. Men of colour must fight twice as hard to be seen, let alone be seen as art. When I started this project, still living in India, I wanted it to focus on brown bodies, their stories, subcultures and kinks. Men of colour were rarely seen as innately beautiful within the hegemony, only as ‘exotic’, and there were few stories or images to relate to. I collected and anonymously shared the lived experiences of mostly South Asian men, and photographed countless anonymous men in fleeting, vulnerable moments. Watching that community find a voice was exciting. Six years after moving to Brighton, I feel conflicted. Living the white dream in one of the queerest cities in the world, safe and unburdened, can I still call myself part of that movement? Can I still do justice to a project I once felt so passionate about? Perhaps not, but I can try.

Himbodied is a play on words: him, embodied. It shares the sex, bodies, men and subcultures I see around me, from my perspective. It is a self-gratifying journal and a collection of the men I encounter, but also a take on the state of masculinity and gay culture today. Even as my photography reflects life in a predominantly white city, men of colour remain at the centre of this project. Through submissions, their bodies, desires, kinks and lived experiences are told in their own words. Himbodied aims to be a counter-archive for men who have been filtered out, a space where they can be desired on new terms. When white men are photographed here, they are framed, posed and desired through a brown gaze. Some days it feels like reverse colonisation. Other days they are simply objects for use.

Sex in mainstream porn and film is sensationalised and rarely a realistic representation of how people experience it. Within the mainstream gay community, kink is accepted as rebellious only when it comes in a certain body: the white, gym-built masc jock in leather and spandex. The same fantasies explored by an average guy with a dad bod or a man of colour are often derided. I believe much of what makes a fetish acceptable has little to do with desire itself, and more to do with how well it fits existing structures of power and how easily it can be monetised. Far from being natural or neutral, these preferences are conditioned by media, by Eurocentric standards of beauty and by the market.

himbodied looks at sex, fetish and kink as they are lived by ordinary men in the gay community. For many of us, these desires are deeply tied to how we form our identities. Sexually explicit content is often where people first discover their own quirks and kinks, learn how to practise them safely and put a name to what they want. Breeding, consensual non-consent, the sub who wants to be used or objectified, the dom who keeps his sub locked in chastity: these subcultures can seem outrageous from the outside, yet for the people within them they carry personal and social meaning. They are navigated through power, roles, limits and consent, and cannot easily be sorted into categories acceptable to all. Queer sex has always existed at the margins of these limits. This project aims to document the interplay between sexual desire and social meaning that shapes contemporary kink cultures.

In a regressive world, the photographs on this site are seen as explicit sexual content, censored on the belief that the explicit and art cannot share a frame. Perhaps the explicit is called explicit because it reveals more of a person than we are comfortable witnessing, or giving of ourselves. In times where most images of sex are representations performed for the viewer, the photographs here are records of real encounters, attempts to capture the primal feelings of lust, submission, shame and release as they happened. To document what it means to be a person, a gay man, in the most fundamental expression of the body. There is something to be found in giving in, in getting naked in public or being handled by a stranger, in being vulnerable in ways one did not imagine. The men in these photographs are objects and subjects at once. Together with the testimonies submitted by readers, they offer an honest account of navigating identity and meaning through sex and the body. Instead of instructing the viewer, this project invites the audience to be participative and reflexive: to push past the stigma and find out what these images mean to them.