How old were you when you realized that getting erections was not something that was going to be automatic for you?

It all kind of started, you know, early 20s, so I would have been probably about 22, 23 kind of

struggling with that problem.

This is Brandon. He's 27, lives in Toronto. And it was around the time that he came out as gay, that he realized he had trouble

getting and maintaining erections. I found myself very much avoiding sex, whether it would be leaving a date early, so that wasn't a possibility or making sure that we were going out somewhere, so that we weren't coming back with that daunting expectation of, oh, are we going to go into the bedroom and what does that go look like?

And am I going to, you know, be unable to get hard and to perform sexually? And I think at that point, I realized to myself that you need to do something here.

So Brandon talked to his doctor about it and his doctor prescribed him Viagra.

I found out that Ruck Hell drugs were very much a role of the dice.

So for me, it was, you might be able to get an erection and hold one, or you might not. And there's no way of knowing.

Do you feel sort of like lied to by erectile dysfunction drugs about what kind of fix they offer?

Yeah, actually, initially I did. You watch commercials all the time for Viagra and see all these happy guys doing all these activities. That was not my experience.

And, you know, I didn't find myself riding a ski do through the lake here.

Or mountain biking in the forest. No, no. None of those things happened after I took these medications.

I'm Anna Sale and this is Heart. A series from Death Sex and Bunny about Viagra.

It's much easier. They just have an erection erectile dysfunction. I just remember thinking like Christ up in Christ.

And the ways we do and don't talk about sex relationships and our bodies.

I mean, like if something about it might get broke, like it did not at all.

Brandon first emailed us three years ago. The subject line of his email was, what happens when you're a 24-year-old gay man with ED?

The standard is, or the expectation is gay men have crazy wild sex all over the place.

But whether that's out on the street and nature in the bushes or at home, homosexual gay male culture is very sexually charged.

And it's everywhere and it's in your face.

Were you able to talk with anyone about how your body wasn't responding the way you wanted it to when it came to sex about erectile dysfunction?

...