Fun and Sexual Profit through Instagram

I love taking photographs. I have absolutely no training or formal education in photography. I'm not particularly good at it. But that doesn't stop me, when I see something I’d like to remember, or a scenario that I find striking, from taking a snapshot.

Actually, whenever someone shows me his fancy SLR camera and begins talking about exposures and f-stops and shutter speeds, my eyes start to glaze over. All I know is that I like taking photographs, that I take hundreds of them a month, that I take most of them with my phone and am fairly happy to keep doing so, and that Instagram is the most absorbing app ever invented.

For those of you who aren’t using an iOS device, or who haven’t discovered the app, Instagram is a deceptively simple service that lets one share photos with other users around the world. One takes a photo—it’s possible to do so from within the program itself, though most of people I know do it with their dedicated point-and-shoots or with the phone’s camera app—labels it, and posts it for one’s friends to see.

It’s possible to touch up and frame one’s shots with one of Instagram’s built-in filters that will make the shot look distressed, or aged, or from a Instamatic camera circa 1972. And in fact, whenever I see Instagram in the press, or whenever I see someone disparaging it, they make a big deal about these filters, as if they’re the entire point of the app. They’re not. It’s possible to find applications with filters all over the damn place. Instagram doesn’t need them. Hardly anyone I know uses them.

The point of the program is its endlessly fascinating ability to connect the most unlikely of people in very personal ways. If I’ve just taken and posted a fascinating study of the train tracks down at the local Metro North station, I can click on the photo’s geotag and see who else has posted shots from the same location. Users can add hashtags to their photos so that people with similar interests can find them—so if I want to spend a nostalgic hour looking at photos of my old home town, it’s ridiculously easy. If I want to find photos of people flying kites, or classic architecture, or of guys working out, or just of sexy guys with beards, they’re only a search away.

I like the Instagram community because it’s supportive and encouraging and, by and large, pretty tolerant of each other. I don’t run into the huge flame wars I find on Facebook and other similar social networking services. Either you like a photo—in which case you can double-tap it to affix a little heart by it to show your appreciation—or you move on to the next. No hard feelings.

And damn, is it ever easy to get laid from it.

No, seriously. I’ve made a couple of comments in the past about how I’ve had more hookups from Instagram—on which no photo is anything more than R-rated lest one’s device be locked out—than I have from Grindr or Scruff or any of the apps classified as ‘adult.’ Each time, I’ve received some incredulous replies. Instagram? Really? How’s that even work?

It’s a god-damned mystery to me. There are a certain proportion of male users on the service whose feeds are nothing but self-posed shots of themselves. Hey look! I’m shirtless and twisting my body to its best advantage in front of my bathroom mirror! Hey look, it’s me, shirtless, sitting down on my workout bench at the gym! Look, it’s me with a skimpy shirt on at the club, taking my hundredth photo in front of another mirror! I follow a few of those guys, if they’re especially pretty.

But I am not one of them.

No, my photos tend to be landscapes. Shots of the neighborhood around me, or the vistas afforded down the street at the local beach. I take photos of Manhattan and of bridges and clocks and machinery, none of which is arousing in the least. The only thing I can think of that might be even vaguely sexy about my photos are the shots of skyscrapers I often include. Perhaps the phallic imagery just makes people horny.

Yet I have men on the service flirting with me all the damned time, almost as much as if I were actually contorting my body in the mirror to hide the flaws and snapping myself in jock straps to pander to a . . . hey, wait a minute. . . .

So I can’t tell you why it goes down, but I can tell you how.

Along with the basic information and photo I put in my Instagram profile, I’ve included my Kik nickname. Kik is just an instant messenger phone for the iOS platform. There’s nothing special about it. A lot of Instagrammers use it to send quick messages to each other about contests and the like. Every once in a while I’ll get a message from someone like the one I got last week. Hey sexy, it said.

I looked at the little icon by the name, which I didn’t recognize. It was of a kid in his late teens or very very early twenties. Handsome kid, despite the puppy-sized ears he still had yet to grow into. Thick, black hair. Dark eyebrows. Soulful eyes. Gangly, lean body. What’s up? I asked him.


I liked your photos, he said. Now I’m thinking about your cock.

I’d like to take the opportunity that the photos I’d most recently posted were a sunset shot of a local beach, and a night shot of the Empire State Building. So maybe my phallic subliminal message theory holds water. Have you ever seen my cock? I asked him. I knew the answer was no. So I sent a shot of it directly to him.


I want it, he wrote back. I want to sit my ass all the way down on that.


Where are you? I asked, expecting the answer to be Utah, or Texas, or Vancouver, or somewhere impossible.

But he was in Rye, not more than fifteen minutes away. I didn’t wrestle with the decision. I had a nineteen-year-old hungry for my dick, and whether or not he had a clear idea of what I looked like or was into, I was horny for his ass.

He lived in some kind of dump above someone’s garage—a parent? A grandparent? I didn’t care. All I knew is that he answered the side door naked, looked me over, nodded, and held open the door so I could walk up the stairs and into his little space. The room was over-warm and smelled like old pot and dirty laundry. The bed was unmade and littered with cords connected to the laptop that was running in the middle of it. He had the radio running, but turned it off when I entered the room. “Let me see that dick,” he said.

I obliged by unbuckling my belt, dropping my pants and my shorts, and standing there with my hands on his hips. He went down into a squat instantly, taking my dick in his mouth and worshipping it. He was good, too; he knew what to do with a cock. He didn’t squeeze with his hand, or try to beat me off while applying his lips to the tip. He sucked it down, and sucked it deep, and closed his eyes as he went deep along the shaft. His own dick hardened between his smooth, almost hairless legs. He didn’t touch it. It was one of those dicks where the foreskin never quite separated from the dick’s head; it looked like the skin there was fused around three-quarters of the perimeter.

“I don’t meant to be blunt,” he said finally, bouncing up to both feet. “But I don’t got a lot of time and I want that in me. Is that cool?”

I shrugged. Fine with me. The kid was taller that I’d expected from his Instagram photos (which mostly were of him sitting down and smiling into the camera). Standing, he was my equal in height, though he was even slighter in build. I didn’t resist when he pushed me down on the bed, though, moving the laptop aside at the last moment to accommodate me. His legs were narrow but strong; he positioned his knees on either side of me once I was lying down, applied some lube to his hole from a bottle at the bedside, and started sitting down on me. Once I reached down to hold my dick steady while he settled on it, but he pushed my hands away. “Let me,” he said in a tone that seemed to assure me he knew what he was doing.

He did. There was some serious resistance at his back door as my cock head pulsed against it, but after some grunting and pushing down on his part, the hole opened and I plunged inside. He went all the way to the base in almost one single, smooth motion, pausing only once to bounce up slightly when it got too much for him. Dick in his hole is what he’d wanted, though, and now he was getting exactly that.

He kept his eyes closed during the whole fuck. His upper teeth bit against his lower lip; from time to time he would nod, when I was hitting the right places. Once in a while, across that puppy-dog face would flash a smile, a moment when he’d seem to be completely happy, his needs met. I liked those little smiles. I’d thrust my hips up, or twist so that my dick went in at an angle, or swell my girth, just to get him to toss one at me from above, like someone angling for gleaming beads at Mardi Gras.

It wasn’t a long fuck. His big dick with the fused head kept flopping against my stomach as he bounced up and down. Eventually he grabbed hold of it and beat it off until it sprayed its load all over my chest and face. It didn’t take long. I came shortly after. He pressed his hands down onto my chest and held me there after he’d shot, and then picked up the pace with his ass and hips. “Give it to me,” he kept whispering. He wasn’t going to let me up until I did. “Give it to me.”

When I did, it was softly, with a little laugh of surprise.

I didn’t dare say no.

“You hooked up with other guys from Instagram before?” I asked him, when he was walking me down the stairs. Naked, still.

“A couple,” he admitted in a gruff voice. “Just not a lot of bullshit there. You know?”

I nodded, and pretended to understand. But I really still don’t. How is it easier to hook up on an internet service not intended to be used for that purpose, and on which this photographer, at least, rarely shows a photo of himself? It rings true somehow, but I still don’t get it.

Though quite frankly, if it’s scoring me hole like that, I’m not questioning it too deeply, either.