Welsh bodybuilder star Anthony Stingl, 30, was once a young boy hiding his sexuality and facing bullies at school. Growing up at a time where he felt being a "gay man was something to be made fun of", he began isolating himself, trapped in a cycle of unhealthy eating habits.
But now Anthony, who goes by the nickname Welshy, has shared his transformation and the reality of being an online creator and the only openly gay Welshman to have reached the British bodybuilding finals. Raised in Penarth, Anthony said his interest in body building began when he was just three years old.
“There was a character on TV called Action Man and I was really fascinated with how he could look so muscular", he said. When Anthony joined secondary school, he faced constant bullying over his weight and rumoured sexuality, adding: “I remember when I was in school, I never came out and people would still always say ‘oh you're gay’ or use other derogatory terms. I look back at some shows on the TV back then and being a gay man was something to be made fun of.”
Anthony began isolating himself and spent most of his early teenage years indoors playing video games and trapped in a cycle of unhealthy eating habits. “I had an eating disorder. Comfort eating is an eating disorder. Eating to feel good and regretting it - to then eat more to feel good again is a disorder,” he said.
But at age 14 Anthony decided he had had enough. “I knew I had to change my mentality. I had to do what I wanted to do and not think about what society wanted me to do,” he said. His fitness journey started with pull ups on a tree branch in his garden. Soon after he started sneaking out of his house at 4.30am to go on runs around the neighbourhood. "I felt embarrassed about doing it. In a big school like that people like to start rumours and I was already someone people made a lot of assumptions about, so I never wanted to add to that,” he said.
Once at college Anthony decided to compete in his first body building competition. A competition that he said “did not go well at all”, although he did meet his first boyfriend backstage.
Although he never personally felt that being gay was an issue, Anthony was aware that not all of society at the time felt the same way. “It was 2011, we didn’t even have gay marriage at that time, it was still a new concept,” he said. Despite these concerns he decided it was time to come out to his family and friends who he said were very accepting of his sexuality.
After a short period of studying at college, Anthony decided to drop out and pursue his passion for bodybuilding. The athlete became a qualified personal trainer and began sharing his fitness content on social media. He said: “I started by just putting up the work I was doing at the gym. It was more because I wanted to show how much I had changed between posts and then I realised that people were enjoying it and it started to grow.”
After over a decade of posting content Anthony now has over 30,000 subscribers on YouTube and over 46,000 followers on Instagram. He said he fell in love with content creation and the hustle and graft on social media.
In March 2018 Anthony decided to join OnlyFans. He said: “For a while it wasn’t my thing, and I didn’t want to do it, but I was struggling to pay my rent and bills. I needed to find something to do, and OnlyFans was literally it, so I signed up. "
Anthony describes his OnlyFans account as an “artistic form of body building” and insists: “I am not hooking up with anyone or anything like that on there, I produce a lot of behind-the-scenes content from competitions and show my progress.” However, he does admit to posting full nudity content.
He is also clear that while he makes a living from the platform, the reality is he does not make the eyewatering figures some perceive OnlyFans to generate. Anthony's fans pay a monthly subscription rate of £8.82 ($11) or yearly subscription rate at £74.12 ($92.40).
After five years on the platform he has had over 44,000 likes, posted 149 videos and 572 pictures. He has made a gross £166,000 from the site. That works out as an average salary of £33,000.
As a company, Only Fans takes a 20% cut from all creators. If he was to earn £100,000 a year, Only Fans would take £20,000, a rate that he said can feel very harsh at times. And he knows that he has little job security. OnlyFans attempted to ban sexual content in 2021 and could easily decide to do that again.
“I do hope I have built up a base following for long enough that if I went onto another social media site then I could monetise that,” Anthony said. “The world of the internet changes so fast. Even from just being on YouTube, what you can say and can’t say has changed so much since me being on there and I think what you can and can’t post on OnlyFans will be the exact same.”
After over a decade of monetising social media content, Anthony added: “I think the biggest lesson I have learnt is that things will happen that you cannot control but it is what you do after to make it the best situation you can that matters.”
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