Dr Carlton Thomas Made Anal Health Easy to Ask About. In 2022 He Took On Mpox.
In May 2022 a San Diego gastroenterologist who had spent two years answering questions about anal and rectal health on TikTok made his first mpox warning video. By midsummer his inbox was full, and he spent sleepless nights pointing men to treatment and vaccines. He is a gastroenterologist; this is his work in his own words, with the research beside it.
Dr Carlton Thomas is a gastroenterologist in San Diego, California, who posts about queer health and anal and rectal health as Doctor Carlton, with 270,500 followers on TikTok and 91,192 on Instagram when we read his accounts on October 19, 2026. He started posting in 2020. In 2022, as mpox spread among gay and bisexual men, he made warning videos, went live on Instagram with people who had it and shared treatment and vaccine information; Out magazine named him to its 2022 Out100, and San Diego Pride named him its Hero of Pride for 2023. Since July 2024 he has co-hosted the weekly podcast Butt Honestly with Dangilo Brian Bonilla. The federal provider registry lists him as an MD whose specialty is gastroenterology; he is a doctor, not a patient-creator.
On May 20, 2022, a festival in Belgium announced three cases of mpox, a virus then seldom reported outside parts of Africa. In San Diego, Carlton Thomas, a gastroenterologist who had spent two years answering questions about anal and rectal health on TikTok, looked at the calendar: a large gathering in Chicago was coming soon after, and “a similar crowd would travel to that.” “I made my first warning video,” he said later. By midsummer his feed was one of the places gay and bisexual men went to learn what the rash was, how much it could hurt and where to find a vaccine.
Thomas posts as Doctor Carlton. His TikTok bio begins “Gay GI Doc,” his Instagram bio adds “Mayo Clinic Grad,” and since July 2024 he has co-hosted a weekly podcast, Butt Honestly, with the creator Dangilo Brian Bonilla. The federal registry of health-care providers lists him as an MD whose specialty is gastroenterology. His subject is the part of the gut patients find hardest to raise with their own doctors, and the infections, screenings and vaccines that come with it.
The start: A lockdown account and an audience he did not expect
He started posting in 2020, he told Queerty in November 2022, out of “pandemic stress relief and boredom. My kids were big Tik Tok fans so I jumped in one night and realized how great it could be.” What took off first were frank, clinical videos about anal health and sex, which he described as “delicately worded.” “I got about 50K followers from that,” he said, and the early audience surprised him: “Interestingly the stats showed 75% were women early on which I did not expect.” From there he “pivoted to a more solidly queer health platform on my Instagram,” covering HIV prevention “but also proper STI testing, vaccinations, and harm reduction.”
When Out magazine put him on its 2022 Out100 list, he described the gap he was filling. “I feel like no one really got queer health and sex education in school and there is so much we all need to know,” he said. Then came the offer that still defines the account: “My direct messages are always open for personal questions that people often find too embarrassing to discuss with their doctors.”
The turn: Summer 2022: live videos, a full inbox and sleepless nights
Mpox spread that spring overwhelmingly among men who have sex with men, and Thomas, who said he had “one of the few queer health social media platforms,” went to work on it. “I started doing Instagram lives with people who had it, and started delivering all the treatment and vaccination information I could to help stop this,” he told Queerty. “My inbox was flooded daily with men who were newly infected and had no idea what to do. I helped point people to resources to get treatment and vaccination.” His specialty sharpened his focus. “As a GI specialist, the rectal pain part of this was of particular interest.”
“There were lots of sleepless nights helping men that had nowhere else to turn.” — Dr Carlton Thomas, to Queerty, November 2022
Out counted what that summer produced: a live video with Dr Demetre Daskalakis, the White House deputy director for the mpox response, and more than 1,000 vaccine clinic locations around the world shared on Instagram. “I felt the need to step up and do my part,” Thomas told the magazine, and by autumn he could name the reward: “The biggest achievement so far this year has been seeing those case numbers drop.” He did not call the job finished: “We still have work to do as the majority of new infections are in people of color, while vaccination rates are much lower for them,” he told Queerty.
The recognition: From a crowded inbox to a hometown honor
San Diego Pride named him its Hero of Pride for 2023, describing “a widely known gastroenterologist and advocate for queer sexual health” who “provided vital education during the MPOX outbreak, coordinated with the CDC, and received White House recognition.” His own Bluesky bio lists “‘22 OUT100; ‘23 Queerty Pride 50.” Raised, he has said, in “very conservative rural South Carolina,” he took the work on the road. “The biggest development is that I have been doing sex education and queer health shows in conservative states,” he told Queerty in May 2023.
When cases picked up again in San Diego County late in 2023, he went back to the vaccine. “People have completely forgotten about it,” he told 10News that December, adding that the shot is “not a silver bullet but if you do get infected it reduces your symptoms and improves your outcome dramatically.”
The show: Butt Honestly, every Wednesday since July 2024
The podcast began with a trailer on June 28, 2024, and a first episode on Wednesday, July 10. Butt Honestly with Doctor Carlton and Dangilo describes itself as a show about the messy life challenges of sex, socializing and love for LGBTQ+ men and their friends, and bills him as “the internet’s favorite gay.” Listeners send in questions, and the doctor answers the medical ones on air. The 120th numbered episode went out on October 14, 2026, distributed by MSW Media and, since August, also on YouTube.
Most weeks are frank and funny. Some are the clinic by other means: the August 5, 2026 episode carried “an inspiring update from Australia about one listener’s HPV journey and why getting screened can truly save your life,” and on September 23 a listener asked whether “his post-sex STI prevention strategy is actually doing the job.”
Shigella, 2026: A warning about a resistant gut bug, from experience
In April 2026 the CDC reported a rise in extensively drug-resistant Shigella, the bacterium behind the gut infection shigellosis, and Thomas spoke about the infection from experience. “Yes, there is a slight rise in Shigella infections across the world in the gay community,” he told Queerty on April 22. He said he had “learned this the hard way” the year before, with shigellosis that brought a “fever to 104F, severe cramps.” He used his own case the way he used the mpox summer: to tell people what to watch for.
What the research actually measured: Rectal pain in mpox, screening at 45 and a resistant gut bug
The rectal pain Thomas singled out was common. A CDC report on the first U.S. mpox cases, published August 12, 2022, counted 2,891 cases through July 22; 99% of those with case report forms were men, and of those with information, 22% reported rectal pain and 10% rectal bleeding. An international series of 528 infections in 16 countries (New England Journal of Medicine, 2022) found anogenital lesions in 73%; 13% were admitted to hospital, the leading reason being pain management, chiefly for severe anorectal pain. No deaths were reported in that series.
Colonoscopy is his specialty’s signature test. In May 2021 the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force lowered the starting age for colorectal cancer screening to 45 for adults at average risk, continuing to 75; its statement in JAMA estimated that 10.5% of new cases occur in people younger than 50.
Anal cancer is rarer and concentrated. A 2021 meta-analysis put its rate at 85 new cases a year for every 100,000 HIV-positive men who have sex with men, and 19 among those who are HIV-negative. Like cervical cancer, it is preceded by precancerous changes: the ANCHOR trial (June 2022) randomized 4,459 people living with HIV, aged 35 or older, with biopsy-proven high-grade lesions, and treating the lesions lowered progression to anal cancer by 57% compared with monitoring (9 cancers against 21). His link page carries the NIH page on screening for people with HIV.
Shigella is this year’s story. The CDC report of April 9, 2026 says it spreads through fecal-oral transmission and sexual contact. Among 16,788 U.S. samples with resistance data from 2011 to 2023, 510 (3.0%) were extensively drug-resistant, meaning resistant to five standard antibiotics, and that share rose from 0% in 2011 to 2015 to 8.5% in 2023; 86.2% of those patients were men.
The audience: TikTok first, then Instagram, Bluesky and a weekly show
Thomas posts as @doctorcarlton on TikTok, where he had 270,500 followers and 3.7 million likes when we read the account on October 19, 2026, and on Instagram, with 91,192 followers the same day; on Bluesky he has 11,394. His link page holds 26 links, six of them federal public-health pages on mpox and HPV vaccination, prevention after exposure and anal cancer screening.
The disclosure map: Where his interests sit
Thomas is a practicing gastroenterologist in San Diego; Medicare’s public directory of clinicians lists gastroenterology as his primary specialty. The podcast, distributed by MSW Media, takes advertising through its hosting platform and offers paid membership on Patreon. His link page carries no product, supplement, discount code or affiliate link. In July 2023 the drug company Napo Pharmaceuticals announced in a press release that it would take part in an education event in Orlando where he was guest speaker; the release quotes him only on sex education and his open messages. Gut Health Times has no relationship with Dr Carlton Thomas, Butt Honestly, MSW Media or any organization named here.
How we checked this: Sources and method
We read his TikTok account data, Bluesky profile and posts, link page and the podcast’s feed and Apple Podcasts listing on October 19, 2026; the Instagram figures come from a logged-out read of his grid that day. His words come from his own bios and from interviews he gave to Queerty (November 5, 2022, May 29, 2023, and April 22, 2026, read in archived copies), Out (October 28, 2022) and 10News San Diego (December 8, 2023). His MD degree and specialty come from the federal NPI registry and Medicare’s clinician directory, and each study was matched to its PubMed record. This article is educational, describes what the cited sources say, and is not medical advice.