blogger interrupted

I became a professional at hooking up online, so much so that not only did it take over my life, I began taking the worst of risks. 

I lowered the age I professed myself to be.  The professed age of men I chatted with online became younger and younger.  The picture of myself looked just young enough, just cute enough, to land some pretty hot guys.  I needed more.  I started to justify myself by saying, hey, what’s the difference between 25 & 21?  Between 20 & 18?  The spiral quickened.

One day in April, 2001, someone pretending to be 13 years old showed up in the chat room.  I struck up a chat.  It proceeded very rapidly to discussion of sex.  Then he disappeared for months.  I breathed a sigh of relief.   That was stupid, I thought.  Glad that’s over.  I was fooling myself.

In October, the professed 13-year-old showed up again, and by then, 6 months deeper into the descent, the die had been cast.  I didn’t care anymore about risk, about right or wrong, about anything or anyone but me and my desires, however foolish they’d become.

I had been freed.  Finally, after all these years, I’ve got access to what’s been denied me my entire life, what I denied to myself – my own sexuality.  I thought everything that ever hurt me had been defeated, and I was finally invulnerable to it, so much so that I could delve into the worst of it, almost out of spite. 

In reality, everything that ever hurt me had not surrendered but had won, and was now poised for its final victory lap.

The FBI agent reeled me in like a fish on a line.  Got any porn to share?  What would we do if we were alone?   I must have looked like the most pathetic sitting duck for the FBI and their friends from WEWS NewsChannel5.  This guy is too good to be true.  

I had so perfectly regressed to that first day with Bobby in the fort, the reckless abandon of assumed invincibility had taken over.  The words I wrote in those chats were not written by a lawyer, political consultant, or professional who should be at the top of his game, but by a child angry at the world.  Age 34.

As I left the house to meet the FBI agent at a convenient store, it never occurred to me that this might be a sting.  It never occurred to me that it was November sweeps week, time to fill the evening news with sex!  I never thought, hey wait a second, kids don’t talk like that.  They don’t just hook up online with men almost 3 times their age.  They don’t conveniently live down the road from my parents’ house. 

All I could think, if thinking was possible in my bizarre haze, was, “what the hell am I doing?”  I drove my dad’s van because I’d told the kid I’d be driving my black Honda because I wanted the option to just take off before he saw me if I changed my mind.  I thought maybe I’d see the kid and tell him, look kid, just get on your bike and go home.  This is stupid.  This is a big mistake.  Then I thought I’d go through with it no matter what.  Fuck it.  Just get this over with.  Then I thought what the hell am I doing.  I drove around the convenient store over and over, my hands shaking, my heart pounding. 

I never drove into the parking lot.  I decided to just leave, leave now, fast, just stop this insanity, get the hell out of here.

As I started to drive away after a final pass, blue and red lights exploded into my rear view mirror, and with them, my entire world.  I closed my eyes and started to collapse into the driver’s seat, as the police officer came to the window.  I didn’t see the TV cameras that would go from the arrest site to my parents’ house to knock on all the neighbors’ doors and get local reaction, I just gave in.

After the 20 minute ride in the back seat of the police cruiser to the jail downtown, my body losing all feeling, we paused at Jacobs Field for the driver to radio ahead to tell the crews we were coming.  We continued, and as we turned into the jail, floodlights blasted into the back seat from the TV cameras.  After a career spent in politics, I knew what that meant immediately, and became totally catatonic.

I have no recollection of my behavior during the booking that prompted the decision to put me into the psych ward as a suicide risk.  Hours later, somehow I managed to use my one call to phone my mother to tell her I was in jail, to call Larry Friedman, and tell him to get an attorney to the county jail downtown. 

And then I started crying.  Alone in my cell in the psych ward, I cried like an infant, endlessly, so intensely I couldn’t even breath sometimes.  Larry came in a few hours, and I couldn’t even look at him through the window in the conference booth.  Through gasps for air, I struggled to describe what had happened.  Internet.  Sex.  Thirteen year old boy.  Thank God that Larry seemed unphased at that moment, focused totally on what to do to get me out of there.  Larry found an attorney who came at 2 a.m.  

The rest of my 3 days in jail are a blur, lying on the cot looking at the ceiling for something to hang myself from, a friend visiting unannounced on the second day.  Leslie just showed up, she worked for a judge, and saw my name pop up somewhere, and hurried over.  I was completely exposed and destroyed before her.  When she hugged me, I leaned against her like a rag doll.   She saw not a man, but a shell, weeping, trembling, in an orange jump suit.

After bail, the conversation I never wanted to have with anyone, ever, was waiting for me at every turn, with every person I ever knew.   The questions were brutal.  How could you?  Why?  Why didn’t you tell us you might be gay, or bi, or…whatever?  Why didn’t you trust us?  Don’t you know we love you? 

The judicial process ground on, for almost a year, and the judge was convinced that I was not a predator, not a threat, and deserved lenience.  I plead to precisely what I had done, no more, no less.  My sentence was as light as I could have possibly hoped for, one year probation reduced to four months, small fine, therapy, and no requirement to register as a sex offender.  But I was now a convicted felon.

Through my therapy and the endless conversations with friends, I was able to get to grips with my sexuality, although not completely understand it.  I gave myself, finally, permission to explore it in the open.  That first trip to a gay bar, I took Larry with me, a circumstance unthinkable to me at any point in the previous 15 years, but which, had it occurred at any point therein, would have saved me from the self-imposed cancer that destroyed me.  I began to thank God for the incident, even for the TV crews, for I knew it took action that drastic to get me to stop lying to myself, and everyone around me, about who I was.  I thought it was over.

It was just beginning.