Yeah buds, I know I have plugged
that fabulous quarterly covering the best of the gay and lesbian internet,
CYBERSOCKET MAGAZINE, several times already. And I'm sure I've urged
you dudes to run out and pick up a copy. But considering that my
growing legion of AAARRGH!!-a-nauts hail from far and wide, from Australia
to Amsterdam, Mexico to Mauritius (maybe not quite that far), I feel a
certain obligation to reprint my contributions to that esteemed publication.
So let me take a few pages to introduce you to my writings for CYBERSOCKET,
and maybe next issue you'll be that much more motivated to search it out.
By the way, their website and directory is AWESOME, as well, check it out
at http://www.cybersocket.com.
Here's an article I wrote
for the January 2000 issue, another feature story--hope you dig it!
| HOW YA GONNA KEEP THEM DOWN
ON THE FARM (AFTER THEY'VE SEEN CYBERSPACE)?
Can the internet make small-town gay life fulfilling? Matty's Stadium Tavern was my hometown gay bar, open two nights a week, with all its windows "discreetly" painted black. Olean, NY had 20,000 people, the biggest "city" in 50 miles. Outside of that was Portville, a "suburb" with 1500 people, and outside of THAT was Westons Mills, my real hometown, with about 700 people. By the time I was 16 or 17 I knew I was headed for the big city, New York or LA--in the meantime I used to nervously pace along that sidewalk in front of the Stadium Tavern, hoping to catch a glimpse of a real live homo like me. One night I was lucky enough to happen upon some FOR REAL sidewalk drama--two guys were having a lovers' spat right there on the street. "I can't believe you were s*cking his D*CK--f*cking piece of SHIT!!", the taller cuter one was yelling. The sight of that screaming all-boy bitch fight sent me RIGHT home to wank off, and dream about all the gay boys I'd see someday on the sidewalks of the big city. In the 1970's anyway, being a young gay (or theoretically gay--I never got a chance to check out the plumbing and see how it worked for me) man in smalltown America was a real BITCH. You could either suppress everything and get married to a girl, or step over the line separating the good boys from all that was evil and DAMNED, escaping to the safety of the few big-city gay ghettoes. That's what you did, and nobody really questioned. Has that sad reality changed? On the Internet chat rooms and meeting places I seem to run into rural and smalltown guys a lot, and they don't seem to be near-suicidal. Some are not even sure of their sexuality, trying on a gay identity as casually as a GAP t-shirt. Is life online making it possible to take your time making these big decisions--be gay, bisexual or straight? Stay at home, move to a big city, or find some happy medium in between? For some guys, the chat rooms attached to sites like webcams are easy places to start conversations. Unlike dedicated chat sites, there's something going on to talk about and break the conversational ice. Kip O'Neal is a young, sweet-natured native Southern Californian, but his KIPCAM website (http://www.kipcam.com) attracts guys from Alaska to Capetown. When the handsome bronzed beach boy is oncam, often sitting comfortably naked typing at his keyboard, fifty or sixty guys at a time pop into chat to spend time with him. Kip, a bisexual Venice surfer, is uniformly welcoming to college boys and retirees, women, gay men, and straight guys anxious to meet a hot, sexy kid who engages them on whatever level they bring to his "room". Of course, when you're looking at a guy who spends 18 or more hours every day nude on camera, sharing the most mundane and the most intimate moments of his life, the conversations in chat have a strong sexual undercurrent. Still, camaraderie and friendship among the chatters is the order of the day. "Will" is a fortysomething single bisexual guy from a small town in Atlantic Canada, who finds a rich and varied gay life online in chat spaces like Kip's. His first forays into online chat were at music fan chat forums, where he found kindred spirits to share his interest in singer/songwriter James Taylor. "I came across a site for James Taylor fans, and it was a real find. Lots of info and concert dates and all the junk an old die hard fan could drown in. However I did find my way to a chat on the same site and felt myself being drawn into a fraternity of people who had a personal connection with a man most had never met or seen in person. In a short time (many late nights) I made friends with a number of genuinely wonderful people. I became aware of relationships spawned in that fertile site, and could see a dynamic at work there. People from all over the world got acquainted and made friends more easily, and without the baggage of shapes and sizes, voices or smells, looks or other judgmental criteria. It was and continues to be a wonderful experience. " That led Will to seek out other men online, exposing him to a wider range of gay, bisexual and bi-curious guys than he'd ever meet in his isolated corner of the North American continent. "I started surfing the net for smut and found plenty. I checked out a few webcam sites and most left me feeling a little less than clean. Certainly I felt cheap and guilty (even after all these years...) but when I found Kip's site there was something about it that struck me as genuine. Aside from the fact that I think Kip is one handsome young man, well-endowed and getting all the things I wish I had gotten in my younger years, I saw something else in him. Through his two or three chats with the room I was struck with his openness, his playfulness, and his sense of humour." Will thinks that the chat room experience he found online has added to his home life and range of experience with men. "In the last few days, as I have chatted on at least two cam sites, I have been meeting and talking with people who share my views on bisexual relationships and aren't afraid to talk about their wants and desires. The pictures, cams and setting are all just a set or the meeting room. It is the people who make contact and strike a chord without the old baggage, that are the real story. In time, if I am open and honest I hope to meet a person who I can become friends with and share some time and even some love." A small-town Iowa farmboy who's not really into the gay scenes, "Scott" has the opportunity to travel around the country with his work. "The internet has been a godsend to me," he reports. At home and away, he keeps in touch with his chat room friends, and even meets them when he finds himself nearby. Scott recently met an online beau from Los Angeles who travels to Iowa from time to time in HIS work, so he maintains a cross-country courtship from his rural home. "Frat" was a big-city boy all his life, living in New York and then Los Angeles. Though most people would consider living in Las Vegas an equal urban setting, Frat felt really bored and tied down until he developed an online network of friends. Though most were met in chat rooms, he feels most comfortable with emails and ICQ for letting those friendships grow. Since cyberdistance is quite irrelevant, Frat now finds himself considering a move that would have been unthinkable, to a new job in rural Mississippi. He knows that his day-to-day life there won't lack for the comfortable discourse with his Internet buds that have kept him feeling "in touch" and connected, in a location where his physical social contacts could leave him feeling isolated and alone. Sometimes a guy needs more than a disembodied line of text to feel connected. The videoconferencing world of ICUII ("I see you too") at http://www.icuii.com provides a dizzying socio-sexual whirl. Log on and sign up with one of the many directories (at peak evening hours there are three or four gay/bisexual directories with up to three hundred names and bios listed in each), and watch the quick messages (with vdeocam snapshots attached) start piling in. Most of the "gentleman callers" have sex on their minds, but from the number of bios stating "face shots only" a lot of guys are looking for friends and social chat as well. After "QM"-ing back and forth, you can decide to follow through with an actual videocall, with large, QuickTime-based screens of video on your desktop representing your and the other guy's "vids". "Steve" lives in Northern England, a cute, lean, dark-haired 25-year old. He often finds himself meeting guys on ICUII from far-flung corners of the world (many South Americans, Australians and Frenchmen are devoted videoconferencers). When he meets a guy online he likes, both may choose to add each other to their ICUII "buddy lists"--then a quick glance shows Steve the online status of his "bud" so he can pop in for a quick "Hello". "Jack" is a straight college guy in Southern Ontario with a gay life that so far exists only in fantasy. If his roommate is out of the house, Jack feels secure enough to get online and meet understanding guys in cyberspace. He's quite persuasive in getting guys to call or give HIM a phone number so he can share a real, living breathing voice across the ether. Of course he wants to "get off" but he also needs to just connect with another man--even though he says he'd like to take the step of an actual meeting, he has the option of keeping that electronic distance until he's ready (if he EVER moves past the bi-curious fantasy into the real physical world). Where is all this millennial "meeting and greeting" leading? Are we losing the regional charm, accents and small-town manners that gave variety to our gay world? Can we look forward to the day when Ray Dragon and 2xist-clad clones populate the whole world? Most of the guys I've met choose to stay in their small-town or rural settings BECAUSE they feel more comfortable defining their own un-"ghetto"-fied lifestyles--you can meet smalltown, rural or urban guys and share part of your life, but maintain a unique perspective on life that doesn't have to fit anyone else's definition or agenda. People like to blame computers and the Internet for isolation, but it really is all about human expression and gifts and community. The gay online expreience is uniting and connecting people, so it's ultimately a GREAT thing... And if you happen to be that taller cuter guy I observed "bitchfighting" outside the Stadium Tavern...? Dude you can always email me and let me know how that all worked out. I'm a city guy now, but maybe I could make a trip upcountry and catch you on the rebound (twenty years on). Jeez, hope he didn't bust yr heart up THAT bad... (West Hollywood artist and gay
trainer LEN WHITNEY is "a little bit country AND a little bit rock and
roll". Find out if the tough city streets have changed him, at AAARRGH!!
superhero training http://www.aaarrgh.com)
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Wanna see my other articles for CYBERSOCKET? Click here for PART ONE (SPRING'99) or PART TWO (SUMMER/FALL '99)
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