My AOL Chat Room Experience

January 3, 2015
Day 248

I was planning to tell you more of my dating nightmares, but the more I think about them, the sicker I feel.  Some people don't deserve my time, and some of my best stories just wouldn't be appropriate for this blog anyway!

So instead, I'd like to tell you a bit about how my dating life began.  And I'll share all of this with one overriding reminder: I found Andy, and I found him relatively early on, so please know when I speak of other guys, my heart was forever grabbed and won by this one incredible man I'm so honored to kiss and live with every single day of my life!

In the beginning, there was no internet.  Not for me, at least.  When the internet really started arriving, I was a monk in a conservative Roman Catholic religious order, and while they've since gone very much online, I never was.  My gay life consisted of sneaking peeks at gay books in the college library, and spending Vow-of-Poverty money on issues of The Village Voice sold at a 7-Eleven on Long Island.  The gay dating ads were few and far between, but I lived off them.  I looked at them over and over like they were some secret passageway into another world, which is exactly what they were.  I left the religious life in July of 1997, and finally got my own computer with internet access in 1999.

The AOL Chat Rooms were where we all went back in the late-90s to early 00s.  It was this sometimes-perfect, sometimes-disgusting world online where you could find guys from anywhere into anything.  And though it seemed clear early on that most of them just wanted to get laid, in whatever ways they could, I always knew there had to be good guys in the mix too.  After all, the online dating world was still very small for us, so you knew most guys had to be in these rooms along with you.  You just didn't know who was who...until they private messaged you with "ASL?"

I don't know if ASL is still thrown around any more, but in the chat rooms, it was probably the most-often-seen phrase thrown around.  It stands for age/sex/location, and putting aside the stupidity of asking someone their gender in a gay men's chat room, what always annoyed me the most was the fact that I'd just written my age, my gender, and my location in the chat room.  They'd see where I was and how old I was, and they'd proceed to send me a private message asking, "ASL?"

Still, there were some amazing moments back then, peppered here and there amid the salt sea of horny men.  I'd talk to kids or young men in middle America or the south whose world had not yet changed.  They'd tell me about how homophobic their parents or town were, and how they weren't sure if they'd ever be able to come out.  I'd literally be in tears talking to some of them as they explained how far away New York and this new world still were from them, how lucky I was to be in such a better part of the country.  (It boggles my mind that 15 years later, there are kids still growing up feeling this way!)

There were chat rooms called M4M Priests, str8butcurious, and M4M whatever location you were in.  Gays in New York had a bunch of chat rooms, because the demand was there.  We had M4M Long Island and M4M Long Island Now (which meant pretty much what it sounds like), and eventually even M4M Long Island 2.  The chat rooms just called "Gay" always had all the kids in them, because there wasn't a teen room, and there were literally kids in there saying they were 13 or 14, and just looking to chat.  I'm sure they got some older guys cruising them too, but hopefully they got the support and friendship they genuinely needed most of all.  It really was a quickly changing world back then.  Ellen DeGeneres had come out in 1997, and Matthew Shepard was killed in late 1998.  I came out of the closet in 1997, so I really felt part of the wave as it crashed on the world's shores. 

The AOL chat rooms could be gross or hysterical, but they were extremely important to our community too.  To this day, I have great friends who I met through those rooms, and some online-only friends I met there too, who I still talk to from time to time.  We needed all those chat experiences--the good, the bad, and the ugly--to help us see how many of us were out there.  They taught us we weren't alone, and never were, and they helped us see through to the next step: creating a larger community of friends offline.