Porter and Joey Attending to Saint Randy’s Physical and Spiritual Needs | Digital Photocollage | 2026
GoFundMe is a digital fundraising platform that serves as a vital lifeline for LGBTQ+ individuals navigating healthcare systems that were never designed with them in mind.
Jason Pacheco, known to fans as Randy, an adult film star, posted a GoFundMe shortly before his death at age thirty-three. He was in recovery. He was living in a halfway house and was discharged because his hospital stay ran too long. He was broke and didn’t know where he’d go when he left. Identifying as straight, he had built his career in gay adult film.
His story is not unusual. Gay men and men orbiting gay culture have always faced a particular combination of healthcare discrimination, family rejection, and institutional abandonment that makes community-based mutual aid like GoFundMe not just a supplement but a replacement for a system that doesn’t recognize them.
GoFundMe campaigns fund gender-affirming care, bail for queer activists, emergency housing, and the survival costs of lives that the dominant culture views as expendable.
The culture of digital fundraising mirrors the historical LGBTQ+ tradition of chosen family — the network that shows up when the biological family does not. It is the same impulse that built the hospices during AIDS, that had strangers becoming family because what else do you do when the world abandons you.
Randy needed somewhere to go. The community he had served showed up. The harvest gold moon knows what fulfillment looks like — and sometimes it looks like a stranger clicking donate at two in the morning for a man they never met but recognized anyway.
The Closet Series. 2026. — Behan.
