*Explicit Content*

On February 26th of this year, I posted a photo on my instagram (groundbreaking), captioned “happy memories from Lisbon when I went to a sauna and got crabs.” The photo of me, shirtless in a fountain in Lisbon last summer, went totally viral, garnering over an impressive two hundred likes (eat your heart out Zoella). What happened next was set to change the course of my life forever, with emails popping up left right and centre and the landline (I don’t have a landline) ringing “off the hook” (apparently phones used to have… hooks?). I got emails from producers at BBC Breakfast, The Jeremy Vine Show, This Morning and even Lorraine Kelly (herself) dropped me a message. Rylan Clarke tweeted out his support, as did sexual health charities who praised my openness,  and my gran text me to say her goldfish died and she had a spare tank if I needed somewhere to home my new crustaceans (bless her). I became a reference point on Nick Grimshaw’s Radio One show and reportedly (according to my ex best friend) Little Mix gave me a shout out at an intimate gig in Barnsley. I was- for want of a better word- an internet sensation. 

And yet, the rumours are true: I declined each and every opportunity presented to me. Some of you reading this today may call me a fool. You may say “but why? Why would you turn down a casual chat in front of a live TV audience at 12.45 in the afternoon with Coleen Nolan, Nadia Sawalha, Kaye Adams and Jamelia? Why would you reject free plane tickets to LA to be interviewed by recently cancelled daytime chat show host Ellen Degeneres and why God why would you say no to a guest spot on Fleabag in a special scene written between Andrew Scott and yourself?” To my critics, let me just remind you of an old saying, “the grass is always greener”. I’ve spent my entire existence watching fame tear down those who once seemed so promising and revered: lest we forget Amanda Bynes in that now iconic blue full fringe wig in the courtroom, or Kinga shoving the wine bottle up her vag in Big Brother 6. And so now, a year after the photo that put my name both on the map and on the lips of the general public across the globe, I’m here to tell my truth. To do that, I will answer the two most asked questions I have received since genital-crab-gate: a) how do they feel?, and two) how did you get them?

I’ll start with question two: “how did you get them?” The simple answer is: how long is a piece of string? Does anyone ever really know where slash how they got their crabs? What I will say is I went to a gay sauna in Lisbon last summer, and if I was to hedge my bets, I would say 7/10 I probably got them there. I know what you’re all thinking, and the answer is: yes, I did. But I went in prepared, because I’d already been to a similar sauna when I was in Sydney a few months earlier. The truth of the matter is that I preferred the one in Syndey, because of three simple factors: 1) the music was better, 2) I had sex with more men, and 3)  the Sydney sauna had a sexy mysterious quality, whilst the Lisbon sauna was more aligned to what you’d see if a straight person wrote an ITV prime time murder mystery drama starring David Tennant as the flawed but watchable lead, set within the confines of a gay sauna. That said, I still enjoyed the facilities of the bar, the hot tub, the showers and the sex swing. I even left with an Italian hairdresser who I walked the streets with at six in the morning, hand in hand, smoking a joint, watching the sun rise. It was all very Woody Allen (I take that back there was no over-intellectualising of the mundane, no persistent male protagonist and no accusations of child molestation).

It was only a week or so later, when I was pouring a mean looking gentleman’s Guinness at work (in the interest of heightened public scrutiny, and lessons I have learnt from those who have travelled the celeb route before me, I will keep the details of said workplace private). It was when I was watching the liquid turn from cloudy to black, that I commented on how itchy my pubes were. The mean gentleman watched me absentmindedly give my downstairs a little scratch before wrapping my palm around the Guinness glass and passing it across the bar to him. And then came the fatal words from my colleague, who we’ll call “Rhys”:

Maybe you have         crabs.
 
This brings me to question A: “how did they feel?” I had described the sensation to “Rhys” (and inadvertently to the mean looking gentleman who ordered a Guinness) as ‘itchy’, and I would stand by this description. The feeling was itchy, not massively dissimilar to a shaving burn. Yeah, it was more like a shaving burn. It was like a shaving burn if a shaving burn doused itself in oil, set itself on fire and danced through the pits of hell in a pair of the highest heels for six hours with blistered feet. It was an itch- nay, a burn- of the highest order, like when Gary Barlow told Tulisa she had “fag ash breath” on the X Factor in 2012, or when Lisa of pop duo Ablisa turned to Natalia Imbruglia and asked (politely), “sorry- who are you?” (c.2010)

That’s what crabs feels like. 

“Rhys” told me to go home, shine my phone torch into my pubes, and watch to see for movement. So, crawling into my bed at 4am, tired and emotional from drinking too many shots of tequila, I pulled my best David Attenborough and watched for any sighting of crabs within my pubes. It was one of those profound moments of realisation. One of those: how had I been so ignorant to the facts? moments. One of those: how do I break the news to the stranger on Brick Lane I slept with last night? moments. Give me the villain edit, but I never told him. (UPDATE: still haven’t told him.) As it was 4am in the morning, there was no pharmacy open or accessible, so I considered taking some tweezers and plucking them out manually as someone had suggested on a website dedicated to genital crabs. But that would have meant getting out of bed, and so instead I decided to cry myself to sleep in the style of Timothée Chalamet staring into the fire in Call Me By Your Name (2017). 

The healing process involved creaming myself head to toe in an ointment I picked up from the pharmacy in the big Sainsbury’s (#spon) in Whitechapel, washing all my bedding and clothes and cringing with disgust when I discovered that the small stains that had appeared in some of my underwear wasn’t my own skid marks as I had originally thought (initially a relief), but the excreted faeces of the crab community who were, by all accounts, thriving down there. And within two weeks, I am proud to announce: I was crab free. 

A year on from that trip to Lisbon, how the world has changed: we’re caught up in a whirlwind pandemic, dancing to Dua Lipa’s club album whilst burning our once beloved Harry Potter books without even a fresh bunch of Love Islanders to check in on. B*ris J*hns*n has a bébé, gay saunas have either closed or been refashioned as cafes and Robert Pattinson is suddenly in every film. 

You might be asking: why have you felt the need to be so open (and brave) about this experience? If you’re a straight person, I say: thank you for reading this far. To everyone else, I say that I have come to find myself in an outer-body experience (ok, Russell Brand), watching a gorgeous-but-faded crab-free starlet wasting a golden opportunity to document an authentic and under-told queer experience. Undoubtedly this will cause quite the media storm, but this time, I feel prepared. It will be no surprise to me when Ryan Murphy shows up on my doorstep offering a million pounds to the rights behind this tale (yes, that is a both an anecdote and a prediction.) But Ryan, I abide by my original conviction that I will not stand by to watch another queer role be stolen by Darren Criss and despite many fan comparisons, Ben Platt looks too old to play me. 

So, to stardom I say, (in the style of Dale Winton, may he rest peace) “Bring On The Wall!” But for now, I’m going to enjoy my final moments of peace and tranquility as I write these words, shirtless on a bench, my stomach getting gradually sunburnt, reminiscing fondly about all the strangers who came on me that fateful night in Lisbon. I dedicate this to you. To the strangers who I’ll never know. The strangers who I’ll never see. And to you- the stranger who entered the sauna that night with an itch, that became a burn, that became a colony of crabs in my pubes. 

Thank you.