Last month, local television station NY1 fired meteorologist Erick Adame after images of him from nude webcam sites leaked and were sent anonymously to his employer (and mother).
The reaction to Adame’s firing has been largely negative, with numerous commentators criticizing NY1 for punishing a queer employee for consensual sexual expression and rewarding the people who intentionally sought to derail Adame’s career. As reflected in the headline of a New York Times article about the case, reporting from other news outlets, and the reaction of critics on Twitter, many thought Adame was the victim of what our culture now labels “revenge porn”: the distribution of a person’s intimate images without their consent. In a court filing last week, Adame similarly claimed to fall within the scope of Section 52-b of New York Civil Rights law, the state’s “revenge porn” law enacted in 2019. Over the past decade, 48 states have enacted similar revenge porn laws, which criminally punish those who distribute sexual images without consent. A majority of states also provide civil remedies, such as monetary compensation, to revenge porn victims.
Erick Adame’s case does bear many of the hallmarks of revenge porn. His recorded sexual expression was sent to his employer and family in an effort to shame him for being visibly queer in a sex-negative, homophobic culture. Still, what happened to Erick Adame is highly unlikely to be protected by New York’s revenge porn law. As a result, he likely will be unable to pursue a lawsuit against the people who contacted his employer and family, and any related criminal prosecutions against the leakers are unlikely to succeed.
In nearly every state, there are significant, largely overlooked limitations in the scope of criminal and civil revenge porn laws. Such limitations exclude from protection a wide range of sexual expression that is extremely common in the digital age, yet doesn’t conform to dominant understanding of moral propriety and sexual privacy. (I discuss this in a forthcoming article in Boston College Law Review.)
Most relevant to the Adame case is an exception in most state laws (including New York’s) for images created or distributed in “public or commercial settings”—which likely includes physical spaces like Pride festivals, nightclubs, bathhouses, or clothing-optional beaches, as well as public digital platforms. Although there has yet to be a case that squarely confronts Adame’s circumstances, the reasoning used in prior revenge porn cases signals that these laws are highly unlikely to protect images shared through sites such as Grindr, Scruff, Onlyfans, Cam4, and Chaturbate.
The reasoning is that, because nudity and sexual expression in these places involve showing one’s body outside of “a person’s most intimate sphere,” the state has minimal interest in protecting privacy in these “public” contexts. Sharing sexual images on Grindr, performing naked on a webcam, or relaxing on a nude beach are different from the prototypical revenge porn scenario in which victims’ sexual images are procured in the context of a marriage or long-term relationship.
Victims in these scenarios have overwhelmingly been women facing serious harassment, mental anguish, and economic harm after their (typically, male) partner distributed their sexual images without their consent. In response to widespread accounts of this abusive behavior, prominent feminist scholars and advocates worked to persuade lawmakers that these victims were engaged in very common behavior and should be protected after experiencing a profound privacy violation. The resulting laws map neatly on to the prototypical revenge porn victim, but they exclude other common forms of consensual sexual expression that can lead to similar campaigns of abuse and harassment.
While carving out “public” contexts like hookup apps and webcam sites from revenge porn laws affects everyone who enjoys sexual connection via digital networks, these exceptions—as shown in the Adame case—are likely to impact queer communities disproportionately. Queer people often heavily rely on digital networks to find each other, due to both the constraints of a heteronormative society as well as the wider acceptance of open sexual expression within queer communities. These platforms can be important places for queer people to connect with each other and find some validation against the backdrop of a still-often-hostile dominant culture.
Erick Adame may have been the subject of major news coverage after being fired, but he is hardly the first person to lose their job after strangers shared their naked images with their bosses. For instance, high school teachers, outed to their supervisors by “concerned” community members, have been fired for daring to seek sexual partners online, off campus, and outside working hours. Their terminations have been upheld despite otherwise excellent records and without evidence that they can no longer perform the duties they were hired for.
Adame did allegedly mention his employer during some of his online discussions, which, as some have argued, differentiates his case from those of other fired employees. Still, Adame’s employer would never have known about any of his statements without anonymous tips from individuals who knowingly visited sexually explicit queer spaces and enjoyed Adame’s performance before deciding to email his boss. Putting aside the question of whether any of this impacts Adame’s ability to forecast the weather, the salaciousness of Adame’s sexual expression should not shift the focus away from the individuals who launched a campaign to shame, stigmatize, and professionally harm someone for being horny online—in contexts expressly designed for such purposes.
For some, common sense suggests that being purposefully naked in front of strangers with recording devices means giving up privacy. Yet this line of thinking flies in the face of most contemporary understandings of privacy. Meaningful privacy is not about keeping all information absolutely secret from the outside world, but instead about managing the boundaries between the varied social contexts in which we spend our lives. What might be appropriate at a nightclub or church may be very different from what is appropriate at the office; meaningful privacy allows us to embrace the norms of our different social contexts and decide for ourselves when intimate information can cross community lines. Queer digital environments demonstrate the importance of embracing this context-sensitive understanding of meaningful privacy.
Participants in queer digital environments believe there to be norms of limited disclosure and consent surrounding sexual images. Yet even if participants in sexually charged spaces subjectively expect to retain privacy in their sexual expression, laws regulating sexual privacy typically hold these expectations up to an objective\—and heteronormative—paradigm of near-absolute secrecy. In other words, according to existing revenge porn laws, if you show your body to anyone but your spouse or committed significant other, then it becomes available for all to see. This “objective” secrecy paradigm is reflected not just in recent revenge porn legislation, but in a long line of privacy laws with limited usefulness for queer people.
Even if queer people do give up some privacy when they take their clothes off on a cam site, they do not deserve the intentional harassment, often infused with homophobia, that follows. When someone obtains possession of a person’s sexual images, they hold immense power over that person’s career, relationships, and overall well-being. Revenge porn laws mean to send the message that it is entirely inappropriate for someone to distribute another person’s sexual imagery without their consent, but this message is significantly undermined by laws that carve out from protection some of the most vulnerable and marginalized forms of sexual expression.
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