The MP Chris Bryant has faced calls for his resignation for appearing in his pants on a gay website — but others see Gaydar as the future of dating. So what is it really like? Mark Simpson speaks with the (exhausted) voice of experience
(Independent on Sunday, 7 December 2003)
Gay men are having sex! Lots of it! Every night! With a different man! And they don’t even have to leave the house!
There was more than a hint of sexual jealousy surrounding the ‘outrage’ in the British press last week’s over Gaydar, the cruising website where gay and bisexual men exchange instant messages, personal pictures, addresses and then sexual positions, sometimes in less time than it takes to get served at a West End bar.
To condemn it however is to protest against the inevitable, since Gaydar’s methods will probably end up being adopted by everyone from 18–30 dating agencies to golden oldie matchmakers — and, judging by the envy on display, its sexual mores will soon follow.
Oscar Wilde once famously defined a moralist as someone who likes to lecture on the evils of vices of which he has grown tired. In this accelerated age, a moralist is someone who likes to lecture on the evils of vices that they are about to try. However, as a (mostly) former internet cruiser, I’d like to report from the frontier of human degradation/innovation in the more traditional, Wildean form — as a sinner who has grown jaded. If internet cruising is the future of dating, then there is certainly no future — or place — for romance. And probably no future for sex either.
At the height of the record-breaking summer heatwave I visited the gay reservation of Hampstead Heath in the naive hope that the torrid weather might have made gays more (anti)social, more retro, more inclined to leave their pokey, humid bedrooms. But the Heath was deserted. There were one or two punters, but these were men of a certain age who had not yet figured out how to get online with the obsolete computer that a nephew off-loaded on them.
Now, call me old-fashioned, but what is the point of sex to a single homosexualist if it doesn’t get you out of the bloody house? On the hottest night of the year? Gays — all of them, every last one of them, especially those in relationships — are “logged on” with lob ons, looking for someone who will “travel” while they “accom”.
If Joe Orton had his time again his diaries would have been just printouts of thousands of Gaydar profiles and alarming digicam photos. I, for my part, look back on my pre-internet days of compulsive cruising of the Heath in the driving sleet and rain as a golden age of warmth, romance and human contact.
Moralists who protest at gay e-promiscuity should actually be encouraging the Government to provide gays with grants for permanent broadband connections, since the internet not only keeps them off the streets and out of the parks, it turns all that messy sexual energy and appetite into … typing. Gays have become the unpaid secretaries of desire, filing and cataloguing human weakness. Promiscuity is now a form of bureaucracy. Tedious, eye-straining, number-crunching slave work.
Don’t bother feeling jealous, all you sexually frustrated, non-online non-gays: internet cruising is its own form of punishment, Dante’s e-ferno where thousands of disembodied souls in e-ternal torment constantly prod one another with inquisitorial malice: “stats?”, “into?”, “travel or accom?” and “how big’s your cock?”
The evil of internet cruising — and the reason why it will become irresistibly, devastatingly mainstream — is precisely its efficiency. IT plus a wired world means lust can be much more productive, much more accurate, much more all-consuming, and much more pointless. Internet cruising allows you to pursue endlessly and ever more obsessively your ultimate “type”. Like an especially well-organised, if unfriendly, Roman orgy, there are chat rooms for every (legal) fetish and taste. Gaydar members can search the database on height, age, hirsuteness, ethnicity, hair colour, pec-size and sex role (passive, active, or versatile). Strangely, there isn’t a box to check for “twinkly eyes” or “great sense of humour”.
But efficiency is precisely what sex is not about. Sex is a journey where, if you’re lucky, you get lost — like Hampstead Heath on a foggy night. Arriving is not really the point, it’s the confusions, the collisions, the diversions that are (sometimes) rewarding. With internet cruising there’s ultimately no escape from your own desire. Even when you actually meet someone off the net — one of you, reluctantly, agreeing to leave the house — they never really exist, and nor do you. You are both merely each other’s computer-generated horny hologram, one that dissipates with orgasm — “Cheers! ‘Ave a good one mate!” is the universal, embarrassed e-kiss off.
The most familiar cliché/complaint about internet dating is that when they turned up “they weren’t the person in the picture”. The real disappointment is that they were exactly the person on the profile. To the inch. It was a profile rather than a person you met and got groinal with. You were tricked, not by the flakiness of others, but by the emptiness of your own desire.
And no matter how “hot” the sex was for both of you, and no matter how much you both say you can’t wait to do it again and even make explicit arrangements to do so, it won’t happen. Come the appointed time, you’ll both be online again, looking for another profile that more exactly matches your requirements. What the internet giveth, the internet taketh away.
You see, the real efficiency of online dating, just as with internet anything, is not the way it delivers you lots of pointless sex without leaving the house, but the way that it ensures that you will be spending more time on the internet. The web is a jealous lover, and will countenance no infidelity that lasts longer than a hurried shag with some data it has selected and loaned you for an hour or so. Like a Las Vegas casino, the internet always wins. I’ve never met Mr and Mr Gaydar, and don’t know anything about them except that, having figured out a way to tax gay lust, they must be living in a penthouse apartment atop their own luxury skyscraper in Manhattan.
This kind of fierce fidelity can’t be supported indefinitely, however. Something has to give. Martin Luther may have described marriage as a curative for lust, but today that role has been usurped by the internet. Burn-out is the inevitable consequence of on-line dating. Or heart attack. If I didn’t find myself cured of lust I certainly found myself disenchanted.
By allowing me to focus on the boring “sex” to the exclusion of the arousing “journey” or “travelling” aspect of desire, internet cruising and the spinning bedroom turnstile it brought, utterly demystified sex. It was like working as a hustler but for free, and having to do all that hard work of choosing your clients instead of the other way around. Unforgivably, the internet has deprived me of the most cherished illusion of every homosexualist: my faith in sex.
Which is really unfair. I mean, what am I supposed to do with the rest of my life? Not that I expect anyone to feel much sympathy. But let my jadedness be a warning to you all: internet dating will ruin your sex life.
By giving you one.
© Mark Simpson 2003
Twitter
Facebook
I guess gay men get to try vagina fleshlights too, if they wish, which may challenge their ‘cock-only’ purity.
I went to a ‘women’s sex shop’ a while back. I accompanied a man, as men aren’t allowed in without a woman. This didn’t actually feel all that empowering, standing round waiting while he shopped for strap-on harnesses for a tryst with another woman that night! Anyway the shop was very popular with lesbians. But everywhere I looked all I could see were cocks. Plastic ones, electric ones, pink, purple, white, black Cocks. I’d see lesbian couples picking out their favourite ready to take home.
Freud would have loved that shop.
No fleshlight, although not due to any noble ideological reasons (unless you count poverty as an ideological conclusion). Because I’m pretty sure I’d fuck anything, and the fleshlights sounds more appealing than most offers I get on line.
I could have had a whole QRG Range of sex toys! My principles get in the way of sex and success, all the time.
P.s. Do any of you boys use Fleshlights? Go on you can tell your aunty Riot Girl. I find them hilarious. Especially the anus ones. Do you think straight men use them in a ‘heterosexual’ way? Do they think they represent women’s anuses because they are all pink and girly?
I don’t use vibrators and this is mainly out of some retro Marxist-Feminist belief that I shouldn’t have to pay The Man to have a wank. You see what I mean about my priniciples?
Yours and my own fantasy as to how my threesome actually went will always be better than the actual event itself — although I’d pass on Keanu as he does come across like a rigid blow up doll.
Shame about your missed opportunity — you could have had a collectable QRG signature cone vibrator.
I once got offered the chance of a MMF threesome, with two men who worked in the sex toy business. They said they were making a prototype for a new ‘cone’ vibrator, marketed at women. I could try it out if I wanted! I thought it was a wind up. But ‘the cone’ came on the market about a year later:
http://www.theconevibrator.net/positions.php
what a missed opportunity…
A live skype feed of a homo-antipodean threeway is the best offer I have had in a long time, Marcelo!
But I expect I’d even be disappointed by that. Because of course, in my head, your fuck buddies look just like River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves…
I’m not too sure if the boys would be all that keen on me sending u pics QRG — although, you never know. I’ll ask when I go back this weekend.
Maybe we could do a live Skype feed just for you.
Pics or it didn’t. (demanding? Moi?)
I don’t see how life could be anything but disappointing to the individual — I mean, we are just sooo demanding.
The menage au trois did actually happen btw.
Marcelo, if our e-sex lives were anything like River Phoenix, everything would be fine! But we all know River Phoenix was just a beautiful dream we all had in the early 1990s…
I use gaydar and bear411. And I too feel like a hustler most of the times. The other day, I walked in to a guys house and after a brief conversation he said “want a shower first?” I said no, I already had one. Then he said “the bedrooms in the back — I’ll be there in a minute”. I walked down the corridor of this sunny QLD house and sat on his bed. And for a minute, even after all these years of fuckin’, I caved in on myself. I felt like I was waiting for something that was out of my control — and, I was right of course. I went completely soft at that point.
I’d rather go out. But, frankly I went out to a gay club recently. There was a drag show, guys dancing to GaGa etc — the usual. And still asked myself the question I always have asked. What has any of this got to do with me wanting cock?
It’s actually very much like GaGa actually. You like music but you have this wall of GaGa or Black Eyed Peas that’s pushed on to you by this giant out of control machine, forcing you to have an opinion on something and maybe even,shock horror — liking it.
So, I think I’ll stick with my River Phoenix’d e-sex life. It has to be better than no sex life, right Mark/qrg?
Of course — once my brisbane friend walked in to the room, he turned out to be — well, a lot of fun. And, once it was over — it was over. We wiped the sticky off and that was it.
“And no matter how “hot” the sex was for both of you, and no matter how much you both say you can’t wait to do it again and even make explicit arrangements to do so, it won’t happen. Come the appointed time, you’ll both be online again, looking for another profile that more exactly matches your requirements. What the internet giveth, the internet taketh away.”
So true Mark. It turns out that he’s partnered and they want me for a threesome.
I eagerly wait to be disappointed.
Marcelo: I’m glad you’re at least able to away disappointment eagerly. That’s a lot more than I’m capable of. The flesh and the spirit is very weak in my case.
On my bad days I felt like a washed up porn actress, dismissed without pay for poor performance, sat on a railway platform, waiting for the last train home.
Now that is bad. At least I had a car.
This discussion has brought back a couple of horrendously embarrassing memories. I am too embarrassed to write them down and yet, stuck in my head they are probably even more excruciating. Really really bad.
I know what you mean about the unpaid hustler thing, but we all feel like that. There is no ‘client’ in internet sex. We are all sex workers, paying for the privilege of the role. I think actual sex workers spend some proportion of their time laughing quite hard at people who do it via the bureaucracy of the internet for free.
It’s a good sign that you can still be embarrassed. No, really, it is.
I wasn’t able to be entirely honest in that piece because it was for a ‘family newspaper’. I couldn’t mention that I felt like an unpaid hustler on the good days. On the bad days I felt like a pre-warmed motorised dildo.
I think your suspicions are probably right, though straight men’s fear of casual sex is bound up in their attitudes towards and experiences with women so you can’t really separate the two. Just as gay men’s embracing of casual sex is bound up in their attitudes towards men. I expect some gay men still think women are for settling down with, which is why some ‘straight’ gay men ‘feminise’ their gay ‘wives’.
I realised pretty fast that jadeddater.com had a major design fault built into its whole concept!
I just clicked on the site, I feel a bit nostalgic…
I do concede that gay men are more seasoned in the art of casual hook ups. But in a way the ineptitude and confusion of those involved in hetero casual sex kind of added a bit of interest to proceedings.
The myth of straight men being more blase about casual sex than women, I think I well and truly busted.
I’ve always had a sneaking suspicion that what differentiates gay men from straight men is not their object choice but their attitude towards casual sex. Straight men tend to be fascinated by the ‘no-strings’ freedom — and free-ness — of gay male ‘dating’, and love to talk about how ‘jealous’ they are, but I suspect they would be terrified if most women exhibited the same attitude as the gays.
I would have signed up for jadeddating. I’m just not sure I would have ever checked my messages.
I bought a domain once called http://www.jadeddater.com but I was too jaded to turn it into a going concern.
I find it hard to believe that in 2003 internet ‘cruising’ was not also a heterosexual pursuit. Chatrooms like aol became so solely used for sex hook ups that some got closed down, I think around that time, because of ‘the children’.
I too lost faith in sex partly because of how straightforward and ‘bureaucratic’ the process of getting it became. But I had no Hampstead Heath heyday to compare my internet experiences to.
My favourite site, the Ronseal of hetero internet dating, was http://www.sexintheuk.com
But that is another story…
Wow, sexintheuk really does what it says on the tin. In braille.