“Everything in my house I bought with my porn money,” Branden tells me. Leaf-like decals billow across the walls. Hanging by the door, there’s a framed painting of a rainy Paris street. He shares the apartment with his long-term partner, Xavier, a long-limbed drug and alcohol counselor and graduate student he met on BGC, a pre-Grindr gay dating app geared toward black men. “This is my favorite thing to do,” he says.īranden, 25, lives in a one-bedroom in a quiet gated complex 15 minutes from the Daytona shoreline. I say sure, and he starts ripping a piece of paper into small strips, placing them in a row on the dresser. The spread - which includes colognes, perfumes, and at least one unisex scent - is expensive, each glass bottle cast in its own sultry shape. He’s got 25 in total, arranged carefully on top of a wooden dresser in his Daytona Beach, Florida, bedroom.
