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The odd life of the man with two penises

 
Tampa Bay Times
Published Jan. 11, 2015

The 25-year-old man known as "DD" was born with two penises. DD — who guards his real identity with militant care — has a rare, congenital condition called diphallia, in which a duplicate penis develops during gestation.

And since Jan. 1, 2014, when DD gave Reddit one of its most popular Q&A sessions of all time, he has suffered another condition entirely: massive Internet fame, the overwhelming, all-encroaching kind that has you abruptly ending long-term relationships, answering fan mail at all hours of the night, and charging $8 for a very brief, very graphic self-published autobiography.

"When I 'came out' to the world on Reddit, I had no idea anyone would really care that much about me," DD writes in the book, punnily titled Double Header.

In conversation, he puts it a little more bluntly: Internet fame is "a double-edged sword," he told me. "On one side, it's been exciting and fun. On the other side it ... causes me a great deal of anxiety from time to time."

To understand why, one need only consider DD's personal history. Only 100 cases of diphallia have been reported in 400 years. But in what little medical literature exists, diphallia is usually characterized as an unhappy thing: a herald of social ostracization, and spinal bifida, and a slate of reproductive complications too grotesque to explain here. DD has been relatively lucky — his complications are minimal, and his equipment's in working order — but he didn't exactly escape diphallia's downsides.

He has, for starters, been treated to a life-long parade of prurient bystanders: gawking pediatricians, surprised friends, unrelenting high-school bullies who made him despondent and suicidal, contemplating radical corrective surgery at 17. He has experienced the occasional disgust, even horror, of would-be lovers. At one point in Double Header, he describes an encounter in which a woman ran, screaming, from his room.

And yet, since DD's story went viral, you'd be hard-pressed to find a guy more amped to put what is technically a congenital deformity on public display. "(It's) human nature to stare at something odd or gawk at something confusing, especially when it's another person," he explained. "On the flip side, it's also human nature to either shy away from being gawked at and hide in the shadows, or courageously own the object of attention and display it proudly."

To that end, DD has displayed his object(s) of attention on Tumblr — the site that started it all — as well as on Reddit and Twitter. For his community interview (or AMA) on Reddit, users submitted 17,000 questions.

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To date, his AMA is still Reddit's fourth-most popular — after Barack Obama, Bill Gates and David Attenborough. Ranked in order, that's president of the United States; world's richest man; beloved naturalist; guy with two penises. (There can be no better summation of the Internet's varied interests.)

His celebrity might look a whole lot like exploitation, but DD doesn't quite see it that way. He's trying to control his own narrative: He won't post pictures of his face, he won't reveal any even vaguely personal details, and he absolutely won't do porn. ("Not interested in it," he told one interviewer. "People think of it as an anomaly but it's my body.") He runs his own accounts on Tumblr and Twitter, where he loves getting messages from followers and fans. And he isn't making any money off the ebook, he claims — that's all going to an unnamed publisher. He just wanted to get out his story in "his own words," to transcend the one-dimensionality of DD as meme.

He's okay with the people who see him as some kind of sex object. ("The gawking amuses me," he says. "You have to realize, I've looked down at these boys all my life.") But he's also interested in something a little bigger: If he can parlay diphallia into something like fame and happiness, then every bullied kid who feels "different" has to have some hope of overcoming or owning their differences, too. DD corresponds regularly with people in that category, he says; he actually used to aim uplifting Twitter messages directly to them. "We may all be different looking," he explained, "but inside we're all human."

It's not exactly a profound sentiment, but it's definitely an empowered one — particularly coming from a guy whose fame is based entirely on the fact that he looks different. If the Internet is the freak show of the 21st century, at least we're freaking out with a little more humanity.

— Washington Post