BuzzFeed News has uncovered dozens of ads on Facebook and other sites that reveal a new LGBT dimension to the housing crisis: young men lured into "sex for rent" contracts to avoid sleeping rough. In a multi-part investigation we expose the truth about these landlords, as young men speak out about being raped, beaten, drugged, infected with HIV and treated as domestic slaves.

In the second part of BuzzFeed News' gay sex-for-rent investigation, men speak out about the extreme violence and danger they face, as charities describe the shocking scale of the problem. “There’s never a time when I don’t think ‘This could be it,’” said one man. "'I could lose my life.’”

It took just three months for Denholm Spurr’s life to plummet, for the newly graduated straight-A student to find himself exchanging sex for somewhere to live. He did not know what he would lose, that what awaited him was a succession of men who would drug and abuse him, that he would be infected with HIV, and, on several occasions, raped.

Sometimes the men – some of the landlords – had no need to use force. “I didn’t have the strength to say no,” he said. “I became what I felt people wanted. I branded myself as this ‘sexual being’ that other people fed off… I felt that’s what I needed to do.”

Spurr’s eyes flickered as he cast his mind back over everything. “The last five years of my life would have been extremely different had I just had somewhere to stay.”

He wants people to know what happens when young men so desperate to avoid sleeping on the streets will do anything for shelter – and what lies in wait. He wants to raise the alarm.

In a multipart investigation, BuzzFeed News exposes a dimension to the housing crisis that has so far been concealed: men having to exchange sex for a place to stay. Read more via Buzzfeed