Feb. 3, 1998
A place where
no one knows your name
By Steve Friess
It's another hopping Saturday night, and SexySammy's
pushing his way into his favorite homo hangout. He's on the
lookout for Mr. Right, as he is most evenings. As Sammy squeezes
into the room and takes a seat on the proverbial barstool, a
buddy calls out to greet him. "It's about time. Where you been?"
barks a regular visitor to this gay town square, also known
as NYCm4m. "Sorry, been in with the bears for more than an hour
waiting for space to open up in here," Sammy explains. "This
has been one busy nightclub tonight!"
As he settles in, a dozen other people say hello.
Most know him only by name and from his passing reference to
an interest in the rugged, burly set of hairy gay men who call
themselves bears. Still, that's all it takes for a couple of
men to sidle up to Sammy and whisper in his ear. "What's yer
phone number?" asks one suitor. Another guy isn't quite ready
for that. "Stats?" he inquires.
Sammy ignores the first question -- "Too forward,"
he insists -- but answers the second in a Tarzan-like lexicon.
"Me: 6' 2", 39 y/o, 190 lbs., blond hair, blue eyes, 8 inches
cut. You?" Then he waits, trying to discern how the guy who
cruised him is reacting to the information. Sammy calls out
for a response, only to find that the mystery man has vanished
from the room.
Now Sammy is frustrated and not feeling very
sexy. He turns to a buddy, who's not having much luck himself,
and laments how flaky some men can be. "I'll tell you, some
relationships can be cold, nasty, brutish, and short," Sammy
offers, suddenly invoking Thomas Hobbes and reflecting his credentials
as an English professor. Then he notes to his comrade-in-disappointment
with a tinge of despondency, "Men suck, don't they?"
A Saturday night in the East Village? As a matter
of fact, it is. But Sammy (who declined to use his real name
for this article) isn't actually hanging out with the guys in
the midst of Manhattan gay nightlife. Instead he's holed up
in his studio apartment, where he can forgo thumping disco music
and spin vinyl Neil Diamond albums. He doesn't have to worry
if the white polo shirt and black jeans he's wearing are stylish
enough, and the heat glowing from the color monitor of his computer
is far less intense than glaring club lights.
SexySammy is glomming on to a red-hot gay scene.
At 11 p.m. that night, approximately half of the 629 America
Online chat rooms existed for gay men, lesbians, bisexuals,
and the made-for-cyber-space "straight-curious." An average
of 20 users in each room adds up to at least 6,000 gay chatterboxes,
making AOL -- with its $19.95-per-month cover -- a popular gay
hangout. AOL doesn't mind its large gay clientele, although
it does not market specifically to gays. "We're open to anybody
who wants to chat, and anybody is welcome to create a chat room
as long as it's within our terms of service," says AOL spokeswoman
Janine Dunne.
For many gay people, chat rooms provide a place
where they can be themselves without really having to open the
closet door. A person's online name, or handle, can be anything,
keeping their real identity a secret. And chatterers can create
identities by tinkering with their on-line "profiles," short
autobiographies that other people on-line can access with the
click of a mouse, regardless of whether a person is in a chat
room.
A high-profile case last fall involving a naval
officer in Hawaii proved the Internet is not completely anonymous,
however. Timothy R. McVeigh (no relation to the Oklahoma City
bombing suspect) is facing the end of a distinguished 17-year
career for using the word gay in an AOL profile. The Navy is
moving for discharge under the "don't ask, don't tell" policy,
saying McVeigh voluntarily revealed his sexuality on-line. McVeigh,
who has declined to comment on his sexual orientation, said
neither his on-line handle nor his profile gave away his identity.
And, he says, he never went into chat rooms.
While some gay men and lesbians say they don't
like the idea of not seeing whom they're talking to, the vast
majority of on-line denizens say rubbing elbows in a chat room
is just as "real" -- if not more so -- as lolling around listlessly
in stand-and-pose bars. Aside from AOL and other for-pay private
services, hundreds of free chat rooms dot the two-dimensional
landscape of the Internet and allow anyone with an electrical
outlet, a telephone line, and the most modest computer equipment
to click and type away with glee. (One company, WebTV, even
sells the ability to use your television to access the Internet.)
"It's definitely a new meeting place for people,"
says Phillip Blackmon, a 38-year-old property manager from Kensington,
Md., who calls himself Worley1 on-line after his cat, who's
named for Laugh-In comedian Joanne Worley. "It's a meeting of
the minds. You can explore personalities much better, see how
another person's head works. "
Gay culture is so pervasive on-line, David Leavitt,
among other writers, mentions it in his book Equal Affections,
in which the main character's boyfriend gets so high from cybersex
that it nearly wrecks their relationship -- not unheard-of in
real life.
Nowadays, clubs form in cities across the nation
to discuss the discussions in various chat rooms. One on-line
doyen, Larry Peery of San Diego, even publishes a frequent on-line
magazine in which he offers his impressions of the dozens of
gay chat, sites across the Internet. "I sent out 1,700 cyber-greeting
cards today," he said a few days before Christmas as he hung
out in The Advocate's neighborhood-tavern-style chat room.
His reviews can be glowing or merciless. Of
the PlanetOut chat room, Peery raves, "It seemed like a cozy
spot." By contrast, the Alamak chat room, with more than 60,000
registered members, "reminded me of a shopping center on the
Saturday before Christmas!"
Blackmon, like 10 million others on-line, gay
and straight, prefers the user-friendly icons of AOL. Admittedly
shy and single, he logs on for about 90 minutes a day, a significant
drop from a few years ago, when he hung out for 30 hours a week
and spent nearly $400 a month, when AOL charged by the hour
instead of a flat monthly fee. For all that effort he failed
to meet a boyfriend but did link up with a New York man who
is now a "lifeline to me," he says. "When I went on-line it
was the first time in my life I was popular. I think quickly,
I'm reasonably well-read -- all those things that should come
out face-to-face but hadn't."
Blackmon was out when he started his cyberlife,
but many others use the cover of on-line anonymity as an ultrasafe
first step toward opening the closet door. "I had questions
about gay things, but in a small-town area everybody knows everybody,
and you can't talk about it with anyone," says Chris Huffman,
28, a former computer specialist at the Virginia Military Institute
in Lexington, Va. "When our school got hooked up to the Internet,
I was able to get on IRC [Internet Relay Chat, a free Web chat
service]. I talked to gay people I didn't know and told them
what I was feeling. I came out with their support."
It's also how he met his partner. One evening
four years ago, he spotted Will Grant, 25, across a crowded
chat room and noticed that Grant was on-line through the Internet
service at Washington and Lee University, also in Lexington.
The coincidence of finding another gay man in the college town
of 10,000 people amazed them, so they chatted for weeks and
finally met at a restaurant for dinner. Huffman had never met
an openly gay person before. The couple now live together in
St. Louis, where Grant attends law school and Huffman runs a
gay E-mail club.
Carrie Stoner of Charlotte, N.C., also met her
girlfriend on the Internet. Stoner, 21, who wears mostly black
and listens to Depeche Mode, says she likes to meet women on
AOL because "people think I'm pretty scary" in person. Her on-line
profile so intrigued another lesbian that she sent an instant
message saying, "19f - les. Wanna talk?"
For a whole slew of marginalized communities
-- people of color, older people, the disabled, the overweight,
people with HIV -- the on-line world provides slightly more
equity in the dating game. At any given moment chat rooms spring
up specifically geared toward men and women seeking dates of
specific races, ethnic groups, ages, and physical conditions
-- from Over60M4M to BlackBoyz4WhiteBoyz. "On-line, in general,
people are less racist," notes Adrian, 25, a closeted Asian
man in San Francisco who declined to give his last name. "People
on-line are often a little more educated and not as narrow-minded.
Also, what they don't see doesn't affect them."
Yet as often as those kinds of connections are
made, something far more fleeting occurs on the Internet. For
all the virtues of meeting people without the pretense of appearances,
anonymity also allows users to invent and reinvent themselves
to fit various purposes. In many cases the purpose is sex-either
in real life or in the cyberworld.
Charles Michael, 39, of Rochester, N.Y., enjoys
both. Michael, who works a split shift as a restaurant manager,
is usually on-line from 1 a.m. to 6 a.m. His handle is BFD9in
-- short for Big Fucking Dick nine inches. "Yes, it's true,"
Michael insists. "I have a GIF [Graphics Interchange Format,
an on-line picture] I send people to prove it." He also admits
something no other source is willing to acknowledge on the record
-- that he "really gets off doing cyber sometimes." One morning
he pretended for a married man from California that he was alone
in an office waiting for a gay maintenance man to arrive for
oral sex. "I don't know if he believed me or not, but he really
got into it," Michael says.
Such hubris -- boasting of an enormous penis,
for instance -- usually elicits snickering from other on-line
residents. "If all those people were telling the truth, the
world would be populated with people with ten-inch dicks, and
size queens would be delighted," Grant quips.
Indeed, 28-year-old Chris Carroll of Los Angeles
says he has met several people who have lied about their age,
habits, or appearance. One night Carroll, who says he has met
about a hundred men on AOL and has dated about 15 of them since
1994, went to the apartment of a man in his late 30s. "I get
inside, and I realize right away that he's much older than I
thought he was and that he's a smoker," recalls Carroll, whose
profile not so subtly tells puffers and the not-so-young to
stay away. "All of a sudden I say, `Know what? This is not going
to work out.' I get up to leave, and he gets between me and
the door and starts to grab me and stuff like that." Carroll
managed to slip away, but he resolved to be more careful.
Safety issues surrounding chat-room conversations
and the meetings that often result from them are cause for as
much concern as leaving a bar drunk and getting behind the wheel.
News reports of on-line flirters who turn out to be sexual predators
or even minors lying about their age has much of the cyberworld
on edge. A common rule of thumb is to meet up with on-line mates
in crowded public places.
Still, for those who decide not to hook up with
the man or woman behind the mouse, cybersex is a safe convenient
way to indulge in fantasy without actually touching another
person. Mike Chaney, a 26-year-old restaurant worker who goes
by the handle The_Snugglebunny in Internet chat rooms, has an
agreement with his partner, Matt, who calls himself The_Hunnybunny
on-line. The pair live in Prestonsburg, Ky., a rural backwater
of 2,500 people about 160 miles from the nearest city, Huntington,
W.Va. "As long as it doesn't get too involved, too personal,
cyber is all right," says Chaney. "Heck, we love to print the
messages out and have a big laugh over them."
Such a sex-charged atmosphere on-line isn't
much different from that of many gay bars, but it strays dramatically
from the lowkey, clubby scene common at most lesbian hangouts.
"I'm amazed at some of the things other women say to me on-line,"
says Rose Kurz, a 41-year-old high school English teacher in
the Seattle area. One of her problems may be her on-line name,
RRRose, which refers to her interest in railroad trains but
is often mistaken for a come-on. These days she prefers chat
rooms such as the one attached to a Web site dedicated to lesbian
rock star Melissa Etheridge. The chat room, called soc.women.lesbian-and-bi,
features more-serious talk, and Etheridge even logs on occasionally.
"I wanted to talk to other women about women's issues on AOL,"
Kurz says, "but they just want to talk about Jodie Foster fantasies."
Of course, there's no way to tell whether Kurz was talking to
women or to heterosexual men playing out their fantasies.
Indeed, gays aren't the only ones uninhibited
by the medium. Every night someone barges into a gay chat room
to spout off biblical condemnations, slurs, even physical threats.
Sexysammy calls that cowardice: "A bigot who walks into Splash
[a New York City nightclub] and starts screaming about Sodom
and Gomorrah would be run out."
And as the rising New York sun begins to peek
through Sammy's window, casting a glare on his monitor and reminding
him that he's been on-line all night, the number of AOL chat
rooms increases rather than declines. "It's really great to
be with other gay people whenever you want to," Sammy says.
"And, no, it's not too different from a real gay bar in one
way. Even here we all stand around and say to one another, `Don't
you just hate these places?'"
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