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. It’s this community where Dovak found most solace in his size. It’s also where he gained his internet fandom for growing huge, or “a monster,” as Waltman put it. “He took more steroids and he definitely got bigger and stronger, but he never felt good about it,” Waltman says. “Whenever we left the gym, he would feel like shit about it. 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. “He was just a guy who had a connection to black market, industrial-grade silicone,” Waltman says. “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.
Malcolm Roth, the former president of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, told NPR in relation to trans pumping parties. Silicone freely injected into the body travels through the bloodstream into the lungs, which can cause death.
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. 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.