The death of porn star August Ames has been one that has been highly discussed within the gay community, which is a bit off kilter given that August is a woman and she only worked in the straight porn industry.
The reason being is because she took her life only a day after she found herself in a social media dispute where she tweeted about not wanting to work with men who have had prior experience in the gay porn world. She followed up with the original tweet and said that she was looking out for her safety and that she wasn't putting her body at risk, which was met with a ton of negative reactions from both straight and gay porn stars, as well as several users on social media. She was only 23 years old.
Now, new information has come to light that might shed the reasons why she committed suicide in the first place, and it goes beyond the spectrum of backlash that she received for posting what many believe was a homophobic comment.
She appeared on the Holly Randall Unfiltered podcast back on September 13th, where she opened up about childhood sexual abuse, mental health issues and drug abuse.
During the podcast, she revealed that she experienced "a lot of sexual molestation" when she was growing up, but it wasn't from her father. It got worse for her because no one believed her when she spoke up about it.
“It was just awful. It’s still recent where I have to keep myself occupied or else I start thinking about all that s*** and then I fall into a depression. “I try to do therapy. I hate that word. I hate therapy.”
She admits that she hated going to therapy because they would judge her based on her profession.
“I would get in contact with some people and then I would feel badly because they’d be like ‘what’s your profession and I’d be like ‘oh, I’m in the adult industry’ and then I’d feel like they’re like ‘oh, that’s the whole reason that you are the way you are’ and then I’d get turned off.”
She goes on to reveal her past use of drugs and a scary incident when she was 15, as well as using medication to deal with her bipolar, depression and multiple-personality disorder.
Now that this information is revealed, will gay men have some compassion towards her even though the comment she made earlier this week was deemed as homophobic?
Just what good is any
Just what good is any 'compassion' now? It seems as effective as 'thoughts and prayers' at this point.
She didn’t have an argument
She didn't have an argument with the "gay community" (hope everybody stops using this term); she had an argument with different people over a comment that sounded discriminatory and was unnecessary to post on social media. Many of the people who called her out were women; not gay men men.
And I find it ridiculous to imply that gay men don't feel compassion over her death as you do in your last parragraph.One thing is to criticise the intention behind the tweet that started the conflict, but another very different thing is to suggest gay men don't feel compassion for how things ended.