I didn’t know that until I heard someone had died - and then Tank had died from it.” “But no one ever told me I could die from it. “I talked to Tank about it and I expressed interest in getting work done myself,” says Donick Slaick, a friend of Hafertepen’s. Miami Gardens Police / Barcroft USA /Barcoft Media via Getty ImagesĪmong the people dead from injecting silicon were Dovak who died last November, a Miami trans woman who died from injections to her butt (Oneal Ron Morris, the woman who injected her, was sentenced to 10 years for practicing medicine without a license), and last month, Tumblr gay celebrity Tank Hafertepen - the partner of the man Dovak allegedly went to for advice - died of a lung hemorrhage caused by, in part, silicon injection syndrome, according to his death certificate obtained by Rolling Stone. Photo: Miami Gardens Police / Barcroft USA /Barcoft Media via Getty Images Oneal Ron Morris, 30, was sentenced to 10 years for injecting a woman’s buttocks with a mixture of cement. Silicone freely injected into the body travels through the bloodstream into the lungs, which can cause death. Malcolm Roth, the former president of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, told NPR in relation to trans pumping parties. “Aside from being illegal, it’s clearly unsafe and these practitioners are not licensed physicians and they’re certainly not board certified plastic surgeons,” Dr. “He was just a guy who had a connection to black market, industrial-grade silicone,” Waltman says. But the man Dovak went to wasn’t a doctor. (Hafertepen denies that he told Dovak where he could obtain the procedure.) I eventually stopped working out harder than him so he could feel better about his progress.”Īccording to Waltman and other sources, Dovak reached out to an online acquaintance - another popular online gainer named Dylan Hafertepen - who told him where to go to get the illicit procedure. “Whenever we left the gym, he would feel like shit about it. “He took more steroids and he definitely got bigger and stronger, but he never felt good about it,” Waltman says. It’s also where he gained his internet fandom for growing huge, or “a monster,” as Waltman put it. It’s this community where Dovak found most solace in his size. It’s a site for all the guys who spent their childhoods stuffing pillows under their shirts or staring a little too long at big-bellied men in the supermarket.” (Grommr does not advocate for silicon injectors, which is a small portion of the gainer subculture, and the site’s online community has been adamantly against silicone enhancements.) The site coins itself as a place, “for guys of a similar mindset - that bigger is, most often, better. Gay men are also more prone to eating disorders and other body dysmorphia conditions that result in poor self image.īut until the gainer community became more popular with the introduction of a niche hook up app dedicated to them, “Grommr,” larger gay men had few places to find satisfaction or admirers of their bigger appearance.
But the community isn’t only based around fetish - the gainer community is well known to encourage body positivity, which is sorely needed among LGBTQ communities.Ĭompared to straight men, gay men are more prone to focus heavily on their weight and appearance. The community lives online, mostly, with Tumblr blogs dedicated to idolizing bigger guts and monstrous testicles.
Though the trend has appeared to decline recently - at least among trans women in New York, according to Radix - as quality care for trans-identifying people continues to grow, it’s now become more visible among the body modifying subculture of gainers. “You’re desperate to change your body, people will go through great lengths. “When people come in and say silicone, they don’t really know what they mean because it could be anything,” says Asa Radix, senior director of research and education for Callen-Lorde in New York City, an LGBTQ-focused health center, adding that some of his patients even had quick cement or peanut butter injected in them. It makes health experts reticent to even call the mixture “silicone,” at all. In one Florida woman’s case, tire sealant and cement were both injected into her face. But over the past five years, there have been a number of news reports exposing “pumping parties,” where groups of trans women pool their money to get injected with silicone, and the practice has now become more underground and more risky.Īnd much of that has to do with what’s being put in the mixture, which many times is unknown by those who receive the injections. The Private Lives of Liza Minnelli (The Rainbow Ends Here)Īmong trans women, silicone injections are a well known way to achieve the ultimate body: curvy butt, thick thighs or larger breasts.
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