Sept. 1, 1998
wwwatch me
By Steve Friess
Sean Patrick Williams is being watched. He's
really not doing anything special, stationed as he is in front
of his home computer in a white undershirt sipping an unidentifiable
drink to wash down the porridge he forks out of a plastic bowl.
But wait a few minutes. Any Internet moment
now, he might just scratch his nose. Or he might shift in his
seat. Or maybe, if the thousands who are staring at him are
really lucky, he'll offer a glimpse of his legs as he leaves
the room.
It's OK to look; Williams knows you're there.
The gay 26-year-old data-systems designer from Washington, D.C.,
was the one who chose in March to attach a $175 checkbook-shaped
digital camera to whatever computer is nearby and offer a 24-hour
World Wide Web broadcast of what he calls his "rarely cute,
sometimes monotonous, but always fun" daily life.
Unlike the Jim Carrey character in the film
The Truman Show, who doesn't know he's in a televised fishbowl,
Williams knows and doesn't mind that 70,000 on-line voyeurs
around the globe stop in at least once a day to check out "Scan
Patrick Live!" (www.seanpatricklive.com). Every 30 seconds the
camera snaps a new shot of its environment, be it Williams's
sparse living room as he watches TV or his desk at work as he
analyzes data for a nonprofit women's reproductive services
agency. You also might catch Williams lounging at a Delaware
beach house, writing E-mall, or even sleeping in the nude.
This standing invite to peer through the looking
lens makes the North Carolina native one of the Web's hottest
male stars, gay or straight. (The undisputed winner among women
is Jennifer Ringley, who pioneered the genre with JenniCAM,
first broadcast in 1996 when Ringley was a 19-year-old college
student in Carlisle, Pa Ringley's site is now so popular, she
charges viewers $15 a year.)
The cameras and software needed to produce these
Web cam sites plummeted in price and complexity last year. Today,
there are hundreds of them, many run by gay men and almost all
of them run by technology dabblers in their 20s who, like Williams,
just wanted to see if it was possible.
Yet in contrast to Scan Patrick Live!, many
other such sites aren't flee, few actually stay on around the
clock, most refresh the image less frequently than every 30
seconds, and many require computer users to have more advanced
Web-viewing sofle machines, also entices followers to keep coming
back by posting his intimate poetry and by including a message
board and chat room on his site. Occasionally, though rarely,
he even breaks down the fourth wall by joining the chat or posting
a message.
Mostly, Williams insists, he ignores his camera
and lives his life normally, almost never acknowledging the
gaze of the unseen thousands. "We don't all look great when
we get out of bed every morning; why not expose that?" he explains.
"What I'm trying to show is that what goes on in somebody else's
life always seems bigger and different and fabulous and a lot
different than what's going on in our lives. But that's not
true. We all stay home sometimes on Saturday nights and watch
TV."
Indeed, the tedium is the message. "It does
show that all gays aren't out there having sex all the time,"
says Atlanta resident David Stanley, 48, a loyal viewer of Sean
Patrick Live! "We have normal lives, and sometimes it's pretty
dull."
Yet as pure a motive as Stanley claims for watching--"I
just like to see what he's up to," he says--another avid portion
of Williams's audience anxiously awaits the star's next nude
appearance. The message board is cluttered with offers to trade
X-rated images of Williams and with crass calls for Williams
to post the images again or to expose more skin. He doesn't
take such requests, though, and rarely is seen doing anything
vaguely pornographic, although careful viewers have caught Williams
masturbating on camera a couple of times ("It was the middle
of the night, and I rolled over and did it; people do that")
and having sex at least once ("We thought we had turned the
lights down enough, but some folks were able to manipulate the
image with their own programs to see what was going on").
Williams responds angrily to the objectification.
Somewhat shocked by the pervasive peep-show mentality, he's
posted a few messages denouncing the picture trading by insisting
it's a violation of copyright law and asking that it stop. This
July 9 diatribe was typical: "For all of you who think it is
unrealistic for me to make these requests, I have one thing
to say (well, actually a few): 1. Fuck off. 2. Do not return
to the site. 3. Don't let the doorknob hit you on the ass on
the way out."
Others are dismissive of Williams's outrage,
however, noting that he chooses whether to keep the camera on,
whether to appear naked, and even whether to allow the audience
to post messages about his nudity on the site. "It's pretty
stupid for you to complain when you're the one in charge here,"
challenged an anonymous user in a recent post. "You sleep naked
with the lights on. C'mon." Williams claims the lights are off
but that the camera has a night-light.
While Williams eschews the sex angle, his Web
cam competitors offer more skin more often to attract viewers.
Web cam exhibitionist Robert Roper chats more regularly with
viewers on his "Takyrob" site (www.takyrob.com), occasionally
masturbating and twice sleeping naked in the computer room,
where he could be seen, instead of his bedroom. "The conversations
I try to engage in are away from sex," says Roper, 22, of Orlando,
Fla., whose two-month-old site was inspired by Sean Patrick
Live. "But it's reality: Sex sells. It sells coffee, and it
sells your Web site. And I can't say I don't like it because
it does sort of turn me on."
Williams, however, dodges the exhibitionist
label and insists he's neither aroused nor affected by the presence
of the camera. He's rankled when asked if he ever sees a day
when he'll shut off the camera and get on with his life. "I
am getting on with my life," he insists. "This is my life. I
still do the same things I do."
One thing he doesn't do is check out many other
Web cam sites. "It's not that I feel other people are boring,"
he says. "I just don't get the appeal from the viewer's standpoint.
I have other things to do with my time."
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