Note: This video is unlisted so I can maybe get a job someday. You can watch it at this link, but please don’t share/post it beyond this site due to the private nature of its content. Thanks.
The first time I remember getting on the internet is when I’m a junior in high school. I’ve been sent to a boarding school in rural central Utah, a town where turkey processing plants and sheep outnumber the town’s inhabitants. There are no cell phones, I don’t have a television, and the 50 some-odd girls I share a dormitory with share two pay phones in a single booth to call our families and friends. Centennial Hall is locked and alarmed at 7pm each night. It’s exactly where you’d send a kid that you didn’t want to get into any more trouble. Only one of the students at Wasatch Academy is out – as bisexual. I have no idea that I’m queer, but my uncle is gay, and I think that’s the just the most wonderful thing in the world. I’m even a little bummed I wasn’t born gay. I’m not sure how much of this is projecting a gay aesthetic onto a kid’s past, but clearly, there were some obvious signs for me too for me too.
When I sneak down the hall into the senior girls’ wing at night, I’m just practicing for boys. I have no idea why I needed to learn some of that stuff for boys. I figure out how to install AOL instant messenger on my massive laptop to chat with guys in the boys’ dorm after we’re locked in at night. My friend Paul* tells me over IM that when he was thirteen, he accidentally got his girlfriend pregnant. They didn’t tell anyone. She went into labor very prematurely and their tiny child died a few days later. Their parents forbade them to speak with each other. He is a punk, and I am a hippy, so during the day he heckles me, throws hard boiled eggs at the back of my head, and we don’t ever discuss his online disclosure. Today we are friends on Facebook. But right now I just feel like taking a minute to reflect about how much of a neohippy I am.
In a drunken haircut accident the summer between my junior and senior year, my shoulder length hair gets totally butchered, and have to have it shaved the next day. I return for my last year covering my head with a green bandana, in near tears that I look like a lesbian. My boyfriend’s roommate calls us Greg* and Steve. I am Steve. I learn to laugh about it. Years later I name my female cat Steve. (I give Steve away because she’s horrible and I learn that I dislike cats.) Of course, as these things go, years later I also learn that Greg is in a queer relationship. I hear about chat rooms and immediately pursue the conversations with the most lurid sexual content. I had an anonymous account or three. I’m both disgusted and intensely drawn to the way men speak to women, and the ways women speak about their bodies. I cyberfuck a bunch of guys, some girls, but I don’t think of it that way at the time. Sometimes I like to keep my gender a secret. Sometimes I like to be a man. But mostly I just want to be talking dirty with strange men, sitting at my desk wearing patches of corduroy while the screen lights up my face in the dark room. Sometimes my roommate and I laugh about it. It’s the new crank calling. Other times it’s more private. It’s funny how sometimes people on internet can be very serious, and some are a complete joke.
When I moved to New York several years ago in my mid-twenties, I didn’t hesitate to use the internet for actual weird gay sex. It’s what queer people used the internet for as soon as it was invented. Before OkCupid, I posted ads on craigslist by myself, with friends, and partners. I feel lucky that there’s less shame in gay world about hooking up online, from the get-go. As a queer dyke, it felt good to claim some cyberspace from a realm and practices thought to be the domain of gay men. Often, it’s a joke, executed. Sometimes it’s even sweet – I posted this for a girlfriend who trolled the free section of craigslist more than she cruised the Women for Women section of casual encounters. Other times it’s the only way I ever actually get laid. Clearly, filling the internet with my desires has been a pretty good time. In some ways it seems a little ironic that freedom has always been a compulsion of mine. Learning how to use the internet and learning how to be queer were pretty much synonymous with each other for me. We’re definitely not stopping now.
* Name changed.
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