IF YOU’RE OF A MIND to write a book about and for gay men and the Internet—or, say, fly fishing and the Internet, or careers in advertising and the Internet—know that your work will be hopelessly outdated about two hours before your publisher agrees to put forth the thing in ink.
This I knew, even as I launched my book, M4M: For an Hour or Forever—The Gay Man’s Guide to the Internet, way, way back in 2007. This I came to know more painfully, as each successive month of rewrites drew me and my oh-so-topical prose further and further away from what was evolving daily. Case in point: I had devoted one chapter to on-line pornography and had offered, quite viably 
when the initial writing was underway, stern but loving instruction on the rates and benefits of the major gay password sites. About two days later, these monoliths of gay smut went the way of the T-Rex and the free porn blog, like the little mammals scampering from their burrows to see that the nice meteor wiped out the bad boys, began its reign. And I won’t even go into the heavy use I made of AOL as the gay man’s portal into connecting in those innocent, pre-Google days.
Yet the book endures. It does not endure in the timeless and elegant manner of Middlemarch, perhaps. Nonetheless, hefty chunks of its more website-specific points are still valid, chiefly because I deliberately addressed only those few dating sites which, by sheer virtue of their (sometimes straight) subscription bases, simply could not be torn down all that quickly. And the marrow of the book remains sound because the essence of what we as gay men do when we attempt to connect on the Internet does not change—not from what I’ve witnessed, at any rate.
No, we are the same men, and the ways in which we present and conduct ourselves within on-line media have not changed appreciably. Yesterday’s ISP chat room may be today’s tired joke. The meeting requirements as put forth in an ad may now, due to an extraordinary rise in exposure and thus responses, be so tough as to discourage all but the most determined. The gay hook-up site of two years ago may today be—mirabile dictu!—all about the search for meaningful relationships. But the men engaged in these pursuits are still searching for the things men seek, even while switching over to the latest technologies, experimenting with a new tone to strike in an e-mail or instant message, or adapting their image to better draw the kinds of men most attractive to them.
The real foundation for all of it, of course, is how we see ourselves and our needs, and how we put those choice nuggets on the table. Look back on the early days of on-line interaction. What you will see is not so much an exploding vista of gleeful connecting but something more like a riot of alleyways. For the advent of the Internet was for the gay man something like a shiny new set of the keys to the kingdom. Those restricted by locale, by timidity, by being closeted to coworkers or family or everyone, could safely jump in. Those men curious but terrified could now explore at their leisure. How freeing was it not to have to wait for the wife to go shopping and risk a run to the video arcade? Gay men attracted to the straight, the bi-curious, and the terrified swarmed in to reap this fresh harvest. It may be even now a premature assertion, but it seems likely that a dramatic spike in bisexuality was one direct consequence of the presence of the Net in every home.
So we made the Internet our own. We learned fast, as any marginalized segment of the populace must, and we shaped the on-line experience by our actions within it. We quickly raised the bar on the parameters necessary for an actual, real-world meeting with someone—once we discovered how shamelessly deceptive other guys could be in their desire to meet us. We learned that the bigger the city, the more hurdles had to be raised before a hook-up could be considered. We made the photo-to-share a sine qua non for any encounter in the real world. (One wonders if in fact gay men were not responsible for the fusing of the digital camera and the cell phone: they are coeval technologies, but there was no necessary reason that they had to merge.)
And we chatted. We used all sorts of masquerade names (to this day my personal favorite remains “GoMooseGo”), and we took our libidos and longings for neighborhood walks. Was it all a waste of time? Perhaps. But there was fun to be had. Life in the chat room produced a variety of social types or roles that showed up repeatedly, and still do. From my own archives of experience, here are a few of the dominant types:
The Queen Bee. He’s the one who has taken it upon himself to rule the room, usually with an iron fist. Clearly someone in desperate need of esteem, he squeezes it out of strangers who are too bored to dethrone him. He’s easily identified, for he’ll be in the room almost all the time. He will also have a cute or clever name, and never something short, as he’s too complex a soul for brevity. And that name will flash on the dialogue screen with a frequency to shame a strobe light. Some QB’s rule by offering every comment as a definitive pronouncement on whatever foolishness is being spewed and scrolled on the dialogue screen. Others reign through adopting a Wal-Mart-like role of greeter, the one person who’s everyone’s friend.
The Hustler. Hats off to the modern entrepreneur! Male escorts have long since discovered the rich fields of the chat room, and I salute their industry. Often the Hustler sensibly and politely incorporates his vocation into his screen name by weaving a dollar sign into it, as in “LAE$cort” or “MU$CStd4U.” Others are more cagey: their names will entice you to examine their profiles; once in, you’ll learn the score, if not the price. My personal favorites are the career boys looking for a “generous friend.” Who says the age of the bimbo chorus girl is gone?
The God. This individual boasts extraordinary physical dimensions and an unassailable divinity. He is also one tough customer to hook up with, as he has every right to be. His profile screams that he’s not looking for anyone; he gets all he wants whenever he wants it. And you begin to wonder—in addition to why he’s in the chat room at all—how this specimen can survive when breathing the same air as the rest of us, including your own poor self.
The Whiner. Maybe the most common type encountered in a gay chat room, the Whiner is known all too well by the others present. His calling card is an endless slipping in of laments about his lack of a partner, peppered with avowals about his willingness to do anything to get one, with the occasional insertion of what he thinks are funny remarks about his solitary situation.
The Yawner. Cousin to the Whiner, the Yawner is perhaps the second most frequently seen chat visitor. He’s the one who enters into the dialogue only to remark upon how boring it is, how bored he is, and how boring the day and everything in it have been. The Yawner is a strange beast: clearly too bright for those surrounding him, he is nonetheless incapable of grasping the fact that his unendurable boredom is not likely to be alleviated by his spending hours bemoaning it in a chat room.
The Sniper. This is the guy—often someone either a little too devoted to his religion or harboring serious issues related to his own sexuality—who jumps into gay rooms to bash everyone else. He will frequently ask what those freaks are doing in there. He then furiously inquires as to why these freaks don’t enjoy the anatomical attractions of women. Feel for the Sniper, for these are questions that trouble him deeply.
There were many others, but you get the idea. I say “were” because, in fact, the chat room as we knew it has faded away. So the question before us now is: where did these men go? Did they evolve from the primitive, schoolyard stereotypes they once evinced? Hardly. Did they all marry and forever abandon on-line gay interaction? Of course not. They simply changed lanes, as it were. The God took his staggering selfhood and slapped it onto a CraigsList ad. The Hustler is still in business; now he weaves his dollar signs into the CL ad below the God’s. The Whiner, still alone, still loudly desperate, has turned to ManHunt (where his main photo is, to put it in a genteel fashion, a physical representation of his emotional need, taken from behind).
They’re all still out there, and they put into play all the machinations of gay life that take place on-line, whether to secure an hour’s fun or a potential partner. As ever, success is still hampered by the same peculiar, persistent delusions and deceptions—delusions of what one can reasonably expect to find out there, deceptions in self-disclosure. The Internet is no doubt a more sophisticated tool now, but the fundamental mistakes have not changed for us, as they have not changed for our straight friends.
The Internet is a tool with which people present themselves from a distance, and the man seeking another man through this medium must always acknowledge this crucial temporal-spatial reality. Think about the streets of the real world. Have you never espied what appeared to be an extremely attractive form a block or two ahead, perhaps through a haze, only to find that each step closer brought new imperfections, shattering the illusion? And yet, that shadow man coming your way did not in any manner attempt to present himself as something other than what he was. The illusion was all on your part and based only on a physical impression, and you went your separate ways. Add to this the myriad factors of interaction on the Internet: what you believe you’re after, what you genuinely want, what you want from the other guy, how accurately both he and you portray yourselves, along with the ever fluctuating element of what’s going on with both of you individually at that moment and how much this distorts your self-image—which all combine into an insoluble knot of revealing and concealing one’s intentions and oneself, leading one to conclude that reliance upon the Internet for forging a relationship is a fool’s game.
The reality, of course, is that we’re placing an altogether unrealistic burden upon the poor Internet. In possession of this sophisticated technology and scads of access, we think we can bypass the two components of a relationship that the Net can set in motion but not replace: chemistry and time, those irritating, hoary, and hopelessly demanding obligations of the thing.
Already another foundational change is afoot as the old-fashioned chat room fades, one that’s best exemplified by one website in particular, the notorious ManHunt. Even by Internet standards, it wasn’t all that long ago that ManHunt exploded onto the scene. Officially launched in 2002, the site as such began picking up steam—lots of it—by 2004. Not to put too fine a point on it, ManHunt was where you went for sex, period. And it seems the site had all the right stuff, as witness the exponentially growing ranks of its members—and the number of hook-ups arranged and consummated. To warp an old cliché about the French, millions of horny gay men can’t all be wrong. Then an odd thing happened—and it’s happening still. As you scan the ManHunt ads, mingled among the usual no-nonsense calls for action are a number of more thoughtful, often very clever, personal ads whose authors are looking for something more. For them, ManHunt is not the upscale, back-alley locus of gay action on-line, but a place to find a mate. A bit of anecdotal evidence for this: I happen to count among my friends several couples who found each other through ManHunt, and perhaps the reader does as well.
I believe this very unexpected shift in what a hugely popular site provides has been generated by what its members are asking for. It strikes me as not at all absurd that, as we tended to go for more adolescent thrills when the Internet itself was young, we’re growing up a bit along with this increasingly sophisticated tool. No longer restricted to fast and secretive action in the world at large, we’re able to demand the elements of life that can sit in the front parlor. Thus the computer, initially taken as a sort of pornographic jack-of-all-trades, has been morphing into a quite respectable facilitator of long-term gay relationships. May it continue to move in this direction.
