Not sick, just bad habits

I am not sick, to the best of my ability to determine. It was just a long day, and dehydration getting to me. And wearing long underwear and insulating socks on a day that I needed neither (and in fact, spent most of the day indoors). It was a long day.

But after my day was over, I got home and sought out gay.com. Why? In retrospect, I’d like to feign ignorance, but really it gets down to a point I was trying to hash out with , and a few other qgpa’ers over vietnamese after seeing Transamerica. The point was about Brokeback Mountain. I vehemently reject that it was a love story. It was a story about denial, repression, intolerance, as well as internalized and external homophobia. It’s not just the absence of happily ever after, it’s the absence of happy from that movie. After their first summer, they never spent more than a weekend together, and never more than a handful of weekends per year (that’s my understanding). Habit and longing, yes. Lust, absolutely. Repression induced obsession, sure. Love, no. (Of course, for similar reasons, I’d say Moulin Rouge, and a host of other hollywood “love stories” aren’t love stories).

So, longing. Gay chat media parade a cornucopia of possibilities in front of a willing participant. If it’s sex you’re after, here’s an array of naked men in various states of arousal, just standing around, or occassionally engaged in this, that, or the other sex act. And you might just be able to meet them. Very democratic that way. If you’re looking for a deeper connection, people will try to bare their hearts in text (though more frequently, they just vent their frustrations, or their disdain for others’ open sexualities, sometimes denying their own in the process). And it all seems like the possibility is at hand. It’s the Tantalus principle: look, you’re so close, you just have to reach out and grab it, just a little bit further. And sometimes it works out for folks. Plenty of guys met the love of their life on gay.com or the like. But, truth be told, the outcomes have rarely been terribly satisfying for me.

I think there were some skinner box experiments with uncertain rewards. As I recall, the animal in the box (a bird? a rat? It doesn’t really matter), was presented with a button and a dispenser. In some boxes, pushing the button always gave a food pellet, and the animals ate normally. In another, the button was deliberately unreliable. Sometimes it gave a food pellet, sometimes not. The animals in that box kept pressing and pressing and gorged themselves.

Another wonderful feature of gay.com is the spambot. Basically, these are automated accounts which advertise pay porn sites. Selling more teases, essentially. When they first showed up they were pretty direct, now they’re a bit more circuitous (still only marginally harder to specify their behavior than a “hello world” program). And so, countermeasures arise, and there are ignore lists and spambot blockers. The blockers reply to any opening message with a request for some word or phrase, usually found in the profile or byline. After which your message is transmitted.

Now, for a more concrete story. I have a silly picture of me that took at market days, I think. Possibly pride. Some point in time when I was shirtless on halsted. (I’d say a plurality of the pics on there are probably fully clothed, with shirtless followed shortly by no pic at all, followed by more revealing pics). I have a bizarre look on my face. But it does show a rather flattering view of my chest, or at least the part of it that shows. Up until this morning, it was my default gay.com pic. Partly whimsy, because so many people put faceless, bland, or model-perfect shots up, and I felt like it would be contrast, and partly because I felt it showed a bit of character or at least a sense of humor about myself. I recognized that it might give the “sex now please” message, and figured I should probably get around to changing it, but that was more of an investment of effort than I cared to make.

So, some dude from CA (in his byline) pops on. I figure enh, what the heck, let’s chat. I ask him what someone from CA is doing in an MN chat room. I get past his spamblocker, and the first words he sends back are “A better question is what someone out of shape is doing with a shirtless pic in his profile.” What a charmer. I only said “goodbye”. I then promptly changed my pic to something much blander and more fully clothed. I was thinking “I bet I know which part of CA you’re from.” Assuming I was right, it wouldn’t have left us much to talk about anyway. I then logged the fuck off and reminded myself that these are the wages of online chat, and I should know better by now.