Rebecca Dundee, known online as IamBeckyD, is sitting in her bedroom in Atlanta, Georgia reflecting on a whirlwind past few days in which she has gone well and truly viral.
The 21 year old has gone from 150 – 50,000 (and counting) Twitter followers in three days. One of her videos, filmed for TikTok and shared to her Twitter timeline, has amassed more than 4.1 million views. People cannot get enough of her – and her looks. Becky, a former member of the military, is a sculpted strong beauty.
“It has been a crazy few days. I’m just a broke college student,” she says.
Warm, funny and energetic, if she can make people “happy and horny” at the same time, that’s fine by her. She attributes her growth to TikTok, and the fact that there weren’t many other “studs of colour” on the platform, so she stood out.
Over the past few days, comments on her posts include: ‘Could I possibly pay you to step on me?’, ‘I’m straight but maybe not’, ‘Girl you could break me in half like a log and I would say thank you’, and ‘my palms started sweating oh my’.
Her girlfriend fortunately isn’t the jealous type and has taken Becky’s rise to muse-status very well.
“We have a lot of trust. We’ve been dating for about a year now. It’s long-distance and an open relationship, but she says ‘I don’t care what you do, at the end of the night you’re calling me anyways’.”
Now a TikTok LGBT icon and publicly out online, she has to yet to speak to her parents about her sexuality. One of her TikToks says ‘My mom is Guyanese and Hindu’, ‘My dad is Guyanese and Christian’, ‘What am I?’ ‘A closeted lesbian who eats beef’.
“I know that they [her parents] can see it,” she says, “we just haven’t sat down and talked about it. The Caribbean community has been evolving when it comes to LGBT – in Guyana they had a whole LGBT party going on.
“There are some families that are like ‘I love my kid for who they are’, but there are some families who are more into old traditions.
“I know my mom would be fine because she married Christian and was able to adapt to her religion, but my father hasn’t had to adapt religion and all his life has thought homosexuality is a sin.”
Social media has provided a way for Becky to find like-minded friends across the world, and to feel less alone whilst growing up. “Being West Indian in a majority Hispanic, black and white community, you don’t have a lot of people to relate to. Online, I found people like me.”
With a growing online presence, Becky can now be that ‘someone like me’ for other people. She also wants her platform to be a happy place – somewhere to take a break from the depressing state of the world’s news.
“I want to be able to make people laugh – that’s the biggest joy in my life. I want to make sure that people around me know that they are important, they’re adored. There are a lot of things going on in society, things feel especially divided in the US, and if my face and my smile happens to make you smile, then shit I’ll do it all day.”
We’re here for it! And something tells us she won’t be a broke college student for much longer.